Editorial: Cleaning up California’s oilfields may cost $21.5 billion. Taxpayers shouldn’t get the bill

There’s a huge problem looming as California moves beyond fossil fuels: How to get its declining oil industry to plug and remediate tens of thousands of oil and gas wells that already sit idle or won’t be producing for much longer. While the oil industry and state regulators dispute some of the numbers in the Carbon Tracker report, its conclusions largely reinforce what has been clear for years: The oil and gas wells that fossil fuel companies are leaving unplugged and idle are a multibillion-dollar problem. California’s Department of Conservation Geologic Energy Management Division, or CalGEM, said that it shares the concerns raised in Carbon Tracker’s report, but that its data show more bond money has been set aside than stated in the report and that it has been making progress plugging idle wells using $100 million in new state funding. “We issue far more permits to plug and abandon wells than any other activity,” spokesperson Jacob Roper said, “which means existing oil companies are plugging more of their own wells than they are drilling.” Roper said the department is “still in the process of implementing” a 2019 law that gave it broad authority to increase the amount of cleanup money oil producers must set aside, up to $30 million per operator.