Pennsylvania is believed to have the worst accumulation of old, unplugged, ownerless oil and gas wells in the nation. There are an estimated 200,000 of them, and the cost to plug them could exceed $6 billion. The state’s orphan well plugging program has been underfunded for decades, but it is primed to take advantage of an influx of cash. Part of Joe Biden’s $2.3 trillion proposal to upgrade the nation’s infrastructure would dedicate $16 billion to reclaiming abandoned wells and mines across the U.S. Pennsylvania environmental regulators and the state’s conventional oil and gas industry have spent years drawing attention to the dire need for more funding and studying ways to plug vastly more abandoned wells. The Department of Environmental Protection has lined up 500 priority and nearby wells that could be bid right away when… or if… stimulus funding arrives. Bills introduced in the U.S. House and Senate in recent weeks would dedicate between $5 billion and $8 billion to plugging orphan wells, with the bulk of the funds dispersed to states through grants administered by the Department of the Interior. Even a fraction of the proposed cash would be more money than Pennsylvania’s well plugging program has ever seen.