Oklahoma House Passes Bill Allowing Conversion of Orphan Oil Wells to Geothermal or Energy Storage

Oklahoma’s House passed the Well Repurposing Act in March, creating a process for companies to buy abandoned oil and gas wells and repurpose them for geothermal energy or underground energy storage. The state has identified over 20,000 orphan wells.

Fixing a single old well can cost anywhere from $75,000 to $150,000 or more depending on location and complexity. The Well Repurposing Act is modeled after a similar law that New Mexico adopted last year to address its 2,000-plus orphan wells. In Alabama, legislators passed a law last month that allows the state to approve and regulate the conversion of oil and gas wells to tap alternative energy resources like geothermal.

North Dakota adopted a bill last year requiring a legislative council to study the feasibility of using nonproductive wells to generate geothermal power. Colorado state agencies launched a technical study to evaluate the potential of repurposing old wells for geothermal development and carbon capture and sequestration.

Millions of inactive wells are located across the United States, the relics of earlier eras of fossil fuel production.

Many of the sites have no official owner and continue to pollute groundwater and leak methane. At the University of Oklahoma, researchers have been evaluating how to turn four old oil and gas wells into sources of geothermal heat for public schools and homes in Tuttle. 7 million grant from the US Department of Energy’s Wells of Opportunity program in 2022.

It was paused last year during the Trump administration’s sweeping freeze on federal funding and is still waiting to start its next phase. Saeed Salehi was the Oklahoma project’s director before joining Southern Methodist University as an engineering professor in 2024. It took nearly nine months to get the Tuttle project’s permits.

Salehi said geothermal firms can avoid significant upfront drilling costs if the wells are already sufficiently deep and hot enough.

“Oil and gas firms which today pay millions of dollars to properly seal and shut down modern wells can give their assets a second life instead." — Saeed Salehi, former director of the Tuttle geothermal project Salehi added that everything is going to take time but he thinks we are moving in the right direction. In Pennsylvania, Arash Dahi Taleghani is an engineering professor with the Repurposing Center for Energy Transition at Pennsylvania State University. His team is looking to secure funding to repurpose old wells to supply the Penn State campus with geothermal heating and has studied using some of the state’s more than 200,000 abandoned wells to heat agricultural greenhouses as well as to house energy-storage systems.”

“Decommissioning wells is expensive, costly, and it’s not generating any revenue." — Arash Dahi Taleghani, engineering professor at Pennsylvania State University Dave Tragethon is communications director for the nonprofit Well Done Foundation, which works to find and cap abandoned oil and gas wells nationwide. Tragethon said the Well Repurposing Act recognizes that these wells are a liability and that there may be a way to turn them into some sort of revenue generation and give them value. Emily Pope is a geologist and senior fellow at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. Pope said oil and gas well conversion presents an enormous opportunity but it’s pretty far away technologically from being a reality. Wired reported that policymakers in both Republican- and Democratic-led states are exploring conversions because the holes are already drilled and regions with widespread oil and gas development have rich subsurface data that geothermal firms need.”