NEW FREEPORT, Pa. — There are no traffic lights, restaurants or grocery stores in this tiny hamlet in the heart of Pennsylvania’s shale country. It’s the kind of place where residents tend to keep to themselves. But last summer, a message appeared on a township Facebook page that jolted the roughly 80-person community.
“There was a FRAC OUT at the bottom of Fox Hill,” read the June 2022 post from Guy Hostutler, a New Freeport supervisor.
He was referring to what can happen when an abandoned well is disturbed by nearby drilling, causing it to leak gas and fluid.
“If you smell gas or have discolored water DO NOT DRINK OR USE!” Hostutler wrote.
Bill Yoders and his wife, Tammy, immediately stopped drinking their water. So did Tim Brady, Steve Roberts Sr. and several other residents.
The natural gas company that was doing the drilling, EQT Corp., promised to investigate the incident, and the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection launched its own probe.
But more than a year later, New Freeport residents say they are still without definitive answers over what exactly happened and whether their water is safe to drink. The Yoderses, Brady and Roberts are among those who are not taking any chances and are still drinking only bottled water.
“I worked my whole life, going to spend my retirement on water and I’m going to pay them back by pissing it off the back porch,” said Bill Yoders, a former pipeliner.
The situation in New Freeport has implications that go far beyond this rural corner of southwest Pennsylvania.
At least 3.5 million abandoned oil and gas wells are scattered across the U.S. in forests, backyards and even near waterways. More than 100,000 are documented “orphan wells” — ones that have been left behind by companies that no longer exist.
The neglected wells have been found to leak cancer-causing chemicals and emit methane, a planet-warming greenhouse gas that’s over 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. In extreme cases, gas from abandoned wells has been linked to explosions.
The environmental and health risks are especially high in places like Pennsylvania, where companies have long drilled for oil and natural gas without adequate oversight by state agencies, according to a 2020 report commissioned by the then-state attorney general, increasing the chances that pollutants from the wells and surrounding reservoirs can seep into the ground, water systems and potentially people’s homes.
“It is literally the wild west out there,” said David Hess, who was the head of the state Department of Environmental Protection, or DEP, from April 2001 to January 2003. “These companies can do whatever they want and ask for forgiveness later or not.”
President Joe Biden has committed to plug the nation’s abandoned oil and gas wells. Congress set aside $4.7 billion under the bipartisan infrastructure law to fund the effort, which is now underway in several states. But it’s a massive and complicated undertaking.
Pennsylvania, the birthplace of America’s oil industry, is among the states with the highest number of documented abandoned wells in the country. So far, about 27,000 have been identified, but researchers estimate there could be as many as 760,000 in the state alone.
“That’s a lot of wells we don’t know about and it’s pretty scary,” said Adam Peltz, a director and senior attorney with the Environmental Defense Fund. Peltz says the real cost of closing wells in Pennsylvania alone is likely closer to $17.5 billion.
A 'shallenial' gas CEO
New Freeport is located just a few miles from the border with West Virginia in what was once considered “coal country.” Many residents have worked in the industry as did their parents and grandparents.
But at the turn of the century, the “shale boom” started to take over, driven by advances in drilling technology combined with high oil and gas prices spurring increased production.
New Freeport sits atop the Utica and Marcellus shale formations, the largest natural gas resource in the U.S. and one of the largest reservoirs in the world.
It’s no surprise that it would draw the interest of a company like Pittsburgh-based EQT Corp., one of the nation’s largest producers of natural gas, which controls over 600,000 acres of gas fields in Pennsylvania alone.
EQT began drilling for the Utica Shale in Greene County, which encompasses New Freeport, in 2015, producing a record-breaking nearly 73 million cubic feet of natural gas per day, according to its website.
The drilling process, known as “fracking,” involves pumping millions of gallons of water, sand, and chemicals into wells drilled thousands of feet into rock under extremely high pressure in order to crack formations apart and release oil and gas that’s used to heat and power homes across the country.
EQT is run by Toby Rice, 41, a self-proclaimed “shalennial,” who has positioned his stewardship of the company as the dawn of a new era.
“We want to be the operator that is embraced by the community,” he told Greene County residents in 2019.
That hasn’t happened in New Freeport, where some residents who once appreciated the industry as a source of opportunity now feel abandoned.
“My honest opinion, I don’t see why Toby is letting this go on,” said Bill Yoders, who worked for six years at the company Rice’s family founded and sold to EQT for over $6 billion in 2017. “My experience with Toby wasn’t like that. It was probably the best job I ever had.”
This past June, several New Freeport residents and members of the Center for Coalfield Justice, a community group that has been helping supply bottled water to locals, rallied outside an EQT office carrying brightly colored signs that read, “Where the frack is Toby.”
The following month, EQT donated $500,000 to Greene County to turn 360 acres of land surrounding a reservoir into a “destination for families and outdoor enthusiasts,” the county said on its website.
Residents believe the situation is complicated by the fact that two of the three township officials work for or with EQT. Hostutler is a direct employee and the other works for a company contracted by EQT, according to their LinkedIn and Facebook pages. (The men did not respond to questions about their employment.)
“They say they can do what they’re doing without being conflicted,” said Tim Brady, who moved to New Freeport with his family in 2017. “I don’t know how they get away with it.”
Brady, 53, previously served as a township official in nearby Aleppo for 22 years.
“I wouldn’t have been sitting on my ass like they did,” said Brady, who added that he spent nearly $10,000 to install a home water filtration system.
Earlier this year, Hostutler told NBC News that the situation was difficult because it still wasn’t clear what happened or what the consequences were.
“We’re trying to get a resolution to the problem,” he said.
The incident that prompted Hostutler’s Facebook post occurred on June 19, 2022.
EQT workers were fracking multiple wells at one of their existing drilling sites in the area.
Over a mile away, just off New Freeport’s Main Street, an abandoned gas well, believed to date back to the late 1800s or early 1900s, was disturbed. At the time, an EQT representative observed fluid and gas spewing from the well, according to a state DEP compliance report that cited the company for its failure to notify the agency.
EQT continued fracking operations at an adjacent well after the impact was confirmed but was ordered to stop all activity at the site on June 21.
Afterward, at least a dozen nearby landowners reported negative changes to their water supplies and filed complaints with the state DEP, according to legal documents EQT filed in November.
“When you do things like this, and then you have an accident, sometimes you just gotta own up to it,” said Joe Moore, 38, who works for Consol Energy, helping identify wells to be plugged ahead of coal mining operations.
A state DEP incident report from last year says EQT determined that fracking operations “communicated” — or impacted — the abandoned well.
But in response to questions from NBC News, an EQT spokeswoman said the company believes there was “no communication between its operations and the abandoned shallow well.”
The spokeswoman said the company, in partnership with the state DEP, began operations to plug the abandoned well in February.
“We see no reason for concern for landowners,” the spokeswoman said in May.
Yet landowners are concerned.
Last October, John Stolz, director of the Center for Environmental Research and Education at Duquesne University, first cautioned residents not to drink their water based on initial sampling he had done at the request of the Center for Coalfield Justice.
“For safety’s sake, everybody within this zone of impact should definitely be using bottled water,” Stolz said at the time, citing concerns over fracking chemicals leaking into the well water.
But the incident has also raised concerns about another potential threat: methane gas.
Stolz’s tests found three homes with well water containing concentrations of methane greater than 7 milligrams per liter, the state’s contamination action threshold.
Methane gas alone is not toxic in water, according to experts, but at high concentrations it can migrate out of water, accumulate and become explosive in confined areas.
In recent years, stray gas from abandoned wells is believed to have caused explosions in Bakersfield, California, and Wheatley, Ontario, according to local reports.
“There’s always the potential depending upon how your well is situated that explosive levels of methane could build up,” Stolz said.
In a statement, the state DEP said it has “not found evidence that oil and gas activity nor the communication incident has impacted water supplies” in New Freeport but is continuing to work through many water supply complaints.
DEP said it concluded the methane detected in the water supplies appears to be natural in origin.
“EQT is permitted to conduct some well tests as part of its investigation to determine a root cause of the incident,” the agency added.
The concerns about the water may not have come to light had the June 2022 incident not occurred. That’s because Pennsylvania does not test water from private wells and has no regulations on their construction or water quality.
Experts say the lack of regulation makes water wells more vulnerable to contamination and makes it more difficult to determine a cause after an incident occurs because there are typically no base levels for comparison.
“Ignorance is bliss,” said Jennifer Fetter, a water resources expert at Penn State University. “That is the story of Pennsylvania’s private water supply, and it’s so hard to convince people of that until a big scary story happens.”
'Falling way behind'
The abandoned gas wells represent a particularly challenging problem.
Drillers have historically walked away from wells at rates greater than the number of wells plugged, leaving the state in a perpetual game of catch-up.
More than 3,000 wells were abandoned by their operators between 2017 and 2021, according to the DEP. A 2022 report by the DEP concluded that there was “significant non-compliance with relevant laws in the conventional oil and gas industry in Pennsylvania.”
“Even with all the federal money, we’re falling way behind in terms of preventing new abandoned wells because we don’t have the tools in place,” said Hess, the former secretary of the state DEP.
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro said in an interview that he has prioritized plugging abandoned oil wells.
“In the six months since I’ve been governor, we’ve already capped 70,” said Shapiro, who ordered the state report on the fracking industry in his prior role as Pennsylvania attorney general. “We’ll have 100 done by Labor Day, and then you’re going to see a hockey stick line graph to show how aggressively we’re capping these.”
“Unfortunately, at times we’ve had too many lawmakers who were willing to give corporate polluters the ability to simply shirk their responsibility,” he added. “I’m trying to change that culture here in Pennsylvania, hold our corporations accountable and protect the public.”
Some New Freeport residents say they want to leave town but don’t have the means to do so.
“If they buy me out, I’d get the hell out of here,” Steve Roberts Sr., 68, a former coal miner, said of EQT.
Paige Moore and her husband, Joe, who bought their home in October 2022, said they first learned about water concerns less than a week before their purchase was finalized.
“With no information, it’s hard to make informed choices,” Paige Moore, 32, said. “Do I want to leave? No, I just bought the place, but I also have a 5-year-old I have to worry about as well.”
Her husband said he’s resigned to the fact that they’ll eventually have to start drinking their water again in spite of their concerns.
“You’re either gonna drink it or you’re spending a small fortune on bottled water,” Joe Moore said.
