OIL'S VERY DIRTY SECRET

More than 100,000 abandoned oil and gas wells dot the land, spewing methane and pollutants. One former energy company executive has made it his mission to cap them.

- Michaela Haas

CURTIS SHUCK WAS INSPECTING WHEAT CROPS with farmers in rural northern Montana in 2019 when he followed a rotten-egg stench and spotted corroded metal surrounding a borehole.

The discovery he stumbled upon would change his life, and eventually the trajectory of carbon emissions in the United States. It was an abandoned oil well that spewed pollution, including methane, into the air and the surrounding fields. Once he realized what he was looking at, he identified other wells across the surrounding landscape, left behind in the 1990s after the Gulf War tanked crude prices.

“I couldn’t believe what I saw,” Shuck says with his heavy Texan drawl. “I was just at the wrong place at the wrong time. Or I was at the right place, depending on how you want to look at it.”

The pollution left such a deep impression on Shuck, a former oil and gas executive, that he immediately wanted to take action. His plan: to plug as many oil and gas wells as possible. Before the day was over, he had come up with a name for a nonprofit, Well Done, and from his truck he registered the domain name WellDoneFoundation.org.

Abandoned oil wells can pop up anywhere. Below: Curtis Shuck also pops up anywhere to cap them.

What started out as the epiphany of one hard-charging man has since led to the capping of wells in 14 states.

“We just capped our 45th well, in Akron, Ohio,” Shuck says by phone from the departures hall at the airport in Portland, Oregon. He’s on a mission of crisscrossing the country to find the most urgent wells, the ones spewing the most CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent, a measure to compare the effects of different greenhouse gases).