Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Effect of Corporate Bankruptcy on Urban Oil and Gas Infrastructure

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).

Mass bankruptcies of energy companies have orphaned thousands of oil and gas wells across the United States in recent years, and these bankruptcies are projected to increase dramatically. Without solvent owners to plug and decommission them, such wells add to the already-sprawling network of abandoned oil and gas infrastructure. Oil and gas wells in cities are especially prone to abandonment, exposing nearby communities to toxins, redevelopment challenges, and exorbitant cleanup liabilities.

This doctoral dissertation project investigates the impacts of corporate insolvencies on oil and gas-producing communities. In addition to providing training for a graduate student in methods of scientific data collection and analysis, the study’s findings are disseminated broadly to a variety of audiences, including in general interest publications, industry journals, legal bulletins, and the reports of environmental organizations.

Three research questions motivate this study: (1) To what extent and in what ways does bankruptcy, as both a legal technology and a genre of political discourse, shape claims for urban economic stability, environmental justice, public health and safety, and corporate accountability? (2) How do insolvent oil and gas corporations and their orphan wells underscore the unpredictability and uncertainty of finance capitalism? (3) In what ways do the locations of orphan wells, in urban as opposed to rural areas, impact the responses of citizens to the abandonment and decommissioning of wells? To answer these questions the doctoral student uses ethnographic fieldwork to accompany and interview diverse urban stakeholders such as frontline community groups, environmental justice organizations, city officials, and industry representatives as they navigate corporate bankruptcies, oil and gas extraction, and the environmental and financial futures of their cities.

The project offers a model for examining how accountability, liability, debt, and credit affect the oil and gas sector, and by extension, impacts nearly every aspect of political, economic, and social life of the spaces where this abandoned infrastructure is located for generations to come.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.