The Zombie Well Crisis

ClientEarth USA attorney Benjamin Segal led the research and writing of a new report exposing the true scale of Illinois’s “zombie well” crisis. Coauthored with Northwestern Pritzker School of Law’s Environmental Advocacy Center, the report shows that while the state lists about 6,000 abandoned wells, the real threat is far larger: most of Illinois’s 30,000 active wells produce little to no oil and are at high risk of abandonment—potentially leaving taxpayers with more than a billion dollars in cleanup costs. 

With the report now published, well received, and featured on the front page of the Chicago Tribune, we are pleased to share Ben’s thoughts, exclusively for this journal.  

What did your collaboration with the Northwestern University law students involve? In what ways did they support your research, and how did you contribute to theirs?

The students did a ton of work. I have been working on related issues for a few years and so was able to provide a national perspective on the problem and point them in the right direction, but the students were the ones calling state agencies, submitting freedom of information requests, combing public records, etc. Most of my work had to do with helping to then understand and frame all the information we were gathering, to make sense of it and place it within legible narrative structures. From there, I collaborated with the clinic and a few key partners to assess the information we gathered and then developed thoughtful suggestions for how Illinois could mitigate its problem.

From your perspective, how essential are partnerships with academic institutions to the future of ClientEarth’s legal practice and to its mission of driving systemic change through innovative applications of business and financial law in the environmental sphere?

I think your question already provides the answer – essential. Clinics especially provide a great resource to help us magnify our impact, and at the same time it’s exciting to help train new lawyers who will join us in fighting for a livable planet. Plus academic partners help give some legibility to our work for audiences that maybe don’t know who ClientEarth is but certainly know institutions like Northwestern.

As policymakers, communities, and industry leaders begin to respond to the findings in this report, what concrete steps would you most like to see taken in the next year?

I deeply hope that the state takes all of the steps we lay out. The hole they are in is pretty deep, and no one change will be a magic fix. But I think the first step is just recognizing the existence and scale of the problem and focusing attention on addressing it. Some environmental catastrophes are sudden, massive spectacles, but these disused wells are present in a subtler, slower, more diffuse form of disaster that is all too easily ignored or disguised. Making it visible is the necessary first step to addressing it, and I hope significant regulatory, enforcement, and legislative changes will follow.

-Ben Segal, Attorney, ClientEarth USA