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Oklahoma’s oil and gas industry touts its altruism and environmental stewardship by pointing to a voluntary levy that companies pay on their production, which is then used to clean up orphan wells that have been left to the state.
But some of Oklahoma’s biggest oil companies have opted out of the fund, forcing the state to return millions of dollars that would have otherwise gone to restoring land scarred by discarded drilling infrastructure and contaminated by leaks and spills, according to a ProPublica and Capital & Main analysis.
The list of companies that received such refunds includes some of the Oklahoma oil industry’s household names, such as Ovintiv and Chesapeake Energy Corp. It also includes the two richest people in the state : Harold Hamm, a pioneer in fracking technology and the founder of the multibillion-dollar Continental Resources, and George Kaiser, whose success as head of his family’s oil company helped him buy the Bank of Oklahoma.