Six years ago today, the Well Done Foundation plugged an orphan well called Anderson #7 in Toole County, Montana. The critics called it a drop in the bucket. They had no idea what that drop would become.
A Well Drilled in 1929
The Anderson #7 was spudded on July 11, 1929, drilled to a final depth of 1,560 feet by C.A. Remington in Montana’s historic Kevin-Sunburst Oil Field. It sat on a forty-acre parcel known as the Anderson Lease, home to nine oil wells that had been in production since 1924, through a Great Depression, a World War, and over three generations of Montana families.
For decades, those wells meant good-paying jobs. They built communities and infrastructure across Montana’s Golden Triangle. But when the last operator, Cavalier Petroleum, filed for bankruptcy in the early 1990s, the wells were orphaned. By default, they became the responsibility of the State of Montana. The once-productive wells were now a liability for the state, a black eye for the oil and gas industry, and a daily obstacle for the farmer working the land around them.
That farmer was Sam Stewart. For nearly thirty years, Sam farmed that ground with orphaned wellheads sitting in his field like broken promises from a company that no longer existed. Leaking methane. Wide open. And nobody was coming back.
A Day That Changed Everything
On July 26, 2019, Well Done Foundation founder Curtis Shuck laid eyes on the Anderson Lease for the first time. He had spent thirty years in oil and gas. He knew what a wellhead looked like when nobody was coming back for it. But seeing an entire forty-acre lease full of abandoned, leaking wells, smelling the hydrogen sulfide in the air, watching gas vent with the naked eye, it marked an inflection point in his life that started a chain reaction still going today.
“I had no idea that I would be fortunate enough to share an update like this with you all,” Curtis wrote in a reflection on the Anderson Lease three years later. “That fateful July day became the start of the Well Done Foundation.”
Curtis adopted his first orphan well on the Anderson Lease in the fall of 2019. The Well Done Foundation plugged its very first well, Big West Anderson #3, on Earth Day 2020. Then came the Allen 31-8. And then, on September 30, 2020, in the middle of COVID, with almost nobody watching, the team plugged Anderson #7.
It was WDF’s third orphan well plug. And it was the one that changed everything.
“A Drop in the Bucket”
Vice News came to the Anderson Lease. They filmed a story about orphan wells and the retired oil man who had started a nonprofit to plug them. That video has received more than 1.7 million views on YouTube, and when the segment aired, the skeptics had their verdict ready.
“A drop in the bucket.”
Three and a half million abandoned wells in this country, and you plugged one? Activists questioned the motives. Regulators questioned the scale. A resource council expressed doubt about the effort. An oil guy playing savior? Good luck with that.
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Curtis understood the skepticism. He’s said so many times since. They were right about the scope. Three and a half million is a staggering, almost incomprehensible number. But they were wrong about what one well could prove.
“I’ve worn that ‘bucket’ comment as a badge of honor ever since,” Curtis wrote recently on LinkedIn. “While our entire organization feels the overwhelming scale of the orphan well issue, we all take solace in our #onewellatatime approach.”
Nine Wells. One Lease. Full Circle.
Anderson #7 wasn’t the end of the story on that forty-acre parcel. It was the beginning.
After #7 was plugged, the Well Done Foundation went back for the rest. In June 2021, with funding from HB2 Origination LLC, WDF began plugging Anderson #3, #4, #6, and #8. Kerrits founder and former WDF board member Kerri Kent funded the Allen 31-8, with support from Kerrits new owner Joel Citron of Tenth Avenue Commerce. Newlight Technologies, the California-based maker of AirCarbon, funded the plugging of Anderson #5 in November 2021 and Vital Eco supported efforts to plug these initial wells. By the fall of 2021, all nine orphan wells on the Anderson Lease had been permanently sealed.
Ninety-seven years of oil production. Three decades of abandonment. And then, after a chain of partnerships, donors, and crews working through Montana winters, the lease was whole again. When Curtis visited the site in the summer of 2022, he was greeted by an amazing stand of spring wheat. You would never know the rich history of that property, or the important role it played in the energy, environment, agriculture, and community spaces.
Sam Stewart got his land back. The ground was farmland again, just like it was always meant to be.
What a Drop in the Bucket Looks Like
Six years after Anderson #7, the Well Done Foundation is preparing to rig up on its 130th orphan well.
Here’s what those drops added up to:
- 130 orphan wells permanently plugged
- 26 states with active or completed projects
- More than 5 million metric tons of CO₂ equivalent eliminated, not offset on paper, not traded on a market, sealed in the ground
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The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service entrusting WDF to perform work on sensitive public lands to plug more than 112 wells in refuges, including 37 wells plugged at Deep Fork National Wildlife Refuge in Oklahoma in 18 months
- The National Park Service signed a cooperative agreement with WDF to assess nearly 700 orphan wells across 54 national parks in 26 states
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Partnerships with companies including Oracle, Atlantic Media Group, Pacific Steel and Recycling, Zefiro/Plants & Goodwin, and more.
- Former roughnecks who spent their careers drilling wells are now getting trained and paid to plug them through WDF’s Qualified Measurement Specialist (QMS) program
“A Drop in the Bucket” campaign
To mark the sixth anniversary of Anderson #7, the Well Done Foundation has launched “A Drop in the Bucket,” a public campaign inviting individuals, corporations and organizations to contribute to the effort to address the nation’s orphan well crisis.
“A drop is not insignificant because the bucket is large,” Shuck said. “A drop is how you begin filling it. Every well we plug is methane no longer escaping into the atmosphere. Every acre we restore is land returned to productive use. We’re asking people to add their drop.”
The campaign directs supporters to welldonefoundation.org, where they can donate to fund well-plugging projects, learn about orphan wells in their state and share the foundation’s work. A special edition of the foundation’s Carbon Wildcat video series, in which Shuck returns to the Anderson #7 story, accompanies the campaign launch.