Author: Staci Taruscio, CEO

The science behind this was built by people who understood the thing being measured and is why high-quality forestry credits hold up to scrutiny. I think orphan well plugging can take a page from this book, only in this chapter we must remember not to hire forestry experts and send them out to a wellsite.

In forestry, land managers with expertise in rights and regulatory processes are best suited to establish what business-as-usual looks like for a given forest. They understand the jurisdictional context, the ownership landscape, and what would actually happen to that land without intervention. They are, in short, experts in their field. In orphan well plugging, we have just shortened it to landman. A landman understands title, mineral rights, and the regulatory landscape that determines whether a well would ever be plugged without carbon finance. Without that expertise, your additionality case is built on assumptions rather than documented reality.

LiDAR and satellite imagery allow precise, high-resolution mapping of carbon stocks across large or inaccessible forested areas. The technology translates what is physically present into a measurable, verifiable number. In orphan well plugging, various well testing techniques do the same thing, capturing methane volumes under varying conditions and placing them precisely in time. The direct connect method, stability windows, and multi-hour measurement campaigns are the orphan well equivalent of LiDAR. They take something complex and dynamic (gas leakage) and translate it into a number the market can trust. And just like forestry, remote sensing requires a trained eye to interpret correctly. Well test data requires a production engineer who understands what the measurements actually mean.

For a forestry project, biometric measurements such as species composition, height, and diameter, are translated via biomass equations to estimate carbon content. The math is only as good as the underlying measurements, and the measurements are only as good as the person taking them. In orphan well plugging, reservoir engineers translate well test measurements and subsurface parameters such as rate, pressure, and gas composition into material science and reservoir equations to estimate emission volumes. The crediting model that results is only as defensible as the engineering behind it. Decline curves, type wells, and flow regimes are not carbon market constructs, they are oil and gas industry tools being applied to a nascent carbon market.

Selecting suitable tree species and managing growth over time ensures that carbon stays stored permanently within the forestry project. The permanence case is built on ecological expertise applied at the site level. Designing plug composition and setting requirements to ensure long-term integrity requires exactly the same depth of site-specific expertise. The cement goes in the ground once. The engineering decisions made in that moment determine whether the credit holds up. That is not a methodology question but a plug integrity question, and answering that question requires people who have spent their careers understanding well design and how subsurface behaves after it is sealed.

In the spirit of dialogue, each of these points begs a single question: Did the fledgling carbon market rely on industry because they recognized them as experts, or was it because they had no other choice? The market has grown and the situational difference is that now, the market is filled with “carbon experts” – a valuable perspective when paired with industry but not in place of it.

In forestry, verification requires on-the-ground validation. Someone has to go back to the forest, measure the trees, and confirm the carbon is still there. There is physical evidence of the work, and it can be physically checked.

In orphan well plugging, the work disappears. When a well is plugged and a site is restored, there is no infrastructure left to validate. The well is gone, the land is returned, and what remains is the data, the measurements, the engineering documentation, and the post-plugging monitoring records, as well as the people who produced it.

This is why the question of expertise matters arguably more in this space than it does in forestry. In forestry, you can go back and check. In orphan well plugging, you are largely trusting the process. Which means the process has to be built by people who know exactly what they are doing.

The voluntary carbon market made a smart decision when it built forestry methodology on forestry expertise, and it should make the same decision for orphan well plugging.

That means requiring the full bench of landmen, production engineers, reservoir engineers, plugging specialists, and safety professionals not as a nice-to-have participants but as a baseline expectation for any project entering this space. It also means recognizing that the expertise the oil and gas industry built over a century of supplying energy to our nation is the technical foundation that makes high-integrity methane abatement credits possible.

At Rebellion, the well site does not just disappear when we are done. It becomes something. It becomes native grasses and healthy, restored soil. It becomes a recovering ecosystem on land that was contaminated and neglected for decades – we partner with experts in their own right to perform this restoration, and how do we know they are experts? They have years of degrees, experience, and references, plus the ability to articulate their methods and then substantiate them with data and science.

The carbon market made this connection with forestry, and we have figured it out with grassland restoration. In a world where everyone is an expert, what indicators will the carbon market look for to identify its own oil and gas industry roster?