There are more than 20,000 known abandoned oil and gas wells across Oklahoma. Each one is a liability on someone’s books: an environmental risk, a cleanup cost, a scar from an extractive era that took what it needed and moved on. If you’ve driven through rural Oklahoma, you’ve seen them. Rusting things on someone’s land that nobody’s doing anything about.

But each one is also a borehole that already reaches deep into the earth. The drilling is done. The infrastructure exists. And the temperature gradient between the surface and those depths is a permanent, inexhaustible energy source. The Earth already did the work. We’re just accepting the gift.

Phoenix Wells is a proposal to convert those abandoned wells into community-owned geothermal power plants: energy infrastructure that powers local AI systems, community oracles that serve education, healthcare, agriculture, municipal planning, and civic engagement. Not cloud computing shipped in from somewhere else. Intelligence that lives where people live, powered by the earth beneath their feet.

The workforce that drilled those wells has the skills to convert them. The communities whose land sits over geothermal heat get the revenue. This is oil country ingenuity applied to the next century’s problem.

Oklahoma is 50th in education. The fossil fuel economy is ending whether we like it or not. The question isn’t whether to transition. It’s whether Oklahoma leads or gets left behind. I know which one I’m betting on.

The wells are already there. The future is waiting underground.

David

Correction, September 29, 2026. This post first said Oklahoma has over 22,000 abandoned oil and gas wells. The Oklahoma Corporation Commission, the state agency that regulates oil and gas, counted 20,406 known abandoned wells that still need to be plugged or taken over, in 76 of the state’s 77 counties, in a January 2025 report to a state Senate subcommittee. It also says the real number is almost certainly noticeably higher, because many early wells were never recorded. The post now says more than 20,000, and so do our other pages that used the old figure.