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Works Committee, on Monday said he will press Interior Secretary Sally Jewell to explain what the department will do to increase well inspections in light of the AP report.
• "The fines Interior Department inspectors can levy on oil and gas companies who violate drilling safety requirements amount to a slap on the wrist -- they are nowhere near a sufficient financial deterrent to ensure that companies put safety ahead of speed. Now there is increasing evidence that potentially dangerous wells go uninspected altogether," he said. "We need to ensure that the oil industry is paying its fair share to drill on public lands."
• BLM's deputy director, Linda Lance, said the current rate of inspections "is simply not acceptable to us."
• "No one would have predicted the incredible boom of drilling on federal lands, and the number of wells we've been asked to process," she said. Since fracking reached a height in 2009, about 90 percent of new wells on federal land are drilled by the process, which involves pumping huge volumes of water, sand and chemicals underground.
• The agency oversees 100,000 oil and gas wells on public lands, 3,486 of which received the high priority designation.
• According to BLM records for fiscal years 2009 to 2012, 1,400 of those high priority wells, spread across 13 states, were not federally inspected. Wyoming had the most, 632, or 45 percent. South Dakota had 1 out of 2 wells uninspected, and Pennsylvania had 1 out of 6.
• All the higher-risk wells were inspected in six states -- Alabama, Michigan, Mississippi, New York, Ohio and Texas.
• Many more wells are located on private lands, where state officials take the lead in ensuring they comply with environmental laws, with mixed results. Nationwide, there were nearly 500,000 producing gas wells in 2012, according to Energy Information Administration data. More than 1,800 new wells were being drilled in March alone.
• Dennis Willis, a former BLM field officer in Price, Utah, says he routinely provided input on oil leasing and drilling decisions on federal land before his retirement in 2009. He described a situation of chronic underfunding dating to at least the early 2000s, when BLM management made clear that issuing new permits would be a priority over other tasks, according to a 2002 memorandum from supervisors in Utah to field officers. At the time, fracking was becoming more widely used.
• "There certainly wasn't a shortage of spills, leaks, pipeline failures and other problems," said Willis, who now does consulting work for conservation and other

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