I'm Aisha Roscoe, and this is a Sunday story, where we go beyond the news of the day to bring you one big story.

For more than 150 years, the U.S. has been drilling for oil.

That meant punching millions of wells deep into the earth.

And those wells, they don't just go away when that big gush of oil is over.

Today, our big story is about the life, death, and afterlife of all wells.

We're talking to NPR's Camila Dominozki, who did a series of stories all about these wells.

Hey, Camila.

Hi, Ayesha.

So now, you know, I used to be an energy reporter.

And so I really follow that news.

I'm always into, like, the energy story, especially with oil.

And, of course, there's a lot going on in the energy world right now.

You could say that again.

Yeah. So can I ask you,

like, what made you want to cover these old wells, which are, you know, I mean, you look at it as

like literally old news? I honestly fell down a rabbit hole based on a single fact that blew my mind, which is that the

vast majority of U.S. oil wells make very little oil. That's really not what you would think.

That's very counterintuitive. So what's going on here? Yeah. Well, what's happening is most of the wells in the

U.S., more than three-fourths of them, are only making a tiny bit of oil. When you put all the

wells of the country together, the U.S. makes a ton of oils, the largest producer ever. But most of that

comes from a relatively small number of wells, which are absolute beasts. They spit out huge amounts

of oil. So like the overachievers? That's right. But all of these wells have a life cycle.

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