PECOS COUNTY, Texas (Reuters) – On a sprawling ranch in Pecos County, oil well control specialist Hawk Dunlap used a backhoe in late July to uncover an abandoned so-called zombie well that had come back to life despite being abandoned just over a year ago. closed. year earlier, hissing gas and bubbling toxic water in the dry Texas dirt.
Dressed in bright red overalls and a silver helmet, Dunlap jumped off the machine and into the hole to clear away the remaining soil with a shovel. He then picked up a brittle piece of cement that was part of the casing meant to contain liquids and gases. underground. With a light pressure of his fingers, he pulverized the cement into dust as the Briggs family, who own the ranch, formed a circle around him.
“This wasn’t connected properly,” Dunlap said. “This is the work of the three stooges of the Railroad Commission.”
The Railroad Commission (RRC) is the regulatory agency that, despite its name, oversees oil and gas operations in Texas. And Dunlap, a 30-year veteran of oil fields around the world, has become one of its most outspoken critics.
Armed with a portable gas detector and cell phone, Dunlap has spent much of the past two and a half years documenting a spate of blowouts and spills from oil wells in West Texas, at the insistence of landowners, into an epidemic, he says. is caused by low quality plugging work left by operators and their contractors and approved by the RRC.
He and his partner Sarah Stogner, an oil and gas attorney who documents their work on social media, say they have now recorded more than 100 leaking old or “orphan” wells without a responsible owner, which were listed in RRC records as correct connected, including the one at Briggs Ranch in Pecos County.
Reports from Reuters in West Texas, along with interviews with landowners and experts and a review of RRC data, show why the state regulator is under increasing pressure to step up its oversight. The additional research comes at a time when more and more abandoned wells over the past two years have started to flow or even form geyser-like streams, form salt- and chemical-laden lakes or create sinkholes.
Making matters worse is the increasing pressure coming up from underground as a result of the billions of gallons of wastewater being injected back into reservoirs for disposal in the latest fracking-led drilling wave in the Permian Basin, the largest oil field in the world. the USA That pressure, Dunlap says, is likely causing the heavily clogged wells to burst.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said it would investigate revoking the RRC’s permitting authority for waste treatment wells after Texas watchdog group Commission Shift filed a federal complaint alleging mismanagement.
RRC spokesperson Patty Ramon said the EPA has not yet contacted them to launch the review, noting that the agency previously praised its underground injection program.
“If they do, we will help them with any input,” Ramon said.
Faced with increasing calls from concerned landowners, Dunlap is waging a long-running campaign to win one of three RRC seats as a Libertarian this fall, hoping to change the organization from within.
“It’s about making sure that things are done right and that we don’t let oil companies overwhelm the citizens of Texas just because they produce oil and gas and pay some royalties,” he told Reuters.
Among the changes he would like to see: faster and better quality plugging of wells, accountability for the oil companies that left them behind, and a new name for the Railroad Commission to make it clear that it regulates the oil industry.
“I’ve wandered the earth for 27 years praising the fact that Texas is doing it bigger and better than everyone else. So you have to understand that when we started excavating and investigating … it was quite a blow to me,” said Dunlap, who has worked in 103 countries.
PERFECT STORM
Without a known solvent owner, the responsibility for plugging these orphan wells falls to the RRC, which plans to plug 2,000 wells this year with state money.
Although the RRC has documented more than 8,500 inactive or unplugged orphan wells in Texas, experts estimate there are thousands more undocumented, the legacy of more than a century of drilling, that do not qualify for closure funding.
Meanwhile, oil drillers exploiting new wells in the Permian, above Texas and New Mexico, are collecting about 24 million barrels a day of “produced water” — the salty mixture that forms alongside oil and gas, according to Laura Capper of energy consultancy EnergyMakers. Between 40 and 55% of this water is injected into local drains, while much of the rest is reused for oil activities, she said.
In addition to concerns about the produced water — loaded with chemicals like radium and boron — threatening local aquifers and vegetation, all the drilling, pumping and reinjecting is causing the earth to rise and sink in some places and trigger earthquakes, landowners and activists say .
“It’s this perfect storm in the Permian with all this produced water, earthquakes and orphan wells,” said Adam Peltz, director of the Environmental Defense Fund’s Energy Program.
Deep injections of wastewater have caused earthquakes, leading the RRC to restrict new drilling permits in some areas. However, shallower injections create excess pressure in the subsurface, causing poorly clogged wells to leak or bubble.
The RRC pushed back on the claim that the problem is widespread.
“There is little evidence that previously plugged wells are leaking on a large scale,” Ramon said, adding that commission inspectors put “high-risk, high-priority wells” at the top of their plug list.
In 2022, Texas received an initial $25 million grant from the bipartisan infrastructure bill’s Orphaned Well Program to address the problem. In January it received another $80 million, but it came with strings attached: Using the money, the RRC must measure the amount of methane and other gases leaking from plugged wells before and after plugging them.
The RRC estimates it will need a total of more than $481 million to cap its wells.
Ramon said the RRC has exhausted the first tranche of federal funds and has begun tapping the larger tranche, in addition to the state orphan funds. She said the agency is “complying with federal requirements.”
‘WILL ONLY GET WORSE’
Meanwhile, scientists have strengthened the link between wastewater injection and blowout wells.
For example, a paper published in Geophysical Research Letters in July by researchers at Southern Methodist University showed that a massive orphan well blowout in Crane County, Texas, in 2022 was caused primarily by wastewater injection that occurred several miles away.
The RRC is also investigating the connection, but has not yet published a conclusion. It closed two saltwater disposal wells after a series of earthquakes just northwest of Pecos County in the last week of July.
Back in Pecos County on the 320-acre Briggs ranch with 30 abandoned wells that were last productive in the 1980s, Laura Briggs said things have only gotten worse.
Less than a week after Dunlap dug up the previously clogged well on the property, a separate old leaking well less than 1,000 feet from her home and animal pens suddenly experienced an explosive burst of produced water. Briggs’ gas monitor showed high levels of toxic hydrogen sulfide.
“It’s been leaking for a year. I reported it to the committee several times,” she said. “But it has to leak like this before the Railroad Commission will respond.”
In early August, a vacuum truck arrived at the ranch to suck out the liquid that flowed from the well as it collected near her livestock.
“It’s going to suck up whatever comes out of that well,” she said of the truck. “Then he’s going to take it off and dump it in a saltwater well, and that’s why these wells leak.”
(This story has been refiled to its correct location from Pecos County to Ward County, in the caption of Figure 1)
