Spic and span
Landowners James Wright and Vicki Hayward llook over their land, which is the 1000th wellsite cleanup in Osage County by the Oklahoma Energy Resources Board.
Osage County landowners Vicki Hayward and James Wright soon will be able to let their grandchildren safely play on their property after crews this week began clearing out a nearly century-old abandoned oil field site.
“It’s a dream come true,” Hayward said of the cleanup effort. “It’s beyond our expectations. It means so much to us to see the land restored.”
Hayward and Wright about three years ago bought the more than 140 acres northwest of Tulsa without realizing about 25 acres were scarred with the concrete remnants of an old oil field and of an old saltwater dump that left barren a large swath of the land.
They asked Osage leaders for help and were directed to the Oklahoma Energy Resources Board (OERB), which agreed to cover the costs of cleanup.
“The land would have stayed like it was,” Wright said. “We just didn’t have the means to make those kinds of repairs.”
The site is the 1,000th OERB has cleaned up in Osage County alone. Funded by a voluntary tax from oil producers, the OERB has restored more than 15,000 abandoned oil field sites statewide.
“We have spent $5.5 million on 1,000 sites in Osage county over the past 10 years,” said Steve Sowers, OERB’s environmental director. “We’ve made great strides, but we still have a way to go.”
The largest county in Oklahoma and home to some of the state’s earliest production, Osage County also presents regulatory challenges. Because the minerals throughout the county are owned by the Osage Nation, oil and natural gas development is regulated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, not the Oklahoma Corporation Commission. The Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality has some regulation over water and air in the county.
In Osage County, cleanups are referred to the OERB by Bureau of Indian Affairs and its 14 field inspectors.
“OERB has been a great asset to us because they’ve allowed us to show that we are good stewards of the land, and they have helped surface owners clean up their properties,” said Richard Winlock, deputy superintendent of the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ Osage Agency.
One notable difference for the cleanup effort in Osage County is that properties tend to be larger in the area, said Phil Spurlin, owner of Edmond-based Beacon Environmental, which coordinates OERB’s cleanup efforts.
“Because of the size of the ranches up there and the property controlled by the Osage Nation, sometimes we’ll get projects with multiple sections,” Spurlin said. The ability to work on several projects in one area boosts efficiency, he said.
The cleanup efforts have benefited all of Osage County, said Raymond Red Corn, assistant principal chief of the Osage Nation.
“This is a beautiful place,” he said. “When that beauty is marred by accidents or negligence, it’s obviously very helpful to have an organization with adequate funding that can address these surface issues time and again and get Mother Nature back to work.”