Toxic menace bubbles up
Millions of old oil wells may be spewing ugly mix of chems
CRANE, Texas — Rusted pipes litter the sandy fields of Ashley Williams Watt’s cattle ranch in windswept West Texas.
Corroded skeletons are all that remain of hundreds of abandoned oil wells. Unable to produce any useful amounts of oil or gas, the wells were plugged with cement decades ago.
But something eerie is going on beneath the land, where Watt once played among the mesquite trees and jackrabbits.
The wells seem to be unplugging themselves. They’re leaking dangerous chemicals into her fields.
First she found crude oil bubbling from one abandoned well. Then an another well was seeping pools of produced water, a byproduct of oil and gas extraction containing toxic chemicals.
“I’m watching this well literally just spew brine water into my water table, and then I have to go home at night, and I’m sweaty and tired and smelly, and I get in the shower, and I turn on the shower and I look at it, and I think, is this shower going to kill me?” Watt said.
The crisis unfolding on Watt’s 75,000-acre ranch offers a window on a growing problem for the oil industry and the communities and governments that are often left to clean up the mess.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, 3.2 million abandoned oil and gas wells exist in the United States. About a third were plugged with cement to prevent leaks.
Most haven’t been plugged at all. Many of the wells are releasing methane, a greenhouse gas containing about 86 times the climate-warming power of carbon dioxide over two decades. Some are leaking chemicals such as benzene, a known carcinogen, into groundwater.
Regulators don’t know where hundreds of thousands of abandoned wells are because many were drilled before modern record-keeping and plugging rules were established.
They are a silent menace.
And the problem isn’t confined to Texas. In recent years, abandoned wells have been found on the Navajo Nation, where a hiker stumbled across wells oozing fluid that smelled like motor oil; in Colorado, where a basement exploded, killing two men after an abandoned flowline leaked methane; and in Wyoming, where a school shut down after air tests revealed high levels of benzene and carbon dioxide.
Experts believe the problem is getting worse. Even before the viral pandemic, producers were declaring bankruptcy and abandoning oil fields after spending more on fracking operations than they ultimately could afford. Then the coronavirus halted travel, obliterating demand for fuel and leaving less money to properly plug wells.
President Biden wants to spend billions plugging the wells. But Congress is unlikely to allocate enough money to seriously confront the issue.
“If, all of a sudden, we could switch to all green renewable energy, that’s great, but these wells don’t disappear; they’re still going to be there,” said Mary Kang, an assistant professor at McGill University in Canada.
After the discoveries on Watt’s ranch, traces of benzene showed up in the well that supplies her cattle’s drinking water.
Chevron, which owned two of the oil wells that recently came unplugged, began trucking in drinking water while its crews tried to fix the leaks.
But Watt worried her animals might have consumed contaminated water. So she had her 600 head of cattle hauled off to another part of her ranch.
Though Chevron officials maintained that the cattle could safely return, Watt disagreed. She’s haunted by a memory of crude oil bubbling up in a toilet bowl at her family’s ranch when she was a teenager.
Horrified, they switched to another well, but never found the source of the leak.
Representatives for Chevron said the company is committed to replugging the two wells that recently sprang leaks.
But Watt fears additional wells are deteriorating, and Chevron doesn’t plan to check its other wells.
If Watt should inform Chevron of another leaking well, “if we have to take responsibility, we will and we’ll do the right thing by the landowner,” said Catie Mathews, a company spokeswoman.
Hailing from a long line of cattle ranchers, Watt never thought she’d be fighting this fight.
She graduated from the Naval Academy and worked in intelligence for the Marines. Even after she obtained an MBA from Harvard, she returned to the ranch.
“The story of my family,” Watt said, “is a story of land, if nothing else.”
The first successful commercial oil well in the U.S. was drilled in Pennsylvania in 1859, but few detailed records survived that early oil boom.
Pennsylvania has located roughly 8,700 orphaned wells, mostly unplugged. Yet based on historical photos and surveys, Pennsylvania estimates 100,000 to 560,000 additional unplugged wells around the state.
“We’re not plugging fast enough to keep up with the wells we’re discovering,” said Seth Pelepko, an environmental program manager in the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.