Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Old oil wells tainting Texas land
Properties leaking, money lacking to stop it, researcher says
Ashley Watt is nothing if not a friend of fracking. She’s invested in mines that supply the sand that frackers blast into the ground. Her family owns a ranch larger than Manhattan that’s home to hundreds of oil and natural gas wells. Her Twitter handle is “Frac Sand Baroness.”
But three weeks ago Watt began publicly railing against one oil driller for leaks on her land. Noxious wastewater from oil drilling began leaching across the ground, endangering people and livestock. By her count, the pollution has killed four cows and two calves so far.
Chevron Corp., which drilled the 1960s-era wells that polluted Watt’s land, brought in earth- moving equipment and a well-control crew, even though it had sold most of its interests there years ago. It took 10 days to halt the leak. Given the hundreds of other aging wells dotting the land, it’s done little to put Watt’s mind at ease.
“I am not anti-oil industry,” Watt said in an interview. “That is the economy here. It’s a good business.” At the same time, she said, “We have to be responsible stewards. If we can’t do it right here in the Permian Basin, then how can we do it right anywhere? Nobody should let us in if we’re going to act like this.”
And just like that, Watt —
whether she liked it or not — became an ally to scores of environmentalists and activists who’ve been warning for years that America is on the verge of an environmental disaster. Long before the advent of shale drilling techniques that fueled the greatest move toward energy independence the nation’s ever seen, conventional oil explorers left the country pierced with millions of defunct wells that are aging by the day and increasingly springing leaks.
“There’s this enormous backlog” of abandoned wells, “and we don’t have financing in place to clean them up,” said Daniel Raimi, a fellow at the nonprofit research group Resources for the Future. “We’ve seen very clearly that existing regulatory structures, particularly at the state level, have not properly incentivized companies to clean up their infrastructure.”
There are 3.4 million old crude and gas wells in various states of abandonment across the U. S., an almost 20% increase in the past decade, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Less than half of those holes have been plugged, EPA figures showed.
METHANE LEAKS SOAR
Methane releases from abandoned gas wells have grown by 40% in the past three decades. As the energy industry pivots away from fossil fuels to combat climate change, the inventory of untended wells will only expand.
Abandoned wells have become so thorny an issue in longtime oil states like Pennsylvania that President Joe Biden included $16 billion in his infrastructure package to put laid- off roughnecks to work plugging old wells and mines. Federal lawmakers including Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts have meanwhile blasted the Bureau of Land Management for failing to hold the oil and gas industry accountable for plugging millions of abandoned wells on public lands.
In Texas, the nation’s largest source of oil, companies plugged almost 8,900 wells in the past fiscal year, and have sealed another 5,700 so far this fiscal year, according to the Texas Railroad Commission that oversees the oil and natural gas industry. The agency requires concrete barriers through sections of a well that go through aquifers, but the commission doesn’t track how many of them spring leaks. The regulator documented more than 500 industry-related spills and accidents last fiscal year, with equipment failure and corrosion listed as the top two causes.
For it’s part, Chevron said in a statement that its priorities on Watt’s property “are protecting people — including Ms. Watt and our workforce onsite, protecting the environment, plugging the well and remediating impacts.” Industry experts estimated the cleanup is costing Chevron more than $250,000 a day, though the company has declined to disclose its expenses. The company also helped Watt relocate 500 cows and trucked in fresh drinking water for her family and ranch workers.
“There are hundreds of wells on this ranch alone,” Watt said. “Extrapolating thousands of wells in the Permian Basin, tens of thousands, how many of those are going to collapse? Even if it’s only 1%, that’s going to pollute aquifers and destroy a huge swath of land. That’s enough to make the Permian Basin functionally uninhabitable in 50 years.”
RED BUCKET FIX
Watt and her attorney Sarah Stogner took to social media to highlight the scope of the pollution. In one Tweet, they showed a cleanup crew’s ad hoc method of slowing a wastewater leak by placing a red plastic bucket atop a length of pipe. Red bucket memes exploded across Twitter’s energy-industry subculture. In another, Watt invited Chevron Chief Executive Officer Mike Wirth to visit and “come get some sand in your Gucci loafers.”
Chevron hired Cudd Well Control, a legendary oilfield outfit famous for snuffing out the late Saddam Hussein’s fiery blowouts in Kuwait, to help with the cleanup.
Despite all of Chevron’s efforts, Virginia Palacios, executive director of the watchdog Commission Shift based in Austin, Texas, calls old wells like the ones on Watt’s property “ticking time bombs.”
“It’s important for the Railroad Commission and other agencies to understand that we need to plan to monitor these wells in perpetuity,” Palacios said. “Even if you plug these wells, as we have seen in this incident, they can still cause environmental damage and pose a risk to human health.”