Texas agency won’t plug some abandoned oil wells polluting private land

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Schuyler Wight is a fourth-generation rancher who has raised longhorn cattle exterior Midland for many years. Wight is not any geologist, however through the years, he’s needed to familiarize himself with what lies underground. Scattered throughout his sprawling 20,000-acre ranch are greater than 100 abandoned oil and fuel wells left behind by wildcatters who drilled in random areas for many years searching for oil. Many have been unsuccessful, however the drilling opened up layers of porous rock, revealing water and minerals.

Rather than cap the holes, the wildcatters and their oil firms — now lengthy gone — transferred possession of unproductive wells to the earlier homeowners of Wight’s ranch for use as water wells, often called P-13 wells.

Decades later, some of the wells on Wight’s land are leaking contaminated water, hydrogen sulfide and radioactive supplies. Occasionally, Wight’s cattle drink water that has bubbled as much as the floor and die, representing 1000’s of {dollars} in losses for his ranch.

Typically, the Texas Railroad Commission would take duty for cleansing up oil and fuel wells abandoned by now-defunct drilling firms. But the fee won’t spend a dime on wells like Wight’s. That’s as a result of the fee argues his wells aren’t oil or fuel wells as a result of they by no means efficiently produced fossil gas.

Without state or federal funds to scrub up the mess, farmers, ranchers and small native governments are struggling to repair the foremost environmental harm left from a long time of drilling. Wight has spent lots of of 1000’s of {dollars} — and counting — to scrub up just some of the wells on his property.

“That’s a lot of money when you’ve got to pay it back with cattle,” Wight stated.

Across the state, in response to the fee’s data, there are practically 2,000 documented P-13 wells. Not all of them have began to leak as on Wight’s ranch, however it’s not possible to know the total scale of the issue. “The RRC does not maintain a cost estimate to plug abandoned water wells as it is the responsibility of the landowner to complete those pluggings,” agency spokesperson Andrew Keese stated in an e mail.

In Pecos County, the Middle Pecos Groundwater Conservation District has repeatedly requested the Railroad Commission so as to add 40 wells to the agency’s statewide record of 8,000 abandoned wells marked for cleanup. The small native agency doesn’t have the funds, workers or assets it must plug the abandoned wells which can be polluting groundwater within the area, stated Ty Edwards, the district’s supervisor. Many of the wells are on distant properties, owned by absentee landowners, environmental advocates say. The most notorious of those wells, Sloan Blair No. 1, has been spewing a lot briny water that it’s shaped a physique of water nicknamed Lake Boehmer in the midst of the West Texas desert.

According to an evaluation commissioned by the groundwater district, the properly was initially drilled into the San Andres formation as an oil check properly after which was abandoned. Now, underground strain is inflicting the salty water to spew to the floor, bringing with it contaminants resembling benzene and xylene, each carcinogens. The evaluation discovered each compounds have been at unsafe ranges. The properly can also be leaking hydrogen sulfide fuel at doubtlessly deadly ranges for people, and heat-trapping gasses together with methane and carbon dioxide. To survey the location, researchers should put on hazmat fits.

“The problem is that when they drilled into this formation, there are several [layers] with no well integrity — you’re picking up different constituents that are causing the water quality to go very, very bad,” Edwards stated. “The water quality in the area is drastically degrading over time,” turning into undrinkable and unusable. “It’s known that you can’t get any good water in the area —most people get on the county water line that comes from 20 or 30 miles away. It’s making some areas uninhabitable.”

The million-dollar — even perhaps billion-dollar — query is why the Railroad Commission has doubled down on shedding duty for the transformed water wells, stated Cole Ruiz, a lawyer for the groundwater district. “The factual circumstances around these P-13 wells is that they were originally drilled by oil and gas operators — which requires a permit granted by the Railroad Commission,” he stated. “There’s nothing in the statute that allows them to shed jurisdiction once they’ve reclassified it as a water well.”

In essence, the Railroad Commission’s slim definition of what counts as an oil and fuel properly permits it to decide on which wells it would plug with state and federal funds. Since wells are nonetheless being transformed on paper to water wells — wherever from a handful to a couple dozen in recent times — meaning the issue continues to be rising, and operators could also be escaping future legal responsibility.

Ruiz suspects if the wells have been added to the state’s roster of orphan wells, they’d value tens of millions of extra {dollars} than the state has already dedicated towards cleanup and would slow the progress the agency has been reporting in recent times. In one significantly extreme case, for instance, an abandoned and improperly plugged oil and fuel properly on Wight’s land triggered a sinkhole so deep the state transportation agency is now spending greater than $25 million to reroute a street.

Railroad Commission workers members who testified at a current Texas House Natural Resources Committee listening to repeated their argument that some of Pecos County’s most troublesome wells, just like the one which created Lake Boehmer, merely aren’t within the agency’s jurisdiction. “It never produced any oil, or any gas. But it did produce a lot of water,” stated Clay Woodul, the fee’s assistant director of subject operations. “And that’s the difference. It never has been an oil or gas well. It will never be an oil or gas well.”

In the Eighties, the Texas Legislature allotted cash from regulatory and allow charges towards cleansing up wells and oil fields abandoned by firms that went bankrupt. Each abandoned properly can value not less than $20,000 to plug, in response to some estimates. An inflow of federal {dollars} by way of the Biden administration’s infrastructure invoice has granted the state $25 million to chip away at the $480 million problem. The fee has stated it won’t use federal cash for the P-13 wells.

Nationwide, the Environmental Protection Agency estimates there are more than 2 million abandoned oil and gas wells that must be plugged in an effort to scale back methane emissions nonetheless leaking from the wells, along with different pollution.

When Wight first observed the leaking wells on his property in 2015, he couldn’t discover data for them within the Railroad Commission’s databases. Wight employed a surveyor from Dallas, Jackie Portsmouth, who searched by way of the basement of the Midland Energy Library to discover a paper path for the issue wells. “Part of the problem is that the Railroad Commission’s older well data from 1964 hasn’t been put in their system properly,” Portsmouth stated.

Portsmouth used GIS instruments to find out the geolocation of the wells. Eventually, he discovered the permits, the mineral rights leases and different documentation for the wells. The firm that drilled one of many downside wells in 1969, Union Texas Petroleum, doesn’t exist on paper anymore — it was acquired by ARCO, one other oil and fuel firm, for $2.5 billion within the Nineteen Nineties.

“One of the arguments the [Railroad Commission] is making now is, ‘We never got any oil out of this,’” Wight stated. “But sometimes you drill dry holes, that’s the way that thing goes. You have to get a permit to drill it. I’m not very smart, but it sure looks like it’s their baby.”

Advocates and consultants say the Railroad Commission’s distinction between water wells and oil and fuel wells is bigoted. The choice appears to be primarily based solely on present commissioners’ and staffers’ interpretations of the state’s natural resource code; there aren’t any strings connected to federal orphan properly funds that may make some wells ineligible.

“The definition of orphan wells is broad enough that it could encompass P-13 wells,” stated Tannya Benavides, the advocacy director for the nonprofit watchdog group Commission Shift. “The Railroad Commission is passing the buck — these wells weren’t originally drilled as water wells.”

Commission Shift has advocated for the state Legislature to amend the Natural Resources Code to particularly embody the transformed wells in its definition of orphan wells. That would pressure the fee to incorporate the wells in its cleanup and will additionally present extra funding, research and assets to handle the issue of transformed wells on private property.

“I’m not trying to put words in their mouth, but it seems like this is a problem the Railroad Commission wants to go away,” stated Ruiz, Middle Pecos’ lawyer. “But I can tell you, it’s not going to go away.”