By Valerie Volcovici
PECOS COUNTY, Texas (Reuters) – On a sprawling ranch in Pecos County, oil well control specialist Hawk Dunlap used an excavator in late July to uncover an abandoned, or so-called zombie, well that had sprung back to life despite being plugged just over a year ago, hissing gas and bubbling toxic water into the arid Texas soil.
Dunlap, wearing bright red overalls and a silver hard hat, jumped off the machine and into the hole to scoop away the remaining dirt with a shovel. Then he picked up a brittle chunk of cement that was part of the casing designed to contain liquids and gases underground. He crushed the cement into dust with a light squeeze of his fingers as the Briggs family, who own the ranch, formed a circle around him.
“It wasn’t sealed properly,” Dunlap said. “It’s the work of the three henchmen of the Railroad Commission.”
The Railroad Commission (RRC) is the regulatory agency that, despite its name, oversees oil and gas production in Texas. And Dunlap, who has worked in oil fields around the world for three decades, has become one of its most vocal critics.
Armed with a portable gas detector and a cell phone, Dunlap has spent much of the past two and a half years documenting a spate of oil well blowouts and leaks across West Texas at the behest of landowners. He believes this epidemic is the result of substandard, RRC-approved sealing work performed by operators and their contractors.
He and his partner Sarah Stogner, an oil and gas attorney who documents her work on social media, say they have now identified more than 100 leaking old wells or “orphaned” wells with no responsible owner that are listed in RRC records as properly plugged, including the well at Briggs Ranch in Pecos County.
Reuters reporting from West Texas, interviews with landowners and experts, and a review of RRC records show why the state regulator is under increasing pressure to step up its oversight. The increased scrutiny comes at a time when more and more abandoned wells have begun leaking or even bubbling like geysers over the past two years, forming salt- and chemical-laden lakes or causing sinkholes.
Making matters worse, pressure is increasing from underground as billions of gallons of wastewater are being pumped back into reservoirs for disposal during the recent fracking boom in the Permian Basin, the nation’s largest oil field. That pressure, Dunlap says, is likely causing poorly sealed wells to burst.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said it would review whether to strip the RRC of its permitting authority for waste disposal wells after Texas watchdog group Commission Shift filed a complaint with a federal agency over alleged mismanagement.
RRC spokeswoman Patty Ramon said the EPA has not yet contacted her to initiate the investigation, noting that the agency has previously praised her underground injection program.
“If they do that, we will support them with all the information they need,” Ramon said.
Faced with a growing number of calls from concerned landowners, Dunlap is running a campaign to win one of the three RRC seats as a Libertarian this fall, hoping to change the organization from within.
“It’s about making sure things are done right and not allowing the oil companies to rip off the people of Texas just because they produce oil and gas and pay a few royalties,” he told Reuters.
Among the changes he would like to see are faster and better well capping, accountability for the oil companies that have abandoned them, and a new name for the Railroad Commission to make it clear that it regulates the oil industry.
“I’ve traveled the world for 27 years and prided myself on Texas doing it better and better than anyone else, so you have to understand that it was quite a punch in the gut for me when we started excavating and investigating,” said Dunlap, who has worked in 103 countries.
PERFECT STORM
In the absence of a solvent owner, the responsibility for plugging these orphaned wells falls to the RRC, which plans to plug 2,000 wells this year using government funding.
While the RRC has documented over 8,500 inactive or uncapped orphan wells in Texas, experts believe there are thousands more undocumented wells – the legacy of over a century of drilling activity – that are not eligible for well closure funds.
Meanwhile, oil drillers drilling new wells in the Permian across Texas and New Mexico are collecting about 24 million barrels a day of “produced water” – the salty mixture that comes to the surface alongside oil and gas, according to Laura Capper of energy consulting firm EnergyMakers. Between 40 and 55 percent of that water is injected into local disposal wells, with most of the rest being reused for oil production, she said.
In addition to concerns that the extracted water, contaminated with chemicals such as radium and boron, threatens local aquifers and vegetation, the many drilling, pumping and return lines also cause ground heaving and subsidence in some places and trigger earthquakes, landowners and activists say.
“It’s this perfect storm in the Permian with all the water being produced, the earthquakes and the orphaned wells,” said Adam Peltz, director of the Environmental Defense Fund’s energy program.
Deep injections of wastewater have triggered earthquakes, leading to the RRC not issuing new drilling permits in some areas. However, shallower injections create excess pressure underground, causing poorly sealed wells to leak or burst.
The RRC rejected the claim that the problem was widespread.
“There is little evidence that there has been widespread leakage from previously plugged wells,” Ramon said, adding that commission inspectors have placed “high-risk, high-priority wells” at the top of their list of wells to plug.
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 with strings attached: Use of the money requires the RRC to measure the amount of methane and other gases escaping from capped wells before and after they’re capped.
The RRC estimates that a total of over US$481 million will be needed to plug its wells.
Ramon said the RRC has used up the first tranche of federal funds and has begun drawing on the larger tranche in addition to state funds for orphaned wells. She said the agency is “meeting federal requirements.”
“It’s only getting worse”
Scientists have now confirmed the connection between the discharge of wastewater and erupting wells.
For example, a paper published in July in Geophysical Research Letters by researchers at Southern Methodist University showed that a massive blowout at an orphaned well in 2022 in Crane County, Texas, was primarily caused by a wastewater discharge that occurred several miles away.
The RRC is also investigating the connection but has not yet published any conclusions. After a series of earthquakes northwest of Pecos County in the last week of July, two saltwater disposal wells were closed.
At the 320-acre Briggs Ranch in Pecos County, where there are 30 abandoned wells that were last productive in the 1980s, Laura Briggs said the situation has only gotten worse.
Less than a week after Dunlap dug the previously plugged well on the property, there was a sudden explosive release of produced water from another old well less than 1,000 feet from her home and animal enclosures. Briggs’ gas monitor showed high levels of toxic hydrogen sulfide.
“It’s been leaking for a year. I’ve reported it to the commission several times,” she said. “But it has to leak like this before the railway commission reacts.”
In early August, a vacuum truck arrived at the ranch to begin removing fluid flowing from the well that had collected near their cattle.
“It will suck up everything that comes out of the well,” she said of the truck. “Then it will take it off and dump it into a saltwater disposal pit, which is why these wells leak.”
(Reporting by Valerie Volcovici; additional reporting by Adrees Latif and Evan Garcia; editing by Richard Valdmanis and Marguerita Choy)
