Reporting contributed by Martha Pskowksi, Inside Climate News
Earlier this year, Hawk Dunlap walked up to an oil well he had dug up to check if it was properly plugged — it wasn’t.
”When we got to excavating, this part of the casing was eat up with large holes in it,” Dunlap said. “When we came back, we stripped this back and found crude oil in the surface pipe.”
On Antina Ranch in Crane Country, the well control specialist addressed a small crowd of officials from the Railroad Commission of Texas, the state’s oil and gas regulator, along with a number of attorneys representing oil companies that own wells on the property.
Dunlap is part of a group that’s excavated around 90 oil and gas wells on the ranch over the last three years. The process has left craters across Antina — exposing wells that are leaking gases and fluids. He suspects there are more festering underground, polluting groundwater or causing other damage.
Along with this project, Dunlap is also running as a libertarian candidate for Railroad Commissioner.
He fumes as he and his colleagues lead the officials on a tour of the excavated wells. According to him, part of the reason some of these wells are leaking is because companies and the Railroad Commission either botched the job or didn’t plug them at all.
“They cheat,” Dunlap said. “They dump cement, they cut it off and cover it up and put one on their tally for plugging one that year.”
When an oil and gas well reaches the end of its productive life and it's no longer in use, the owner of the well is required to plug it with cement to prevent any harmful substances from being released. If an operator goes out of business or just walks away from a well — plugging it becomes the state’s responsibility.
Across Texas’ oil fields, there are thousands of these old wells that have been decommissioned. Once they are plugged and buried they are largely ignored and forgotten.
The group of state officials and lawyers being led on the tour of Antina is mostly silent as they look at signs of contamination across the roughly 22,000-acre ranch. Dunlap said he hasn’t just found leaking wells, he’s also found wells with large amounts of pressure that are ready to burst.
According to Dunlap, another reason so many wells are breaking down is the cement used to cap the wells is decaying.
“We have cadaver farms all over the United States where we study the decompositions of the human body, but nobody has ever dug up a plugged well before, until now,” Dunlap said. “Now we have a 22,000 acre [oil and gas well] cadaver farm and we’re seeing that a lot of the methods used in the past [to plug them] don’t work.”
Dunlap and his colleagues believe this is a huge problem that goes beyond the borders of Antina Ranch. After all, there are plugged oil and gas wells all across Texas, leftover from over a century of drilling.
Petroleum engineer Dwayne Purvis believes the issues being discovered on Antina Ranch show that more attention needs to be given to plugged wells.
“Antina Ranch is unique in that it’s the only place I know of where well heads have been dug up so they can be examined,” he said, “It’s the most extensive systematic look at old well heads anywhere.”
Purvis has researched the issues surrounding retiring wells. Currently, he says there isn't a lot of information on how long cement plugs will last. He said the industry has largely “assumed what we did was a good, secure procedure to keep the wells from flowing, but we haven’t been checking.”
In a written statement, a spokesperson with the Railroad Commission said there is “little evidence of a widespread occurrence of previously plugged wells leaking due to failing plug jobs.”
But now, the owner of Antina Ranch is taking companies to court over the leaking and improperly plugged wells on their land — specifically targeting Chevron. According to Daniel Charest, the attorney spearheading the landowner’s case against the major oil company, Chevron owns around 120 oil and gas wells located on Antina Ranch.
“The problem is with a lack of regulatory oversight, a lack of compliance,” Charest said. “The reality is what we are seeing is that many, if not all of these wells, were not properly plugged.”
Charest is working to force Chevron to replug their leaking wells here, clean up any pollution and do a detailed assessment of all of the retired wells it owns on the property, which could cost millions of dollars.
A Chevron spokesperson declined to comment on the lawsuit, but wrote that the company “has successfully re-plugged wells on Antina Ranch, without any lawsuit or court orders requiring us to do so.”
According to court documents, the company’s lawyers have previously claimed that without more information it is hard to tell if a large number of Chevron’s wells are contaminating the ranch. Charest said they’ll have to convince a jury of that when the case goes to trial, which he expects will take place next year.
“The least that these oil companies that made billions and billions and billions of profit, could do is to at least take care of the environment,” he said.
For Ashley Watt, who owns Antina Ranch, the property is not just some patch of dirt in West Texas. The land has been in her family for decades. It’s where they used to raise cattle and it’s where Watt scattered her parent’s ashes when they died.
She said, “It’s really tough for me emotionally, you know, seeing this ranch that I loved and it’s now just a disaster area.”
The disaster really started for her in 2021, when a well Chevron had originally plugged began erupting salt water. Since then, Watt’s spent a fortune having wells excavated and taking oil companies to court.
“These wells have fallen apart and are all leaking and that’s not going to be only on this ranch,” she said. “The only way to see these things is going and digging them up, which these oil companies have no interest in doing.”
Watt says she doesn’t want a cash settlement from Chevron, she wants it to clean up the mess it’s left in its wake. If the company won’t, or if that’s not possible, she wonders what that means for people in oil rich areas across the U.S.
“Have we tacitly decided as a society that this land can be raped, pillaged and left for dead,” Watt said. “And if we as a society have decided that — did anyone tell the landowners?”
If she wins her lawsuit against Chevron, Watt believes it could establish an important precedent — one that’ll help others protect their property and hold oil and gas companies more accountable.
