Forgotten oil and gas wells linger, leaking toxic chemicals

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing.

Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or ...

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in Please refresh your browser to be logged in Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later?

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.

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.

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, threatening to explode or contaminate drinking water.

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.

President Joe 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.

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.