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Skyler Wight has noticed an increasing number of abandoned oil wells being resurrected and bubbling above the surface on his West Texas ranch in recent years, and last week he discovered his largest well yet.
Gaseous water was bubbling up from the ground, flowing a quarter mile down the road and into a pasture on the edge of his property.
“It’s a lot stronger than other rivers,” Wight said. “It’s getting worse, there’s no question about it.”
It’s the latest in a series of mysterious water events in the arid Permian Basin, America’s largest oil-producing region, that regulators have so far been unable to explain.
Last year, a saltwater gush flooded several acres on a ranch owned by Wight’s cousin, sparking a multimillion-dollar cleanup effort. In 2022, geysers erupted from a well in Crane County and then at Antina Ranch. Nearby, a large pond filled with groundwater gas has become a permanent feature called Lake Bomar.
The state’s oil regulator, the Railroad Commission of Texas, has yet to explain why so much water is leaking to the surface. After a major cleanup in January, the commission said in a press release that the cause is “still under investigation.” The commission did not immediately respond to questions.
[“Nobody really knows what you’re supposed to do”: Leaking, exploding abandoned wells wreak havoc in West Texas]
Wight, a fourth-generation West Texas rancher, has watched the problem grow for years: The commission has plugged about 10 old wells that were leaking water onto the surface of his land, but each time that happens, another well starts leaking, he said.
“I can’t tell you how delayed they are, how badly they’re handling this,” he said. “It’s not just in Pecos County, you’re going to see more of this. You’re going to see it everywhere.”
It’s not uncommon for old wells to leak. Many of the wells in West Texas were drilled during World War II, and being buried underground for 80 years can do a lot of damage to steel and concrete casings. Also, many of these wells were filled with water to squeeze out the last drops of oil.
The mystery right now in the Permian Basin is what’s driving so much water up to the surface.
“There’s a pressure source down there, and it’s shallow,” said Hawk Dunlap, an oilfield firefighter from Crane County who investigated the latest blowout in Isle of Wight last week. “We’re not sure what the source is.”
Dunlap said he’s responded to oil field emergencies in 102 countries and has seen water dripping from old wells, but never anything close to what he saw in West Texas.
He said it was strange that water sometimes came out of an oil well on its own, when local ranchers needed pumps to get it out of their wells.
Dunlap suspects it has to do with the injection of wastewater from hydraulic fracturing. West Texas oil producers pump millions of gallons of so-called produced water into the ground each day, often into old oil and gas wells, that is laced with chemical lubricants and a host of toxic compounds, including arsenic, bromide, arsenic, strontium, mercury, barium, and organic compounds, especially benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylene.
In theory, the produced water would remain in those wells and rock formations forever, but geology is imprecise, and if the water breaches boundaries, it could affect pressure in other parts of the underground.
Dunlap said many other factors could affect the situation. Gas can create pressure underground, as can the interaction of fresh water with heavier, salty water. Produced water can be five to eight times saltier than seawater.
“There’s been a massive increase in produced water disposals over the last decade, and the amount of water that’s being disposed of is huge,” said Dominic DiGiulio, a geologist who retired from the Environmental Protection Agency. “That pressure has to go somewhere, so if you have a well, it’s going to move freely through the well penetrations.”
The most common is a naturally buoyant gas leak from an old oil well, although water leaks are less common but have been known to occur under “a variety of unique combinations of conditions,” according to Dwayne Purvis, founder of Purvis Energy Advisors.
He cited examples from California related to steam injection for oil recovery, and from Pennsylvania, where water from old coal mines is leaking to the surface through abandoned oil wells, where the EPA is also investigating “fracking out,” a phenomenon in which water used to hydraulically fracture oil wells “connects” with abandoned wells and contaminates the well water.
In any case, Purvis said, “the fluid pressure has to be sufficient to lift the fluid to the surface.”
Water from the latest gusher continues to flow on Wight’s ranch, and measurements show it’s moderately saline, so Wight can only watch as it seeps onto his land.
“Salt contaminates the soil and then nothing can grow there,” he says. “There’s not much you can do to remediate salt contamination.”
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