Dunlap, dressed in bright red coveralls and a silver hard hat, jumped off the machine and into the pit, clearing away residual earth with a shovel before picking up a brittle bit of cement that was part of the casing designed to keep fluids and gases underground.
He smashed the cement into dust with a simple squeeze of his fingers while the Briggs family, the ranch’s owners, formed a circle around him
“This was not plugged properly,” Dunlap explained. “This is the work of the three stooges of the Railroad Commission.”
The Railroad Commission (RRC), despite its name, regulates oil and gas operations in Texas. And Dunlap, a three-decade veteran of oil fields around the world, has become one of its most outspoken detractors.
Dunlap, armed with a portable gas detector and a mobile phone, has spent much of the last two and a half years documenting a flurry of oil well blowouts and leaks across West Texas at the request of landowners, claiming that the epidemic is caused by low-quality plugging jobs left behind by operators and their contractors and approved by the RRC.
He and his partner Sarah Stogner, an oil and gas lawyer who documents their work on social media, claim to have identified over 100 leaking legacy or “orphan” wells with no responsible owner that were listed as properly plugged in RRC records, including one at the Briggs Ranch in Pecos County.
The research in West Texas, as well as conversations with landowners and experts and an examination of RRC documents, demonstrate why the state regulator is under increasing pressure to strengthen its monitoring.
The increased inspection comes at a time when, over the previous two years, an increasing number of abandoned wells have begun to spill or even burst geyser-like, forming salt and chemical-laden lakes or sinkholes.
Making matters worse is the increased pressure pushing up from beneath the ground as a result of billions of gallons of wastewater injected back into reservoirs for disposal during the recent fracking-led drilling boom in the Permian region, the largest oilfield in the United States. According to Dunlap, such pressure is most likely what causes the badly clogged wells to burst.
Following a federal complaint filed by Texas watchdog group Commission Shift alleging mismanagement, the US Environmental Protection Agency stated it will investigate whether to withdraw the RRC’s permitting authority for waste disposal wells.
RRC spokesperson Patty Ramon stated that the EPA has not yet contacted them to begin the assessment, and that the agency has previously praised its underground injection program.
“We will assist them with any input if they do,” Ramon promised.
Faced with an increasing number of calls from concerned landowners, Dunlap is launching a long-shot campaign as a libertarian to win one of the three RRC seats this autumn, aiming to transform the organization from inside.
“It’s about seeing that things are done right and not letting oil companies run over the citizens of Texas just because they produce oil and gas and pay some royalties,”
Among the reforms he would want to see are faster and higher-quality well plugs, accountability for oil firms that abandoned them, and a new name for the Railroad Commission to indicate that it oversees the oil sector.
“I spent 27 years around the world praising the fact that Texas does things larger and better than anyone else. Dunlap, who has worked in 103 countries, admitted that the commencement of excavation and investigation was a “gut punch” for him.
PERFECT STORM
Without a solvent owner of record, the RRC is responsible for filling these orphan wells, with plans to plug 2,000 wells this year using state funds.
While the RRC has verified over 8,500 dormant or unplugged orphan wells in Texas, experts believe there are thousands more undocumented, the result of over a century of drilling, that are ineligible for closure funds.
Meanwhile, oil drillers drilling new wells in the Permian Basin, which covers Texas and New Mexico, are accumulating almost 24 million barrels per day of “produced water” – the salty mixture that comes up alongside oil and gas, according to Laura Capper of energy adviser EnergyMakers. She stated that 40-55% of this water is injected into local disposal wells, with the majority of the rest being reused for oil activities.
In addition to concerns about generated water containing contaminants such as radium and boron endangering local aquifers and plants, landowners and environmentalists claim that all of the drilling, pumping, and reinjection is causing the ground to rise and subside in spots, producing earthquakes.
“It’s a perfect storm in the Permian with all this produced water, earthquakes, and orphan wells,” said Adam Peltz, director of the Environmental Defense Fund’s Energy Programme.
Deep injections of wastewater have caused earthquakes, prompting the RRC to prohibit new drilling licenses in certain locations. In contrast, shallower injections overpressurize the subsurface, causing poorly capped wells to leak or blow.
The RRC challenged the statement that the problem is pervasive.
“There is little evidence of a widespread occurrence of previously plugged wells leaking,” Ramon said, adding that commission inspectors prioritized “high-risk, high-priority wells” when plugging.
Texas will receive a $25 million initial funding from the Orphaned Well Program of the bipartisan infrastructure package in 2022 to solve the issue. It received an additional $80 million in January, but with conditions: the use of the funds requires the RRC to quantify the amount of methane and other gasses leaking from plugged wells before and after plugging.
The RRC estimates that it will need more than $481 million to plug its wells.
Ramon stated that the RRC has depleted the first tranche of federal monies and has begun to draw on the second tranche, in addition to its state orphan well funds. She stated that the agency is “complying with federal requirements.”‘
Only Getting Worse’
Meanwhile, experts have been confirming the link between wastewater injection and exploding wells.
A work published in July in Geophysical Research Letters by Southern Methodist University researchers, for example, demonstrated that a major orphan well blowout in Crane County, Texas, in 2022 was primarily triggered by wastewater injection several miles away.
The RRC is also looking into the issue, but has yet to publish its findings. Following a series of earthquakes just northwest of Pecos County in the last week of July, it closed two saltwater disposal wells.
Laura Briggs, who lives on the 800-acre (320-hectare) Briggs ranch in Pecos County, said the situation has only gotten worse. The ranch has 30 abandoned wells that were last productive in the 1980s.
Less than a week after Dunlap dug up the previously stopped well on the property, a separate old leaky well less than 1,000 feet (300 meters) from her house and animal cages suddenly exploded with generated water. Briggs’ gas detector detected elevated amounts of hazardous hydrogen sulfide.
“It’s been leaking for one year. “I reported it to the commission several times,” she stated. “But it has to leak like this before the Railroad Commission will respond.”
In early August, a vacuum truck arrived at the property to begin collecting away the fluid that was gushing out of the well and pooling around the livestock.
“It’s going to suck up what’s coming out of that well,” she remarked. “Then he’s going to take it off and dump it into a saltwater disposal well, which is why these wells are leaking.”
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