MONAHANS — A dozen people huddle around a 10-foot deep hole in the parched West Texas soil. The group falls silent in anticipation as well-control specialist Hawk Dunlap, in a red jumpsuit, scrapes at the soil with a shovel. A lawyer in a hardhat peers down and trains his iPhone camera on the excavation. Dunlap unearths what was buried decades ago. It’s not a cadaver, but a plugged oil well. Or at least it was supposed to be plugged.
Ranchers reported abandoned oil wells spewing wastewater. A new study blames fracking. The common wisdom is that once an oil or gas well is plugged, the chapter is closed. Regulators don’t require operators to go back and check the plugs. Most everyone assumes that crude oil, produced water and gases like methane won’t leak from a plugged well. But Watt and her team are documenting how decades-old plugs can fail, with disastrous consequences.
‘Nobody really knows what you’re supposed to do’: Leaking, exploding, abandoned wells wreak havoc in West Texas In the three years since the original well blowout, Watt and Stogner say they have excavated about 90 of the roughly 330 wells on the ranch and found widespread integrity problems. As the scale of their endeavor became clear, they brought on Daniel Charest, an experienced Dallas trial lawyer with Burns Charest LLP.
Another blowout adds to mystery of Permian Basin water pressure In an interview, Watt called the well count a “moving target.” Stogner noted the difficulty of identifying well locations across the ranch. The recorded coordinates of a well don’t always match where it is located. They have found other wells for which the state has no records. “There are wells where there shouldn’t be wells,” Stogner said. “They’ve asked to tell them everything that’s leaking.
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