In the small town of 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. Not a cadaver, but a plugged oil well. Or at least it was supposed to be plugged.
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. She wants Chevron to re-plug and remediate wells on her land.
The multinational took over the Antina assets, including the Estes 24 well. Chevron plugged and abandoned the well in 1995. Estes 24 wasn’t supposed to leak oil or produced water, which is salty, toxic wastewater laced with heavy metals that was supposedly encased underground. Chevron eventually re-plugged the well at Watt’s insistence. But in the process Watt and her attorney, Sarah Stogner, developed what they describe as a deep distrust of the company.
Neither Watt nor Stogner is afraid to speak her mind or use colorful language to describe the multi-national, multi-billion dollar oil company they are going up against. Eventually the two sides agreed to a protocol for collecting evidence at the wells. Chevron would have observers present for all the excavations and get their own set of samples. Watt would have to stay more than 100 yards away from Chevron employees. That’s why a cohort representing Chevron trailed Stogner and Dunlap, the well-control expert, on a chilly morning this April as they excavated wells. Between the two sides, over a dozen lawyers and contractors were on hand.
Regulators, landowners, and the environmental community generally agree on the importance of plugging orphan wells, of which there are at least 117,000, according to a. The federal Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, passed in 2021, included $4.7 billion to plug orphan wells nationwide. Texas also has a state plugging program, with a $63 million budget for 2024 and 2025. But while regulators deal with a huge backlog of orphan wells, they have rarely bothered to consider how long a plug lasts.
Bankruptcies are also common among smaller operators, so in many cases there is no corporate entity to hold responsible for an old, leaking well.