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How Texas’s zombie oil wells are creating an environmental disaster zone

JacksinPA

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Thousands of abandoned oil wells dot the Permian Basin in west Texas and New Mexico, endangering humans and wildlife. With oil costs plummeting, they’re likely to proliferate. Who is going to cover the cleanup costs?

When Laura Briggs and her husband finally found their dream home in west Texas, they knew they’d be sharing space with the oil industry. The Pecos county ranch’s previous owner, local attorney Windel “Hoot” Gibson, died there when a rickety old pumpjack teetered over and fell on top of him.

But sharing 900 acres with a handful of old oil wells seemed like a fair trade for a spacious ranch where the Briggs family could raise four kids and a mess of farm animals. The property is smack dab in the middle of the Permian Basin, an ancient, dried-up sea that streaks across Texas and New Mexico and is the most productive oil field in the United States. Approximately 3m barrels of the Permian’s monthly crude production happens in Pecos county; there is an oil or gas well for roughly every two people here.


The climate emergency is here. The media needs to act like it
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Then William “Gilligan” Sewell came along. Ever since, the family’s lives have been marred by the mess he left behind.
Sewell, a 48-year-old businessman based in Midland, Texas, founded 7S Oil and Gas LLC in 2014. In less than two years, the small-time pumping company acquired oil leases on over 18,000 acres in the region. Among them were two dozen wells on the Briggs ranch, which is just a hair bigger than New York City’s Central Park. 7S didn’t have to involve the family at all to acquire the wells on their property. In Texas, property rights are split into two categories: the land on the surface and everything underground, including oil and natural gas. When Laura bought the ranch, they only purchased rights to the surface; 7S subsequently leased the so-called mineral rights underneath.
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I think this mineral rights thing is nationwide. Houses I've owned had the deed specifically exclude mineral rights, which had been bought up cheap by Big Energy.

In TX you need to do your homework before a rickety old pumpjack falls on you. Read this article, which is too long to post.
 
Some states do require the mineral rights holder to compensate the surface holder for surface damages caused by mining/drilling activity. If those damages cannot be satisfactorily negotiated, the trial can get messy. The bigger problem is with wells which get abandoned without being properly "cemented in" to prevent leakage from the well into drinking water aquifers. Ruins a lot of water.
 
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