Earthquakes & Oil Well Blowouts In West Texas Associated With Wastewater Injection

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Well, here’s a shocker. Foe every barrel of oil extracted by fracking in the Permian Basin — much of which is located in West Texas — three barrels of what the industry calls “produced water” is created. Much of that wastewater gets pumped underground to force even more oil out from below. According to Statista, more than 2 billion barrels of oil were extracted in Texas in 2023. Industry publication RBN says for every barrel of oil pumped, about three barrels of wastewater are created. You do the math.

DeSmog Blog reports that about 20 million gallons of wastewater are sloshing around the Permian Basin every day. That wastewater is often a toxic and briny mix of corrosive salts, water, chemicals, and naturally occurring radioactive materials. It has swamped the oil and gas industry’s wastewater disposal operations, whose primary method for disposing of that polluted water is injecting it into the ground. Doing so can cause a host of issues, including earthquakes. Recently the West Texas town of Toyah, which sits astride I-20 southwest of Midland, Texas, was rocked by five earthquakes in a single 24-hour period, ranging in magnitude from 2.5 to 3.8 on the Richter scale.

A Geyser Over West Texas

Then at the beginning of October, the town was rocked by news that a geyser of “produced water” was happening west of town. DeSmog reporter Justin Hamel photographed the geyser on the morning of October 4, capturing images of an oily rainbow sheen around a tower of water over 100 feet tall. A rotten-egg smell, a telltale hallmark of the presence of hydrogen sulfide gas, sometimes known as sewer gas, was evident in the air from at least two miles downwind of the geyser.

“It’s a ripper,” Hawk Dunlap, a current candidate for the Texas Railroad Commission, told DeSmog. “It could be coming from anywhere and it’s not going to be an easy fix.” He noted the region where the geyser erupted has also been plagued by earthquakes amid record wastewater production in the Permian Basin. “This is on the southern edge of the seismic response area where they have been having earthquakes from all the produced water we are injecting — 23 million barrels per day,” he said.

Dunlap, a long-time well control specialist and director of Well Control Management International, according to his LinkedIn bio, posted records from a 1961 well identified as belonging to El Paso Natural Gas Company, which he described as the suspected source of the blowout. “In my professional opinion, I think the well had been leaking for some time and was not on anyone’s radar,” he said. As the well passes between 4,000 and 11,000 feet below ground, he added, it crosses through oil and gas production zones and wastewater injection zones, in addition to groundwater deposits. That means the water in the geyser could have come from a number of sources.

Who Owns The Well?

Kinder Morgan fully acquired El Paso Natural Gas Company in 2013, after purchasing a 50% share of the pipeline company in 2012. Despite that purchase, it is possible that Kinder Morgan did not actually add any oil and gas wells in the Toyah area as part of that deal because El Paso Natural Gas’s exploration and production affiliate, EP Energy, was sold to “affiliates of Apollo Global Management and others” for $7.15 billion before Kinder Morgan acquired El Paso Natural Gas. Despite its backing from the private equity giant Apollo, EP Energy filed for bankruptcy in 2019, seeking relief from its $4.6 billion in debt at the time. It was the biggest oil and gas bankruptcy in years, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Local officials have expressed little interest in discussing the incident. Reeves County Emergency Manager Jerry Bullard declined to comment about the geyser, saying the county has little incentive to shout it from the rooftops when such things occur, “because most of the county budget comes from taxes paid by the oil and gas industry,” the Houston Chronicle reported.

The Texas Railroad Commission, which has jurisdiction over the oil and gas industries in the state, said it has had an inspector on site since Tuesday, according to Patty Ramon, a spokesperson for the Commission. “We are working on identifying the responsible party for the well and contacting the operator to control it.” That may be comforting to some, but the TRRC has a long history of being a good friend to both industries. A report by Carbon Tracker earlier this year found there were 476,790 documented wells that have been drilled, but not plugged, in Texas. There are 8,580 wells on the current Texas orphan list, which was last updated in April. The Environmental Defense Fund defines an orphan well as one that is inactive, unplugged, and has no solvent owner of record.

Derelict Wells In Texas

According to Fast Company, derelict wells are virtual doomsday machines that foul the air, pollute the soil, threaten groundwater, and make it increasingly likely that America won’t meet its carbon reduction goals in the near future. In Texas and other oil and gas producing states, the bill for oilfield cleanup is staggering, but there are signs that state and federal lawmakers are getting serious about paying it.

On the heels of the Carbon Tracker report, Congress in 2021 passed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which earmarked $4.7 billion for “orphaned well site plugging, remediation and restoration activities on federal, Tribal, state and private lands.” According to the Environmental Defense Fund, 120,000 wells in the United States qualify for plugging under the new federal program, including the entire Texas orphan list. Plugging those wells and eliminating the methane they emit would be the equivalent of taking up to 4.3 million cars off the road for a year, according to the EDF.

The reaction to the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law was chilly at the Texas Railroad Commission, Fast Company says. “We’re going to wait to see what their rules are before we decide if we have the opportunity to accept those dollars,” Commissioner Christi Craddick said in a speech at a Texas Pipeline Association meeting in January of 2023. Craddick said she intended to protect Texas from regulatory strings attached to the bill that might be “hostile to energy.” In other words, there better not be any “woke” nonsense in the regulations that would offend the tender sensibilities of Texans. By the end of 2023, Texas had decided to take the federal money after all, accepting a $25 million grant to step up the orphan well plugging program, with an additional $319 million to follow in subsequent funding rounds..

At the Capitol in Austin, Representative Brooks Landgraf, an oil and gas attorney who represents the city of Odessa and chairs the Texas House Environmental Regulation Committee, has been driving an effort to boost funding for oilfield cleanup — including plugging orphan wells “This is something that’s going to take a lot of time and a lot of money, but it’s something we have to do,” Landgraf said in May 2022. “We have to clean up our state.” A bill authored by Landgraf that would have tapped a new severance tax to increase funding for orphan plugging passed the Texas House of Representatives in 2023 with overwhelming support, but died in the Senate. He plans to bring the bill back in the 2025 session.

In a radio interview in April 2023, Craddick said she and the other commissioners on the Texas Railroad Commission believe “it’s important that we plug wells” and that Texas has the “most aggressive well-plugging program” in the country. “We have just under 1,000 people who work for this agency. Of that, almost half are inspectors,” Craddick said. “We go and inspect these wells and identify where it is and then put them on a list,” Craddick said. “When they go on a list, we prioritize them. Then, we have a process to determine whether they should be plugged sooner rather than later.”

This is a textbook example of death by bureaucracy. Increase your budget every year, issue press releases with multi-colored charts, walk fast while carrying a clipboard, and accomplish as little as possible in the time allotted. Despite plugging more than 1,500 wells each year, the backlog of orphan wells in Texas never seems to diminish. Making matter worse, the list does not include an unknown number of unplugged wells that are undocumented, abandoned, or otherwise likely to meet the orphan criteria in the future.

The Takeaway

There is just too much money to be made in the oil and gas industry to allow any regulations or environmental concerns to stand in the way of the torrent of profits. In what dystopian fantasy is it a good idea to pump billions of gallons of polluted water under high pressure deep underground and not expect any negative consequences? When the Bible said God gave humans dominion over the Earth, did that mean we were free to pollute our earthly home in any one of a thousand ways because there is money to be made?

The fracking boom has brought out the worst in people in the US. We drill millions of holes in the Earth, then walk away, leaving gaping wounds in the Earth in our wake. Every once in a while, we sell off those old wells to some shell corporation that later goes bankrupt, leaving the taxpayers to clean up the mess left behind. Politicians and judges corrupted by the gusher of money flowing from the coffers of the oil and gas industry stand passively by while the devastation of the land continues day in and day out for years on end. It’s another example of a corrupt economic system that privatizes the profits but socializes the costs.

A geyser of polluted water in West Texas will affect only a few people, but it is a symbol of the incalculable damage being done in the name of profits. We have sold our souls to the oil and gas industries and mortgaged our future to do so. Those who get stuck with the bill when the music stops are going to be incredibly angry at those who allowed this to happen and did not lift a finger to stop it.