Water Is Bursting from Another Abandoned West Texas Oil Well
June 12th, 2024Via: The Texas Tribune:
In recent years, Schuyler Wight has noticed a growing number of abandoned oil wells coming back to life, gurgling fluids on the surface of his West Texas ranch. Last week he found the biggest one yet.
Gassy water was gushing from the ground and down a quarter mile of roadway before it drained into a pasture on a remote corner of his land.
“It’s by far flowing more than any other,” Wight said. “It’s getting worse, there’s no question about that.”
It’s the latest in a string of mysterious water features in the arid Permian Basin, the nation’s top producing oil field, that regulators have been unable to explain.
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The mystery now in the Permian Basin is what is pushing large volumes of that water up to the surface.
“There’s a source of pressure there and it’s shallow,” said Hawk Dunlap, an oilfield firefighter who lives in Crane County and surveyed the recent blowout for Wight last week. “It’s not clear what the source is.”
Dunlap has worked oilfield emergencies in 102 countries, he said. He’s seen water dribbling up from old oil wells before, but never anything close to the quantity he’s seen in West Texas.
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Dunlap suspects it may be related to the injection of fracking wastewater. West Texas oil producers pump millions of gallons of so-called produced water, laced with chemical lubricants and numerous hazardous compounds such as arsenic, bromide, strontium, mercury, barium, and organic compounds, particularly benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylenes, underground every day for disposal, often into old oil and gas wells.
In theory, the produced water will remain in those wells and rock formations in perpetuity. But the geological science is imprecise, and if the water broke out its confines, it could affect pressure in other pockets underground.
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On Wight’s ranch the latest blowout continues to flow. Measurements indicate the water is moderately salty, and Wight can only watch helplessly as it seeps into his land.
“The salt poisons the ground and nothing will grow after that,” he said. “There’s not a lot you can do to remediate salt contamination.”
Such a huge topic–poking millions of holes in our mother earth (these are just the active wells):
https://www.fractracker.org/2015/08/1-7-million-wells/
Fracturing the structure of the earth down to 10,000 feet with a 10,000 psi witches brew of poison to extract a couple years of petroleum under a massive depletion rate of production:
https://www.eia.gov/analysis/drilling/curve_analysis/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fracking
Then we rely on the well casing seal of the quickly abandoned well to remain intact into perpetuity to prevent a connection developing between the layer of poison fracking fluids and the groundwater layers above. Then there’s the methane leakage from all the abandoned wells.
Then from the original article, there’s the ““frac-outs,” which occur when water being used to frack a well “communicates” with an abandoned well and then contaminates well water far from the fracking site” and the toxic produced water that is pumped down old wells where “That pressure has to go somewhere. So if there’s a well penetration then it’s going to move freely up that well penetration.”.
We drove through the area of the North Dakota Bakken formation a few years and the level of drilling activity and gridwork of wells across the farmlands was astonishing. I can only imagine the situation in the much higher producing Permian Basin field of Texas.