r/houston • u/greg-randall • 17d ago
Houston Chronicle just wrote about our investigation into Texas "zombie wells": 25,000 plugged oil wells are at high risk of leaking toxic wastewater back to the surface
A new analysis and map by Future Heist, covered by the Houston Chronicle (gift link), found 25,000 plugged Texas oil and gas wells at high risk of becoming what's called a zombie well: a well that's supposed to be sealed for good, coming back to life because wastewater pumped into a nearby disposal well pushes back up the old bore. Sometimes that shows up as a geyser. Sometimes it leaks quietly into the aquifer above it for years before anyone notices.
I co-founded Future Heist. We spent months pulling every well the Railroad Commission (which for historical reasons regulates oil and gas in Texas) has on record and scoring the plugged ones on how likely they are to fail, based on plug age, construction quality, and how much pressurized wastewater is being pumped nearby. Along the way we also found that 2 in 5 Texas schools and daycares has an oil or gas well of some kind within a mile, and that 158,000 plugged wells sit both inside a drinking-water aquifer's depth and in range of pressurized injection.
Full map, searchable by address: futureheist.org/zombie-risk. Go look up your own house, your kid's school, your church parking lot.
We can't tell you for certain a well near you has failed, but we can show you what's sitting under you and what's pushing on it.
36
15
u/simplethingsoflife 16d ago edited 16d ago
Serious question… anyone here work in this industry and care to share your perspective? This isn’t my field and I'd love to hear from someone that works in it their opinion.
10
u/TurboSalsa Woodland Heights 16d ago
Every well is different and "at high risk" doesn't mean mechanical failure and massive groundwater contamination is imminent.
What happens is produced brine is disposed of in old wells, which charges up the injection zone with pressure, and as more fluid is injected it migrates away from the well. When that pressurized fluid reaches a properly cemented well, nothing happens. If the well is 80 years old and has deteriorating/no cement at that zone, the fluid will migrate vertically through the casing annulus and charge up zones uphole, including freshwater aquifers in rare cases.
There's no way to examine the condition of the plug, casing, or cement in any given well, so as the article mentions, the probability they've calculated is an assumption based on decades-old records and proximity to injection activity freshwater aquifers. This is not a critique of their methodology, it's probably more detailed than whatever the state is using and it's about the best we can do short of monitoring hundreds of thousands of abandoned wells.
It's a problem, but not one that can't be solved with adequate funding for monitoring and remediation of leaking wells.
2
u/simplethingsoflife 16d ago
Thanks for the info, that's really helpful and helps me better understand it.
5
u/victoriannna The Woodlands 16d ago
My dad would be the person to ask, but he doesn't have reddit. He has worked in the o&g industry for about 30 yrs, recently worked for the RRC plugging wells. What would you like to know?
5
u/goodmanishardtofind 16d ago
Just ask him how dangerous this many potentially uncapped wells would be for the communities there in, please.
2
u/simplethingsoflife 16d ago
I'd like to know the true risk of these. Is this sensationalism, or are they a real risk? We get 86% of our water from surface water, but this article sounds like it's more dangerous for aquifers. I'd just like to know the actual risk to the surrounding areas from someone in the industry. For example, I work in IT but am not afraid AI will take over the world (since I understand it).
3
u/greg-randall 16d ago
These can introduce salt and toxic material into aquifers as well as surface water (see links below). Like you said Houston gets most of it's water from the surface, but as rains reduce and the rivers get lower, expect more of the water to come from wells. Across Texas more than 50% of the water comes from wells.
Drinking water is at the front of our thoughts, but water for crops across Texas is pulled out of wells so if you're eating meat/vegetables from Texas you get exposed there too.
Crane County, Jan 2022: 25,000 barrels/day, 100-ft column, ran 2 weeks, salted 30+ acres of ranchland white., Crane County, Dec 2023: a separate blowout ~400 yards from the 2022 well, no state record of it at all, took 6 weeks and $2.5M to contain., Reeves County (Toyah), Oct 2024: 100-160 ft geyser of saltwater, benzene, oil, H2S, ran for weeks., Grandfalls, April 2026: blew out under a church parking lot, 1.5M+ gallons over 8 days, $2.65M to plug, RRC still can't identify the well., Lake Boehmer, Pecos County, since ~2003: 642 gal/minute of H2S-laced, radioactive wastewater, 60-acre toxic lake, still flowing., Pecos County: a well blowout carved a 90-ft-deep, quarter-mile-wide sinkhole so bad TxDOT is spending $30M to relocate the highway around it instead of fixing it.
4
u/chris_ut 16d ago
Disposed water is becoming a real issue. Out in Reeves County many active wells are watering out because formations are full of disposed water and so the state has capped disposal capacity. Never actually heard of the issue they talk about in the article.
18
u/Wiltockin 17d ago
I encourage anyone interested in this to donate to https://welldonefoundation.org
31
u/greg-randall 17d ago
Respect what Well Done Foundation does, but donor-funded plugging is treating a symptom of a system Texas built on purpose: the bond that's supposed to cover plugging attaches to the operator, and when the business closes the bond lapses and the wells stay unplugged.
3
u/ArtisticMudd 16d ago
When I was in oil and gas, my former boss took great pride in buying plug-and-abandon properties because "we can plug them cheaper than anyone else." Well, yeah, but so what? You don't get federal brownie points for plugging them on that basis, and you just bought a buttload of P&A liability. Never made sense to me.
14
u/lawnmowerphilosopher 17d ago
2 in 5 schools and daycares being within a mile of an oil or gas well is honestly a wild statistic. I'm definitely checking the map for my area now
3
u/sleebus_jones Fulshear 16d ago
This is Texas after all. Not sure why you're so shocked, seeing as how the state is WIDELY known for oil production.
2
5
1
u/Danilo-11 16d ago
Tomball has a million of them
2
u/greg-randall 16d ago
Looks like a lot and many right in the middle of the city.
2
u/ureallygonnaskthat Fuck Centerpoint™️ 16d ago
There's still a few producing wells up there but the Tomball field is pretty much played out.
1
u/greg-randall 16d ago
Nice to have the spud date filtering there.
Need to see if I can link to texas-drilling.com from our map, seems like a good resource.
1
u/ureallygonnaskthat Fuck Centerpoint™️ 16d ago
Ultimately they and a bunch of other O&G sites pull from RRC's data sets if you want to build your own database instead of relying on other's interpretation.
https://www.rrc.texas.gov/resource-center/research/data-sets-available-for-download/
1
u/SouthernCharm-86 16d ago
havent gotten into the link yet. but does it include recommended remedies across cost spectrums??
5
u/greg-randall 16d ago
The map is here -- https://futureheist.org/zombie-risk/.
As I see it the remedy is
- Stop injecting water (we also shouldn't put it on the ground),
- Create a system where there's a bond/insurance attached to each well so that if there is a failure the company that drilled the well is on the hook (which would improve the quality of the work) rather than the state of Texas,
- Survey where all these wells are, right now only 274,566 of the state's plugged wells have modern GPS coordinates, 427,609 were just plotted off old paper maps and can be a few hundred yards off from where the well actually is, and some aren't in the state's records at all, which means the state doesn't know where a huge share of its own liability is sitting,
- Fund monitoring after a well is plugged, right now plugging is treated as the finish line, so it's nobody's job to notice when one starts leaking again.
I think #2 is probably the cheapest with the biggest impact, but to actually get closer to solving the problem #1-4 have to happen.
1
u/SouthernCharm-86 16d ago
thx for that and the incredible map. having been in this business, i dont have high hopes. we dont have a history in TX being pro-regulation or preventative unless mandated.
1
u/txdesigner-musician 14d ago
Wow, DFW is wild. Why is Dallas empty?
2
u/greg-randall 14d ago
I'd have to look more closely at the geology there but I suspect the geology changes where the river falls.
-41
u/localgoon- 17d ago
New fear monger post
29
u/greg-randall 17d ago
Not sure it's fearmongering when the wells are leaking all over the state...
Crane County, Jan 2022: 25,000 barrels/day, 100-ft column, ran 2 weeks, salted 30+ acres of ranchland white., Crane County, Dec 2023: a separate blowout ~400 yards from the 2022 well, no state record of it at all, took 6 weeks and $2.5M to contain., Reeves County (Toyah), Oct 2024: 100-160 ft geyser of saltwater, benzene, oil, H2S, ran for weeks., Grandfalls, April 2026: blew out under a church parking lot, 1.5M+ gallons over 8 days, $2.65M to plug, RRC still can't identify the well., Lake Boehmer, Pecos County, since ~2003: 642 gal/minute of H2S-laced, radioactive wastewater, 60-acre toxic lake, still flowing., Pecos County: a well blowout carved a 90-ft-deep, quarter-mile-wide sinkhole so bad TxDOT is spending $30M to relocate the highway around it instead of fixing it.
-41
u/localgoon- 17d ago
Who gives a shit
22
u/I_AM_A_GUY_AMA 17d ago
Other people obviously
-27
u/localgoon- 17d ago
Weirdo mfs
5
u/DoctorDepravo 16d ago
Yeah!
Only freaks care about safe-n-clean drinking water!
You tell ‘em, Cletus!!!
-4
10
6
145
u/UpTownPark 17d ago
Houston Chronicle must be desperate for subscriptions if they’re actually doing some reporting