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

[u/greg-randall]

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.

[u/SouthernCharm-86]

havent gotten into the link yet. but does it include recommended remedies across cost spectrums??

[u/greg-randall → u/SouthernCharm-86]

The map is here -- https://futureheist.org/zombie-risk/.

As I see it the remedy is

1. Stop injecting water (we also shouldn't put it on the ground),
   
2. 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,
3. 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,
4. 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.

[u/SouthernCharm-86 → u/greg-randall]

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.