A Legal Fight Over Legacy Oil Industry Pollution Heats Up in West Texas

Reporting contributed by Mitch Borden, Marfa Public Radio

MONAHANS, Texas—A dozen people huddle around a 10-foot deep hole in the parched West Texas soil. The group falls silent in anticipation as well-control specialist Hawk Dunlap, in a red jumpsuit, scrapes at the soil with a shovel. A lawyer in a hardhat peers down and trains his iPhone camera on the excavation.

Dunlap unearths what was buried decades ago. 

Not a cadaver, but a plugged oil well. 

Or at least it was supposed to be plugged. Decades underground had corroded the metal casing and cement that sealed the half-mile deep well. Leaking crude oil had stained the casing black. Gas hissed from the rusted, stained well head. Contractors got to work, collecting soil samples and measuring compounds in the gas. The well was clearly leaking.

“Things shouldn’t be left out here like that,” Dunlap observed drolly. “Not by an international oil company.” 

Chevron holds the lease for this old well—and dozens of others—at Antina Ranch in Crane County, Texas. Ashley Watt, who inherited the ranch from her parents, filed a lawsuit in the 109th District Court in Crane County against Chevron and other oil companies in December 2022. She alleges that the multinational and smaller companies failed to properly plug and abandon wells on the property. She argues that old wells are now leaking, contaminating the groundwater and surface of her ranch. 

The common wisdom is that once an oil or gas well is plugged, the chapter is closed. Regulators don’t require operators to go back and check the plugs. Most everyone assumes that crude oil, produced water and gases like methane won’t leak from a plugged well. But Watt and her team are documenting how decades-old plugs can fail, with disastrous consequences. She wants Chevron to re-plug and remediate wells on her land. The ambitious lawsuit, still in the discovery phase, could upend assumptions about plugging oil and gas wells. 

“This is a colossal liability that’s going to have to be borne by somebody,” Watt said. “Whether it’s the companies—or, if they pass the buck—the taxpayers of the state of Texas.”

Legal Team Documents Oilfield Pollution

The first sign that something was wrong at Antina Ranch came in June 2021, when the Estes 24 well began spewing toxic water to the surface. 

The Watt family cattle operation had co-existed with oil and gas drilling for years. Her parents bought the ranch in 1995. Their ashes are now buried there. Watt’s family traces its roots in the Permian Basin to her great-grandfather. 

Spread out over the ranch’s 22,000 acres—about half the size of Washington D.C.—are hundreds of oil and gas wells. Many were originally drilled by Gulf Oil in the 1940s and ‘50s. The Standard Oil Company of California purchased Gulf in 1984, rebranding it as Chevron. 

The multinational took over the Antina assets, including the Estes 24 well. Chevron plugged and abandoned the well in 1995. Estes 24 wasn’t supposed to leak oil or produced water, which is salty, toxic wastewater laced with heavy metals that was supposedly encased underground.

Chevron eventually re-plugged the well at Watt’s insistence. But in the process Watt and her attorney, Sarah Stogner, developed what they describe as a deep distrust of the company. They say they set out to find other leaking wells on the property.

In the three years since the original well blowout, Watt and Stogner say they have excavated about 90 of the roughly 330 wells on the ranch and found widespread integrity problems. As the scale of their endeavor became clear, they brought on Daniel Charest, an experienced Dallas trial attorney with Burns Charest LLP.

“This problem went from being, ‘Oh, there’s a leaky well or two,’ to, ‘There are hundreds,’” Watt said. 

In December 2022, Watt filed suit against Chevron and Walsh and Watts Inc., Pitts Energy Co. and Williams Oil Company, smaller oil companies that took over low-producing wells on the ranch. 

The lawsuit aims to get the wells replugged and for Watt to be made whole for the damages to the property. Watt wants the court to find Chevron and the other companies liable for contamination, require cleanup and restoration of the property and require Chevron to pay monetary damages.

In a filing earlier this year, Watt stated that test results have found constituents on the surface or underground including benzene, toluene, arsenic, radium-226, radium-228, ethylbenzene and xylenes, all heavy metals. She no longer uses well water on her property and has moved all the cattle off the ranch. Benzene is a known human carcinogen; benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylenes can all harm bone marrow, the central nervous system and the immune system.

Watt isn’t the first Permian Basin landowner to report leaking and compromised wells on her property. But she said she is determined to get her day in court and has poured upwards of $1.5 million into the case. She acknowledges that few landowners have the financial resources to litigate such an expensive, contentious case.

“This is one ranch, one part of Texas. But the scope of this problem is mind-boggling,” said Charest, the attorney. “There are ranches all across the state that don’t have these resources.” 

‘I Tried to Warn You’

Neither Watt nor Stogner is afraid to speak her mind or use colorful language to describe the multi-national, multi-billion dollar oil company they are going up against. 

Chevron refers to Watt as a “vigilante” pursuing a “social media disparagement campaign” in its court filings. The company’s motion also sought her communications with members of the media (specifically naming both Inside Climate News and Marfa Public Radio). They also point to posts Watt made on Twitter (now X) and comments she made to Chevron employees that they consider threats. 

Chevron sought to halt the excavations with a court order, arguing they could damage the well plugs and compromise evidence before trial. The company also questioned whether Watt had the authority to excavate the wells.

Chevron has also asked the court to compel Watt to disclose the number of contaminated wells and the specific constituents identified at each well.

In an interview, Watt called the well count a “moving target.” Stogner noted the difficulty of identifying well locations across the ranch. The recorded coordinates of a well don’t always match where it is located. They have found other wells for which the state has no records.

“There are wells where there shouldn’t be wells,” Stogner said. “They’ve asked to tell them everything that’s leaking. I don’t know yet; I’m still in the process.”

Eventually the two sides agreed to a protocol for collecting evidence at the wells. Chevron would have observers present for all the excavations and get their own set of samples. Watt would have to stay more than 100 yards away from Chevron employees.

That’s why a cohort representing Chevron trailed Stogner and Dunlap, the well-control expert, on a chilly morning this April as they excavated wells. Between the two sides, over a dozen lawyers and contractors were on hand.

Stogner wore her signature red jumpsuit and a custom-made trucker hat that reads, “I tried to warn you” across the brim. Charest had traveled from Dallas. The director of the Midland regional office of the Railroad Commission of Texas even made an appearance.

The convoy of pickup trucks rattled over ranch roads connecting the wells. At each well, soil was carefully packed into sample containers. Contractors lathered up the exposed well casing to conduct a “bubble test” to determine whether any gases were leaking. If so, they used a monitor to measure volatile organic compounds (VOCs) being emitted.

For decades these well plugs were out of sight below the hard caliche soil of the Permian Basin. But now they are key evidence in a case against one of the world’s biggest oil companies.

“Chevron has successfully re-plugged wells on Antina Ranch, without any lawsuit or court orders requiring us to do so,” Chevron public affairs advisor Catie Matthews said in an emailed statement. “Chevron will continue to coordinate with the Texas Railroad Commission and respond appropriately to any potential concerns at Antina Ranch.”

Matthew declined to comment on the litigation.

Railroad Commission spokesperson Patty Ramon said that that agency has worked to ensure regulations are followed at the ranch. “There is little evidence of widespread occurrence of previously plugged wells leaking due to failing plug jobs,” she said.

Well Plugs Don’t Last Forever

Regulators, landowners and the environmental community generally agree on the importance of plugging orphan wells, of which there are at least 117,000, according to a federal report. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, passed in 2021, included $4.7 billion to plug orphan wells nationwide. Texas also has a state plugging program, with a $63 million budget for 2024 and 2025.

But while regulators deal with a huge backlog of orphan wells, they have rarely bothered to consider how long a plug lasts.

“If we want [wells] not to leak, we need to design them to last for the future of humanity,” said Dwayne Purvis, a petroleum engineer and oil and gas consultant at Purvis Energy Advisors. “But I don’t think anybody conceived to do that at any point in the history of the industry.”

“[Antina Ranch] is the only place I know of where well heads have been dug up so they could be examined.”

He said the extent of failed plugged wells is unknown but deserving of further study. 

“[Antina Ranch] is the only place I know of where well heads have been dug up so they could be examined,” he said. “It’s the most extensive, systematic look at old plug well heads that I know of anywhere.”

Purvis said it’s basic economics. A plugged well is no longer a money-maker for oil and gas operators. That means companies try to minimize costs while plugging and have no economic incentive to go back and check old plugged wells.

“Oil companies won’t do that until there’s a need to do it,” Purvis said. “And that need is probably going to have to come in the form of regulation.”

Bankruptcies are also common among smaller operators, so in many cases there is no corporate entity to hold responsible for an old, leaking well. 

Oklahoma University petroleum engineer Catalin Teodoriu said that a well plugged in the 1950s or ‘60s would not meet today’s industry standards. But he agreed more research is needed to understand how corrosion and other underground forces can compromise plugged wells. At his laboratory, Teodoriu is studying how different cement well casings age over time. 

“As in almost every engineering system that we build…. your system will fail sooner or later,” he said. “Nothing is made forever.” 

Once a leak is identified, Teodoriu said, professionals must determine where the well is compromised and what external factors, like nearby wastewater injection, could have contributed. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to fix well integrity problems, he said.

“It has to be done based on the well, based on the location, based on what is leaking and why it’s leaking,” he said. 

‘Can People Still Live Out Here?’

Charest anticipates the trial won’t start until mid-2025. He knows a case against one of the world’s biggest oil companies needs to be airtight. 

“I think at trial a group of citizens of West Texas will look and say, ‘Why aren’t you operators—who made billions of dollars extracting value from this land—owning up to your responsibility to take care of it?’” he said.

Many cases against oil companies end in settlements where the public never gets the full story, Charest said. The team said this case is a window into the scope of oilfield contamination across Texas.

“There are subdivisions above plugged wells. There are schools above plugged wells,” said Stogner, the attorney. “I don’t think there are any that are going to be OK forever.”

Watt hopes her land can be put to new uses in the future. But she knows the pollution needs to be cleaned up before any new industry can come in. She refuses to be an absentee landowner, resigned to watching her land succumb to contamination.

“Can people still live out here? Or have we just tacitly decided as a society that this land is going to be raped, pillaged and left for dead?” she asked. “And if we as a society have decided that, has anyone told the landowners?”