Latest news with #TexasRailroadCommission
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Texas oil companies face new deadlines to plug inactive wells
Texas oil and gas companies face new deadlines to plug defunct wells after the Texas Legislature agreed this week to send Gov. Greg Abbott a bill setting new rules for the industry. The bill, which passed with bipartisan support in both chambers, is the first legislative step in years toward addressing the growing environmental problem for which the state's taxpayers have become increasingly responsible. Written by state Sen. Mayes Middleton, R-Galveston, Senate Bill 1150 requires oil and gas operators to plug wells that have been inactive for at least 15 years. The Texas Railroad Commission, the agency regulating the oil and gas industry, must start enforcing the new rules in September 2027. In a statement to The Texas Tribune, the Texas Oil and Gas Association applauded the bill. The bill 'recognizes that once a well has reached the end of its economic life and there is no useful purpose, the owner should be responsible for the plugging, and makes this the law in Texas,' said Todd Staples, the association's president. More than 150,000 inactive wells puncture Texas land, regulators estimate. Nearly 8,900 of them have no established owner because the company is either bankrupt or no longer exists. The commission calls these orphan wells, some of which have become conduits for water traveling underneath them. At least eight have burst with brine since October 2024, costing the state millions of dollars to fix. Current Texas law allows oil companies to indefinitely extend the amount of time they have to plug wells. Middleton's bill changes that, but there are exceptions. An operator can still ask for an extension in a number of scenarios. For instance, regulators can consider requests from operators with a proven history of plugging other inactive wells.. Another provision allows extensions for operators who can't afford to plug the well. If approved, the well would have to be plugged by 2042. Under the bill, regulators must evaluate a number of factors, including the operator's plugging history, the number of inactive wells on the property and whether the operator has a plan to reactivate the well. It will be up to the commission to work out the details of how to enforce the bill. Regulators must consider risks to public safety and the environment, as well as the state and location of the well. Virginia Palacios, executive director of Commission Shift Action, a group that advocates for stronger environmental regulations, said she was impressed to see the oil and gas industry support Middleton's bill, but disappointed the rules aren't more stringent. Lawmakers should have given operators 10 years, instead of 15, to plug the wells, she said, adding that the bill contains too many extensions. She said she hopes the commission's rules will be stricter. 'I'm optimistic that this law is going to help reduce some of the problems we've had from unplugged wells,' Palacios said. 'But, in the bigger picture, we could have so much more efficient laws if we had lawmakers actually taking feedback from the people that are most affected, who are seeing these problems play out on the ground, and are seeing what the solutions should be.' First round of TribFest speakers announced! Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Maureen Dowd; U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales, R-San Antonio; Fort Worth Mayor Mattie Parker; U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff, D-California; and U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Dallas are taking the stage Nov. 13–15 in Austin. Get your tickets today!
Yahoo
08-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Texas has thousands of abandoned oil and gas wells. Who is responsible for cleaning them up?
LULING — Just six minutes from 5,700-person town's historic city center, where an old oil museum still nods to the boom days, the ground groans as oil workers pull steel tubing — each piece is longer than a bus — out of a well drilled in 1983 that stopped pumping profits last year. Rain pours on this quiet Texas field, but the crew doesn't stop their steady pace. The job has become all too familiar. They're sealing one of thousands of unplugged orphaned oil and gas wells scattered across the state — abandoned holes left behind by companies that went bankrupt or just walked away. The last company to own this particular well was Geomeg Energy Operating Co., an Aransas Pass-based oil and gas company. This March project was a snapshot of what plugging a well looks like: part routine, part roulette. Sometimes workers find corroded cement casings, pressurized gas, or unexpected debris that can turn a cleanup into a days- or weeks-long job. 'Even the simplest well can take time,' said Nicholas Harrel, a state managed plugger with the Texas Railroad Commission. From the air, the wells look like pinpricks across the Texas landscape. But on the ground, they can erupt like geysers, leak methane, and threaten water supplies with toxic chemicals like hydrogen sulfide, benzene and arsenic. Abandoned oil wells are piling up across Texas, posing a growing environmental threat and saddling taxpayers with cleanup costs that have already reached tens of millions of dollars. In West Texas, at least eight orphaned wells have blown out since late 2024, spewing brine, a salty liquid laden with chemicals from drilling, and toxic gas. One leaked for more than two months before it could be capped. Another has created a 200-foot-wide sinkhole. 'We have more orphan wells coming on than we are plugging,' Railroad Commission Chair Christi Craddick said. 'We've exceeded our plugging numbers every year, but we still have more orphan wells that keep coming.' Who's responsible for cleaning up these wells, and what happens if Texas falls behind? Here's what to know. Orphan wells are oil, gas, or injection wells with no clear owner — either because the company went bankrupt or disappeared. These wells have been inactive for at least 12 months, meaning the wells do not produce oil or natural gas. Some of them are unplugged. Texas has nearly 8,900 orphan wells, according to the Railroad Commission's most recent list. Many are concentrated in oil-rich areas like the Permian Basin, including Reeves, Crockett, and Pecos counties. Pecos has more than 600 of them — the most of any county. Frio County, southwest of San Antonio, follows with close to 500 orphan wells. Many were plugged with inappropriate materials or using practices that are now obsolete. Older wells — especially those drilled before the 1950s — are more likely to have been abandoned and documentation on who last owned a well can be hard to find. The Railroad Commission of Texas, the state's oil and gas regulator, is responsible for ensuring that operators plug wells properly. Once a well stops producing oil or gas, operators are supposed to plug their own wells within 12 months. But when they don't — in some cases because they went bankrupt — the responsibility can shift to the state. The agency then evaluates how dangerous the orphan well is — to the environment and public safety — and places the well on a list to be plugged by contractors the agency hires. The Luling well was added to the Railroad Commission's list in October 2024 — one of five wells scheduled for plugging in the area. A big concern is air pollution, particularly methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that traps heat in the atmosphere and accelerates climate change. These wells often leak methane, as well as hydrogen sulfide — a toxic colorless gas that smells like rotten eggs. This gas is especially dangerous: it can cause headaches, dizziness and at high concentrations can be fatal. For years, experts and ranchers have warned about the rising threat that unplugged wells pose to rivers, lakes and groundwater when they leak oil, gas, drilling fluids, and fracking wastewater, also known as 'produced water' a toxic mix of salt, hydrocarbons, arsenic, radium and other naturally occurring chemicals. Unplugged wells can create pathways for those chemicals to migrate into groundwater zones. A spokesperson with the Railroad Commission said they are unaware of any cases of groundwater contamination from orphan wells in Texas. The risks aren't just slow-moving — some are explosive. The common industry practice of injecting the massive amounts of fracking wastewater into deep wells can put pressure on underground geological formations. In some cases this pressure has led to increased earthquakes. In other cases, researchers have linked injections to well blowouts — sudden eruptions of water and gas that migrate underground until they hit an old well and burst from the earth. Blowouts can happen in any well. However, orphan wells and older, plugged wells are less likely to withstand the pressure and blow. Last year in the West Texas town of Toyah, a well erupted and spewed a foul-smelling, hydrogen-sulfide-laced plume that took 19 days to contain. Residents had headaches and wore masks to protect themselves. Harrel, the Railroad Commission well plugger, said that while the Luling well is a 'non-emergency' well, meaning it did not pose an immediate threat, it was still a concern because fluid was rising in the well and could eventually threaten groundwater. The Luling well is located in a field called Spiller known to have higher hydrogen sulfide levels. A 2024 study found that at least 20 wells in a Luling oilfield were releasing dangerous amounts of hydrogen sulfide gas. Residents report smells as far as Austin — 50 miles away. The Railroad Commission operates a State Managed Plugging Program, which is partly funded by the Oil and Gas Regulation and Cleanup Fund that receives bonds, enforcement penalties and permitting fees paid by operators. However, critics say those funds often fall short of actual cleanup costs. The agency has plugged more than 46,000 wells through the state plugging program since its inception in 1984. The commission said it has budgeted $22.75 million a year to plug 1,000 wells a year. For the past five fiscal years the agency has plugged an average of 1,352 wells per year. But that money doesn't go nearly far enough. The cost to plug just two emergency wells this fiscal year hit $9 million, nearly 40% of the state's entire annual plugging budget, according to Craddick, the agency chair. To keep up, the commission has increasingly relied on federal support. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, passed by the U.S. Congress in 2021, included a $4.7 billion nationwide injection to plug orphan wells on public and private lands. Through that law, Texas received $25 million in 2022 from the U.S. Department of the Interior and another $80 million in early 2024 to plug orphan wells. Combined with state funding, those dollars helped plug over 2,400 wells in 2023–24. However, federal funds are uncertain with changes in administrations. Meanwhile, plugging costs have also skyrocketed. Just a few years ago, Craddick said it cost around $15,000 to plug a well. Today, the average is closer to $57,000, and that number jumps dramatically for wells with high water flow or hazardous leaks. For example, a blowout near Odessa in late 2023 took more than two months and $2.5 million to contain and plug. The RRC warned last year that it can no longer sustain the growing cost and scale of the problem and requested an additional $100 million in emergency funding from lawmakers — about 44% of its entire two-year budget — just to keep up with the backlog, tackle urgent sites and cope with rising costs due to inflation. Lawmakers are considering this as part of the overall state budget. The costs of plugging a well vary by region and are based on how deep the wells are, according to Harell. While the Luling well's cost has not been finalized, according to the commission's cost calculation information, the well's cost will be about $24,000. The agency prioritizes wells that are actively leaking or pose immediate threats to the environment, groundwater and people. They might be releasing toxic gases like hydrogen sulfide, flooding land with contaminated water, or dangerously pressurized. These wells must be plugged right away, regardless of the cost, according to the commission. While Craddick noted at a hearing in February the state had 15 priority wells, a commission spokesperson said the number of priority wells fluctuates every day, with typically zero to five wells classified as emergency at any given time. 'If the fluid level in the well, the hydrocarbons and produce water in the well, gets up too close to that freshwater aquifer then it imposes a higher risk to contaminating that groundwater aquifer, so we wanna make sure that we get to those as wells first,' said Travis Baer, an oil and gas division district director at the Railroad Commission. The Luling well is categorized as a 2H priority well — still high risk but not a full-blown emergency. At the Luling field, red trucks and equipment surround a rusted pump jack, a mechanical device used to extract oil from an underground well to the surface. One of the trucks has two tanks that hold cement, another carries a cement mixer and a pressure pump. The process starts with a site assessment: Crews glance at hand-held devices hanging from their neck to test for dangerous gases like hydrogen sulfide and determine the wind direction so they can position themselves upwind. Once the site is secure, three workers wearing hard hats remove equipment inside the 2,000-foot-deep well — steel rods and tubing used to carry oil or gas to the surface. Almost two hours later, the workers were still pulling out tubing. Baer, the division district director, said these materials are often salvaged and sold to help offset plugging costs. Next, they assess the well's structural condition and measure how high fluids have risen inside. Once the well is fully evaluated, crews identify the underground zones that once produced oil or gas — known as perforations. A cast iron bridge plug (mechanical plug) is dropped down the hole, tightly sealed to provide a solid base and prevent fluids from leaking. 'This gives us a permanent bottom, it stops gas migration into our cement plug. So we know we're getting the best plug on bottom to seal off the perforations in the zone,' said Randy Niedorf, a well plugger with the company Bulldog Oil Well Service. Then, cement is pumped deep into the well. It flows to the bottom and rises up around the casing, sealing the wellbore and blocking any potential pathways for gas or liquid to migrate. Multiple cement plugs are installed along the well's depth, including near groundwater layers, to ensure complete isolation of oil and water zones. The final step is land restoration. Once the well is sealed, crews clean up the site. The Luling well was plugged in two days and all five wells in the area were plugged in about a week. First round of TribFest speakers announced! Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Maureen Dowd; U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales, R-San Antonio; Fort Worth Mayor Mattie Parker; U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff, D-California; and U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Dallas are taking the stage Nov. 13–15 in Austin. Get your tickets today!
CBS News
28-03-2025
- Politics
- CBS News
Why are flags in Texas at half staff? Honoring Carole Keeton
Texas and American flags are flying at half staff in the Lone Star State on Friday to honor longtime public servant Carole Keeton . Keeton, also known as Carole Strayhorn, died on Wednesday at age 85. Keeton served two terms as the Texas State Comptroller , the first woman to occupy that office. She was also a three-term mayor of Austin and served on the Texas Railroad Commission and the Austin ISD Board of Trustees. She also mounted unsuccessful bids for governor and the U.S. House of Representatives. Gov. Greg Abbott issued a proclamation on Thursday for flags to be lowered to half staff until sunset on Friday. Flags at the state Capitol and state cemetery will also be at half staff on the day of her burial, the proclamation said. "As a mark of respect for her public service as school board president, state insurance commissioner, mayor, railroad commissioner, and comptroller, it is fitting that flags be lowered to half-staff in her honor," Abbott said in the proclamation. "On behalf of Texas, the First Lady and I offer our thoughts and prayers on behalf of the Keeton family in their time of mourning. I urge all Texans to appropriately remember Carole's service to Texas." In an obituary published online , her sons wrote, "Her tireless dedication and ability to get things done were unmatched. She stood firm on principle, always focused on what was best for those she served and doing the right thing the right way."
Yahoo
27-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Former Austin Mayor Carole Keeton dies at 85: 'One tough grandma'
Carole Keeton, who went from being a 37-year-old mayor of Austin as a single mother of four boys to the "one tough grandma" in charge of Texas' finances a generation later, was remembered as a political trailblazer with a dervish-like personality that "filled a room." She died around midday Wednesday surrounded by family in the home in Austin's Tarrytown neighborhood that her grandparents had built. She was 85. "Mom was first in a lot of things — first woman mayor of Austin, first woman comptroller, but first of all she was a mom and a grandma," said her son Brad McClellan, an Austin lawyer. "Always the most important things were her sons — my brothers — and her grandkids. There's no question about that." Keeton, the daughter of a legendary dean of the University of Texas law school and the mother of a White House press secretary, served three terms as Austin mayor from 1977 until 1983. Austin's current mayor, Kirk Watson, said Keeton's imprint on the city and on Texas is lasting and genuine. "Carole Keeton was a historic figure in Austin and the state," said Watson, whose first stint as mayor came after Keeton was the first woman to hold that office. "Importantly, she gave so much of herself to the city and state she loved and to the people both as a community and individually." Before serving as mayor, Keeton was the first woman to preside over the Austin school board. And after her city service, she was three times elected to statewide office. "She was a powerful personality that filled a room and pushed people to think about the future but also made you laugh at the drop of a hat," Watson said. Keeton — who also was known as Carole Keeton, Carole Keeton McClellan, Carole Keeton Rylander and Carole Keeton Strayhorn during her long public service career — after serving as mayor, made an unsuccessful bid in 1986 to unseat longtime U.S. Rep. J.J. "Jake" Pickle, running as a Republican in the heavily Democratic district. Eight years later, she was elected to one of three seats on the Texas Railroad Commission. In 1998, she won a razor-close race to be the state's top financial officer. An irrepressible campaigner, Keeton announced that she would challenge incumbent Gov. Rick Perry in the 2006 Republican primary. It was an uphill battle from the start, so she shifted gears and rebranded herself as an independent. Keeton came in third in a crowded field that also featured Democratic former U.S. Rep. Chris Bell and entertainer Kinky Friedman, who also ran as an independent. An attempted comeback as a candidate for Austin mayor in 2009 also came up short. Keeton' father was W. Page Keeton, who was the UT law school's dean from 1949 until 1974. And her youngest son, Scott McClellan, served as White House press secretary during President George W. Bush's administration. During her career holding statewide political office, Keeton embraced the nickname of "One tough grandma," which became both her moniker and her campaign slogan. Known for a rapid-fire speaking style that included her own coined aphorisms, including "the Girl Scout Cookie Index" to measure economic conditions and "too much month at the end of the money" to illustrate the challenges of people living paycheck to paycheck, Keeton campaigned as a relatable everywoman in Texas. More: Strayhorn calls for energy referendum Former Austin Mayor Ron Mullen, who served on the City Council in the late 1970s and early 1980s with Keeton and succeeded her as mayor, said she "was really quite an achiever." "To think about the frontiers that she overcame being a woman," Mullen said. "She was a unique person who really was a high achiever to help our city grow and flourish." Brad McClellan, one of Keeton's four sons, said his mother's public life was just part of his upbringing and continued after he and his brothers had grown and started families of their own. He recalled that in her first campaign for mayor, she was the only woman in the crowded field. She earned a spot in the runoff and won the race in a nail-biter that was not finally decided until the wee hours of the morning after the election. Supporters of the other candidates, McClellan recalled, said the rigors of being mayor of Austin was "too tough for a woman." "This is 1977 Austin, Texas, even then the most progressive liberal city in Texas," he said. But, McClellan added, even as a single mother, Keeton had more than enough energy for every aspect of her life. "She'd be doing laundry in the middle of the night, and then get up to take us to school," he said. "And then she'd go to City Council. I don't think she ever slept." Keeton remained politically involved even after her days of seeking public office had ended. In 2012, her organization Austinites For Action helped pass a proposition to improve access to health care in Travis County with a modest increase in property taxes. And in her only social media post on the platform Threads on Nov. 1, just days before Election Day, Keeton made an impassioned plea on behalf of Democratic presidential nominee and then-Vice President Kamala Harris as well as for U.S. Rep. Colin Allred, who was challenging incumbent Ted Cruz for U.S. Senate. "I vote for protecting individual freedoms and rights in law and in reality, putting families first, a government for all the people unifying and caring not controlling, and a government in the sunshine for truth," she wrote under the handle "onetoughgrandma." Such actions, McClellan said, underscored her commitment to public spiritedness. "She was born in Austin, Texas, and died in Austin, Texas," her son said. "She loved this city and this state more than anything besides the family." In addition to Brad and Scott McClellan, Keeton is survived by sons Mark and Dudley McClellan, and nine grandchildren. Keeton's family will be holding a private service for her and will organize a public memorial in the next couple of months, according to her obituary. This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Former Austin Mayor, Texas Comptroller Carole Keeton dies
Yahoo
27-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Former Austin Mayor Carole Keeton Strayhorn dies at 85
Trailblazing former Austin Mayor and Texas Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn has died at 85, Austin Mayor Kirk Watson confirmed to the American-Statesman on Wednesday evening. "Carole Keeton was a historic figure in Austin and the state," said Watson, whose first stint as mayor came after Strayhorn was the first woman to hold that office. "Importantly, she gave so much of herself to the city and state she loved and to the people both as a community and individually." Strayhorn was Austin's mayor from 1977 until 1983. "She was a powerful personality that filled a room and pushed people to think about the future but also made you laugh at the drop of a hat," Watson said. Strayhorn, who was known as both Carole Keeton and Carole Keeton Rylander during her long public service career, died earlier Wednesday, Watson said. She served on the Texas Railroad Commission before being elected as the state's top financial officer in 1998. An irrepressible campaigner, Strayhorn was the first woman to lead Austin and the first to become Texas comptroller. A Democrat-turned Republican, Strayhorn made an ill-fated attempt to run for governor as an independent in 2006. This is a developing story, please check back for updates. This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Former Austin Mayor, Texas Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn dies
