Texas struggles to clean up abandoned oil and gas wells

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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.

What are orphan wells?

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.

Who is responsible for plugging orphan wells?

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.

What are the environmental and health risks of orphan wells?

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.

What is Texas doing to address orphan wells?

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.

How is a well plugged?

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.

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