They’re a rubber stamp for developers.
Yes, the Railroad Commission is also worthless.
Don’t expect it to get much better. The TCEQ, rather than the Railroad Commission, has responsibility for the wells mentioned in the article because they were “exploratory borings”, not “oil wells”, but bottom line is that nobody really wants to deal with them. The federal government released a shit ton of funds for states to identify and address abandoned borings and wells, and many states have set up programs to do just that. But Texas isn’t trying to drive the oil business out of their state, so nothing is really getting done. Those federal funds are going to dry up pretty damn fast now, so don’t look for much action to happen in the near future.
But bottom line: this is the price Texas has paid for political influence. There’s a reason we have 40 electoral votes instead of being Indiana’s bitch. This is the tradeoff.
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I would like to know more, if you can throw out some info
It doesn’t affect me, but it could someone, good friend, down around Giddings
In rural areas, yes. But, as in my edit above, the real blame lies with Texans themselves.
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As usual, after all the profits have been drained and spent, the tax payer will end up getting stiffed with the bill for cleaning up the mess. This is even worse in the Gulf of Whatever, where permanently plugging old wells costs millions each. The original leases require that the seabed is to be restored to its original state upon permanently plugging the wells.
So there are thousands and thousands of wells out there designated as “temporarily abandoned” by their owners allowing them to avoid the expense of permanent removal. They just sit there, leaking what little oil they have left, and no one cares because the ocean washes it away.
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Exactly. You can have a clean environment, or you can make shit tons of money and drive national political policy. And get new iPhones. Choose. You can’t have both. Texans overwhelmingly opt for the latter.
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A good many of these orphaned onshore wells costs millions to plug too. And there are tens of thousands of them.
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And all this ignores the environmental impact of those wells. Any effort to remediate the land/water around those vast pump jack farms in west Texas and New Mexico would cost billions.
But windmills need a diesel powered crane to be erected, so I guess it’s a wash.
Oh I’m very aware, this is why I’m asking the “what the fuck to do” question
While it remains infinitely cheaper for Big Oil to pay off Congress than pay to clean up its own mess, there’s nothing we can do.
To HH’s point, it’s going to take the voting public to change its voting habits. But because the damage is mostly out of sight/mind of the majority of the voters - and they like not paying more for gas - that is not going to happen.
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Thankfully, around here, the PEC and LCRA have their shit together, and do a great job
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And it’s not just Texas voters, but Americans in general. We have this sense of “rugged individualism” that we think is required for the freedom to pursue our own happiness. We demonize any regard for the common good as “liberal”, “socialist”, “woke”, what have you, and nowhere is the Machiavellian approach to “I gotta get mine”, disguised as “FREEDOM”, more pronounced than in Texas.
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The “capture right of water” is going become a HUGE thing very soon
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The vast majority of what we’re talking about is not Big Oil. It’s the result of someone’s great grandpappy trying to get rich quick.
“Rugged individuals” remind me of the best analogy I’ve ever seen for libertarians: house cats. Utterly convinced of their independence while wholly reliant upon a system they do not understand.
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We are what we consume.
I was thinking more of the environmental cleanup type things.
But yes, his granddaddy and daddy before had some wells on their property, outside of Giddings.
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The way we treat water right now is how we treated oil back when Daniel Plainview was drinking your milkshake: the spoils go to whoever can drill deeper, faster.
[Resisting the urge to re-re-post the Climate Town water video]
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That’s my point. Big Oil is far from derelict in cleaning up its own mess. People get mad when Big Oil doesn’t clean up their grandpappy’s mess.
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What was known as the “Austin Chalk” was big for a while. Horizontal drilling into reservoirs with a precipitous production curve, which meant that drillers were on a treadmill running at full speed trying to replace the reserves that were being drained.