Dick and Mary had two daughters. Chevron worked hard to stop the Estes 24 from flowing. An overhead view of Ashley Watts ranch house, the Hacienda. The Permian is more accurately described as an industrial operation that pumps a veritable sea of salt water from the earth daily, then separates out the oil. The last major examination of radioactivity in Texas aquifers, by UT-Austin geologists working for the states Water Development Board, occurred in 2011. He had played defensive back for Darrell Royal at the University of Texas at Austin. Chevron plugged some of the ranchs existing water wells and drilled new ones. Watt drove me around in her gray Ford F-150. Some are smaller and easier to drive. Oil companies could drill deep into the earth for fossil fuels, but its wells needed to be encased in cement as they passed through drinkable water zones. Sleep soundly knowing that any liquid you may haul will make it to its destination safely with one of our tanker trailers. Ashleys great-grandfather Glenn Allen had worked in the Fort Worth Stockyards as a buyer for one of the nations largest meatpacking companies. An aggressive landowner can become a time-consuming headache for an oil company. Her father fired off letters anytime an oil company left a mess at one of the numerous pump jacks, oil storage tanks, wellheads, and pipelines on the property. According to a letter sent a couple of hours later by the Baker Botts attorney working for Chevron, Watt shouted f multiple times. They had planned to spend the summer sending oil operators sharply worded demands to clean up the aging wellheads and pipelines. This water is too salty for anything besides putting it back underground. Additional information is available in this. Four months later, after the Estes 24 leak began and shed begun to suspect a much-larger problem underground, Watt asked Steve Pitts, the president of Pitts Energy, if he would share the files of detailed history about each well that hed purchased in the deal. Wright canceled his trip to Antina Ranch a few days later. Also in Upton County, SM Energy, Pioneer Natural Resources, ConocoPhillips, and Apache Oil each own more than 7,000 acres apiece. Ready to check out tanker trailers for sale? Surgeries and chemotherapy at MD Anderson Cancer Center briefly restored her vitality, but by that Thanksgiving, she was under hospice care. After graduating from the Naval Academy, she served five years in the Marines, including a seven-month deployment to Afghanistan. If you aren't sure which tanker trailer suits your needs, our experts can offer tailored recommendations. The Railroad Commission has taken the position that because the abandoned well was long ago turned over to the landowner and converted into a water well, the agency has no jurisdiction over it. Chevron finished its work at the Estes 24 near the beginning of September. In contrast, the water Watts hydrogeologist drew from near the Estes 27 had 128 picocuries per litermore than eight times the federal limit for drinking water. The Railroad Commission doesnt seem to want to drill test wells to determine the extent of this problem. Kind of beautiful, if you dont smell it, Watt said. We are your premier tank trailer dealership located in Houston, also serving the areas of Midland-Odessa, Katy, and The Woodlands, TX! He agreed. His senior year, 1968, saw the beginning of a thirty-game winning streak for the Longhorns that included claiming the college football national championship in 1969 and 1970. Tanker trailers are usually not exceptionally tall, which makes bridge height a non-issue, so you can craft your route without needing to worry about bridges along the way. Ashley told me that no one had ever informed Dick and Mary Watt about the plan to create a large water-injection well less than a mile from both their ranch house and the source of their drinking water. Stogner sent photos of the Estes 24 leak to Bill Burch, whod been on the team that sealed the disastrous Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010, in addition to other problem wells as far away as Kuwait and Algeria. The public knows the Permian Basin as an oil field. Wedged between the sky above and the sandy-brown soil below, the verdant plant life gave the landscape the look of a three-layer cake. Ashley told me that in 2002 crude oil flowed up into the toilet at the Hacienda. This is true, but its not the whole story. I have no doubt in the world, but I dont want money. , Hendrickson INTRAAX Air Ride Suspension

The water from 58 of those wells had detectable levels of radioactivity, and the median level was 4.8 picocuries per liter. Memories of her mothers painful death were still fresh when the Estes 24 began leaking. It took several plates, pins, and wires to put his limb back together. We are a tank trailer dealer based in Houston, Texas. Stogners fifteen-year-old, nearly blind black poodle, Blue, and Watts rambunctious airedoodle Bucephalus, named after Alexander the Greats horse, added to a sense of familial chaos. I always joke that if Pablo Escobar hung out in the Permian Basin, he would live in this house, Watt told me.

A broker who once showed Dick Watt some ranchland for sale told me that he remembers him looking at the aging oil-field infrastructure and commenting that if he bought the land, someday I will be able to sue the shit out of Chevron.. The groundwater in that part of Crane County flows north to south. Watt tweeted a photo of it with the sardonic caption Yeah that should fix it in response. For days, all that was known about it was that 25,000 barrels a day of brine was pouring out. This browser is no longer supported. The water is three times saltier than the ocean, but its as clear as the water you might encounter on some picturesque Caribbean beach. 2022. Sand hills, which cover much of the 22,000 acres. She noted that the water from the well next to her house is now saltier than the ocean. (Stogner went on to make headlines earlier this year with an ultimately unsuccessful bid in the Republican primary for a seat on Railroad Commission, during which she released a video of herself riding a pump jack on Watts property while wearing only a hat, underwear, and star-shaped pasties. . Burch and Stogner suspected that salt water was surging from one subterranean zone to another, as well as up to the surface. He parked his truck, got out to take a closer look, and began recording with his cellphone. , 1 Compartment Join me for a beer, he said. Shortly after sunrise on December10, 2020, an Antina Ranch foreman was driving down the ranchs main road when he saw water flowing about three hundred yards through a bunch of mesquites, according to Watt. A third-party browser plugin, such as Ghostery or NoScript, is preventing JavaScript from running. It could return as much water as it wanted to belowground, as long as it stayed below a maximum-allowable pressure within each well; two hundred barrels was an estimate of how many per day would result in that much pressure, a level it says it never exceeded. I first visited Antina Ranch last summer, a couple of weeks after the leaks discovery. Toxic water could get into a drinking-water aquifer. If she did eventually settle for a payoff, she said, I insist that it is not confidential because if Im going to sell my soul, everyones going to know my price., A few weeks before the leaks discovery, she had invited Stogner, who was going through a divorce, to move into the ranchs pool house. Black spray paint concealing the Chevron name on a sign for the plugged and abandoned Estes 11 well. You've disabled cookies in your web browser. The oil industry, year after year, decade after decade, is replumbing the subsurface under West Texas, pulling water from one depth and putting it back at a different, more convenient, depth. Was She His Only Victim? At one point, the number of its contractors at the ranch grew to as many as fifty, to contend with the cantankerous and unpredictable well. Gulf sometimes removed the entirety of the pipe, leaving an open hole with just a couple of cement plugs. For months, people were saying we were crazy, and then came the geyser, Watt said. Older wells produce 14 barrels of water for every barrel of oil, according to a recent study. A former Marine machine gunner, Pollard had his leg shattered in a training accident while serving in Iraq in 2004. To Watt and Stogner, it was further confirmation of a zone of massively pressurized water in the area. Chevron, in a February letter responding to the results presented by Watt, noted that radionuclides occur naturally in the aquifer. Get exclusive tools to track your homes value and update its details on Zillow. Watt seemed to enjoy her fight with a multinational company worth more than $300billion, frequently taking her complaints public on Twitter. You've disabled JavaScript in your web browser. Chevron is the surface owner, it stated. I suspect the Permian Basin in fifty years is just owned by oil companies, Watt told me.

He noticed that the best cattle seemed to come from the sandy soils west of Odessa and headed that way. Following the meeting with Watt, Chevrons team agreed to bring in oil-field service firm Schlumberger to run a sophisticated diagnostic test. They dont have to check with the owner to do everything. A big thank you to Red Bucket Well Control LLC!. Charles Gilliland, a research economist with the Texas Real Estate Research Center, at Texas A&M University, said these transactions are a one-way street. She declared that she was willing to spend whatever it took to underwrite a lengthy investigation into the Estes 24. Legal paperwork and maps related to the Estes 24 leak. The commission does nothing. This includes materials such as sand and fertilizer. Many landowners in the area seem to accept oil-field trash and small leaks as a part of life in the Permian, but such conditions bothered the 35-year-old Watt. The next month, Chevron sold its wells on the Estes lease to Pitts Energy, a small firm in Midland. And its full of great reads, yall. She complained about the mess to Chevron and asked to see the paperwork the company had filed with the state about the leak. In 1991 Chevron injected 670 barrels a day into the Estes 23. There are a few reasons this might happen: To regain access, please make sure that cookies and JavaScript are enabled before reloading the page. Like her father before her, she says its because she worries that all that would result from these steps is a whitewash.. So was it headed toward Fort Stockton, seeking pathways through poorly plugged wells until it finds gaps between the rocks where it can form a giant underground sea? Had it arrived half an hour after the leak started? But Pollard did find paperwork for a Chevron well, called the CT-112, that sits extremely close to the site of the mystery geyser. A commissary truck provided Tex-Mex lunches, and a cool-down tent was set up for contractors laboring in the triple-digit summer temperatures. Pumpers and petroleum engineers, ranch owners and roughnecks know that this is not strictly correct. A couple of weeks after that, an incensed Dick Watt demanded in a letter that the Railroad Commission perform an objective and independent investigation, and not a whitewash of Chevron. In the groundwater, a monitoring well drilled by Chevron found toxic benzene, a carcinogen also known to cause anemia. Its team installed valves allowing them to close the wellhead, but it soon became clear that the problems were only beginningthe pressure inside the pipe kept rising. In West Texas, Ashleys mother rode horses and ran the ranch.

Pollard did just that, and what he found didnt add up. Chevron drilled out all the cement plugs that had been installed when the well was abandoned.

Chevron owns 12,647 acres of ranchland in Crane County, home to Antina Ranch, and 34,411 acres next door in Upton County.

Stoker had seen similar leaks every year or so since hed started working Permian Basin wells in 2005. It appears that Gulf was drilling so many of these wells in order to better map the boundaries of oil reservoirs. While some months the numbers were below that 200-barrel rate, the company had at other times massively exceeded the rate for months at a time. Unfortunately for them, as a former Schlumberger logging engineer in Saudi Arabia and Oman, I didnt need to ask how to read an isolation scanner tool log, he told me. The water was so salty, he told me later, that anyone attempting to drink it would have gagged, unable to gulp it down. There are a few reasons this might happen: To regain access, please make sure that cookies and JavaScript are enabled before reloading the page. In other words, it simply sealed the well above and below this watery zone, and moved on. She forced a runoff with incumbent Wayne Christian.).

Tank trailers are built for the transportation of liquids and dry bulk materials. Watt copped to the profanity. The car belonged to the owner of a local oil-field services company, from whom Watts parents bought the property in 1995, when she was nine years old. 24 well should have been safely entombed in cement, but something had gone wrong. You're a power user moving through this website with super-human speed. So Chevron drilled water monitor wells into the shallowest of three aquifers beneath the ranchthe Pecos Valley Alluviumaround Thanksgiving. At least 1,400 barrels of liquid had been hauled off, more than enough to fill a backyard swimming pool. The Estes 24 began to reveal its secrets just after the long Fourth of July weekend. , Rear Discharge Late last year, a company with the generic name US Land Guild bought the 13,600-acre Doodle Bug Ranch, in Crane. Mary died on Christmas Eve 2018. The agencys position, according to a staffers email to Chevron, was that it considered the leak a civil matter and we will not be acting as a mediator.. A tough-as-nails fourth-generation West Texan, Watt has the rsum of someone youd expect to run for Congress: educated at one of Houstons most exclusive private schools, then the U.S. Tank trailers range in their sizes. One of the files contained a Chevron document describing the Estes 20 leak. All Chevron had left behind was a wellhead, painted turquoise, sticking about four feet out of the ground amid an acre denuded of vegetation. Permian oil isnt under extraordinary pressure. They were plugged soon after they were drilled. The citizens of Texas, and especially those of us who live in the oil fields, deserve safe and clean groundwater, she said. Others are larger and harder to drive but can carry a larger amount of material.

Chevron would let Burch review the results but would not help him interpret the brightly colored squiggly lines on the readout. Site provided by Once the land is in the hands of oil companies, whos left to complain about damage to the land or the groundwater? Ive killed a lot of people with drones, she said. Visit Trailers of Texas and see our selection of models. Frustrated that the state wasnt doing more to investigate what was happening, in December Stogner decided to launch her quixotic bid for railroad commissioner. Indeed, as Watt was about to learn, this might have already happened on her land, seven months earlier. Chevron likewise marshaled its own team. After completing the CAPTCHA below, you will immediately regain access to the site again. I didnt scream at them, but I was like, You have fed this up, and youre going to clean it up, she told me. Meanwhile, the Hacienda began to feel like a mixture of the mobile headquarters of a military operation and the home of a large, busy family composed of Watt and what she calls her motley engineering crew. Stacks of documents related to every well on the ranch piled up on any available surface. , 1 Compartment Thats when pressure builds up and finds an outlet, such as an old well, for pushing an out-of-control mix of oil, gas, and noxious water to the surface. Find your next tank trailer for sale at Trailers of Texas! The cementer paused for four days, then added a plug at 1,160 feet. (Chevron disputed this characterization and said it too wanted to understand what was happening underground, in addition to sealing the well.) At least fifty were in Crane County, including two on Antina Ranch. Then Chevron plugged the well permanently. The scent of rotten eggs, the telltale sign of hydrogen sulfide, wafted toward us. Draw a parallelogram between these wells on a map, and it covers more than seven thousand acres. , Rear Discharge Christ on Friday thats a lot of water, Pollard replied. But We Talked to an Expert About What Will. New 2023 LBT 9200 Gallon 5 Compartment Fuel Tank Trailer Nothing the lake touches survives. Between the Antina wells, the geyser, and the Citation well, there were now multiple pieces of evidence pointing to an extraordinarily pressurized zone of salt water.

Then, sometime around the final hours of 2021, another West Texas well failed in spectacular fashion. Solar Power Is Bailing Texas Out This Summer, A January 6 Fugitive Was Arrested on a Property Connected to the Kinney CountyAttorney, Love and Death in Silicon Prairie, Part I: Candy Montgomerys Affair, In an Urgent New Book, Floodies Reinvent the Story of Hurricane Harvey, Paradise Lost: Where You Cant (or Shouldnt) Swim Right Now in Texas, The Climate Crisis Spells Big Business for Carbon Capture, Bitcoin Miners Could Save the Texas Gridor Sink It, The States Winningest HS Football Coach Might Forget All His Victories, Welcome to Party Island on Lady Bird Lake, East Texass Most Exciting New Store Is Hidden in a Small-town Mansion, The Top 50 Texas BBQ Joints: 2021 Edition. All calculations are estimates and provided for informational purposes only. Emotionally devastated, Dick followed just fourteen months later. But back at Antina the next month, she noticed a bunch of trash at the Estes 20 site, as well as tire tracks on a side road where it looked as if a large number of trucks had turned around.

Calhoun told Watt that Chevron would pay the going rate of 8 cents for every square foot touched by the spill, or $1,401.03. Meanwhile, the Railroad Commission has continued to permit larger and larger salt water disposal wells, even as state agencies have determined that pumping too much salt water underground likely triggered earthquake spikes in the Midland area and central Oklahoma. To reach oil reservoirs, wells are routinely drilled through the freshwater aquifers needed to grow crops, slake the thirst of cities, and nourish livestock. Burch gave impromptu seminars on well construction and control. 24 P&A. Most of the wells on Antina Ranch were part of the W.A. Estes lease. It is shocking. Chevron had pumped a sea of water beneath Antina Ranch, and the state had either ignored injection rates significantly in excess of the estimated maximumor never noticed them. Every day, the industry produces more than 5million barrels of oil from the Permian, along with something like 30million barrels of water. As you were browsing something about your browser made us think you were a bot. The ranch was the dream of her mother, Mary Williams, who grew up the horse-riding daughter and granddaughter of cattle ranchers. How had Chevron come up with its estimate of 31.69 barrels? He became a prominent oil and gas attorney, founded two energy litigation firms, and served as chair of the State Bar of Texass oil and gas section. Later that evening, a consultant hired by Watt took his own sample. Memories of her mothers painful death were still fresh when the Estes 24 began leaking. Chevrons lie created a fake world where they could avoid giving any notice about their injection activities to the actual landowners, my family, Ashley Watt wrote in a letter to the Railroad Commission last December. Pollard also found a record showing that a few months before the sprouting of the mystery geyser, and less than a mile to the northeast, a cement company was sealing a Citation Oil & Gas well when it encountered flowing water at a depth of 1,200 feet that had pushed its way up the well. Will the Permian become a denuded landscape of poisonous ponds and toxic geysers, capable of sustaining intensive oil and gas activity but little else? Its animpermeable solidor it had been when Chevron plugged the Estes 24 in 1995, according to company records filed with the state. Where else had wells encountered this pressure zone, which didnt seem to exist a few years ago, and how big was it? We also drove past another well that had recently leaked salt water. If I wanted to sell it, I am absolutely positive Chevron would buy it right now, she responded. She looked across the lake, past the spindly dead trees poking out of the water, toward the big blue sky beyond. For instance, in 1983 Gulf Oil injected an average of 410 barrels a day into the Estes 31. Chevron said it wanted to take this step based on proximity to wells that have experienced breakouts within the past two years. Thus far, Watt has denied Chevron permission to work on these wells or drill more wells to monitor the water. Chevronand before it Gulfhad owned the wells continuously for nearly a century. Mary attended school in El Paso, then Austin, and finally moved to Houston, where she met Dick Watt. Stogner organized records, discussed wellhead pressure readings, and chopped mangoes and vegetables for group dinners. His spokesperson said it was both out of concern over rising COVID-19 cases and because Stogners newly launched bid for election to the Railroad Commission presented a host of issues. Though the geyser was successfully contained, months later the well remains a mysteryno one knows when it was drilled or who owns it. Stogner had noticed unusual pressure readings at several Antina Ranch wells even before the Estes 24 started flowing. Watt learned that when Chevron arrived at the Estes 20 following the foremans reporting of the leak, water was flowing from the well at the rate of about a barrel a minute. The next month, a gate would finally be installed to prevent public access to Lake Boehmer. Joshua Pollard seems to subsist on steak and Flamin Hot Cheetos. Sailing Was Supposed to Save Christopher Cross. Stogner instead became Watts wartime adviser. We also proudly serve those in Katy and The Woodlands, Texas. I will stay on top of everything I can do within the law to make sure that things are done correctly, Jim Wright told her. If you come here and its not to do good, Watt said, I want you to be nervous.. But the true oddity was Chevrons attestation that it had notified nearby landowners. , 5 Compartment (3100/1250/1100/1100//2650) If these plugs failed, the wells were open elevator shafts for whatever might rise from below. MyLittleSalesman.com.

Gulf operated the lease until the mid-eighties, when Chevron acquired the company. Chevron told meand the Railroad Commission agreedthat the permit does not explicitly limit the number of barrels the company can inject into wells. A few months later, in March, a hydrogeologist working for the local groundwater district would find elevated levels of arsenic and radium in the water, as well as trace amounts of hydrocarbons and H2S levels in excess of 14,000 parts per millionseven hundred times higher than the federal governments workplace safety guidelines allow. Landowners obviously dont want drillers befouling their aquifers with hydrocarbons or, worse, salt. Our record review. About a third of a mile north of the ranch house, the well had been plugged and abandoned in 1999. A third-party browser plugin, such as Ghostery or NoScript, is preventing JavaScript from running. (Of course, he admits to being a pessimist by nature.) She scooped water from the puddle and took it to her truck, where she placed it on a scale. These mesquite trees aint even lost their leaves. He walked farther off the road, his boots crunching on a white crust left behind by evaporated salt water. MLS ID #160743, Eileen Depew, Keller Williams - Lake Travis, 512-263-9090. This wasnt a case of salt water entering the well from the bottom, rising upward, and corroding the pipe from the inside. As we crisscrossed the ranch, she jerked her truck down dead-end roads to show me weathered pieces of oil equipmentnot all of it belonging to Chevronin various states of neglect and disrepair. (I quit drinking two and a half years ago, and I have some time on my hands now, he explained.) New 2024 Tremcar 7000 Gallon Stainless Steel DOT 407 Chemical / Acid Tank Trailer One morning, she, Stogner, and I piled into the F-150 and drove south toward Fort Stockton. , New 2024 LBT 9200 Gallon 5 Compartment Fuel Tank Trailer This waterflood proposal included turning the Estes 24 and 27 into wells for injecting that water. (CT stands for core test.) In the mid- to late fifties, Gulf drilled hundreds such core tests from Los Angeles to Houston. When the crew reached a zone 1,475 feet belowground, something unexpected happened, according to Burch, who was at the well site at the time. Among those, I tallied 370,395 acreslarger than several Texas countiesand I expect thats an undercount. Oil companies can ignore it, and the Railroad Commission has shown little interest in being a rigorous regulator. Watt collected water from the test wells and sent it for testing. Stoker reported it to the Railroad Commission of Texasthe agency charged with regulating the oil and gas industryand sent his fifty-second video to a lawyer, Sarah Stogner, who was working for the owner of the ranch, Ashley Watt. After going down a few rabbit holes, he came across a 1978 document about Gulf Oil. I asked Watt if she was still intent on neither reaching a financial settlement with Chevron nor selling the ranch. This is the foundational deal between Texas and the oil industry.

People are always like, Well, we dont want more regulations because thats going to stifle oil and gas and everything. The only regulation I want is already on the books, which is like, Okay, if you make a mess, you have to clean it up. And thats, like, basic, you know, golden rule. Some of these liquids may require a Hazmat endorsement. At Houstons Kinkaid School, which counts George W. Bush and JamesBakerIII among its alumni, Ashley earned three varsity letters her senior year. To Watt, Lake Boehmer is an example of the states see-no-evil approach to oversight. The toxic body of water first appeared in 2003, when an abandoned well began sending water to the surface, and it now covers more than sixty acres. A white Rolls-Royce, its tires kicking up clouds of dust, figures prominently in Ashley Watts earliest memories of the ranch. After oil companies buy such acreage, they tend not to sell it. Burch explained that there was evidence of a high-pressure lake of potentially toxic and radioactive water underground pushing into the Estes 24 and likely other wells that were plugged by aging cement that might easily give way.

Though the paperwork reveals nothing about Chevrons intentions, the cement injected would prevent anything from coming up the well from the Salado zone. There it is, flowing up out of the ground, he said, before picking up a dented piece of metal and turning it for his phones camera to record. Weighing ten pounds per gallon, it was 20percent heavier than fresh water. But Texas state regulations are loose and permissive, and the records a jumbled mess. This isnt pretty., Based on the Schlumberger test, there were multiple holes in the top six hundred feet of well. By the time the sun rose on January1, a hundred-foot-tall column of salt water had appeared eight miles southeast of Antina Ranch. By August 2021, hed learned how much water Gulf had been permitted by the state to inject (an estimated maximum daily rate of 200 barrels into each well), and he had the recordssome handwrittenof how much Gulf, and then Chevron, had injected. Most of that is the former McElroy Ranch, which Chevron bought in 1990 and closed to quail hunters.