I am looking into filing a claim against a company that bought a old oil field in our area. The field been abandon for several years and the TRRC been out checking out the wells after i filed a complain. They had roughly 70 barrels of oil on a well location on our place spilled from a rusted out tank. Another well location had over 700 barrels of oil spill from it. Another location was hit by lighting in 2013 and the company hasn’t done anything in cleaning it up. All the well locations has been stripped of any of value. None of the 89 wells in the field hasn’t produced any in 5-10 years. The RRC told me this is my best chance to get me minerals back and get these location cleaned up. Has anyone ever done this? And what are the chances of winning this.
I knew a man that had several of the original wells drilled on their family property about 40 to 50 year’s or so ago in the Alabama Ferry Field. He bought his own measuring stick and started checking the wells himself. They were stealing from him. His initials were J.W.
I know who JW was. I worked in the field piping out wells and laying pipe lines in the field. The Alabama ferry field was projected to only last 10 years. But they water flooded and killed it.
I would not take legal advice from someone at RRC. If the lease has expired then you have your minerals to lease. An oil and gas attorney can help you take appropriate steps to terminate the lease. If production has ceased and there are spills and wells to plug, then RRC needs to force the operator to fix this. If the operator has disappeared, then the RRC will have to plug the wells. You need to be careful not to take any actions which might subject you to personal liability and responsibility for plugging and clean-up.
It pretty dang crazy with the RRC the regional office in Kilgore had their field guy checking all the violations
Sorry hit the button before i was ready. Then Austin approving their operator license before seeing the violations sent to austin from kilgore. I sometime feel the RRC is more for the companies than the landowners or environment. I will definitely check into what happens if I follow through with this claim.
The RRC, like the OCC in Oklahoma, has 1 job to do and that is to keep the states tax commission full of money.
You got that right. The poor field guy for the RRC runs his butt all over this field taking pictures of everything that wrong. Then the state approves Newco oil and gas to hold it. But then the state want let them to produce anything until everything is fixed. So then all of us mineral owners/ land owners have sit while well location that are a mess.
The water flood project way back then took advantage of the land and mineral owners. The land and mineral owners did grave damage to themselves, land and the mineral owners. Probably basically they practically HBP’d themselves. The State of Texas should be “forced” to fix these problems asp.
MO5- so think the state of Texas should arbitrarily void contracts they were voluntarily entered into?