I know a few of you have seen me post pictures and videos from this Alabama ferry field in SE leon county. I had to go on my neighbors property today to check on something and seen this while i was there. The neighbor never noticed this and he doesn’t have any minerals so he never looks at this well. Hopefully this will be our white bronco on getting our minerals back. This field has been sitting for years with no production and everytime the RRC starts anything the owner pops out of a hole and pays them off. This is the third time within a year something like this happened. Most people in this area (my parents as well) signed a pretty weak lease in the early 80’s. I will be contacting the RRC about this.
RRC came out today and inspected it. They are schedule to plug this one since the owner is no where to be found. We are hoping others will in plugged as well and our minerals released because of no production for over the last 12 months. Most of these wells hasn’t produced anything in several years. I also took the field guy to a well he didn’t even know it was there. Half these wells in this field isn’t even mapped on the RRC mapping. Then getting to them you have to walk to because either the creeks washed out the crossing or the roads to them are grown up. I am meeting with the district manager out of Henderson Thursday to show him other problem wells in this field. People on the northern side of this field are have oil show up in their drinking water. Luckily we haven’t had this issue here yet. But if these wells are taken care of we could.
You and your neighbors may need to contact the Austin Office of the Texas Railroad Commission along with Certified Letters. return receipt requested since the Henderson Office won’t do anything. I believe the State or the Federal Govt. can come up with the money. All this operator is doing is trying to hold (HBP) these leases to sell for another oil and gas play. Maybe the Comstock Play or the other players.
I am working on that now. I also contacted Mr. Dunlap that ran for commissioner this past election. He got me in contact with a houston news paper. We are about to expose just how screw up the RRC is on these well clean ups are. Most of the field guys try to do their jobs but Austin sits on their butts and do nothing. They just bandaid these cleans for a bigger problem in the future all over the state. If they are really about clean and water they wouldn’t have so many orphan weĺls around the state. They let companies leave these problems when they should hold the accountable.
What about the operation that has these rights HBP’ed that has their gathering system on Hwy 7 west of Centerville? Go to the App. District and see who is paying property tax on it and their address. If I owned mineral rights in this water flood mess I would hire a law firm to get my mineral rights released before they sell or lease them for the deep gas play by Comstock and others.
That was Lasmo Energy on 7. They have some wells producing but not many. With everyone tied up in these units from the water floods in our area i have to get everyone to go along. The crazy thing is no one wants to rock the boat to get the minerals back. I do have over 300 mineral acres no tied up in this field so if someone comes leasing i will update it and maybe work a deal with the company leasing to include my other land.
Thats what got me. You would think the RRC would have sold the oil in these tanks to be use to clean this up. I asked the field clean up guy about damages payment and he said the state doesn’t pay damage payments. They took all the oil soak soil and dumped it inside the firewall. Which then took up space for the oil to stay inside the firewall with it still leaking out. I asked the guy what happens if we get a hurricane here and it dumps several inches of rain and causes the oil and water to overflow the firewall. He said lets just hope that doesn’t happen. They are sure playing with fire. It this place gets hit by another lightning strike it wiĺl be a major fire.
The RRC and TxDOT are still DEI type hires. If you report them not taking care of a problem it’s like the “FOX Guarding the HEN HOUSE”. They are policing themselves! You might try making a trip to the Austin Office and get a name of a person that may ultimately get something done.
I have talked to a couple of landowners about making a trip to Austin. One landowner doesn’t have any mineral rights and raises game deer. He’s had issues with game dèer getting into the oil that leaked off the location into his pasture last year. I am hoping i can get more people involved and make a bigger statement on getting things clean up.
The weak lease is not the problem. It is that RRC has policy of not ordering pluggings for inactive wells, regardless of time. How many wells are involved? Are any of these wells on the Oil Field Cleanup - State Well Pluggings Remaining by District and what is the Priority listing? There is a specific complaint process to handle these wells which will get attention. https://www.rrc.texas.gov/media/scngdype/wells-remaining-12-16-2024-pdf.pdf Or are the wells only listed as orphan wells? https://webapps2.rrc.texas.gov/EWA/orphanWellQueryAction.do If they are not on either list, then check the RRC wellbore status to see if they have listed operator.
Great Post, thanks! I suspect that the operator is only holding this old dead water flood project so that they can lease it for the Haynesville/Bossier Play that is moving south and east in Leon, Anderson and Houston County as well as Leon County.
Its around 1,400 wells that in the water flood program. Most of these wells still have tanks, line heater and heater trèe but the pump jacks were moved out. Some of them has a sand plug in them, and the rest are open. I got words yesterday the RRC will be cleaning up the injection station thats had these oil leak in September. Now if they really do it i want hold my breath. I finally got some ranchers in the area pushing as well on getting things cleaned up on their locations. Its only taken 10 years of calling, emails, and taking pictures of these issues that come up for them to finally say they will do it.
Maybe or maybe not. In many old fields, the leases have been depth-severed and the deep-rights holders are not the same as the shallow-rights holders. The incentive here to keep ‘operating’ may be to avoid or delay the RRC-estimated $100,000 per well plugging cost. By failing to require operators to plug wells which have not produced for decades, ultimately operations are assigned to small companies with few assets or the operators just go out of business. Then RRC has to pay plugging costs. But RRC does not clean up the all the surface, leaving surface owners with damaged land.
How could a performance bond protect the landowner and the taxpayers for being responsible for ecological disasters such as in the Alabama Ferry field? Obviously, it’s too late for this field.
The bonds or cash deposits required by RRC for operators will not cover plugging costs for multiple wells. Real problem is that RRC does not require nonproducing wells to be plugged as long as the lease has not expired, even after decades. So 1,000s of old wells are sitting out there. Then operator goes out of business, whether by death of owner or bankruptcy or etc and taxpayers and surface owners are left holding the bag. Around 2010 the RRC started requiring plugging schedules for wells that were not producing for 5+ years. That was overruled whether by inside RRC or by Commissioners and so here you have this disaster. Meanwhile plugging costs are way up and so the RRC can never get ahead of needs.
This is crazy. Hilcorp was the last major operator of this field. They sold it to a company called Newco then this company officials spilt and they fourmed Geohydro. Then it split again and one guy took it over and called his company Texas Tea black gold. He’s from Mexico and now he’s no where to be found. Its crazy they can’t come back on hilcorp for leaving this field like this. It not like they are out of business since Comstock just bought hilcorp interest in minerals in the western part of the county. Then they are the largest hold in the Alaska field now. All hilcorp did here was milk what they could from this field in the 10+ years they had it and leave this all behind. They owned it in 2015 when this injection station was hit by lightning. Then they never reported to the RRC. I called our field guy and he was totally caught off guard about it.
