Railroad commission requests $100 million to clean up after oil well failures

In recent years, parts of West Texas have begun to resemble Yellowstone , with geysers and pools of water bubbling up unexpectedly from underground. Except these aren't natural phenomena. They're the result of broken wells and pipes built by the oil and gas industry, and the liquid that rises to the surface can be harmful to humans .

Fixing these infrastructure failures is becoming a bigger and bigger job for the Railroad Commission of Texas , which regulates oil and gas in the state. And it's not cheap work. On Aug. 30, the commission's executive director sent an emergency request to the state Legislature for an extra $100 million , all to address leaking wells.

The request was first reported by Amanda Drane , an investigative reporter for the Houston Chronicle focusing on the energy industry. She spoke to Texas Standard about the agency's plan. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.

This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:

What is the railroad commission saying about its plans to put this $100 million to work?

Amanda Drane: The railroad commission says it needs these funds to plug so-called emergency wells. These are wells without a responsible owner to plug them – wells that are leaking.

When you say "without a responsible owner to plug them," surely you can track that in public records. But they're saying no? Or what exactly is going on with that?

There's a different story for every well.

For example, there was a well that blew out in Crane County in December of 2023. Notoriously, there was no paper trail associated with that well and the Railroad Commission stepped in to plug it. And that well cost the railroad commission $2.5 million alone.

$2.5 million to plug one well and they can't trace who's actually responsible for it. Can you say more about the threat that these exploding wells pose to groundwater? I say "exploding" – leaking, we're really talking about here.

Some are leaking. Some are exploding. The water, whether it's leaking or erupting from a well, there's a good chance that some of that water is also leaching into the aquifers, that the well is cutting through.

The industry wastewater that they're concerned about tends to have very high salt content, which is damaging to soil that could be used for agriculture. It also could contain radioactive elements, benzene, trace amounts of oil, gas. There are these shallow aquifers that it travels through and some of those aquifers contain protected groundwater.

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Well, in a couple of months, the Legislature is supposed to meet in Austin and get started on a new two-year budget. Is the railroad commission saying they need this money before then?

The railroad commission is saying that they can put the money to use as soon as it becomes available.

So if they can get approval for this emergency allocation, they can go ahead and get to work on some of these leaking wells right away without having to wait for the Legislature.

All we know at this point is that the railroad commission is asking for this money and the ball is in the Legislature's court as to where the money will be coming from. And depending on where the money is coming from, they might need more votes in order to appropriate the funds.

Is there a mechanism to collect money from the oil and gas industry to cover the cleanup of these well blowouts and the like? I mean, the taxpayer now is paying for something that was left behind by the industry, and there's not, in many of these cases, a paper trail to track down just who's responsible, leaving the taxpayer footing the bill, unless there's some sort of mechanism to deal with this for the oil and gas industry writ large.

What do you know about that?

Historically, the railroad commission has done this work, the plugging of wells that have become wards of the state, using a fund that is populated by oil and gas industry fees and fines.

This request and the path it will take is a bit more unclear. It raises the question of where this additional $100 million will be coming from and whether there's enough oil and gas industry fees and fines to cover it all, or if there will need to be additional taxpayer funds used for this purpose.