Fracking Chickens Come Home To Groundwater Roost In Permian Basin As Ground Shifts And Toxins Erupt From Abandoned Wells
There’s one thing you won’t find at the Antina Ranch: cows. That’s because test showed Antina’s main water well was tainted with contaminants such as benzene, chloride, sulfate and salt, according to the ranch’s manager. So all 150 head of cattle were moved elsewhere — and eventually sold at auction.
Visitors will find hundreds of active and inactive oil wells across 22,000 acres at Antina, about an hour southwest of Midland, Texas. Some wells were drilled decades ago, while others that no longer produce are plugged with cement. In recent years, a number of those inactive wells and others nearby have roared back to life. Geyser-like blowouts have erupted in West Texas, and underground pressures beneath the abandoned wells have swelled. The culprit — state regulators, the industry and environmental groups agree — is water, and lots of it.
“I’m hoping we can get it all worked out before it gets too bad — if it’s not already past that stage,” said Greg Perrin, general manager of the nearby Reeves County Groundwater Conservation District. Oil production in the Permian Basin of West Texas is churning out record-breaking amounts of briny, chemically laced “produced water” that comes out of the ground during fracking operations. Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, is a widely used drilling technique that relies on sand, water, chemicals and high pressure to help produce oil and gas. So much wastewater is coming up that, in some pockets of the Permian, operators are running out of places to put it. After injecting the wastewater deep underground resulted in earthquakes, Texas regulators have approved disposal wells in more shallow formations. But with record numbers of produced water being injected in the Permian, the shallower injections have come with a host of new issues, including well blowouts and ground deformation.
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Meanwhile, issues related to produced water and underground pressure are mounting across West Texas. One old well in Toyah, Texas, located about 70 miles away from Antina, came back to life in December 2024, creating a 160-foot-tall geyser of toxic water that gushed for weeks. A sinkhole near an old well in Crane County was so badly warped by a rural highway that the state paid an estimated $30 million to repair the road. Those issues have coincided with a sharp rise in produced water injections. Railroad Commission documents show that the average injection volume for wells that received new permits rose from fewer than 10,000 barrels a day early in the 21st century to more than 20,000 barrels a day by 2023.
In Reeves County alone, annual volumes of waste water injected have risen from 16.9 million barrels annually in 2010 to 1.2 billion barrels in 2024. That is a 7,000 percent increase in 14 years. In all, more than 8.57 billion barrels of oil have been injected underground in Reeves County alone from 2010 to 2025 — enough water to fill the Dallas Cowboys’ AT&T Stadium more than 462 times.
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https://www.eenews.net/articles/fracking-waste-threatens-permian-basin-water-supplies-imperils-oil-industry-plans/