26 Years After Discovery Of Groundwater Contamination From Oil Drilling, The Cleanup Grinds On In Midland Texas [View all]

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The first sign of trouble appeared in 2003 when the water samples came back salty. This remote corner of West Texas, known as the T-Bar Ranch, had long served as the City of Midland’s insurance policy for water security. Midland purchased 20,000 acres spanning Winkler and Loving Counties in 1965, waiting for the day it would need to pump water from the property. Extra salts in the aquifer was not part of the plan.

The city’s investigation soon landed on Heritage Standard Corporation as the prime suspect. The small Dallas-based company operated oil and gas wells and a disposal well near Midland’s water source. In 2007, the city filed a formal complaint with the state, alleging that Heritage Standard’s injection well had contaminated the groundwater. The Railroad Commission of Texas, which regulates oil and gas, ordered the company to remediate. But in 2010, Heritage Standard filed for bankruptcy. The saga continues to this day. The pollution is still being cleaned up more than two decades after its discovery. Heritage Standard also abandoned six inactive wells, known as orphan wells, that the state is now on the hook to plug. These are among the more than 11,000 orphan wells on the list for plugging in Texas.

Protecting water from pollution is one of the Railroad Commission’s primary mandates. But T-Bar Ranch shows how costly, complicated and time-consuming it can be to clean up groundwater pollution left by oil companies. The bankruptcy process allowed Heritage Standard to shed troublesome assets. But the pollution persists. This is one of more than 500 active cases of groundwater contamination attributed to oil and gas activities, going back decades, that the Railroad Commission oversees.

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The Railroad Commission recently secured more funding from the state legislature to plug orphan wells. But the extent of groundwater contamination has received little attention. Cases like Heritage Standard are buried deep in state records or decade-old court filings. Still, Commissioner Wayne Christian, a Republican from East Texas, dismissed the problem at an April 2025 monthly meeting of the three elected commission leaders. He and his fellow commissioners had sat silently as members of the public approached the lectern. Commission Shift’s Julie Range briefly mentioned polluted aquifers during her comments about the agency’s annual monitoring and enforcement plan. Christian cut in. “In Texas, where have we polluted underground drinking water for a municipality where it’s irreparable?” he asked Range. “Midland,” she said. Frowning, Christian asked for more examples. He scoffed at the idea that “one well” was a problem if the city could drill others. “Where I see a problem is us projecting problems when they don’t exist,” he sniped. “To the public, it does a disservice to represent an overage of problems.” Christian did not respond to questions for this story.

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/18012026/west-texas-oil-cleanup-drags-on/