$toxic fracking decade ago new files$

$toxic fracking decade ago new files$ $toxic fracking decade ago new files$

Then the coronavirus halted travel, obliterating demand for fuel and leaving less money to properly plug wells. Even before the viral pandemic, producers were declaring bankruptcy and abandoning oil fields after spending more on fracking operations than they ultimately could afford. A garage in Pennsylvania exploded - a consequence, the state suspects, of abandoned gas wells.Įxperts believe the problem is getting worse. Air quality tests revealed high levels of benzene and carbon dioxide, most likely from a nearby abandoned oil well. In Colorado, a basement exploded, killing a man and his brother-in-law who were repairing a water heater, after an abandoned flowline had leaked methane into the house.Ī Wyoming school shut down for more than a year after students and teachers complained of headaches for weeks. On the Navajo Nation, a hiker stumbled across wells oozing brown and black fluid that smelled like motor oil. In recent years, abandoned wells have been found under brush deep in forests and beneath driveways in suburbia. Without records of their whereabouts, it’s impossible to grasp the magnitude of the pollution or health problems they may be causing. They are a silent menace, threatening to explode or contaminate drinking water and leaking atmosphere-warming fumes each day that they’re unplugged.

$toxic fracking decade ago new files$

Regulators don’t know where hundreds of thousands of abandoned wells are because many of them were drilled before modern record-keeping and plugging rules were established. Some are leaking chemicals such as benzene, a known carcinogen, into fields and groundwater. Many of the wells are releasing methane, a greenhouse gas containing about 86 times the climate-warming power of carbon dioxide over two decades. About a third of them were plugged with cement, which is considered the proper way to prevent harmful chemical leaks. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, 3.2 million abandoned oil and gas wells exist in the United States. The crisis unfolding on Watt’s 75,000-acre ranch offers a window on a growing problem for the oil industry and the communities and governments that are often left to clean up the mess. “I’m watching this well literally just spew brine water into my water table, and then I have to go home at night, and I’m sweaty and tired and smelly, and I get in the shower, and I turn on the shower and I look at it, and I think, is this shower going to kill me?” Watt said. In June, an oil company worker called to alert her that another well was seeping pools of salty produced water, a byproduct of oil and gas extraction containing toxic chemicals. In April, she found crude oil bubbling from an abandoned well. Now 35, Watt believes the problems on her ranch, which sprawls across the oil-rich fields of the Permian Basin, are getting worse. They’re leaking dangerous chemicals that are seeping into groundwater beneath her ranch. One by one, the wells seem to be unplugging themselves. The wells, unable to produce any useful amounts of oil or gas, were plugged with cement decades ago and forgotten.īut something eerie is going on beneath the land, where Watt once played among the mesquite trees, jackrabbits and javelina and first drove the dirt roads at 10 years old. The corroded skeletons are all that remain of hundreds of abandoned oil wells that were drilled long before her family owned the land. CRANE, Texas (AP) - Rusted pipes litter the sandy fields of Ashley Williams Watt’s cattle ranch in windswept West Texas.

$toxic fracking decade ago new files$

Toxic fracking decade ago new files