By Amanda Drane
July 17th, 2023
Mesquite waved in the breeze at Antina Ranch as well control specialist Hawk Dunlap dipped a stick into a hole in the ground and smelled it. “See?” he asked, extending the stick.
It smelled like gasoline.
Where there’s the odor of oil and gas there’s often noxious fumes such as benzene. His device measured 104 parts per million of volatile organic compounds outside one hole on the West Texas property southwest of Odessa. An invisible stream of chemicals was pouring up from below.
“And that’s with the wind, too.”
The site is just one of dozens of legacy oil wells on the 22,000-acre property in Crane County that have mysteriously reanimated, spewing a toxic mix of crude oil, salty water and methane from holes that in some cases were drilled more than 50 years ago. The crew assembled to address the issue at Antina calls them “zombie wells.”
An unplugged well is a portal into a dimension where brine can flow like an underground river, at times carrying the detritus of oil and gas production. They include chemicals used in extraction, leftover hydrocarbons and radioactive elements freed by drill bits cutting through the sedimentary rock. Modern regulations mandate steel and cement caps to prevent what flows beneath from traveling up through a retired well. When those protections fail, as they have at Antina, climate-warming gasses and toxic waters can freely rise to the surface, poison groundwater aquifers and kill plants.
