Horrified, they turned off the well that supplied their water and switched to another well. She’s haunted by a memory of crude oil bubbling up in a toilet bowl at her family’s ranch when she was a teenager. Though Chevron officials maintained that the cattle could safely return, Watt disagreed. “At this point,” she said, “I cannot sell my cattle at market in good conscience, because I have no idea what is in them.” So she had her 600 head of cattle hauled off to another part of her ranch. But Watt worried that her animals might have consumed contaminated water. Chevron, which owned at least two of the oil wells that recently came unplugged, began trucking in drinking water while its crews tried to fix the leaks. “If, all of a sudden, we could switch to all green renewable energy, that’s great, but these wells don’t disappear they’re still going to be there,” said Mary Kang, an assistant professor of civil engineering at McGill University in Montreal who was among the first scientists to call attention to the danger of abandoned wells.Īfter the discoveries on Watt’s ranch, traces of benzene showed up in the well that supplies her cattle’s drinking water. But Congress is unlikely to allocate enough money to seriously confront the issue. President Joe Biden, who has built much of his domestic policy around a transition to cleaner energy sources, wants to spend billions to put unemployed wildcatters to work plugging the wells. 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.

Experts believe the problem is getting worse.

Abandoned oil well wasteland 3