Exxon may face hearings over oil well sabotage allegations in Texas

Exxon may face hearings over oil well sabotage allegations in Texas

www.mcclatchydc.com

Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson called on the state's powerful oil regulatory agency Tuesday to open hearings into allegations that Irving-based Exxon Mobil Corp. improperly plugged and sabotaged oil wells in a South Texas county after failed negotiations to reduce royalty payments.

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Patterson said the alleged violations could possibly result in more than $1 billion in administrative fees to the state from the nation's largest oil company. But Exxon Mobil said in a statement that the Republican official’s allegations are "groundless" and "paint a false and misleading picture" of its involvement in the Refugio County wells.

while exxon denies any wrong doing and points to private interests taking the political stage in this issue, i have a hard time believing exxon did Not do something illegal or evil.

while we will have to wait and see what the truth of this matter is it, for now and to me, is just one more example of how corporations of whom exxon is at the pinnacle of examples are greedy and destructive forces that need to be reigned in.

www.mcclatchydc.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

I've been on site for many re-entries of old wells. It was very common back in the 70's and 80's to use the kind of crap they say they found in the well bore. Everyone did it as a way to clean up a site. Though by the early 90's it was becoming illegal in some areas to do this. Not sure about Texas though. So I don't think this is a sign of them being evil just doing something a little outdated.

I remember one old well that had been sealed in the 70's. We drilled through 100 feet of concrete then about 200' of crap. The crap was old canvas sacks, clothing, chains, broken wooden pallets, waste oil from vehicles. We had a filter unit to catch the crap as the dril bit ground it up and flushed it up the mud line. We caught about 2 or 3 thousand pounds of this crap in a week. Then the drill had to go through the actual kill fluid that kept the gas down below that.

The idea back when this was done was that you first put in kill fluid (a liquid with a density heavy enough that the gas can't push it back up), then you fill it with anything till you got about 20-30 feet below the water table then fill with concrete till you hit the top of the pipe. The crap is cheaper than extra kill fluid or concrete. The concrete protects the water table from being contaminated.

Depending on the original contract the well bores could be owned by Exxon or by the land owner. If they are owned by Exxon then I can see them making the wells unusible to anyone else. If you know someone else wants to come and just get the resources out of your abandoned infrastructure then you would make it costly for them to do so. The new oil company was I think hoping to get a free bunch of wells for the cost of a re-entry drill and got an expensive surprise. They wouldn't be the first to have this happen to them.