Jonathan Thompson: 'But the truth is that it’s also a corporate bailout.'
An abandoned oil well, image courtesy of Jonathan ThompsonEven from a distance it’s clear that an oil and gas well called “State Senate #2″ in New Mexico has seen better days. The pumpjack sits idle, tumbleweeds surround the once-moving parts and the earth smells of crude saturating the soil.
“Orphaned” is an inaccurate term. The parent companies that originally drilled and profited from these wells mostly didn’t die. They fled. Once the wells stopped making money, they were sold to smaller, less solvent companies that then vanished into a haze of bankruptcy. The unplugged wells were left to ooze methane and other nasty stuff with no one around to clean it up.The State Senate #2, for example, was originally drilled by Standard Oil Co.
It’s a common story. The Horseshoe Gallup field is rife with such stories. Another group of wells down the road changed hands several times before being acquired by Chuza Oil, owned by the Dallas producer of a reality television show called “Cheaters”. Now Chuza is bankrupt, and its wells and assorted other detritus are a methane-oozing mess.
Yet the average cost to plug and reclaim a single oil and gas well, according to a 2021 study, is a whopping $76,000, with costs for deeper wells shooting up into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. That would add up to a $3.8 million cleanup bill for Chuza Oil’s 50 wells in the Horseshoe Gallup field.
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