Producers in the Permian Basin of West Texas and New Mexico extract roughly half of the U.S.’s crude. They also produce copious amounts of toxic, salty water, which they pump back into the ground. Now, some of the reservoirs that collect the fluids are overflowing—and the producers keep injecting more.
It is creating a huge mess.
A buildup in pressure across the region is propelling wastewater up ancient wellbores, birthing geysers that can cost millions of dollars to clean up. Companies are wrestling with drilling hazards that make it more costly to operate and complaining that the marinade is creeping into their oil-and-gas reservoirs. Communities friendly to oil and gas are growing worried about injection.
“It’s one of the many things that keep me up at night,” said Greg Perrin, general manager of the groundwater-conservation district in Reeves County, Texas, where companies are injecting some of the largest volumes of wastewater.
Swaths of the Permian appear to be on the verge of geological malfunction. Pressure in the injection reservoirs in a prime portion of the basin runs as high as 0.7 pound per square inch per foot, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of data from researchers at the University of Texas at Austin’s Bureau of Economic Geology.
When pressure exceeds 0.5 pound per square inch per foot, the liquid—if it finds a pathway—can flow to the surface and pose a risk to underground sources of drinking water, Texas regulators have said in industry presentations.
Unintended consequences
In the Delaware portion of the Permian, its most prolific region, drillers crank out between 5 and 6 barrels of water, on average, for every barrel of oil.
For years, they pumped the putrid fluids deep into the ground—and triggered hundreds of earthquakes, some with a magnitude of over 5. They caused little damage in the sparsely populated Permian, but they were felt as far as Dallas, El Paso and San Antonio, where a historic building was damaged.
In 2021, the Railroad Commission of Texas, the agency that oversees the oil-and-gas industry in the state, began cracking down on deep disposal. Companies pivoted to shallow reservoirs, which now absorb roughly three-quarters of the billions of barrels of water that they inject in the Permian every year. The shift largely cured the tremors but has created unintended consequences.
In 2022, a 100-foot column of saltwater erupted from an abandoned well in Texas’ Crane County near the unincorporated community of Tubbs Corner. Chevron, which owned the well, plugged it. But nearly two years later, water started to ooze from a different well in the same area, a sign that bottling up the geyser likely repressurized the subsurface and triggered the new outburst, scientists said.
It took the Railroad Commission about 53 days and roughly $2.5 million to plug that leak. Eventually, the agency quietly shut in the injection wells that it said were likely causing the increase in pressure.
Researchers at the Bureau of Economic Geology painted a critical picture of the frenzied injection in a preliminary, informal project proposal shared with the Railroad Commission last year, an open-records request filed by The Wall Street Journal revealed. Operators were injecting wastewater with little concern over how it might travel underground or its impact on reservoir pressure, they said.
Increasingly, Permian landowners find themselves dealing with abandoned well bores that come back to life. In May, a well on the Pecos County property of Laura Briggs started spraying saltwater like a fire hydrant. She said it took the Railroad Commission about four months to get it plugged at a cost of about $350,000.
“You’re working with broken, rotten pieces of stuff,” she said.
Some ranchers worry that wastewater might contaminate sources of groundwater and imperil their operations.
“If it breaks loose in a zone where we’re drawing, say, stock water from, it could put you out of business overnight,” said Brad Gholson, a rancher and the owner of Reeves County Feed & Supply, a livestock feed dealer in Pecos.
Oil-and-gas fields in South Texas, North Dakota and Appalachia also produce briny water but in much smaller volumes than in the Permian. As this basin matures, wells keep getting wetter.
The industry is testing technologies to evaporate the liquid faster and strip it of salt so it can be reused outside the oil patch. Companies are crafting plans to release scrubbed water into rivers. Texas lawmakers have passed legislation to help advance these solutions.
But researchers said these alternatives won’t alleviate the near-term need for injection. Katie Smye, a researcher at the Bureau of Economic Geology, said there are areas of the Permian where injecting wastewater can be done safely and the industry must put more work into delineating these zones.
“If we say no to deep injection due to earthquakes, and we say no to shallow injection due to surface flows, and we’re not taking into account the science of areas where injection is proceeding safely,” she said, “then what?”
1. Excessive Wastewater and “Pressure Cooker” Conditions
For every barrel of oil extracted, the Permian produces 3 to 5 barrels of toxic, salt-laden “produced water”.
