Neglected oil and gas wells are coming back to life in Texas, harming the environment and challenging Texas regulators.

Fracking wastewater, injected underground for permanent disposal, traveled 12 miles through geological faults before bursting to the surface through a previously plugged West Texas oil well in 2022, ...

A knee-high pipe sticking out of the ground not far from a school. A gurgle in a pond on rolling farmland. A patch of forest undergrowth hiding a long-forgotten, leaking oil well. Relics like these ...

Oil workers pull tubing from an orphan well in a field in Luling on March 27, 2025. Credit: Lorianne Willett/The Texas Tribune LULING — Just six minutes from 5,700-person town’s historic city center, ...

Across the United States, there are many abandoned oil wells left over from companies that went out of business or stopped operating altogether. An estimated 3.5 million oil and gas wells have been ...

The latest well, discovered Saturday in northern Pecos County, is about 14 miles from the “unusual” Crane County well that raised eyebrows earlier this year. It’s roughly 5 miles from the so-called ...

America is dotted with old oil wells that are no longer producing, but have never been plugged. In a prairie in Oklahoma, between bison and brush fires, a pipe sticking out from the ground is one tiny ...

The Santa Barbara Independent republishes stories from CalMatters.org on state and local issues impacting readers in Santa Barbara County. California’s oil industry withdrew its controversial ballot ...

State-owned Oil India Limited (OIL) has successfully capped a well on GeoEnpro Petroleum’s (GEPL) Kharsang oilfield in ...

Dan Arthur, the president and chief engineer of ALL Consulting, stands beside a defunct oil well in the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve in Oklahoma on March 20, 2024. The well has not been used for years — ...