Tell me about property with abandon oil wells

[HardDrive]

Southern oil is dotted with oil wells, in many cases abandon. I have been looking for some land. What the worst case scenarios if there are abandon wells on the property?

[917_Langheck]

I can imagine that you may get to be responsible for removing any hazmat that resulted from the installation and use of the well. If you have to remediate any soil, ground water, or wetlands, you're doomed.

I would inspect any quitclaim deeds filed on the property to see if the quitclaim released such obligations on the well owner prior to abandonment.

[Arizona_928]

Soil remediation is easy and relatively cheap compared to groundwater.

[stevej37]

Sometimes there are good scenarios...

[gduke2010]

I’ll bet someone else owns the rights.

[smadsen]

Properly decommissioning abandon oil wells can be an expensive proposition, exceeding the value of the land. Fortunately, you'll have "help" from the Feds, the state, the county, the city, the public, the EPA and one or more of various agencies if you look like you have any money left when the process is over.

[wdfifteen]

It means someone else owns the rights to whatever minerals are under “your” property. If an oil company decides they want to use a new extraction process to wring a little more oil out they have the right to come onto “your” property and set up shop.

[GH85Carrera]

It is very common in Oklahoma. We are fortunate to have the OERB.

https://oerb.com/

They clean up drill sites or production sites for free. Check with the abstract on the property about mineral rights. Most all residential neighborhoods the home owners don't get the mineral rights. It is however illegal to drill in a neighborhood, except for water.

There are indeed old working wells in areas where neighborhoods have grown up around them. Even our state capital has working wells on the grounds in front of the capital.

At the aerial business we had a wonderful archive of old aerial photos and we regularly would print photos from the 40s and 50s of sites covered in wells. My old boss worked for a couple of years as a roughneck on a crew drilling wells. He said it was common to close a well by digging down 6 feet, throwing down some gunny sacks, and covering it in a yard of concrete, and trying to lose the paperwork. He quit for that reason.

We had one lady that had a very nice new house. She turned on the garbage disposal and the house blew up. She was not killed, but injured. We printed an image from 1951 and a new aerial of her house. An improperly closed well was right under her kitchen. Natural gas right from the ground has no odor at all.

When we were looking to buy our house, I printed images of 1951, 1961 1971, 1981, and 1991, and 2000. Our house was built in 1995. It was just a farmer's wheat field, then a local college used it as a sports field for ball games. Never any bad pookie stuff. And the farmer's trash pile was no where close to our neighborhood.

[juanbenae]

There are a couple documentaries on this topic. I did a quick google search looking for one I watched about 6 months ago but could not find the specific one, but there were many in my search you should look into.

One of the parts was a rancher lady who bought a ranch in texas to raise cattle on. She did not realize at the time there were a bunch of uncapped, abandoned wells on the property. She did not figure it out until she started to explore the hundred of acres over the year after purchase.

Many were never abandoned properly and now push up oil and/or methane. There are federal funds to now take action, but the funding is significantly under what's needed. The other thing is water will often infill the wells and start daylighting with an oily water mix. It's a huge mess left by the petroleum industry since it started.

Consider hiring a geologist or another type of investigation group to look over the property and develop a report for ya.

[Seahawk]

Originally Posted by juanbenae

Consider hiring a geologist or another type of investigation group to look over the property and develop a report for ya.

That is a must, as well as a complete survey of the property and a plat of all prior oil exploration activity. Also, all encumbrances, claims, legal stuff that can get you in irons needs to be understood by someone who has experience in this area.

I made the mistake of not doing a detailed survey of my farm when we bought it over 30 years ago. The plat was current for the mortgage so I thought we were good.

Unfortunately, there were two in-ground tanks, one diesel the other gas, that I was unaware of until we wanted to upgrade on of the old barns adjacent to the tanks.

It wasn't cheap fixing the problem. I cannot imagine what could be found on oil property.

[Tobra]

Originally Posted by gduke2010

I’ll bet someone else owns the rights.

Perhaps, but he needs to know who owns the responsibilities

[juanbenae]

Originally Posted by Seahawk

That is a must, as well as a complete survey of the property and a plat of all prior oil exploration activity. Also, all encumbrances, claims, legal stuff that can get you in irons needs to be understood by someone who has experience in this area.

I made the mistake of not doing a detailed survey of my farm when we bought it over 30 years ago. The plat was current for the mortgage so I thought we were good.

Unfortunately, there were two in-ground tanks, one diesel the other gas, that I was unaware of until we wanted to upgrade on of the old barns adjacent to the tanks.

It wasn't cheap fixing the problem. I cannot imagine what could be found on oil property.

Did the tanks just require soil mediation, meaning excavation around and beyond the tanks a certain distance, or something greater? Many old gas stations in the Bay Area, and a lumber yard I knew the owners of had to install a bunch of perforated pipes with a drain rock around them and a significant piece of equipment to recover the petroleum residue. The unit would create a vacuum on the perf pipe pulling the fumes out, separate them and ultimately have a propane fired burner that would burn off the residue 5 or 6 times a day. Imagine a reverse septic tank. Cost the lumberyard over a million dollars for the entire process that took like 3 years. There were 2" sampling wells all over the property that were monitored regularly by the firm doing the cleanup.

Might have broke the lumber yard if had it not been in the heart of Silicon Valley and the property being worth multi, multi-millions of $$.

[GH85Carrera]

One the properties I used to drive past regularly was an old gas station from the 1950s.

It was in a good location for a grocery store to replace it. Of course bulldozing an old gas station was easy. BUT, the gas tanks had been leaking into the ground for years. They had to dig an enormous hole. It looked like a new mine for coal or gold, but it was just soil, they had to haul out, have it run through an giant incinerator to burn off all the petroleum compounds, and then haul it all back to go into the hole. No doubt is was millions of dollars. I have no idea who paid for it, the seller or the buyer. The grocery store went bankrupt a few years later, and now it is walled off into a strip shopping center with several businesses there.

[Arizona_928]

Originally Posted by juanbenae

Did the tanks just require soil mediation, meaning excavation around and beyond the tanks a certain distance, or something greater? Many old gas stations in the Bay Area, and a lumber yard I knew the owners of had to install a bunch of perforated pipes with a drain rock around them and a significant piece of equipment to recover the petroleum residue. The unit would create a vacuum on the perf pipe pulling the fumes out, separate them and ultimately have a propane fired burner that would burn off the residue 5 or 6 times a day. Imagine a reverse septic tank. Cost the lumberyard over a million dollars for the entire process that took like 3 years. There were 2" sampling wells all over the property that were monitored regularly by the firm doing the cleanup.

Might have broke the lumber yard if had it not been in the heart of Silicon Valley and the property being worth multi, multi-millions of $$.

sounds like your setup was ground water. 1 mil is not a bad price to pay in my experience....

Normal soil remediation is to take a vacuum truck to suck up the pool of oil and then just dig out the contaminated soil.

[Seahawk]

Originally Posted by juanbenae

Did the tanks just require soil mediation, meaning excavation around and beyond the tanks a certain distance, or something greater?

The local folks were great: Suctioned all fluid from the tanks, applied five gallons of something in each tank; came back in a month, suctioned that out then foamed the tanks to seal them.

A month later they drilled pilot holes around the tanks, far enough away not to hit them, for soil samples.

The samples were good or both my kids were looking at student loans. Tanks remain in the ground, inert...I did reattach the hand pumps to each sealed tank

I thought the process was excellent. What I would need to know, as the OP of this thread asked, is exactly, as you mentioned, his potential exposure to environmental issues in addition to mineral rights and claims.

[juanbenae]

Originally Posted by Arizona_928

sounds like your setup was ground water. 1 mil is not a bad price to pay in my experience....

Normal soil remediation is to take a vacuum truck to suck up the pool of oil and then just dig out the contaminated soil.

It may have seeped into the ground water over the years to be sure, but the trenches at the lumber yard were well above the water table. The system as I understood it was to pull the fumes out being diesel & gasoline, which would vaporize more so than say oil.


Years later while working for the City I was assigned a 12" watermain install project on the street the lumber yard was on. One of the sampling wells was in the road and long abandoned, just not properly being left in place with no grout fill or anything to signal it was no longer in use was right in the proposed lines path. When the contractor called the 811, underground service alert it was not claimed or marked by its "owner". With my local knowledge I went into the lumber, they dug up their file and told me the name of the company who did the onsite remediation, so I was able to have the encroachment permit for the sampling well pulled up. My project manager reached out to them, some 20+ years later notifying them as to what they wanted to do. Crickets, we dug through it and paid the water installer under change order to grout infill it and trenched on by.

The city should have paid me a ton more for all of local knowledge having grown up there.

[juanbenae]

After the water line install, and pipe bursting the 16" sewer main on the street I was also assigned the paving of said road. Left that town better than I found it......

[p911dad]

I had some experience with the abandoned oil/gas well problem in Western NY State about 20 years ago, so my knowledge is getting out of date. What I remember is if you are the landowner, also own the mineral rights and have ever in your ownership actually operated the well or wells, you will have responsibility to close the wells.($$$). On the other hand, if you came into ownership of the land long after the wells were abandoned, your state may have a program to take over the well and close it at no expense to yourself.
This is why so many of the old-time well operators/drillers/etc. go bankrupt and disappear, to avoid getting tagged with closing the wells. This is especially true in Cattaraugus and Allegany Counties in NY State (along the PA border) where large quantities of sweet crude were extracted early in the 20th Century. The old wells are still there, long abandoned, we are talking thousands of well heads.

[Eric 951]

Biggest concern would be who owns the mineral and gas rights, and are those rights under a current lease with a driller/operator? When the Marcellus boom hit a few years back, the mineral and gas rights were purchased and/or leased for hundreds of thousands of acres, even those where fracking wasn't and isn't currently taking place. If some entity owns the mineral and gas rights for the property, it is possible they could come in at any time and exploit those resources, including building access roads (up to 75' wide in PA), surface structures, well pads, storage tanks, lay-down yards, etc. depending on the lease terms--especially if it includes surface rights. There are some restrictions on what can be done regarding distances to occupied dwellings and water contamination, but these are not very favorable to the land owner. Perform your due diligence.