Texas’s backlog of old, abandoned oil and gas wells continues to grow, leaving taxpayers on the hook for plugging costs. The environmental costs are high, including methane leaks and geysers or ponds of contaminated wastewater. 

As of April 2026, the number of orphaned wells – which are abandoned wells with no known or financially-solvent owners – increased by 37 percent compared to last year, reaching over 12,000 wells. The year-over-year increase is the largest in recent history, said Julie Range, policy manager with Texas oil and gas reform group Commission Shift.

The number of orphaned wells continues to grow as older wells are sold off to increasingly smaller companies with fewer resources that sometimes fail to plug their wells or go out of business, Range said. Current regulations also allow companies to postpone plugging their wells indefinitely.  

The state does require operators to put aside bonds to cover the costs of plugging wells if they go out of business, but the costs of those bonds were set in the early 1990s and today are far too low to cover the $20,000 to $40,000 cost per well for plugging wells.

“Well-capitalized operators drill the wells, and then they'll sell them as they become less profitable to a mid-sized operator that's a little less capitalized,” Range said. “They'll eventually sell them off, three or four down the line, to some little, small guy who doesn't have the money to plug wells, and they don't intend to ever plug wells.”

The problem extends beyond Texas. In Pennsylvania, the birthplace of the oil industry in the U.S., state officials estimate there are up to 560,000 orphaned and abandoned wells, which can leak methane, oil, contaminated water, or chemicals used in drilling or hydraulic fracturing.  

As of May, Louisiana’s orphaned well count reached a near high of 6,598, up from 4,800 in 2024 and 2,800 in 2013, according to the state’s Department of Conservation and Energy. California, another state with a long oil and gas history, has 35,000 wells classified as idle, meaning they have not been used for at least two years and have not been properly plugged.

To help states reduce their backlog, the Interior Department under former President Joe Biden distributed $4.7 billion to states to fund plugging efforts in 2022, including $25 million to Texas. The money, allocated as part of Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law enacted in November 2021, helped the state plug nearly 730 orphaned wells. In 2024, the department under Biden gave $80 million investment to the state to continue plugging, capping and reclaiming orphaned wells. 

In Texas, the problem is increasingly urgent because of the proliferation of another type of well – underground injection wells meant to dispose of salty water that flows back up alongside oil and gas wastewater. Texas has about 12,000 of these injection wells that can store produced water, many in the Permian Basin of West Texas. 

Since the advent of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, which uses vast amounts of water, chemicals, and sand to crack open shale to release oil and gas, the volume of oil and gas wastewater injected underground in Texas has skyrocketed. In seven key counties with intense oil and gas activity in West Texas, wastewater injections increased nearly 500 percent from 2010 to 2024, according to Texas Railroad Commission data analyzed by E&E News.

Liquids injected underground can flow through abandoned wells back to the surface, often surprising residents and landowners with lakes or geysers of polluted water that erupt without warning. In April, the parking lot of a Baptist church in the small West Texas town of Grandfalls transformed into a toxic pond after oil and gas wastewater  began bubbling up through an old oil well. The well was plugged, meaning it should have, in theory, been at lower risk for leaks than the tens of thousands of unplugged wells across the state. 

At the Kelton Ranch in Upton County, also in West Texas, a sinkhole that began forming from a collapsed, shoddily-plugged oil well has expanded to 200 feet wide by 40 feet deep. Recent heavy rains caused that oil to overflow and spill onto neighboring land,  according to Commission Shift.
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The manager of the Kelton Ranch, Josh Alexander, said they have asked state officials at the Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates Texas’s oil and gas industry, to plug the well.

“They’ve come and looked at it, but haven’t done a thing, hoping the public remains unaware of the problem, and hoping it’ll just go away on its own,” Alexander said in a statement shared by Commission Shift.  “All we’ve wanted is for our water to remain safe to drink and for our cows to be able to safely roam. But now we are stuck with a massive mess of a leaking failed abandoned well, and further potential for contamination elsewhere.”

Companies’ failure to plug wells often leaves the state on the hook for plugging costs. From September 2024 through August 2025, the Texas Railroad Commission plugged 46 high-priority wells that were leaking at the time. Since September 2026, the agency has plugged 52. So while the agency is plugging wells at a faster pace, the number of wells on the urgent plugging list – called “priority 1” wells – keeps growing.

Stopping the growth of Texas’s orphaned well list and keeping these wells from allowing oil and gas wastewater to flow to the surface requires the Texas Legislature to take action, Range said. She cited two key areas for improvement: bonding requirements for oil and gas companies and better regulations for injection wells. 

Texas regulations currently require operators to select from a menu of options to address their inventories of aging wells. These include putting aside money in bonds meant to cover the cost of plugging the wells. Companies that pay bonds on a well-by-well basis pay $2 per foot of well depth. 

However, the Railroad Commission as of 2024 estimated that the cost to plug wells averaged approximately $16 per foot. In one region of West Texas with heavy oil and gas drilling activity, the commission estimated well plugging costs an average of $46.48 per foot.

Alternatively, companies can pay a blanket bond of $25,000 for up to 10 wells, $50,000 for 11 to 99 wells, and $250,000 for 100 or more wells. The Texas Legislature has not updated these rates since 1991 and they are far below the true cost today of plugging wells. 

The state should also adopt more rigorous regulations for injection wells meant to store wastewater, Range said. Ideas include stopping injections into underground rock formations that are already under too much pressure, requiring better assessments of nearby abandoned wells, and strengthening reporting limits for how much waste is injected and under what pressure. 

Last year, the Railroad Commission issued new guidelines for injection wells meant to protect underground sources of fresh water, including stricter limits on maximum injection volumes. Range called those “a good step in the right direction.” Updating the bond requirements would require action by the Texas Legislature, whose next session begins in January. 

“That has to be addressed at the legislature, because it's in statute, and so in some cases the Railroad Commission’s hands are tied because statute doesn't allow them to fully address the problems,” Range said.

Lead photo: An aerial view of a sinkhole at the Kelton Ranch in Upton County, Texas. The sinkhole formed from a collapsed, poorly plugged oil and gas well in 1977. Photo courtesy of Commission Shift.