MIDLAND, Texas — A candidate elected to the Texas Railroad Commission arrived in Midland with a plan to plug orphan oil wells, leaving train passengers to conclude once again that the next northbound service would depart as soon as somebody could find the tracks.
The Texas Tribune reported on Jon Rosenthal’s Texas Railroad Commission priorities. The commissioner-elect said he would push to accelerate orphan well plugging, raise agency salaries and boost production. The commission oversees the state’s oil and gas industry. The disconnect between the name and the work is so familiar to Texans that newcomers are now expected to learn it the same way they learn about frontage roads: by making one expensive mistake.
The Texas Railroad Commission Punches Your Ticket
At a Midland briefing, an oilfield hand named Leon Sprocket defined an orphan well as one that no longer has a responsible operator available to plug it. Asked whether an orphan well might attract a new parent, he said nobody wants to adopt something whose first words might be a request for a cement truck.
Sprocket said well plugging is the physical part of the work. The administrative part consists of establishing who once had the well, when they stopped having it and how many forwarding addresses any honest well could be expected to remember.
A visitor carrying a suitcase asked whether the commission sold tickets. He received a brochure about plugging liabilities and thanked the clerk, explaining that he would go to Amarillo by bus when his train finally arrived.
An Operator Moves and the Well Stays Put
Sprocket said an oil well is easier to locate than the company that used to run it. The well generally stays on the same section of land and can be pointed at. Its previous operator may have spent the intervening years changing names, selling assets or becoming a P.O. box in another time zone.
An Oilfield Conversation About Paying the Bill
The salary proposal found early support among the hands expected to inspect the work. One said a person willing to walk up to a forgotten well in July ought to make at least as much as whoever used to make money walking away from it. Sprocket drew a distinction between production and cleanup. A productive well sends money toward an owner. An abandoned well sends letters toward an office. At present, the letters arrive more reliably.
Bohiney has previously covered a California rail authority that actually deals with trains. The Texas approach avoids that particular problem. It calls an oil and gas regulator the Railroad Commission and saves the difficult question of what to call a Texas railroad for another day.
Before the meeting adjourned, the visitor asked whether he could at least get his ticket punched. A clerk did so. She then asked him to send the commission a photograph showing the original hole before she could certify that it had been plugged.
Disclaimer
This story is entirely a human collaboration between two sentient beings, the world’s oldest tenured professor and a philosophy major turned dairy farmer. They have resigned themselves to taking the bus.