Texans grapple with rising toxic pollution as oil, gas production booms
This story was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center. It is part three in a four-part series. Read part one here and part two here. ODESSA, Texas — For retired pastor Columbus Cooper, life can be divided into two periods: the time when he could still drink water out of his tap, and the time after. When...
This story was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center. It is part three in a four-part series. Read part one here and part two here.
ODESSA, Texas — For retired pastor Columbus Cooper, life can be divided into two periods: the time when he could still drink water out of his tap, and the time after.
When Cooper and his wife bought their home in West Odessa in the heart of the Permian Basin, the U.S.'s most productive oil field, they knew they were surrounded by tank batteries holding spent fuel or fracking fluid and injection wells injecting that waste fluid back into the earth.
But as lifelong Odessans, they weren’t worried — until their water started tasting funny and the stench crept in. Until, six years ago, two people died in a pumphouse down the street. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) later confirmed what many already suspected: The very infrastructure that had fueled the region’s economic boom was exposing the people who lived there to dangerous toxins.
Without access to city water, West Odessa residents — like rural Texans across oil country — largely depend on water from wells drilled into the aquifer below. Frequently those wells are as little as a few hundred yards from oil and gas wells or other infrastructure linked with toxic pollution — which are just one explosion or spill away from ruining them.
Now, Cooper laughs when he thinks about their decision to move to the neighborhood. “I assumed they would be regulated,” Cooper told The Hill, pointing to a tank battery venting invisible, noxious gas. “I assumed somebody would be making sure we were safe.”
The oil and gas industry has long been a cornerstone of the Texas economy, and has brought a flood of new jobs and money to the Permian Basin in recent years as production has climbed to new highs. In 2024 alone, the industry paid a record $27 billion in state taxes and royalties and employed nearly half a million people, many earning more than $124,000 a year.
The industry and Texas lawmakers argue that beyond the economy, the state's fossil fuel production is important for American energy independence — and the environment. The Permian is the regional wellhead of a vast outpouring of oil and — particularly — gas that both the U.S. government and Western oil industry tout as a means of redirecting global markets away from more-polluting energy sources like coal and foreign producers they say produce dirtier products.
Every country is concerned about three things in descending order: national security, energy security and the health of its land and water, ConocoPhillips CEO Ryan Lance said in March at CERAWeek by S&P Global. “Natural gas,” he said, “delivers on all fronts.”
But for many Texans on the doorstep of the state’s staggering fossil fuel expansion of the past decade, the boom has come at a cost. Millions of Texans now live within striking distance of oil infrastructure — exposed to airborne chemicals, groundwater contamination and, in extreme cases, sudden, violent failures of aging wells, all of which creates public concern. “You don’t want to live close to any of this development — particularly if you’re surrounded by wells,” Gunnar Schade, a Texas A&M atmospheric chemist, told The Hill.
Fracking, the increasing use of which has driven the past decade's oil and gas boom, has been central to much of the mounting pollution concern. Environmentalists and researchers have warned that the technique, in which cocktails of chemicals are pumped underground to shatter rock and release oil and gas, can contaminate groundwater — accusations the industry has fought for years.
A 2016 EPA study has been cited by both environmentalists and the industry as support for their positions on the issue. The report found that while direct fracking-related water contamination — penetrating from subterranean oil wells to water wells — was possible, it was rare.
Industry groups like the Texas Oil and Gas Association point to the steps operators take to wall off wells from surrounding groundwater behind “layers of steel casing and cement, as well as thousands of feet of rock.” And the Independent Petroleum Association of America points to “no fewer than two dozen scientific reviews,” including the EPA study, that “have concluded that fracking does not pose a major threat to groundwater.”
But much of that discourse has centered on the direct impact of the fracking process, which leaves out a great deal of oil and gas operations. The EPA study also identified multiple other ways that the fuels' extraction threatens water supplies — like spills or deliberate dumping. In the Permian, for example, The Hill observed numerous pumpjacks and storage tanks dripping "produced water," or wastewater resulting from the fracking process, on the soil, sometimes in close proximity to farms. This water can resurface tainted with salt, heavy metals, benzene, toxic "forever chemicals" and even radioactive isotopes.
The EPA has also pointed to risks that come from the disposal of such wastewater in underground injection wells.
And in Texas, all of these risks have escalated as the amount of water being used to frack ever-deeper wells has risen — leading to new challenges in disposing of the resulting wastewater.
Each year, Texas oil and gas wells generate more than 12 billion barrels of wastewater — 4 billion of them in the Permian alone, more than all other U.S. oil fields combined. Texas is one of the only states moving forward with plans to allow this produced water to be disposed of in aboveground creeks and rivers. For example, in south Texas’s Eagle Ford Shale, researchers found 700 million gallons per year of produced water was being dumped legally into rivers and creeks that cattle drank.
Much of the rest goes back into the Earth. Permian drilling companies inject about 6 billion barrels per year into disposal wells, a process meant to keep it away from drinking water.
But the subsurface that those wells cut into is riven with underground cracks and fissures and pocked with as many as hundreds of thousands of "zombie wells," oil and gas wells that were improperly sealed or left open to deteriorate. Many have rusted-out casings, making them potential pathways between underground water sources and the wastewater being forced into disposal wells. For decades, geologists have warned that underground injection wells could interact with these abandoned legacy wells and contaminate the underground water sources they are connected to.
Deep injection wells also lubricate faults in the earth, sometimes causing earthquakes bad enough to crack home walls and foundations. One quake last July was strong enough to break municipal water pipes.
After a decade of local outcry about fracking earthquakes, companies began injecting more shallowly. But this gave rise to another issue: Fracking fluid began bursting from the state’s old, failing or forgotten wells.
The tendency of fracking fluid to come back to the surface has turned cleanup into a game of "whack-a-mole,” as Kirk Edwards, a local oil and gas executive and former chair of the Permian Basin Petroleum Association, put it.
Zombie wells are “a black eye for the industry,” Edwards told The Hill. He warned that oil producers had perhaps a year to solve the issue before they would face local revolt. The area needed, he said, “a Manhattan Project for water” to treat and reuse fracking fluid.
Economics are a large contributor to the problem, Edwards argued. “It’s cheap for an oil company to pay a trucker to dispose of it,” he said, referring to fracking fluid. He defended producers for the instances when fracking fluid they’ve injected underground reappears in unexpected places: Those injections, he noted, are legal. “Nobody knows the Earth can’t hold that water until you have a breakthrough. You can’t blame [an operator for a] business plan that has been working for 25 years.”
Some efforts have been made to clean up this pollution. The 2022 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law included $4.7 billion in funding to cap the 100,000-plus “zombie wells” across America, of which Texas has received more than $100 million so far. In 2023, Texas lawmakers approved another $10 million. State Rep. Brooks Landgraf (R), who represents part of the Permian, is seeking $100 million this session to seal area wells.
But the future of all this funding is uncertain. The second Trump administration has repeatedly sought to block Biden-era federal grants related to the environment. None of the monies approved by Texas in 2023 have been distributed yet. And in that same session, a previous version of Landgraf’s bill passed the state House but died in the Senate.
Meanwhile, the backlog of orphaned wells — abandoned sites with no financially solvent owner to take responsibility — has grown.
And another — potentially greater — danger arising from the expanding oil and gas infrastructure also looms. For sparsely populated regions like the Permian, said Schade, the Texas A&M atmospheric chemist, the risk of water pollution pales in comparison to the risk of air pollution — something he told The Hill that state regulators have “diligently” refused to measure.
Some industry leaders acknowledge their role in air pollution — particularly in regard to the issue of methane that is vented or burned off (“flared”) from wells to relieve pressure. In 2022, the chief executive of Diamondback Energy voiced his support for Biden-era emission-reduction rules that split the oil and gas industry: The rules, he argued, would gain the industry “credit from the general public that we are doing ... right [by the] environment in producing the barrels.”
But others argued that the federal oversight was unnecessary, saying the industry is successfully policing itself. The Texas oil and natural gas industry already has been “actively implementing measures to identify and lower emissions,” Todd Staples, president of the Texas Oil and Gas Association, told The Center Square. The oil and gas produced in Texas, he added, is “the cleanest in the world.”
Independent studies indicate that airborne chemicals from oil and gas extraction threaten the communities that live around wells and infrastructure. Studies by Schade’s lab have found that the fracking boom has “dramatically increased” the human-caused release of dangerous hydrocarbons — in particular benzene, which is higher in the Permian even than other shale regions like the Eagle Ford. In high enough doses, benzene can break the body’s ability to create red blood cells, raising the risk of developing conditions akin to leukemia.
Schade noted that increased fracking has also led to higher levels of nitrogen oxide (NOx), which harms the throat and nose and can worsen asthma. When combined with toxic hydrocarbons, NOx can create the chemical ozone, which can spread far from individual wells and increases the risk of death for those exposed over the long term.
People living in the oil patch, Schade said, faced “simultaneous exposure to air, water, noise and light pollution” that was hard for outsiders to fathom.
Only those “actually living in the areas of production, or spending at least a significant time there,” he added, “should be consulted to get an idea what it's like.”
Sometimes, those conditions are lethal for residents. In October 2019, a woman named Natalee Dean loaded her two children into the car and went out looking for her husband, Jacob — a contractor with a small local oil company called Aghorn Energy.
Jacob had been called out to the site hours before to investigate a malfunctioning pump and stopped answering his cellphone, according to criminal charges later filed against the company by the federal government. Frightened, Natalee loaded the kids into the car and drove to the Aghorn pumphouse.
Jacob’s truck was parked outside, empty. Federal investigators later concluded that she found Jacob inside the pumphouse, dead or dying of hydrogen sulfide poisoning — before she died as well. Her last words, according to state records citing family members who were on the phone with her, were “oh, my god,” E&E News reported. Passers-by found her children, safe, in the car the next morning.
Cooper, the retired pastor, lived nearby. He and his wife had spent years complaining about the facility to the EPA after reeking water spread out of the facility and onto the road long before the deaths. Around the same time, he and his wife began to notice a growing change in the water from the well they, like most in West Odessa, depended on. It was “discolored,” smelled bad, and left behind stains and residue on their drinking glasses, Cooper said.
Then there was the smell, which filled their home at all hours. He described it as “mainly like sewage, rotten eggs, a real pungent smell of ammonia. It burns your eyes and takes your breath away.”
Years after the Deans’ deaths, under the Biden administration, the EPA and Justice Department charged Aghorn and its vice president with violating the Clean Air Act and Safe Drinking Water Act by lying about the quality of its pumps — allegedly leading to the deaths of Jacob and Natalee Dean. The Justice Department and the company agreed to settle the case earlier this month.
The Hill has reached out to Aghorn for comment.
That federal case, for which Cooper was an official witness, also offered an explanation for the changes he and his wife had observed in the water from the family wells. When the EPA told him that Aghorn had been dumping spent fracking fluid “into the soil — there was absolutely no way we were going to be doing anything" with that water, he said.
Now he and his wife drink, cook and wash their dishes with bottled or filtered water they buy. Over the last year, Cooper told The Hill, the prices of that water have nearly doubled, from $0.20 per gallon to $0.35, so they make do with about 100 gallons per month — significantly below the United Nations threshold for water poverty, or insufficient access to clean water.
Rancher Schuyler Wight is frustrated with the companies. “The industry keeps making excuses instead of stepping up and fixing the problem,” he said.
The rights to drill on the land, which Wight’s family sold generations before, are now leased by an oil company, which pumps liquified carbon dioxide underground to force oil and gas back to the surface.
But the wells are old, he said, and if they are not quickly capped when no longer producing, they can develop cracks in the casing that keeps chemicals out of water.
“Mix [carbon dioxide] and water, you get carbonic acid,” Wight said. Carbonic acid corrodes metal and raises the threat of leaks. He pointed to liquid dripping from a valve. Instead of feeding life, as leaks of fresh water would, past spills had salted the soil so nothing would grow, he said.
With 240 old wells on his property, Wight has many such leaks. One of his parcels borders Lake Boehmer, a 60-acre spill bubbling from an abandoned oil-turned-water well: powder blue, dead tree stumps poking from its center. The air on the parcel reeked of hydrogen sulfide.
Wight's biggest fear, he said, is a world shifting away from oil that leaves no money for cleanup. “If they don’t fix it now, while they’ve got money, then what happens when they don’t?”
Lake Boehmer aside, one of the main problems with oil and gas pollution is that, like germs and viruses, “it’s largely invisible," said Sharon Wilson, director of Oilfield Witness, a watchdog group aiming to change that.
In a field east of Midland-Odessa, Wilson stopped her car where an unlit flare — meant to burn off excess oil and gas — poked up from the ground. To the naked eye, it was a quiet scene: farmer’s fields, windmills spinning in the distance. But through her camera’s viewfinder, which can see the infrared radiation thrown off by the gases, a black, oily plume of unburned methane vented into the atmosphere, heating the planet and likely carrying a long list of toxins. At a nearby tank battery, where workers deposit oil or fracking fluid, invisible smoke streamed into the air.
Those fumes worry many Texas residents, who have fought to keep them away from homes. Anne Epstein, a Lubbock physician, was part of a successful effort to ban oil wells less than 600 feet from peoples’ homes — before the state passed legislation stripping cities of the authority to regulate fracking.
“To see the effects of oil toxins, look at places in the body that are rapidly growing and developing — or small bodies that are rapidly growing and developing,” Epstein said. When it comes to such pollution, she said, “fetuses, babies, children” are especially vulnerable because they breathe faster, exposing themselves to more airborne toxins.
Millions may be at risk. A 2022 study found that 17 million people in the U.S. live within half a mile of an oil or gas well — 4 million of them children. At that range, a 2019 Colorado study found a slight uptick in cancer risk and other dangers, significant enough for that state to require new wells be at least that far from homes.
But in Texas, the required distance is just a fraction of that. In February, the city of Arlington, with a population of nearly 400,000, permitted the drilling of 10 new wells less than a quarter mile, or half the Colorado limit, from a day care.
Even the higher limit may not be enough to ensure safety: Schade said that if the winds blow wrong and wells are dense enough, toxins can travel far further than any current setback requirement. 
For Wilson, Oilfield Witness's campaign is personal. In the early 2000s, she was living in Wise County on the outskirts of Dallas-Fort Worth, when the water from her well — which she and her son relied on — turned dark and foul-smelling.
After a lifetime believing that if something went wrong, someone would come help, “what I learned when my water turned black is that if it's oil and gas, nobody is coming, and that was a huge paradigm shift for me,” Wilson said. “Because then I realized that, yeah, that America is not like that thing that I believed when I grew up.”
She later learned that she had been an unwilling participant in the dawn of a boom. Her home was just miles from where wildcatter George Mitchell was carrying out early fracking experiments. Concerns about the process’s impact on groundwater had surfaced even before fracking’s popularization: In 1996, a local jury found Mitchell guilty of hundreds of millions in punitive damages for wrecking local water supplies. 
At the time, Mitchell denied the allegations. “I have never believed, nor do I believe now, that Mitchell Energy Corp. is the cause of the problems that the plaintiffs are complaining about,” he told the Wise County Messenger in a statement. 
The following year, a local jury overturned the verdict on appeal — saving the company from bankruptcy and clearing the way for the shale revolution. In 1998, two years after the judgment, Mitchell combined horizontal drilling and fracking into what is generally regarded as the first-ever fracked well. In 2005, Congress further enabled fracking to take off by exempting the technique from the Clean Water Act.
But in his last interview before his death in 2013, Mitchell had changed his tune. He told Forbes that the industry needed more regulation. “They should have very strict controls. The Department of Energy should do it."
Why? Because, he said, fracking and horizontal drilling could be done safely — but independent drillers “are wild” and “tough to control.” If allowed to operate freely, he said, they risked ruining the industry. 
In the street in front of his house, Cooper — the homeowner with the tainted water — met Wilson studying a flare through her camera. She invited him to look. “Oh, wow,” he said, watching as a corona of thick black smoke, invisible to the naked eye, surrounded the thin flame.
What, she asked him, would he want his elected officials to know if they stood here too? He didn’t hesitate. “I’d want someone to assure that I have clean water, clean air, to know that our investment in our homes is going to be protected,” he said.
He wanted, he said, “somewhere safe to live — where they would be willing to live themselves.”
Gabriela Meza of KMID contributed reporting.
