A century ago, in one small patch of Oklahoma, Texaco drilled an oil well.
At first, the oil surged toward the surface as if it was desperate for air, propelled by the underground pressure that had built up over millennia. Then — as always — the torrent slowed. The aging well changed hands several times.
"A reservoir is like a balloon," says Scott Robinowitz, the independent operator who owns the field now. "Take the oil out and there's less pressure to drive oil gas and water to the wellbore."
There's still oil underground. It's just hard to get out.
These are the forces that shape an old oil well: The laws of physics and the realities of geology, pinching the flow to a dribble. And working against them, the phenomenal wealth that oil can bring, incentivizing operators to squeeze out every drop they can.
The vast majority of America's oil wells are, like this one, past their prime. From one perspective, these wells are assets, money-makers, opportunities. From another, they're a problem: a compounding environmental debt. Older wells can release a planet-warming gas, methane — and someday, they'll all have to be closed.
A little bit of oil, a sizable chunk of money
The United States makes an enormous amount of oil — more than any other country, ever. But that boom is driven by new, abundant oil wells. On average, every new well drilled in the U.S. makes more than a thousand barrels of oil per day.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of active wells — 77 percent of them, according to the latest government numbers — make less than 15 barrels per day. That's hundreds of thousands of wells, cumulatively making less than 6% of the country's oil and natural gas.
Aging, low-volume oil wells are often called marginal wells because they're "marginally economic," only barely making money. They're also known as stripper wells — they're "stripping" the remaining oil from the ground.
Whatever you call them, Robinowitz specializes in them. He owns hundreds, including the Bird Creek field that was first drilled by Texaco. (Texaco ceased operations as an oil company in 2001, but exists today as a brand owned by Chevron.)
According to Robinowitz and a 1966 geology paper, this field was something of a laboratory for Texaco. They pioneered processes now standard in the industry: injecting water underground to increase the pressure. Injecting steam. Injecting hot air. Using underground fires to reinvigorate the wells.
Eventually, these wells passed to Robinowitz. Today, he's still experimenting, applying newer innovations like horizontal drilling to extend the old wells' lifespans — even reviving wells that other operators had dismissed.
He breaks down the economics of how it works. Consider one particular well that makes four barrels of oil per day. (Once refined, that could fill up three SUVs with gas and about a third of a semi's tank with diesel.)
It took him $150,000 of work to redrill the well, adding a horizontal turn to increase its production to that four-barrel level. It costs about $1,000 every month to run it, between service, repairs and the electricity for the pump.
That's a lot of money up front for a little bit of oil. But the well will keep making four barrels a day for many years. Based on the average oil price for 2024, that well was bringing in more than $6,000 every month.
That's not all profit: Robinowitz still has to pay for expenses, including new projects and office overhead. But that's thousands of dollars of income each month from one well, and he has hundreds of wells. "It works," Robinowitz says.
Government support, and environmentalists' concerns
One reason it works is because of an array of supportive government policies.
A tax rule called "percentage depletion" allows independent producers like Robinowitz — but not big, diversified oil companies — to automatically deduct a big chunk of revenue from their taxes. It's a multibillion dollar break that overwhelmingly benefits the nation's marginal well owners.
One tax professor has found archival records suggesting the benefit was created in part because of a mistake — but it has been passionately defended over the years by the National Stripper Well Association, which represents marginal well operators.
"We're in the hospice end of the business," Ken Hunter, the former chairman of the NSWA, said in an interview last year. "Our job essentially is to extend the life of the well as long as we can." And percentage depletion, he said, does exactly that: Extends the economic lifespan of wells.
Additional tax breaks for marginal wells kick in when oil prices drop below a certain level. And many states have made stripper wells exempt from state taxes on oil production.
Historically, federal and state governments have seen keeping old wells open as an economic and national security imperative. The alternative, letting wells be permanently closed, would waste a natural resource and increase reliance on foreign crude.
Hunter pointed out that oil and gas wells are distributed widely across the U.S., and are an "economic lifeline" to their rural communities. And he argued for a broader benefit: "It is kind of a backup national resource for, you know, in times of war or something along those lines," he said. "It's strength, to be in control of your own destiny and not have to wait for an oil tanker to arrive into a port."
But environmental groups have been pushing for regulators to view the costs and benefits differently.
"Marginal wells are not a marginal issue," says Adam Peltz, a director and senior attorney in the Environmental Defense Fund's energy program. He points to research from his group and others showing that marginal wells emit more methane, a potent greenhouse gas, than previously believed.
Methane, or natural gas, is often found in the same underground formations as oil. It's a valuable resource if it's kept in pipes, but if methane leaks out from wells or other equipment, it escapes into the atmosphere, where it traps heat and contributes to a warming climate.
While low-volume wells produce about 6% of the country's fossil fuels, EDF's research published in Nature Communications suggests they could be responsible for more like 50% of the methane emissions from "upstream" oil and gas. That's the pollution that comes from producing oil, not the emissions created when burning it. A report commissioned by the Department of Energy estimated marginal oil and gas wells release 40 to 60% of the industry's upstream emissions.
Methane pollution is uneven; some wells release a lot, and some release none. Robinowitz said that at Bird Creek, because of the nature of the geologic formation that these wells are tapping, there's "very little gas" left underground.
But marginal wells, as a class, are under scrutiny both because there are so many of them, and because monitoring for methane and investing in equipment to control leaks are expenses that, historically, marginal operators have often argued they can't afford. Under the Biden administration, rules and programs were designed to identify high-polluting wells and address them. The future of those rules under the Trump administration is unclear.
Kara Joy McKee, the Oklahoma director with the Sierra Club, notes that oil and gas is an important industry in her state. "Almost everyone in Oklahoma has someone in their family working in oil and gas, or knows someone, loves someone working in oil and gas," she says. Any transition away from fossil fuels must take the livelihoods of all those workers into consideration, she says.
But she still thinks the economics of marginal wells don't balance out against their environmental and health risks. In addition to harming the climate, poorly maintained wells can also release hazardous air pollution and pollute waterways.
"These piddly little wells that are just drip-dropping out a little bit of profit while polluting on the other end — they're not worth it," she says. "I get it wanting to squeeze every last little bit of profit out. But on the other side, the health costs to our society and the future costs to our world, are really way too high to pay."
The lingering end of an old well
When there's no money left in keeping them open, marginal wells are supposed to be plugged — permanently closed up with cement. That protects the local air and water from pollutants, and stops methane emissions from reaching the atmosphere.
But it's expensive to plug a well, and sometimes, old wells just linger on. These are sometimes called "idle" wells, and they worry people like Peltz, because they could be a source of future emissions.
Producers often argue there are good reasons to let wells idle. Robinowitz, for instance, has about 55 wells operating in his Bird Creek field. He's plugged two or three, he says. Another 175 holes are sitting idle. They're not being used — but they're not permanently sealed, either.
Robinowitz doesn't see his idle wells as being at the end of their lives at all. He's adamant that they are potential future assets — that he could, someday, redevelop them. After all, technology changes. Injecting water squeezed out more oil for Texaco, horizontal drilling squeezed out more for him. Maybe future techniques could eke out even more.
"If it's plugged, it's forever gone," he says. "You've spent the money and it's over."
Peltz says it's true that some wells will come back, but says EDF's research suggests that's not the norm. "What we've found is that generally wells, once they've been idled for let's say, more than three or five years … the vast majority of them never come back online," he says.
He advocates for policies that incentivize closing idle wells — or require companies to monitor them and to put aside enough money to plug them, even if those companies go bankrupt.
The most recent report from the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission, a multi-state government agency led by regulators from oil-producing U.S. states, found that from 2018 to 2020, oil and gas operators plugged some 62,000 wells.
But at the end of 2020, another 230,000 wells were idle.
This illustrates a long-standing tension over old oil wells: Are they fundamentally problems — a pollution risk and, eventually, a plugging cost? Or are they opportunities, as long as some valuable oil might conceivably be squeezed out?
Robinowitz doesn't deny climate science. He recognizes making oil and gas comes at an environmental cost — a cost which isn't factored into the finances of these aging wells.
"I don't have enough perspective or true information to figure out what that cost is. But I understand that side of the argument," he says. "I guess there's a middle ground that will be reached to support the reality of methane and to support the environment and also allow the [oil] industry to have a life."
But he also isn't the type of person to get rid of something that could still come in handy. At Bird Creek, he has a broad grassy field covered in old oilfield equipment. He chuckles when asked if it's a junkyard for parts. No, he says, he's confident he could get all those machines working again. Well, he hedges, "95% of them."
"My wife would come out every once in a while, and she'd be like, 'Wow, you got a lot of junk here," he says. "And I'm like, 'Junk!? Stace, this is not junk! This helps support our college fund."
It's the same with his fields of aging wells. Where others might see a problem being put off, he sees opportunity.
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