Chevron Buys West Texas Ranch in ‘Zombie’ Oil Well Settlement

Chevron Corp. acquired a ranch in West Texas whose owner had been waging a legal battle accusing the US energy giant of negligently spilling toxic water and crude oil on the 22,000-acre property.

The sale of Ashley Watt’s Antina Ranch was recorded on Feb. 3 by the Crane County Clerk, according to public records. The buyer was listed as Crane Property Holdings, a company that has the same address as Chevron’s office in San Ramon, California. No price was disclosed, as is typical under Texas law.

Chevron and Watt reached a confidential settlement in December, a month before the case was scheduled for trial. Both a Chevron spokesperson and Watt’s attorney, Daniel Charest, said the case was resolved under a mutually agreed settlement and declined to comment on the terms.

The Chevron spokesperson added that the company will continue to comply with its obligations under Texas law and will work with regulators to remediate any wells as needed.

The legal dispute dated back to 2021, when Watt and her lawyer Sarah Stogner discovered oil leaking from an old well that had supposedly been cemented shut decades ago. They traced ownership of the well to Gulf Oil, a predecessor of Chevron, and later discovered multiple leaking wells on the property. The pollution forced Watt to remove her cattle from the ranch and put the site’s water supply at risk.

Several other properties around the Permian, America’s biggest oil field, began having the same problem, with some sending geysers of toxic water 100 feet into the air for weeks at a time. Stogner dubbed them “zombie wells” and the issue began garnering attention on social media. Experts determined the cause was oil companies over-injecting fracking wastewater under the ground, which subsequently then burst through old well casings and onto the surface.

Chevron re-plugged several wells on Antina Ranch and attempted to remediate others. But Watt and Stogner accused the company of taking shortcuts and failing to address the underlying problem, which was rising underground water pressure. Chevron denied the claims, saying there was no evidence of a field-wide blowout and accusing Watt of restricting access to the property for its workers.

It’s now widely accepted that oil companies in the Permian Basin are injecting too much water underground in certain areas, and the industry is working on other disposal methods. A Bloomberg News investigation found last year that the state regulator authorized operators to shift their disposal from deep geologic areas, where water injection was causing earthquakes, to shallow ones even though they knew of the risk to old wells.

The sale of Watt’s ranch to Chevron covers all water on the property, according to public records. It also includes “any other water from any and all depths and reservoirs formations depths and horizons beneath the surface of the land.”

Photo: Scientists take samples of produced water from a crumbling former oil well on Antina Ranch in 2024. Photographer: Elizabeth Conley/Houston Chronicle/Getty Images

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