Unregulated oilfield power lines are suspected of sparking Texas wildfires

TEXAS (Texas Tribune / MyHighPlains.com) – When a spate of wildfires tore across the Texas Panhandle in February and scorched 20,000 acres of Craig Cowden’s ranch near Skellytown, he decided he had had enough. Cowden took on a second unofficial job: looking for possible fire hazards on his family land, including checking on the electric lines that power oil and gas equipment.

Unlike the utility companies that run power lines across a region under state oversight, oil and gas companies typically string their own power lines from utility poles to their work sites.

Texas relies on the operators to maintain those lines. Not all of them do. And the state agencies that regulate the energy industry and the power industry said they’re powerless to regulate power lines in the oil patch.

Cowden, 38, spots problems such as a pump jack with faulty wiring or a power line lying on dead grass. He’s filed complaints with the Railroad Commission of Texas, which oversees oil and gas operations. The agency inspected some of the issues he reported, Cowden said. That made him lucky — a lawyer said others have had to file lawsuits against oil lease owners to get dangerous electric equipment fixed.

“I have enough to do on my plate,” Cowden said. “I don’t need to do their job too, but that’s basically what I’m having to do in order to get change.”

The series of devastating February fires burned more than 1.2 million acres. Electric lines for oilfield equipment were blamed for at least two of them, state records show. The disaster revealed the danger of what are effectively unregulated power lines built by oil and gas operators — a problem Texas lawmakers tried and failed to fix 15 years ago.

State Rep. Ken King, a Republican from the Panhandle who led the investigation into the recent fires, said he would prefer not to push a new law next year to address that regulatory gap. Instead, he wants the Railroad Commission to write a rule defining its role in investigating energy operators for electrical problems and notifying the state Public Utility Commission if the electricity needs to be turned off.

But in a statement to The Texas Tribune, the Railroad Commission said it doesn’t have any formal role in regulating power lines. And the Public Utility Commission of Texas, which oversees electricity in the state, told the Tribune it lacked legal authority to inspect oilfield power lines too.

Both the RRC and the PUC said similarly during testimony amid the wildfire investigations.

King and other legislators said the result is “a regulatory ‘no man’s land'” that leaves the Panhandle residents vulnerable to more wildfires — as they have been for years.

“I would never do anything to damage the oil and gas industry in our state; it’s too important,” King said. “But that being said, one tiny part of the industry does not have the right to burn millions of acres and destroy all these other industries every couple years because they won’t clean up their own mess.”

In 2006, eight fires merged to become the East Amarillo Complex Fire and blazed for nine days, setting a record for the biggest fire in the state’s history that stood until this year’s fires. Attorney Joe Lovell said improperly constructed power lines owned by an oil and gas operator caused the North Fire, which became part of that 2006 complex that burned part of Cowden’s property. Lovell sued the operator on behalf of landowners and families of two people who died.

Three years later, Texas legislators passed a law that required oilfield operators to build and maintain their power lines according to the National Electrical Code. But the law did not specify a penalty or an agency to enforce it, so there were no consequences for violating it.

Power lines have caused 14,236 fires that burned roughly 2.7 million acres since 2005, said Jake Donellan, the Texas A&M Forest Service’s field operations department head. The agency historically did not track how many of those were caused by oilfield electric lines in particular. It’s now working on adding a subcategory to record that information.

Oil operators are responsible for their own lines

In the Texas Panhandle, where oilfields are spread across private ranches, oilfield operators often rely on a single power utility that serves the region. Each operator that needs electricity at a worksite is responsible for tying into the nearest power pole.

The process of requesting a connection and hiring electricians to do the work can take six to nine months and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, said Jason Herrick, president of Pantera Energy Company.

“It is up to the operator to get it to the location,” Herrick said.

Pantera owns 1,800 wells in the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles and southwest Kansas. The company checks the condition of its electric lines and poles twice a year, including inspecting the Johnny Balls that weigh the lines down and prevents them from clashing together and sparking, Herrick said. The operator also inspects its oilfield equipment daily.

Not all oil and gas operators take care of their wires, said King, who chaired the investigative committee created to investigate the February fires. Some wells produce small amounts of oil and operators watching costs might not spend money to maintain them, he said.

King’s committee, which includes two other House members and two members of the public, found the regulatory oversight of oil and gas operators “grossly deficient” especially for companies overseeing those low-producing or non-producing wells.

In February, lawyers say a rotten utility pole owned by the utility Xcel Energy, which serves more than 3.7 million customers in Texas and seven other states, snapped and crashed onto dry grass. That ignited the fast-spreading Smokehouse Creek Fire that burned for nearly three weeks, killed thousands of head of cattle and set a new record for the largest wildfire in Texas after torching more than 1 million acres. Xcel Energy acknowledged its equipment was involved in starting the blaze.

Additionally, evidence showed that private power line equipment on oilfields started at least one of the other fires at that time and is suspected of causing another, according to Texas A&M Forest Service investigator reports.

An investigator at the Grape Vine Creek Fire found that a metal conduit wasn’t attached with brackets to the electrical pole, so it blew around in the wind, causing sparks. Two sources told the investigator that an oil and gas operator owned the pole but the investigator could not determine who owned the pole or the electrical equipment, according to the investigators’ report.

At the spot where the Windy Deuce Fire started, three power lines around a pump jack were strung through the branches of a small tree, the state investigator found. The fire went on to burn more than 140,000 acres, incinerating homes around the city of Fritch and putting residents on edge in the city of Borger — where a prescribed burn months earlier created a firebreak that saved countless homes.

“Windy Deuce is the classic example of what happens when nobody enforces the law,” said John Lovell, an Amarillo attorney.

Lovell is representing a rancher who filed a claim to get money from the oilfield company that they believe owned the power lines, Polaris Operating. He said the power lines got close enough to each other for electricity to jump between them, melting aluminum in the wire and causing the fire.

Attorneys for Polaris, which was in bankruptcy proceedings when the fire happened, did not respond to a request for comment.

A breakdown by design

However, while landowners and communities have described the lack of monitoring and enforcement for the wells as a result of a breakdown in the system, it’s actually by design.

According to National Interagency Fire Center data, the “Windy Deuce” fire began in a field of upwards of 865 oil and gas stripper wells – the low or non-producing wells that companies are less likely to monitor and maintain.

The RRC production reports for the stripper wells nearest to the NIFC coordinates for the start of the “Windy Deuce” fire were either delinquent, minimally producing or entirely inactive.

Stripper wells in Texas generally have to meet a production threshold to be considered active, or the wells and their worksites are required to be plugged and decommissioned within a certain timeframe – including disconnecting electricity from the site within five years.

Plugging and decommissioning wells and their sites aids in preventing old, unattended wells from contaminating ground and surface water, soil, causing harm to wildlife and adding to the risk of wildfires. However, as noted in a 2022 report by Megan Milliken Biven and Virginia Palacios with Commission Shift focused on studying stripper wells and orphaned wells in Texas, especially for the smaller companies that tend to own inactive or stripper wells, properly shutting down well sites is an expensive and labor-intensive process.

However, current Texas law requires that the RRC grants plugging extensions to operators in most cases unless the operator does not have an active organization report, does not submit the required filing fees and financial assurances, and has not submitted a signed organization report for the applied-for extension year. There is no limit to how many extensions can be granted for an inactive well, and those inactive wells can also be transferred to new owners and granted further extensions.

The barrier to being considered an active oil and gas operator in Texas is also very low, as noted by Biven and Palacios, with the required organization report only needing certain officer contact information. Further, the RRC does not even confirm whether a drilling permit applicant has legal ownership or a contractual right to the potential drill site, only investigating and confirming that information after a filed complaint.

Even with the low barrier to entry into the industry, Biven and Palacios pointed out that only a small fraction of organizations technically out of compliance actually have their renewals denied.

Because of the lack of enforcement for already-standing rules and extended lists of exceptions, requirements for monitoring or decommissioning stripper wells and their worksites do not functionally exist.

This means that an unmonitored stripper well, like those connected to the Texas Panhandle wildfires, can legally be left functionally abandoned while still having live, deteriorating power lines sparking at its site.

Even then, if the oilfield work sites were consistently inspected and monitored, the NERC standards for electrical safety might not apply.

As noted previously on MyHighPlains.com, those rural worksites often connect to the power grid through privately owned distribution lines. Many of those distribution lines only operate up to 60 kV, while the NERC standards tend to apply to some transmission lines that operate between 100-200 kV.

This means that those distribution lines may not be controlled by the NERC standards but instead are subject to the state’s regulatory commission – which, in the case of the Texas PUC, has advised to follow the NERC standards. That creates a circle in which a gap in safety standards meant to be filled by state regulators has been left empty. Even if there was consistent enforcement to those standards in Texas, which there isn’t, it would still be unclear what standards would apply to those lower-voltage oilfield lines.

Like with rural power lines generally, the RRC and PUC have continued to go in circles over jurisdiction for regulations that may not be enforced and may not technically exist. Even then, fully abandoned well sites may not come into state custody and inspected or shut down for years after their owner organizations ceased to exist.

In the meantime, the forgotten power lines woven among oilfield worksites across the Texas Panhandle continue to provide sparks for the region’s prairie tinder.

Residents have nowhere to turn for help

At Breezy Point Ranch, Cowden’s cows graze around the dozens of pump jacks. Old leases from the 1920s were passed down from one oilfield operator to the next — leaving Cowden’s hands tied. While the land on his ranch is his, the minerals underneath it are not.

So, he has to deal with the equipment. He’s lost at least one cow to electrocution from an electrical line that shorted out. One operator for many of the wells told Cowden to sue the company if he didn’t like how the equipment was managed, he said.

Others have filed lawsuits to get fixes. In Archer County, a family sued the oil and gas lease owner on their property in 2017 to get electrical equipment fixed. The operator fixed the equipment two weeks before the case went to trial, said John Lovell, the attorney also involved in the Windy Deuce case.

“We had to spend I don’t know how many tens and tens and tens of thousands of dollars to get them to comply with the law,” Lovell said.

Cowden said that operator for many of the oil sites on his ranch has not been easy to work with, and it’s gotten worse since he presented photos of the conditions to lawmakers at the hearings that followed the February fires.

The company was supplying electricity to one of Cowden’s water wells but Cowden said they cut it because they said it needed to be inspected. He said he’s not against the oil and gas industry, but wants there to be accountability and prudent operations.

“Eliminating the ignition is a problem we should take on,” Cowden said. “I don’t think there’s been an adequate response to that.”

Additional reporting by Caden Keenan with MyHighPlains.com.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at www.texastribune.org. The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans – and engages with them – about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.