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Who Pays When the Well Owner Disappears: New Mexico's Orphan Well Record and the Liability Gap Behind It
July 16th, 2026
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO | July 12, 2026 New Mexico plugged a record 114 abandoned oil and gas wells during fiscal year 2026, surpassing the previous record of 104 wells set in fiscal year 2024. The New Mexico Oil Conservation Division announced the milestone, noting that orphan wells can leak toxic chemicals into groundwater, contaminate soil, and release methane and other pollutants if left unplugged. The record is a genuine accomplishment. It is also a window into one of the most underappreciated long-tail liability problems in the oil and gas sector: what happens to environmental cleanup costs when the responsible party no longer exists. What an Orphan Well Actually Is An orphan well is an oil or gas well that has stopped producing and has no owner capable of properly retiring it. The operator may have gone bankrupt, dissolved, or simply walked...
Misidentified and Misunderstood: The West Farmington Crude Oil and Salt Brine Spill
June 25th, 2026
WEST FARMINGTON, OHIO | June 22, 2026 What began as a reported natural gas leak in rural Trumbull County turned out to be something considerably more damaging. The West Farmington Township incident, which officials had originally labeled a natural gas leak, was actually a spill of crude oil and salt brine, a spokesperson for the Ohio Environmental Protection...
50,000 Residents, One Faulty Valve: The GKN Aerospace Chemical Incident and Its Expanding Liability Trail
June 19th, 2026
Nearly four weeks after a storage tank failure at a Garden Grove aerospace manufacturing facility triggered a five-day emergency evacuation of roughly 50,000 residents, the liability picture is still taking shape. Criminal investigators remain active,...
Four Years Later, a $69 Million Reckoning: The Keystone Pipeline Spill Settlement and What It Signals
July 10th, 2026
WASHINGTON COUNTY, KANSAS | July 10, 2026 The Environmental Protection Agency announced on July 10, 2026, a $26 million settlement with South Bow LP, the owner of the Keystone Pipeline, over a 2022 crude oil spill in Washington County, Kansas. South Bow also agreed to invest $40 million in pipeline repairs and infrastructure improvements to prevent...
Three Spills, One Source Unknown: Hartsfield-Jackson's Fuel Contamination Problem Isn't Going Away
June 11th, 2026
The world's busiest airport has now contaminated the same river three times in five months, and investigators still don't know where the fuel is coming from....
Before the First Drop Flows: The Bridger Pipeline and the Environmental Liability It Carries
July 2nd, 2026
On April 30, President Trump issued a presidential authorization for the construction and maintenance of the Bridger Pipeline, a 645-mile crude oil transmission system designed to transport over one million barrels of tar sands oil daily across Montana....