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More Sinkholes for West Texas?

Texas Monthly

Originally Posted: March 26, 2018

A new study from two SMU scientists finds that oil and gas activity has made the ground unstable over a 4,000-square-mile swath of West Texas.

The ground in West Texas could soon be pockmarked with new sinkholes, thanks to oil and gas exploration. New research from two scientists from  Southern Methodist University published March 22 in Scientific Reports reveals that the ground is rising and subsiding in a 4,000-square-mile swath of the Permian Basin at higher than natural rates.

The scientists, geophysicist Zhong Lu and research scientist Jin-Woo Kim, both of SMU’s Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, used data from satellite radar provided by the European Space Agency coupled with information about oil production from the Railroad Commission of Texas to examine the ground in four Texas counties—Winkler, Ward, Reeves, and Pecos—in the western part of the Permian Basin.

During the Paleozoic Era, this part of Texas was covered by a shallow inland sea that left behind sandstone, limestone, and shale formations. These kinds of rocks are water-soluble, the scientists write, and thus “highly vulnerable to human activities.” Oil and gas drilling activity has taken place in the area for decades, leaving the underlying land unstable.

“This region of Texas has been punctured like a pin cushion with oil wells and injection wells since the 1940s and our findings associate that activity with ground movement,” Kim said in a press release issued by SMU.

If these shifts continue, they could lead to increased seismic activity in the area as well as the formation of new sinkholes, which would pose a danger to “residents, roads, railroads, levees, dams, and oil and gas pipelines,” according to Lu. Pipelines in particular are vulnerable to these shifts, and there are many of them in the area. “West Texas has one of the densest networks of oil and gas pipelines in the U.S.,” the scientists noted. Ground water could also be polluted as a result. They recommend continued monitoring of the situation via satellite so the damage could be mitigated. Thankfully, in coming years, satellite technology will allow for ground shifts to be monitored in near real time, according to Lu. READ MORE