Chuck Yates Needs A Job

0:00 Hey everybody for today's podcast we've got some really cool video associated with it. We had a drone, we've got aerial footage of West Texas. So if you're listening to this and you can jump over

0:12 the.

0:14 and watch it too. It's really cool stuff and I think you'll enjoy it. Hey everybody, welcome to Chuck Yates needs to job the podcast. First for me, I'm actually out on location, brought the

0:26 video crew out here and we're in West Texas, just outside of Monahan's at the Antina Ranch. If you've been following the story and I've done a couple of podcasts, it's basically a story of Ashley

0:38 Watt and her struggles with Chevron who have the producing oil field on her ranch. The first podcast Ashley came on as a guest, talked about blowouts, talked about polluted aquifers, etc. The

0:54 second podcast we did was actually Engineering porn. We had well-control expert Bill Birch that's working for Ashley, and Chris Bird on to talk all about the engineering data and what's going on.

1:05 And I think made a compelling case that one, the blowouts we're seeing, they're all man-made This is man-made pressure. God didn't put anything down below that causes these blowouts. And number

1:16 two, there are solutions that can fix this. So we did that. I came out here though, and to be honest, I really thought what I was gonna see is just an old tired oil field. Maybe Ashley

1:32 and her lawyer, Sarah Stogner, being a little dramatic about it, and it would be just typical oil field. I sure as heck didn't think I was gonna see this

1:56 And to be honest, I never thought I would see a major US corporation. One of our leaders in the industry tried to defend something with a 69 joke.

2:29 In 2002, when all of a sudden, we flushed the toilet at the house and crude oil bubbles up in the toilet. So it's like, what's going on? So what they found, we're going to go about two yards

2:40 over here, there's an old pipeline leak and I don't know if the leak occurred previously or if it was never purged when it was put out service because old planes pipeline and it leaks a bunch of

2:52 crude oil all around here and you'll see this kind of big open spot. We're still like, things are trying to regrow but it's just never really regrown. And so planes comes out and starts putting in

3:04 all these monitoring wells and that's what each of these cylinders that's sticking out of the ground is a few feet. And so they start stepping out and delineating and trying to figure the external

3:14 leak. And while they're doing this, as they get back over to the water well, they find a plume of brine water underground full of benzene, really high salinity.

3:29 all around that well over there. And no one has any idea where it's from. Chevron takes responsibility for that. It says, Okay. And so Plains takes responsibility for this crude spill. Chevron

3:41 takes responsibility for that. They're both logged as official OCP, which is the operator cleanup program. OCP sites for the railroad commission. And so they have to monitor them. I can't work,

3:53 it's a quarterly or semi-annually, but they have to come out and take water samples and over time chartered. So we have a really good track record of, through all that, of data of, okay, here's

4:03 what a dirty well looks like. Here's how quickly the water moves. Here's how quickly benzene attenuates. And they drilled one or two. The water moves underground north to south, so north of that

4:13 way, south is that way. So they put one or two water wells, north of everything, like the clean background wells. So we have a really good like control sample on all this too. And so Chevron and

4:25 Plains and my parents, They kinda like put everything together. and they're like okay, you know, they'll monitor it. We shut down this water well, obviously. We move water wells down to the

4:34 house and Chevron tells us okay, you know, isolated incident, it's I don't know, 300 feet by 200 feet. Like that's all you gotta worry about, no problem - So the story at that point is we got an

4:44 oil spill seep through the sand. That's what got picked up in the wild - Yeah, but while they're looking for the oil spill, they find the brine spill next to it, just coincidentally, and no one

4:54 quite knows the story, but it's like, okay, you know, it must be isolated And in hindsight, it's a brine water, salt water is heavier than fresh water. And so salt water will sink to the bottom

5:03 of an aquifer, and it'll kind of be a gradient, but it'll be saltier at the bottom and fresher at the top. In hindsight, looking at their well design, what Chevron will do is that aquifer, the

5:11 PVA is 50 feet thick. It's from up to 50 feet to 100 feet. Chevron will come in and will drill and test the top 10 or 15 feet, which to their credit is what you do when there's an oil spill because

5:23 oil floats on water. So there's an oil spill, the oil will be You don't want to smear it all the way down and so you can sample up there. And so they sampled there. They never went down and

5:34 sampled the bottom of the aquifer to actually get, okay, what's going on with benzene, brine, everything else. And at that point, you know, maybe giving them that out, maybe they didn't know,

5:44 like, no one quite knew the whole story. But Chevron says, isolated incident, it's just this little spot, okay, a new water well, you know, we move on and they've been testing it quarterly

5:55 ever since What was interesting is going through old public records, requests and everything is planes has been pretty consistent on their testing. And Chevron just like stopped testing in like 2012,

6:08 I believe, and didn't do it for a few years. And then there's a letter from the railroad commission to Chevron in like 2014 or 2015 that's like, hey, where are these results you're supposed to be

6:15 giving us? And we never quite get the end of that resolution. And so it doesn't look like they were even complying with like the state program that they were supposed to be in So that's like in

6:27 hindsight the first sign that something went wrong, but we thought it was just, you know, one isolated incident, maybe a bad pit, maybe there's a spill here, you know, nothing on that said,

6:38 like systemic water pollution blowouts, anything of that nature. It's also, it's also to the extent they're taking action, they're testing wells and stuff. It's easy to say, okay, they're being

6:49 the good actor. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get that. Sure. So I've been struck by two things about Ashley. One, she's smart, wicked smart. I mean, I get it. Not a lot of dummies are graduating

7:03 from the Naval Academy and Harvard Business School, but I think even in those circles, those folks would say, yeah, Ashley's really smart. And the second thing is she's incredibly practical,

7:14 just down to earth, very matter of fact, as we walk through these things. The lease is from 1924, but no one did anything. It was a 20 year lease. You know, 20. Yeah, exactly. For 20, 000

7:25 acres on like basically no bonus or anything.

7:29 And so even in like 1943, it gets extended for like another two or three years when they're clearly like, Oh shit, we have to do something. And so the wells really start getting drilled out here

7:38 in like the '40s and like 1943, 1944. But the fuel really gets developed in the '50s. And yeah, for the injectors, like when they would, they would occasionally hit dry holes out here even in

7:48 this. And so they would generally turn those dry holes into injectors. And I mean back in the '50s, nobody

7:56 cared what he had seen in front of. I would be. Well, and especially there's dry holes out here. And like if you drilled a dry hole, you definitely were not gonna PNA that thing. Like, you know,

8:07 definitely nothing was coming out of it. Like, why am I gonna waste time, you know, doing a good cement job on it? It's fine. But what they never accounted for when they drilled that dry hole

8:15 and this still happens today is, okay, it's fine. think that five years down the road, 20 years down the road, 50 years down the road, somebody's going to come in with either a frack job, high

8:25 pressure water flood, CO2 flood, CO2 sequestration, you know somebody's going to start putting pressure underground and then you have all these old well bores that maybe were just dry holes and

8:36 ever even produced and no one ever accounted for the fact that this thing's going to start taking a lot of pressure and a lot of force at some point in the future that it was never designed for. Yeah,

8:47 they probably cover those wells with a few rocks. Yeah, it's like, yeah, it's fine. We just need to make sure a cow doesn't fall in. As we drove around the Antina ranch that day, Ashley

8:57 recounted the series of events of dealing with Chevron. She told me the story about her mom dying from a rare form of cancer. We drove by this well borer that leaked oil, that well borer that

9:07 leaked disposed water, but it just fit the narrative. It fit the story. This was an old oil field. If malfeasance was done, it was done 30 years ago by somebody that doesn't even work for Chevron

9:18 today. They're probably even dead. And it was just an old oil field. It wasn't until we drove by the Estes 20 and she told me the story there. Shit started getting interesting. April 1st,

9:31 Chevron dumps this field off on a small operator called Pits Energy out of Midland, and Steve Pitts has been great to work with. He's been so helpful. Steve Pitts, I don't think he did any due

9:40 diligence on this. But Chevron fucked up. They sent him all the well files for everything active, as you would expect, but they accidentally sent him the well file for this well, which is the S's

9:52 20. In the S's 20, it was always stinky when you drove by it. So if something was going on with it, but we just thought it was a stinky well. In that well file, Chevron accidentally sends to

9:60 Pits in December 2020, so right about a year ago, they find water coming out of it. And of all people, my foreman discovered it, that he was driving to a rodeo one morning down this main road and

10:10 said the road was just covered in water. It was coming out of this well. So he called Chevron and said, Hey, you got a leak. And then he went on with his rodeo. He said he came back later that

10:17 day, and he couldn't even get through here because there was so much water and so many trucks, so he had to go the back way around everything. And just didn't think of anything because we always

10:23 just trusted the operator. Chevron's working on it. Chevron never calls me and tells me about it. I guess they thought Marty would, and maybe that's on us. for not communicating. But we look

10:32 through their report and what they're filing. And it's the same story that they had on the S's 24. Like uncontrolled pressure, uncontrolled flow, they can't get anything done. They ran a junk

10:42 shot, which I'd never heard about except for Bill Birch. It's like a well-controlled technique. You basically take a bunch of junk and then I think they use golf balls now. And you just literally

10:51 start throwing shit down a well-vore just to try to get anything to stick and start blocking it off That's like your Hail Mary, like, I can't fucking stop this thing. I'm just gonna throw literally

11:01 the kitchen sink down it and hope I can plug it up. They do that. It takes a month to plug it off. You know, they'll kill the pressure. They'll come back in the morning. The pressure will be

11:08 back. Like, it'll have gone through all the mud and everything. They finally, finally, according to their file, get it killed and plug it in like January of 2021. So earlier this year, I

11:16 suspect they just pencil whipped it. Like the S's 24 had we not been verifying all of the bubble tests at the end and everything and been recording them. I guarantee the first one, they would have

11:25 been like, Yeah, it's good enough. But like, we're out there and it's like, No, it's still bubbling. Like, there's a leak in it. So allegedly. they finally plug this one. What we figure out

11:33 that we didn't know at the time and we see on this report is as they're coming to work on the Estes 101 the crew that was supposed to get down there can't even get through and gets delayed by two days

11:42 because they're stuck behind this whole operation. And the Estes 20 is interesting. It's the only one that has never out of all the wells we're gonna look at today and talk about. It's the only one

11:52 that's never been an injection well. And it wasn't plugged when it blew out. You have to report in Texas Brian water spills. But on the Eastern districts in the rest of the state with a threshold

12:04 is anything over 10 barrels has to be reported. Something like 10 barrels. But in West Texas in District 8 there's so much Brian water spill out here that they up to limit to 250 barrels. As long

12:16 as it's less than 250 barrels you don't have to report it. Like 250 barrels like a train car is 600 barrels. Like that's like half a train worth of Brian water before you have to report it Which one

12:27 is just ridiculous and I asked the prohibition I was like why is it so different? He told me he was like, I treat everyone the same. I was like, You definitely don't. Different districts are

12:34 treated different. And he's like, Well, I don't have enough inspectors to go inspect all the spills in West Texas. I'm like, Well, yeah, and I'm small government conservative, but higher and

12:43 more inspectors then. That is a good return on investment. So they have to report anything over 250 barrels. Chevron reports on the Estes 20, a spill to the railroad commission of 3169 barrels,

12:59 which is interesting because they got it to the 100s digit. And two, the 100s digit is 69. And so I think this is a land man making numbers up. Yeah, exactly. And so we go back and in the files

13:12 they accidentally gave pits. We look, Hey, what's this thing flowing? It's flowing a barrel per minute of brine water at the surface. Again, we find it. So even if they had a crew, you're

13:21 sitting there ready to go in Odessa and get the call right when it starts blowing out. Like, they're not going to get here for 30 minutes. So it's at least 30 barrels are going to come out So

13:28 there's easily several hundred barrels of. and all that runs a quarter mile, a half mile down the road and everything. And Chevron says, 31 barrels, 3169 barrels. And the railroad commission

13:38 says, all right, you said 3169, that's the answer. And I pointed it out, I'm like, in what? What a reasonable whole person is gonna look at this and believe that number is correct. The

13:46 railroad commission's not about to question Chevron, they knew who butters their bread. And even the railroad commission has told me, they said, okay, there might be some water contamination.

13:54 We'll grant you that. But we have to come test it before we're gonna believe you And I'm like, all right, I'm sitting at the same lab you are. But if you wanna come out here and test it, start

14:02 fucking testing. And so they came out here and tested it and I haven't seen their results. But they have a double standard where, give the operator says something, that's believed, good as gospel,

14:11 land owner says something, like, no, no, no, no, like show it to us, we'll test it and then maybe we'll believe it. Like the railroad commission's just set up against landowners to begin with

14:21 - What's interesting is in our history, we've done two podcasts on this and we've chatted out. side of those two podcasts, maybe 45 minutes, is that fair - Sure, I'm something like that - So

14:36 that's kind of, and you know, I've read some about it, I've seen news reports. I think this is the first thing you have told me the 3169 where there's potential current bad actors - Yeah, oh

14:49 absolutely - And by that, I mean, my take on a lot of this stuff is we cut corners in the 70s and 80s, you know, maybe that was even industry practice back then Every industry, everybody's

15:01 cleaned up their act over the last 50 years. I mean, a lot of this has been, in my mind, a lawyer covering for bad acts, just not to accept liability. That's the first thing I think you've told

15:13 me right now that I could see, holy shit, somebody's being deceptive - I just can't fathom the fact that they put 3169 in a report 'cause it's a blatant lie. I mean, you and I went out and looked

15:27 at that stuff I mean, you know what we ought to do tonight? Let's get drunk, trash can. Let's fill it up 32 times, pour it out, and then see how long it takes for us to drive the truck across it

15:39 - Yeah - I mean, what, an hour? Two minutes? That'd be an interesting thing if we - But it's a great visual, yeah - Let's go get 3169 barrels, fill it up, and go pour it on the ground and see

15:52 if we can drive the truck across it. 'Cause Chevron, by their own words, couldn't drive the truck across it for two hours - Nah, I had I screwed up. I meant to say two days, not two hours, but

16:03 hey, I was three glasses of wine in, and I was fucking rolling - Yeah, this is great - Yeah - I'm totally in on this -

16:11 Yeah, I mean, and trust me, I really thought the narrative coming out of here was gonna be, hey, Chevron lawyers, do the right thing, settle with Ashley, 'cause you screwed up some stuff in

16:23 the past, you know you did, but it's okay now, just do the right thing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah And it's going on still.

16:36 And I've been saying, you know, TikTok for months, I want to think - I want to think Shurf Run's doing the right thing. It took me a

16:39 full week for it to really sink in. And then every time something else, and I'm like, oh, it's even worse than I thought. Oh, it's even worse than I thought. And there are a few things I can't

16:47 talk about because of a very limited confidentiality agreement that we had. That I'm just like, oh, my conclusion is, you know how fucked you are And you don't realize how much we get it and how

17:02 little they understand about her true motivation. Yeah. And they really don't get yet that this isn't about money On this first episode of oil filled mythbusters, we have the 31 points. I was

17:16 thinking about naming it the segment. This is bullshit. Too much? I mean it's true. It's mean but it's true. We have not run the experiment yet. Let's see. But you know you've got to give

17:28 Chevron props because they were able to hook up on barrels 69. measure and meter a a

17:34 leak in advance of the leak happening. So come on Ashley. Exactly This is just a bold face lie and Chevron's continued to just hammer down and say it's only 3169. So we are going to spill 3169

17:46 barrels of fresh water this time. For when it was them it was brine water produced water. We care about science. The Chuck Yates needs a job. The podcast. Exactly. Exactly. And let's see and

17:55 maybe it'll run 200 yards down there and we'll say you know what 3169 is a lot more barrels than we thought. But I don't think it's going to go that far. This is, I mean look at this. That's what

18:04 we do in spring. Let's see. It's dry sand whether it was that day. Let's see where it goes. We'll see what happens.

18:14 3169 barrels is almost 1331

18:18 gallons

18:31 We're good about a barrel, man.

18:41 The wonder if this is how Noah in the family, the beginner the water, the grass, the alright, ten percent or ten percent and the ten percent ad, and we have not touched them as fake tree. We

19:21 haven't made it off the well -padded Hey. When you were reading through the wildfowl, was awkward man on the crew that day. I think that would have been does.

20:19 Broke containment! Broke containment! Get COD back out here! I guess I messed up our whole experiment. I'm sorry. He screwed up. Now we're gonna have to redo it. Yeah, it's not real anymore.

20:30 You know, anytime you feel depressed, just remember you're the one in a trillion sperm that actually made it to the egg. The winner? The winner. We might get to that light sign right there. I

20:41 could be wrong. I thought it would get to here But the spill itself got to that power pole down there. Maybe two and three yards. But actually we're only at eight barrels.

21:43 We've got some momentum. It hit the road. It's moving out.

21:49 I'll spit it. Oh, just a shot. Science. Come on. Science. Yeah, what kind of show are we running here? You can consider this. That's just for in advance everyone that comments in their

21:58 comments on your YouTube videos. But Chuck spit in it!

22:10 Who the fuck wrote

22:13 69? They're gonna die on the 3169 hill. Yeah, I just can't believe that somebody didn't get. Okay, that screwed up and sent you an email. Hey, we're really sorry. It was, you know. The 3169.

22:26 2318

22:29 barrels. They transcribed the number wrong. Or whatever. I mean, just. Yeah.

22:36 Right now! Well, yeah! 19! We will over help! Alright! It's more than you thought, but at the same time, we have yet to touch the grass or the mesquite. Yep. I think it's all fraud,

22:50 actually. I can't believe you dragged me out here for this. You polluting my land!

23:02 So you see it's like slowing down ever else and it's just finding this little downhill channel. It's going to pick up over here and I bet all of it starts getting pulled this way

23:14 I'm shocked at the time because I think if I had to guess we've been running ahead in about 30 minutes or 26, 26, 5 off, pick up speed, we're at a 27-barrehold and he said yeah that's boogin,

23:27 show 'em around, I apologize

23:32 Purple rain

23:35 3169 - Woo, 69 - That's

23:42 a fucking piece of shit. Give me a fucking break. 3169. So let's get our final official mark - Still I touched a mesquite - Okay, actually, so you read the well file and it said two days that

23:56 trucks couldn't pass. I know that - I think it was a day or two. I can't - Day or two in the - It held up the bridge - And I'm not a West Texas resident, so I'm not sure, but could we drive over

24:09 that - We could, on this. So I think for it to be so serious, you can't drive a big diesel rig through it. That was some serious water up there - Okay, so just for the sake of science, for the

24:23 sake of experiment Tanner, or you're running on me, let's do this just to -

24:28 cross maybe that sort of the product

24:33 Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh HUH!

24:41 Walking home on a herd of hair fish. Yep runs here run. Here's a shot run for us run

24:52 I think we have a new expression instead of watching paint dryets, watching fresh water drain along the way.

25:09 Ah, yep.

25:13 And there you have it. Science from Chuck Yates needs to job the podcast. Take one. All right, Ashley, so we've run the experiment. We've now seen the results. Interesting thing, number one is,

25:25 I think the flow pattern that you discussed that we hypothesized actually proved out. I mean, the water ran down this way, made a left and did pool over there Yeah, it perfectly explains

25:40 everywhere that we saw dead mosquitoes in the spring. It was from this well. It's clearly from this well. We thought it might be from the S just 101, which is down that way, 'cause it's closer to

25:50 that. But this pattern of water coming down the hill, real narrow and then spreading out and going down that road, that's all the dead mosquitoes. Like this is it, 100 not a doubt. So now let's

26:01 drill down into the guts of the science. 3169 barrels One, I'm not sure it even made it to the roots of the deadness. No, I mean the last other skates are down at that telephone pole down there,

26:14 right? That's another what hundred yards hundred fifty yards password stopped. It would have had to flow way past that I mean they spilled thousands of barrels and they lied that it's 3169 more.

26:24 You know there you go In the name of science, we were gonna try to drive the truck over the water spill there only I didn't sign up for the extra Insurance, so we don't want to risk it. Yeah, I

26:35 think I caught a moth in my it's good stuff. Yeah, the moth seasoning Yeah, exactly really point six nine if the reportable limit was 500 barrels I guarantee it would have been a 420 point six nine

26:46 barrel spill this if you think about humans for all of our history back to You know caveman days we have been tied to land Like you will have lived on the same land where your you know parents lived

26:58 and grandparents and great grandparents and great grandparents And they all will have fought for it They will be buried there and like that is your place You don't roam around you aren't just born

27:07 here and then move to the city and move here like we don't Like all this modern mobility is like, it's a very modern thing in the past couple of hundred years. I went to Scotland a few years ago and

27:16 the Watt family is from this little fishing village on the north coast of Scotland, like built into a cliff, like rough, rough area. And I went to the old church and it's falling apart, the

27:27 roof's gone and the cemetery's all around it. There's graves even in the church and it's Watt. Watt, half the town has the surname Watt, even to this day And they're all ancestors, great uncles,

27:40 cousins, you name it. And like you look at it and there's graves from the 1300s and 1400s of Watts that died fighting Viking raids. Like that land is blood and is soaked in your blood. This piece

27:55 of dirt and this land, like I would absolutely risk my life to protect it. I think once you have been somewhere long enough, the land almost becomes a member of your family that just lives

28:06 perpetually. Like when I think about who am I, like where am I, what am I of, it's West Texas. And it's not just West Texas, it's of this strip of sand that runs north to south, kind of in the

28:17 middle of the Permian Basin - Chevron, I don't even know what to say. Although I will say this, maybe the land man that originally wrote down 3169 barrels, he probably ought to fire him or maybe

28:29 give him a raise.