Who’s responsible for cleaning up abandoned oil wells on the Osage Reservation?

Written By: Allison Herrera

This story is part of a series funded by the Solutions Journalism Network and is the first story in a three-part series

(OSAGE RESERVATION) It’s 9 a.m. on a May morning and the temperature is climbing toward 80 degrees, which means the Oklahoma heat is ramping up. Despite that, John Dildine and Fred Beartrack from the Osage Nation’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) are about to pile into the front seat of a pickup truck to head out for the day. But first, bug spray. A lot of bug spray. And water.

Read this story on Oage News here.

Both Dildine and Beartrack joke about getting bit by chiggers and ticks, but out in rural Osage County, off of narrow roads leading onto fields and leaf piles, the struggle to fight off a dangerous bug bite is real.

After ensuring their pant legs are sprayed off and cold water is loaded into the truck, Dildine and Beartrack head out to one of the sites where a crew is set to plug an abandoned well on the reservation.

“We’re going to 2611 well site 1C,” Dildine says. That’s the technical explanation of the well he’s mapped out and categorized in a database DNR keeps. Dildine mostly works in the office, keeping track of the well sites needing to be “truthed in the field,” meaning verified from a pile of records sourced from the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), the Osage Minerals Council (OMC), the State, and the Indian Health Service (IHS).

Beartrack and Dildine are part of a 12-person crew tasked with plugging orphaned and abandoned wells on the Osage Nation Reservation.

According to the DNR, there are roughly 1,600 of these wells out of more than 43,000 well bores on the reservation.

However, the DNR says that number may not be accurate, and the true number could be much higher.

“So that’s a moving target,” said Craig Walker, who heads up the Nation’s well plugging program, referring to the count of orphaned and abandoned wells. He said some were temporarily abandoned, some have already been plugged and some have never been drilled. And finally, some of the wells were supposedly plugged but after further investigation, they were never plugged at all.

“So, the data had a lot of gaps,” Walker said. 

“As we started going out into the field and looking, we began to notice more wells in the area. And so then we started raising questions and saying, hey, we found this well, you know, why is it not on the list?” he said.

After more than a century of oil production on the reservation, producers, headright holders, the Nation, and Minerals Council members are trying to find out who’s responsible for cleaning up the land and protecting it for the future.

When that question is answered, taking on the task of rehabbing land that the Nation has put into trust and land owned by individuals remains a daunting task that will take years, if not decades, to complete.

According to the BIA, approximately 250 operators are producing within Osage County, and in the last two decades, there have been 400 operators on the Osage Mineral Estate.

Some of the abandoned wells belong to operators who cannot afford to keep them running, while others belong to companies that have gone bankrupt.

The Dangers of Orphan Wells

Orphaned and abandoned wells are a problem on the reservation. They can emit methane, a greenhouse gas that damages the environment and the ozone layer. Some wells have contaminated the Osage County water table with saltwater, a byproduct of oil production, which can seep into the fresh groundwater.

Although, according to Beartrack, proving it may be difficult. “Orphan wells not cemented to today’s standards are conduits for ‘bad’ fluids to contaminate the fresh groundwater aquifers,” he said.

The Department of Natural Resources, with help from Minerals Council geologist Bill Lynn, is trying to locate and clean up these wells. Lynn helps determine which wells are “keeper wells,” some that are still capable of production.

Along the way, they’ve encountered brine scars, areas of land impacted by salt water, particularly from oil and gas production. The scars are a sign that salt water has leached into the soil, killing off native grasses that cattle depend on.

“The scientists analyzed local air quality measurements in combination with atmospheric data and found that oil and gas wells are emitting toxic particulate matter (PM2.5), carbon monoxide, nitrous oxide, ozone and volatile organic compounds (VOCs),” according to the study. These findings will help researchers determine how exposure to these chemicals increases heart disease, preterm birth rates, asthma, and other adverse health conditions.

“Methane is a detriment to the environment as far as climate change and global warming and different things like that, as well as if the concentrations are high enough, it can affect your body, cause migraines, sickness and various things, on top of the fact that it’s combustible,” Walker said.

According to Walker, the BIA has currently issued an emergency level for methane as 55,000 parts per million. Walker said if it’s leaking methane, it will get plugged or capped.

The Nation’s well-plugging programs ramped up work amid increasing pressure from executive orders to increase energy production after President Trump declared a National Energy Emergency the day he took office on Jan. 20.

The price for the words, “drill baby, drill” could mean less time for environmental assessments, less time to conduct National Environmental Policy Act reviews and shortening the time to conduct National Historic Preservation Act reviews from 1-2 years to 7 days, according to a “Dear Tribal Leader” letter dated May 1, 2025 written by the Department of the Interior.

Tribal consultations on these revised permitting processes happened in early July to get feedback about the changes, but at Osage, some permits are already being issued under this shortened timeline, according to OMC Chair Myron Red Eagle.

It’s unclear whose responsibility it is to plug wells that are causing harm. Between the Nation, the producers, the BIA and the Osage Minerals Council, no one could precisely answer that

However, Beartrack had a clear answer.

“When you read the regulations, the United States federal government and the Bureau of Indian Affairs is tasked with maintaining and controlling and developing, I mean protecting the Minerals Estate for the Osage Indians,” Beartrack said.

Red Eagle said there is no clear answer on that question.

“No one wants to take the blame for it, “ Red Eagle said. He said there has been a lot of mismanagement over the leases and the way in which the producers reacted to a stiffer regulatory environment from the 1970s onward. He credits Adam Trumbly, the Osage Agency Superintendent, with doing the best he can and understands the Osage Agency is understaffed and under-resourced.

Trumbly said the responsibility is on a “case-by-case basis.”

“As far as the ultimate liability, I think that’s an open question,” Trumbly said.

In some cases, he said it was the operator’s responsibility, but ultimately, it’s a question that would have to be answered by someone higher up than him.

“That would be one that would have to go up the flagpole … as far as when the operator would be responsible when we terminate a lease, generally they have to restore the condition, the premises back to the prior condition it existed upon prior to the lease commencing,” Trumbly said.  

Operators are required to put up a bond to ensure that when they do stop operating their wells, money is set aside to clean up the damage. The bond can be between $5,000 to $150,000, depending on the size of the operation.

Walker said the answer to the question gets complicated when a producer goes bankrupt.

“I don’t know how you’re gonna get someone that doesn’t exist to plug something,” Walker said.

The wells plugged by the DNR do not belong to any operators, according to Beartrack. There are a significant number of wells that are inactive, but are considered under lease by an operator. Anything under lease is out of the domain of the DNR. When they encounter “inactive” wells like this, the BIA informs the operator of what needs to happen to the wells – the orphan well team is then out of the picture, he said.

Progress remains steady, but slow

To date, the well plugging program has plugged about 40 wells, and there is a difference between orphaned and abandoned wells.

Walker said that some wells are “TA’d,” meaning temporarily abandoned.

“A lot of people in the public will say, man, I have this well on my property and they haven’t pumped it in decades,” Walker said.

TA’d means somebody is responsible for the well, even though it’s not being utilized. The well may have failed an integrity test, meaning it can’t stop fresh water and salt water from mixing, or economically, it doesn’t make sense for a producer to have it running. Whatever the reason, it sits idle.

An orphaned well is one that has no responsible party. There’s no producer. That’s when the bond requirement that producers have to put up comes into play.

The well on the Lost Creek Ranch property was plugged by a crew from Calgary Energy and was abandoned, and was likely drilled in the 1970s, according to Beartrack, and that’s why it’s getting plugged.

The art of well plugging

“Ready to get it,” said Beartrack as the truck door slammed and the engine revs as he and Dildine head out.

The truck hauls along Highway 60 past the Osage Casino in Pawhuska and eventually takes a turn onto a narrow road toward Okesa. The well being plugged is on the Lost Creek Ranch site the Nation purchased in 2021. DNR identified the well more than six months ago and finally got the permit from the BIA to plug it.

They turn onto a bumpy dirt road past abandoned pump jacks, trucks and other oil rigging equipment that has seen better days. At the dead end, amidst a grove of blackjack trees, a crew of ten men are priming an abandoned well after pulling out pipes from the ground.

The pipes sit next to an open pit covered in tarp. A group of men donning protective gear and hard hats surround a giant 50-foot-high pole rig mounted to a truck that runs tubing down to the end of the well to prepare it for cleaning. The crew from Calgary holds things steady as the truck roars into action, powering things along.

The pole rig is used to pull equipment out of the well and clean out the wellbore as deep as possible to prepare for cement. This rig also allows the DNR to use tubing to precisely spot the cement at any depth downhole.

“We use cement, that’s kind of the standard for plugging wells right now,” said Beartrack, amidst the noise of the truck that’s connected to the pole rig.

The goal is to fill the well with cement to prevent methane from seeping into the air and the saltwater byproduct from leaking into the water table. The cement helps to prevent any cross-contamination between fresh and saltwater.

“That’s our prime goal right now, to make sure the fresh water is isolated,” he said.

One of the problems with wells is age, with a typical well being 50 to 100 years old. The average cost to plug some of these wells, according to Walker, is between $20,000 and $40,000.

“The main problem we encounter is rot,” said James DeRoin, who’s had more than 45 years of drilling experience and now works as a field inspector for the Nation. When the casing corrodes, it can leak saltwater and contaminate the freshwater supply. That’s what Beartrack and his crew have found.

DeRoin estimates he’s drilled about 600 holes in Osage County. Now, he’s helping to plug them up.

The well plugging team first uses what’s known as a bond log to inspect well conditions and ensure isolation of hydrocarbons from freshwater. Beartrack and his team have gone out and verified, or “field truthed,” 2,500 wells.

That means they have looked at the available data from the BIA, the Minerals Council, records from the Indian Health Service, the state geological society, and then sent a crew to physically locate the wells.

According to Beartrack, the average time to get a permit approved by the BIA to plug a well is about 74-75 days. Early on in the well plugging process, he said it took 100 to 200 days.

“We’re just making sure, before we do any of the work on these wells, it’s a triple check that these are not orphans. I mean, these wells aren’t orphans, and we have the ability to plug them, even if we have a permit, sometimes it’s still questionable,” Beartrack said.

Tension over the well plugging program

Beartrack and the Department of Natural Resources work with Bill Lynn, the Minerals Council’s geologist. Once the DNR crew has located the well in the field and gathered data, they pass it on to Lynn, who has a system of checks and tests he performs to make sure they aren’t keeper wells, meaning they could still be productive.

Osage News reached out to Lynn to talk to him for this story, but was told he needed permission from the council to talk about his work and the program.

Before the Nation’s DNR took over well plugging, the Minerals Council, the body responsible for managing the minerals estate for the more than 5,000 shareholders, plugged orphaned and abandoned wells. Tensions over the well plugging program between the Nation and the Council have simmered over the last two years when the Nation, through its self-governance department, applied for and received a grant from the Department of the Interior for more than $19 million.

The Minerals Council also applied for the grant, but was denied due to the fact that they’re not a federally recognized tribe.

Candy Thomas, who heads the Nation’s self-governance department, said the Nation reached out to the OMC to see if they wanted to collaborate on writing the grant, but they declined.

“We offered a joint application and they turned us down,” Thomas said in an email.

“They made an application for the same grant and were denied as they did not represent the Nation as the governing authority as listed in the Federal Register.”

In their grant, the OMC cited the need to plug wells immediately as they were “near schools, playgrounds, and homes, and many are leaking oil, gas, saltwater or other chemicals into the air and water. Some of these wells have high fluid levels that can leak into surface water if the casing is cracked, and, even worse, some of these wells are in the bed of the Arkansas River and under Lake Skiatook.”

Five years ago, the OMC received $3 million to begin implementing a well plugging program from a separate federal grant they received. According to the grant the OMC wrote in 2023, they have plugged 51 wells. At an April 2025 OMC meeting, council members said they had plugged more than 80 wells.

The grant application they submitted to the Department of the Interior asked for $49 million, with the cost of plugging wells varying. They cited the average cost being between $4,000 and $70,000. However, the most expensive well they’ve plugged is more than $230,000, and the least expensive one is a little more than $4,000. Wells underneath Lake Skiatook and the Arkansas River bed pose more challenges and hazards and are expected to cost around $500,000 to clean up.

Osage News reached out to both Lynn and Minerals Councilman Talee Redcorn to discuss the OMC’s well plugging program, but were referred instead to the Nation’s Department of Natural Resources for more information.

“We don’t want to have it anymore. Somebody took it … but I’m proud of it, we did a good job,” Recorn said during an April OMC meeting. The OMC recently went to Washington, D.C., to “get a handle on the regulations that’s killing this reservation,” as Redcorn said before their May trip to Washington, where they lobbied to remove and relax some of the regulations they think are impeding drilling and progress on the reservation.

Minerals Council members are concerned that wells are being plugged that could still be viable, but Beartrack assured them that the Nation is working with Lynn to see that doesn’t happen.

“One of the major [regulations] that is out there is we cannot plug economically viable wells,” Walker said.

Beartrack thinks cleaning up the reservation and plugging wells that are leaking is an important way to make sure that the headright holder’s asset, the oil and gas underground, are protected.

“We’re adding value by removing liabilities,” he told OMC members during a regular OMC meeting.

In their 2023 grant to the Department of the Interior, the OMC acknowledged the significant damage a non-existent regulatory environment has caused.

“These orphaned wells directly impact the human and environmental health and safety of the Osage Reservation. Many houses are built over or next to orphaned wells, playgrounds and fields leak gas, and drinking water for humans, livestock, wild animals, birds, and fish are polluted. Our soils are polluted by orphaned and leaking wells, which exposes humans and the environment to gas explosion and fire,” stated the grant.

How much oil is left?

According to Shane Matson, the former head of the Osage Producers Association and head of BlueJacket Energy, the question of how much oil and gas is left in Osage County is a complicated question with an even more complicated answer.

“There’s billions of barrels still in the ground. How much of those are recoverable depends on how much you’re willing to pay for it,” Matson said. He told Osage News that easily recoverable oil is gone. What’s left to recover will have to come from secondary or tertiary methods. Secondary recovery is when you inject something back into the formation to build pressure back up, to move additional oil. Tertiary recovery, the third method, is when you flood the formation with CO2, a model that Capture Point is using on the Burbank Field.

“For sure, the unplugged wellbores are a problem. They are the responsibility of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. They let them get to this place. But at the end of the day, I would say 99% of them are not a hazard,” Matson said.

The bigger problem, in Matson’s opinion, is the damage some of these wells are doing to the county’s freshwater supply.

“So the freshwater aquifer is the only thing that really we ought to be talking about when it comes to plugging wells,” Matson said.

Unplugged or orphaned oil and gas wells can be a source of saltwater contamination of groundwater. When these wells are not properly plugged, they can act as pathways for saltwater and other contaminants from deep underground formations to migrate into shallower, freshwater aquifers. Over time, the casing of a well can deteriorate, creating cracks and gaps that allow saltwater and other fluids to move upward into the wellbore.

You can see some of this damage in the form of brine scars that pockmark parts of the county. One of the biggest hurdles to putting the Osage Nation Ranch into trust was the $40 million price tag to remediate the land, which had saltwater brine scars all over it.

Walker said the Department of Natural Resources is trying to clean up and remediate abandoned wells that are leaking methane, and all of the dynamics that make them so hazardous. He said cleaning up the oil is easier than cleaning up salt, where it will settle into the soil.

“We’re not only helping solve the issue with orphan wells that are detrimental and economically detrimental to the Nation, but we’re also remediating and cleaning the surface as well with stuff that’s abandoned,” Walker said.

Remediating the surface involves cleaning up parts of the land that have brine scarring, where saltwater has leached onto the topsoil, killing off natural grasses that cattle graze on.

“It’s just neglect,” Dildine said.

Brine scarring on the private land that Osage News looked at was caused by a leaky gathering line that collected water and oil from the well drilled into what’s called a tank battery. A tank battery is a type of storage facility where oil, gas and saltwater are processed.

The line may have sprung a leak, according to Beartrack. Cleaning it up involves testing the soil for saltwater contamination, hauling it away, and bringing in fresh dirt.

One well down, thousands more to go

The afternoon heat had set in by the time the Calgary crew prepped the well. Finally, a few of the men returned on the bed of a truck carrying thousands of gallons of freshwater. It eventually got mixed with the cement and will get poured down the well, plugging it. The truck is loud and the crew waits patiently for the “go” signal to start pouring the cement.

Tomorrow, the Calgary crew will return to check on it, then it’s on to the next well.

Both Beartrack and DeRoin think that if the Nation can plug all the old wells, tighten up the leases, then the reservation has a chance to attract more producers to come to Osage County and drill for oil.

The reservation is a major asset that needs investment to improve it. And, the only way to invest is to clean it up.

“Everything starts with cleaning up orphans,” Beartrack said.