"Capping" is supposed to be temporary, with the intention: of usage later combined regular reinspection, or permanent kill later ("plugging"). A plugged well is injected with high pressure concrete to/past the impermeable rock layers, past the multiple steel/concrete well casings that travels through aquifers. Why would you cap a well instead of plugging? lets explore that and see if you can guess the correct answer.
I'm greatly oversimplying this, but the state is supposed to keep track of capped wells to make sure 'something' is done with them. Given the age of these wells (80+ years ago or WW2 era) it doesn't surprise me if shortcuts were taken and records don't exist.
I think if you're going to be against something, it's really important to understand it. My opinion is this is an environmental issue that should be addressed, but treating it with sensationalism and throwing pseudoscience in is just going to add confusion and tie up resources that could be used to fix the problem. These fluids need to stay in the ground... especially the salt water, as that simply does not break down in nature.
The articles author and comments here lack a basic knowledge of Geology:
> Dunlap suspects it may be related to the injection of fracking wastewater
This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of whats happening. Fracking involves the injection of fluids to expand cracks in formations, then flash filling them with an aggregate. This allows formation fluids to flow faster. It's not like you're sitting here pumping up formation pressure to eleventy billion and keeping it there. That would be counterproductive to production anyway: you want stuff to come out of the well, not stay in the ground.
To be perfectly transparent though, there are extractions methods where a flow is introduced into a formation by creating a pressure differential in a formation; you suck at one end and blow on the other. No idea if that's present where the issue is taking place, but it's unlikely.
> If this is fracking water, it's truly horrifying
If a formation underwent production after fracking... where do you think that "fracking water" went? This comment shows a fundamental misunderstanding of whats happening.
> Pennsylvania is increasingly having a similar problem with what they're calling "frac-outs" where the fracking water breaches nearby wells and poisons residential water
This is more than likely surface contamination by some ding dong fracking company, but that doesn't make good headlines. It's hard to take stuff like this seriously... production formations are thousands of feet below ground, far far far below the water table, which sits on top of the bedrock and impermeable layers. If said layers _were_ permeable, no water table could exist, because the water would simply keep going "down". The sensationalism around fracking is face-palm inducing.
> The Permian Basin is home to some of the biggest fracking operations and they've been depleting the ground water to supply the wells so much they've started to run out and have to recycle the waste water (link)
> If you let people pump garbage water into the ground on your property, you deserve what comes back up
Fracking is a one time operation. It's important to understand that.
The other comment links an article that says:
> Fracked wells in West Texas don’t just produce petroleum. Much more than anything else, they spit up salty, mucky water.
This is actually really important to prevent earthquakes and ground movement. If you remove x number of fluids and don't replace them, you'll cause shifts in rock layers. The best place for extracted fluids is back where they came from, in roughly equal amounts.
What's happening in Texas is people are extracting fluids from one area, seperating oil from the saltwater, then gung-ho slapping that water back into the earth in another. This produces a formation pressure imbalance and causes earthquakes among other issues. Nobody can really predict whats going to happen when you do this... we simply don't know "whats down there". As such, a "Dead" formation is probably now being pressurized and blowing out caps that were half-arsed capped. As a matter of fact, companies will keep old wells unplugged for the explicit purpose of turning them into salt water disposal wells.
So in conclusion salt water injection is the root problem, but the media puts a magnifying glass on "fracking" for whatever reason and nothing actually gets done.