Texas has thousands of abandoned oil and gas wells. Who is responsible for cleaning them up?

Oil workers pull tubing from an orphan well in a field in Luling on March 27, 2025. (Credit: Lorianne Willett/The Texas Tribune)

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LULING — Just six minutes from 5,700-person town’s historic city center, where an old oil museum still nods to the boom days, the ground groans as oil workers pull steel tubing — each piece is longer than a bus — out of a well drilled in 1983 that stopped pumping profits last year. Rain pours on this quiet Texas field, but the crew doesn’t stop their steady pace.