Blast from the Past

Back in February of 2004, 70-year-old Charles Yoakum turned on his stove and ignited a blast that blew his mobile home apart and left him badly burned. Yoakum was living in -- a town called Bondad -- right in the heart of 's energy boom. The gas that got him, however, isn't part of the new natural gas rush. It's a remnant of an old energy boom back during the depression.

The gas is coming from an abandoned well called the Bryce X-1. A guy named Nick Splatter drilled it in 1938. There's no way to know how much money, if any, Splatter made from the well, but the Oil and Gas Conservation Commission has concluded that he didn't do a very good job of capping it when he was finished.

Charles Yoakum apparently recovered reasonably well from his burns, but the problem hasn't gone away. The Joint Budget Committee just approved about a million dollars to drill down and properly cap the well. We have to pay because Splatter's long gone and there's nobody else to hold responsible for the problem.

It's an expensive process because the well is nearly 5000 feet deep and it's going to be tricky getting close enough to cap it. We can usually cap an abandoned well for about $12,000. And we have a fund to cover the costs.

Here’s the catch: the state can only cap the wells it knows about. The Bryce X-1 wasn’t on any maps. Nobody knew it was there until the explosion. Even then, it took investigators a while to figure it out. Their first suspects were some other, identified wells in the area.

How many other unknown, abandoned wells are out there? How many of them are leaking gas? Who knows?

But people living near the Bryce X-1 have been on edge since the explosion. Keep in mind that the smell we associate with natural gas isn’t natural; it’s added by utilities to help us detect leaks. Natural gas in the ground is odorless and colorless. And as new developments spread out across the range, more and more people are going to be living on top of old oil and gas fields.