Their best shot is Jeff Weems, who is running for the Railroad Commission. This is the seat that is occupied by Victor Carrillo, who appeared to be running unopposed for reelection until the last day for filing, when a stealth candidate, David Porter of Midland, whose only contact with the oil industry is accounting, entered the race against him. Porter went on to win the race by some 20 points, a result that is attributable to the advantage of having an Anglo surname in a Republican primary.

Weems, a Houston attorney, has worked for Shell Western E & P [exploration and production] and also worked as a landman. He is a member of the American Petroleum Institute and the National Association of Royalty Owners. His legal specialty is oil and gas litigation. Suddenly the Democrats find themselves with a candidate who is better qualified than the Republican nominee.

Another possibility is Jim Sharp, who is the chief justice of the First Court of Appeals in Houston. Sharp is running for Place 3 on the Texas Supreme Court, a position vacated by the retiring Hariett O’Neill. Her retirement opened the door to a six-person free-for-all, which led to a runoff between the top two finishers, former legislator Rick Green and Fort Worth district judge Debra Lehrman. I do not have enough words to express my dismay that Rick Green could serve on the Texas Supreme Court. I have had a lot of bad things to say about the state’s high court over the years, but even they don’t deserve Rick Green. These days Green identifies himself as a constitutional speaker and author for WallBuilders, an Aledo-based evangelical organization that promotes the moral and religious underpinnings in American history.

Asked by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram about his judicial experience, Green said [I'm quoting the paper here] that he “considered it an advantage to be the only candidate without judicial experience.” What the court needs, he said, is someone with legal and business and legislative experience. Part of Green’s legislative experience was getting in ethics trouble for using his Capitol office to film a health supplement infomercial. (As best I recall, it was touted as “brain powder.”) Don’t forget the time he went before the parole board to plead for the early release of a man who had loaned his father’s company $4000,000. Lehrman has served as a district judge in Tarrant County for 22 years and is chairman-elect of the American Bar Association’s section on family law. I know I have been critical of TLR too, and their big spending on Court races, but, hey, Weekley, Trabulsi, Toomey, Linbeck: Where is TLR when we need you? Where is Citizen Leader PAC? If Green wins the runoff–and the shorter name is always a good bet–Sharp might get a lot of backing from the state’s legal community.

Bill Moody, an El Paso district judge (and the father of State Representative Joe Moody), who led the Democratic ticket in 2006 with 1,877,909 votes — more votes than Rick Perry got in winning the governor’s race that year — is challenging Republican Paul Green for Place 5 on the Supreme Court. Democratic sources have told me that the trial lawyers are not going to be involved in court races this year — they are holding their fire for legislative races — so Moody is a long shot.

Chairman Victor G. Carrillo, one of three commissioners and the only one not seeking a U.S. Senate seat, lost to Midland accountant David Porter, who gathered about 61 percent of the 1.2 million votes cast in the Republican primary election. Carrillo has served in the commission since being appointed by Gov. Rick Perry in 2003 to fill his predecessor’s unexpired term. Carrillo was reelected in 2004.

Porter will go on to face Houston attorney Jeff Weems, the Democrat who was unopposed in his primary race.

In Tarrant County, Porter earned 57 percent of the 87,000 votes cast, while across the Barnett Shale’s core counties he received about 60 percent.

Prior to serving as a commissioner and then chairman, Carrillo served as a petroleum geophysicist, assistant city attorney, professor and judge. He is the highest-ranking Hispanic official in the state.

Porter has been an accountant since 1981, and runs his own firm in West Texas.

Anti-Hispanic bias?

Although Carrillo has been criticized by some North Texas groups as being too soft on the industry, and hesitant to regulate, it’s doubtful anti-drilling activists would support Porter over Carrillo, Barnett Shale veterans said.

The election result came as a surprise to many North Texans working in the oil and gas industry and Democratic challenger Weems.

“Had Victor’s opponent run a well-funded, well-publicized campaign, then maybe you could draw meaning from it, but he didn’t,” Weems said. Comparatively, Carrillo spent more than $600,000 on his reelection bid while Porter admits to spending about $50,000.

While Weems is hesitant to draw meaning, Carrillo will.

“Early polling showed that the typical GOP primary voter has very little info about the position of Railroad Commissioner, what we do, or who my opponent or I were,” Carrillo said in a statement following his loss. “Given the choice between ‘Porter’ and ‘Carrillo,’ unfortunately, the Hispanic surname was a serious setback from which I could never recover although I did all in my power to overcome this built-in bias.”

Texas Christian University’s Jim Riddlesperger, a professor of political science, said he doesn’t have a good explanation for the result, but isn’t inclined to disagree with Carrillo’s reasoning.

“Most of the people who voted didn’t know either candidate,” he said. “They didn’t know who the incumbent was and they didn’t know who the challenger was, and when you have that kind of thing, others vote based upon what? The name? So, is it a disadvantage in the Republican primary to have a Latino surname? I don’t know the answer to that question, but my guess is it’s not a completely random event.”

November: Porter vs. Weems

The Railroad Commission of Texas has primary regulatory jurisdiction over all oil and gas operations in the state. Porter is running on an anti-Washington, D.C., anti-President Barack Obama platform of less regulation. According his Web site, Porter wants to use his position on the Railroad Commission of Texas as a “bully pulpit” to combat the “economic war [declared] by the current administration on the Texas oil and gas industry.”

Come November, on the other ticket is energy attorney Jeff Weems, a partner at Harrison, Bettis, Staff, McFarland & Weems LLP and former oil rig worker. Weems aims to reduce consumers’ utility bills, clean up old or abandoned industry equipment, end favoritism of the industry over individuals and modernize regulation to fix “spotty and uneven” enforcement. Like Porter, Weems also says the position should be used as a bully pulpit, albeit for alternative energy resources and alternate uses of existing sources.

Porter says Weems “will deliver an Obama-like regulatory environment,” which Weems said “smacks of fairly expected and standard rhetoric that doesn’t have any true meaning or substance to it.”

Weems said he aims to “restore people’s faith in the integrity” of the commission, which he said has been poorly run by the current three commissioners.

“The Barnett Shale is ground-zero for the joys of expanded drilling and the positive economic benefits, but also the pressures that it puts upon the citizens and the environment,” he said. “There’s a balance that needs to be struck.”

Porter did not return calls for comment.

Its chairman is up for election in November, with a challenger in the Republican primary and a Democrat running in the general election. And once that’s over, the commission is scheduled for a sunset review during the 2011 legislative session.

The Railroad Commission regulates Texas’ oil and gas industry. It is governed by three commissioners, who are elected statewide. Over the last decade, the commissioners wrote critical rules on well spacing and density that allowed the development of the Barnett Shale — a huge natural gas field that lies under Fort Worth and about 15 surrounding counties.

But the agency has also been severely criticized for its lack of inspection staff and the appearance that it ignores the rights of landowners and the environmental problems caused by oil and gas drilling.

The two challengers running against Republican Chairman Victor Carrillo say he’s responsible for some of those problems.

“We’ve got too many career politicians and lawyers,” said David Porter, who is running in the Republican primary. “I’ve never drawn a government paycheck.”

Jeff Weems, who is uncontested in the Democratic primary, said the commission missed a change to balance the need for environmental stewardship as the Barnett Shale was being developed.

“The time to develop sensible regulations and engage in active monitoring of water use, injection wells, noise and emission concerns, inner city drilling and gathering line locations was years ago,” Weems said.

“The commissioners must undertake immediately a comprehensive review of all of the rules and regulations for Barnett Shale activities that affect the communities there.”

A 2008 state audit found that about 40 percent of the oil and gas wells in Texas had not been inspected in five years.

More recently, residents in North Texas have questioned whether the Railroad Commission has done enough to investigate complaints of water pollution from gas drilling in the Barnett Shale, although commission staffers say there’s no evidence that drilling has contributed to water pollution.

Carrillo defended the agency’s record.

“Do things happen? Absolutely. And when we’re made aware of them, we go out and try to put a stop to them,” he said. “In terms of just going out randomly and starting to test for groundwater pollution, I’d have to have a lot more information.”

Carrillo said he favors hiring more inspectors and hopes that the state sunset review leads to changes.

“But we are creatures of the Legislature,” he said. “We can’t do it unless the Legislature says we can do it.”

No Democrat has served on the commission since 1994. But in 2008, a relatively unknown named Mark Thompson drew 44 percent of the vote against then-Chairman Michael Williams.

Carrillo, an attorney and former geologist, is the highest-ranking Hispanic official in Texas. He’s an outspoken proponent of oil and gas drilling and the Barnett Shale.

Weems is unopposed in the March 2 Democratic Primary but will face either incumbent Republican Victor G. Carrillo or David Porter in November.

In introductory remarks, State Rep. Mark Homer, D-Paris, said it will be refreshing to have someone on the Railroad Commission who “has a concept of what those people are there for.”

“He actually knows what happens within the Railroad Commission and how refreshing that is going to be,” Homer said.

A Houston attorney with life-long experience in the energy business — first as an oil field worker and now representing both oil and gas firms as well as landowners — Weems labeled Lamar County “ground zero” for Democrats winning statewide elections before telling his audience what he plans to do differently in Austin.

“What folks don’t realize, this is one of the biggest environmental agencies in the entire state of Texas,” Weems said. “They are responsible for monitoring well sites — especially out here in East Texas — that were drilled in the 1920s and some of them leak, threatening the ground water and the land.”

He took a jab at the three incumbent commissioners — Republicans Carrillo, Michael Williams and Elizabeth Ames Jones.

“Two of them are so busy running for (U.S.) Senate they don’t have time to focus on their day jobs; and that’s wrong,” Weems said.

Speaking of large oil and gas companies, Weems claimed the “big boys” write giant checks every year to commissioner campaign funds, something the candidate said is perfectly legal. Weems said Carrillo had $600,000 to start his campaign.

Pitching campaign finance reform, Weems said he would propose restricting campaign contributions to the year a commissioner is actually running for office.

Although he did not accuse incumbents of wrong doing, Weems said he is upset about the handling of a complaint by the mayor of Dish, Texas, the site of a gas compressor station. That station is similar to the Midcontinent Express Pipeline compressor station south of Paris. A Texas Commission on Environmental Quality hearing was held in Paris Feb. 9 with the Dish mayor present.

“He (Dish mayor) went to the Railroad Commission for help when they found benzine in the air at potential unhealthy levels,” Weems said. “Instead of listening to him and treating him with respect, they treated him with disrespect, challenging his authority to be there.

“That is wrong,” Weems said. “You never challenge a public official looking after the health and safety of his or her citizens,” Weems said.

Instead of the Railroad Commission doing a study and holding hearings, the case is now before TCEQ, Weems said.

Weems said he would spend time in the field if elected to the position.

“For too long, no one has paid attention out here,” Weems said. “When is the last time you had a railroad commissioner come out here and visit with you and ask you what you concerns are?

“I want to be that person,” Weems said. “I promise you it won’t be just during the campaign season.”

A message left with the Carrillo campaign remained unanswered at presstime.

Recently, concerns have arisen regarding airborne benzene and other volatile organic compounds brought to light by private testing in Denton County (such as in the town of DISH) and by testing in other areas by both public and private entities. These concerns have focused on one particular point of pressure – the effect of drilling and production activities on air quality. Noting the Texas Railroad Commission’s refusal to act on any complaints, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) undertook several air quality tests in Fort Worth and the surrounding areas. The first round of tests resulted in an “all clear” pronouncement from TCEQ. This finding was trumpeted by the Railroad Commission, even though TCEQ acknowledged its testing practices were substandard – in essence, the qualifications on the results rendered the results almost meaningless (for example, the first round of testing was done in cold conditions where there was little chance of volatilization of benzene or other light organics from any site tested). The second round of testing, released last week, noted multiple sites that were not in compliance with accepted standards for airborne benzene, including two sites that exceeded both short and long-term exposure levels. To their credit, the companies at these two sites took steps immediately to correct the mechanical errors that resulted in these emission levels. Less publicity, however, was made of the 19 other sites that tested in excess of long-term exposure levels. In light of these rounds of tests, the TCEQ has promised to stay on the job and conduct further testing down the road. The Railroad Commission seems quite happy to have the TCEQ take over this job and make its public pronouncements. And although we should all be glad someone is doing something, we have the wrong folks driving the train. This is the Railroad Commission’s job. Period.

The Railroad Commission regulates all aspects of energy production and in-state transportation of hydrocarbons. On this particular issue, the Railroad Commission acknowledges in its own manual called “Waste Minimization in the Oil Field” that it is responsible for benzene and other volatile organic compounds that may be released as fugitive emissions during hydrocarbon production and processing. This responsibility is spelled out numerous times. So why do the commissioners refuse to step up, take responsibility, and direct their field personnel to begin testing?

First, the current commissioners have displayed a thinly-veiled hostility toward persons concerned with air quality issues. At a recent Railroad Commission public hearing, DISH mayor Calvin Tillman appeared and expressed his concerns with the air quality results found by the private testing company DISH used. Instead of treating Mayor Tillman with the respect owed an elected official doing his job looking out for the citizens of his community, he was subjected to dismissive remarks by the commissioners (even asking him about the air pollution caused by operations at the massive DISH airport!). This attitude is inappropriate. The Railroad Commission was originally created to give a forum to the farmers to allow them to fight the railroads’ unfair pricing policies. That history of giving voice to those who have none seems to have been forgotten.

Second, money is tight. Current state leaders have demanded that the Railroad Commission, along with every other state agency, come up with another five percent reduction in its ongoing budget. Regardless of one’s views on whether this is an unfortunate consequence of starving a government to the point where it cannot do its job, the fact of the matter is that the Railroad Commissioners appear to embrace the opportunity to pass this responsibility off and let someone else budget for it. But ask yourself, how many more pieces of monitoring equipment will TCEQ put into service to do this monitoring when its budget gets cut too? I bring up that point because the TCEQ, in justifying its inconclusive testing the first time around, was quick to point out how expensive the testing equipment was and how that limited its actions.

Third, the Railroad Commissioners likely want someone else to handle this matter because it is a political hot potato. On the one hand, you have the energy industry, a vital and powerful part of the Texas economy, especially in the Barnett Shale. On the other hand, you have citizens who are rightfully concerned about their health and the quality of life for their families. It is not surprising that with two commissioners actively running for United States Senator, and the third seeking reelection, it is much more convenient to pass this matter to another agency. But that is not responsible government, which requires accepting responsibility, listening and making some very hard choices.

You may ask why this matters if the Barnett Shale communities are getting the testing done anyway. That answer comes from experience. I am from the Houston area. We have a refinery or two in our neck of the woods. The responsibility for monitoring the impact on air quality from these major industrial emitters falls on the TCEQ. I will be kind and say that the TCEQ’s record is less than stellar on this front. In fact, it was not until our former mayor, Bill White, called the TCEQ and several of the refineries to task about certain benzene and other emissions that some air quality issues improved. In sum, based on Houston’s experience, the TCEQ is the wrong outfit to rely upon to protect the air quality in the Barnett Shale communities. Rather, everyone should look to, and demand action from, the Texas Railroad Commission, the agency that always was responsible for doing this job in the first place.

“The Railroad Commissioners idly watched for years as the intensive drilling in the Barnett Shale strained the Commission’s rules and regulations. Then, out of the blue, one Commissioner made a proposal that could result in blocking all drilling operations in the Barnett Shale region. This would devastate the energy industry, raise unemployment, but provide no meaningful resolution to the issues facing the operators, landowners and the environment in Fort Worth, Arlington and the entire Barnett Shale area,” Weems said.

Weems, who represents both operators and landowners in civil litigation disputes, knows the importance of a strong energy industry that is actively and thoughtfully regulated by the Railroad Commission. “The time to develop sensible regulations and engage in active monitoring of water use, injection wells, noise and emission concerns, inner city drilling and gathering line locations was years ago. The commissioners failed to act on these crucial subjects,” Weems emphasized.

“The Commissioners must undertake immediately a comprehensive review of all of the rules and regulations for Barnett Shale activities that affect the communities there. They must embrace their responsibilities, including their responsibility for monitoring and acting on emissions, and develop a comprehensive plan for reasonably regulating activity in the region. Knee-jerk reactions do not demonstrate leadership – they demonstrate its absence.”

“The biggest disappointment of all has been the silence of the Chairman of the Commission. If you are going to accept the title of Chairman (which always passes to the commissioner up for re-election), then you should lead by speaking out against bad ideas like this.”

Weems is challenging incumbent Republican Victor Carrillo, who has a primary opponent. Weems is unopposed in the Democratic Primary.

Weems, 51, is a Houston lawyer whose specialty is energy and the oil industry. The railroad commission’s main job is to regulate the energy, oil and gas industry in Texas.

Weems is running unopposed in the Democratic Party primary. Two candidates, including incumbent Victor Carrillo, are running in the Republican Party primary. The other candidate is David Porter from Giddings. The Republican winner will face Weems in November.

Even though no Democrat currently holds a statewide elected office, Weems said Texas is poised to elect one.

“The mood in Texas is changing rapidly,” Weems said. “I’ve visited 104 counties so far, and the people I’ve spoken to are not happy with the incumbents.”

Carrillo was elected to the three-member railroad commission in 2004. All of the commissioners are Republican, each serving a six-year term.

If elected, Weems said he will resign from his Houston law firm. Commissioners are paid $137,500 a year.

“As a commissioner you get to be a steward of Texas’ environment,” Weems said. “The drilling in Texas and all the pipelines are having an impact on the economy, that is something I want to help regulate.”

The dead zone in this otherwise lush mountain country meant one thing to Parrish: Gas drillers had been illegally dumping briny water mixed with chemicals, and the waste had killed everything from the rusty well head all the way downhill into a creek. The worst part, Parrish said, was that the devastation could have been avoided if the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection had had enough inspectors to make sure the state’s growing number of gas wells were checked regularly.

“It was sad — sickening,” said Parrish, a former field inspector for the DEP’s office of oil and gas. “It probably had been years since anybody had been out there.”

West Virginia has added a handful of people to oversee its growing drilling industry since Parrish retired in 2006, but other than that not much has changed. For the state’s 17 inspectors to visit West Virginia’s 55,222 wells once a year, they would have to inspect nine wells a day, every day of the year — no weekends, no vacations.

“We are doing what we can do,” said Gene Smith, a regulatory compliance manager for West Virginia. “But that still leaves thousands of wells that are not inspected yearly or even every decade.”

Regulators in other states are equally overwhelmed as they try to keep tabs on the nation’s nearly one million active oil and gas wells, a number that’s likely to climb as the feverish growth in natural gas exploration continues.

Search ProPublica’s database to find how many gas regulators work in your state.

A ProPublica investigation comparing the rapid expansion of drilling in 22 states with staffing levels at the agencies charged with policing the wells found that the nation’s capacity to enforce its environmental protections is weakening. The picture strikes at the heart of the industry’s long-standing argument that state regulatory agencies will be more effective industry watchdogs than the federal government.

While the number of new oil and gas wells being drilled in the 22 states each year has jumped 45 percent since 2004, most of the states have added only a few regulators. Those with the widest gaps are Texas, which is already grappling with the most drilling, and New York, which is expected to soon have the fastest rate of growth.

As regulators’ workloads have grown, enforcement actions — the number of times violations were recorded and acted on — have dropped in many states, often by more than half. That could mean companies are complying with the law — or that inspectors aren’t checking the wells.

“You just can’t do it, physically,” said Parrish, who received a $31,000 salary and said he was chronically overworked. “You’ve got to put out the hottest fires and there was a lot of stuff that slipped through the cracks because no one was looking.”

The Marcellus Shale, denoted in brown, primarily cuts across large swaths of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia. (Map by Jennifer LaFleur/ProPublica)
The imbalance between drilling growth and regulatory staffing levels could become a crucial factor as lawmakers and the public weigh how much environmental damage to expect in exchange for the benefits brought by the drilling boom. Thanks in large part to advances in drilling technology, estimates for the amount of natural gas held underneath parts of the United States have increased by 35 percent since 2007 and are now believed to be plentiful enough to meet the nation’s needs for more than 100 years. As a result, drilling is expanding rapidly, including in the Marcellus Shale, the layer of rock that stretches from central New York, underneath West Virginia to Tennessee.

The boom, however, has brought complaints of water and air pollution. Modern gas drilling in particular has drawn scrutiny because it relies on hydraulic fracturing, a process that injects millions of gallons of chemically infused water underground and produces large volumes of waste. The industry has fended off efforts to establish stricter regulations in part with its argument that the current state oversight is effective.

What it takes to enforce regulations, and whether authorities have enough resources to get the job done, are questions that rarely enter the debate.

“Not having eyeballs on the ground is horrendous,” said Jim Baca, who served during the Clinton administration as director of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, the federal agency that oversees more than 85,000 oil and gas wells on federal land. “If you don’t enforce the law, the industry will do whatever they think they can get away with.”

Spokesmen for state and federal regulatory agencies defend their effectiveness and caution that the picture is more nuanced than mathematical equations can convey. They say that they are working to improve efficiency in their departments and that the number of inspectors alone doesn’t always reflect enforcement because staffers can be shifted to meet urgent priorities. Employees might have capacity in their workload to absorb much of the growth in drilling that is taking place, they say.

“They may have to work a little harder,” said Stuart Gruskin, New York’s executive deputy commissioner for environmental conservation, about staffing in his state. “It’s like any other business. You can adjust from a management perspective how you utilize your resources until you reach the point where you are not doing a good enough job.”

The New York State public employees union disagrees. “Attempting to have them do even more with less is not possible,” it said this week in a statement calling for delaying the expansion of drilling for at least a year because of, among other things, what it called understaffing at the Department of Environmental Conservation and other state agencies.

The Lone Star Record

Click to see our database of wells and inspection staff per state.
No state has more drilling than Texas, which has 273,660 wells and just 106 regulators to oversee them.

As in most states, regulators for the Railroad Commission of Texas, the agency that is charged with oil and gas regulation, are kept busy by a broad range of responsibilities. They police gas wells, oil wells, waste injection wells, disposal pits, compressor stations and access roads. The wells can be spread across hundreds of miles, sometimes peppered throughout difficult-to-access terrain, with limited cell phone or computer access, heavy rains and rough roads requiring four-wheel drive.

Regulators also approve new permits — and try to do it fast enough to not saddle the companies applying for them with extra costs. They visit new wells several times during construction and old wells before they are shut in, or sealed. They are obligated to quickly respond to all complaints, which can range from an unauthorized flaring of emissions or gases to a spill of hazardous fluids.

Eighty-three of Texas’ regulatory staffers conduct field inspections, according to the commission, meaning each person is responsible for almost 3,300 wells, many of them requiring several visits in a year.

As in West Virginia, keeping up with the workload is nearly impossible.

“It’s one of the worst-kept secrets around the state that the wells that are ostensibly checked once a year aren’t,” said Jeff Weems, a Houston attorney who specializes in the energy industry and is running for the top job at the Texas Railroad Commission. “They could double the number of inspectors and still be straining their staff to do their job.”

This photo, taken Oct. 5, 2007, is of an underground injection disposal well site outside Fort Worth, Texas, that had passed the Railroad Commission’s inspection eight days earlier. Inspectors returned about two months later after a resident complained of spilled oil, overflowing dikes and green-colored fluid. The well site was found to have several violations, including oil-stained soil as seen under the disposal pump, above in yellow. (Photo courtesy of Sharon Wilson)

In late 2007, a Texas state auditor’s report (PDF) examined the Railroad Commission’s enforcement record and found that nearly half of the state’s wells hadn’t been inspected in the five years between 2001 and 2006, when the data was collected. (It also said regulators’ routine acceptance of gifts from the companies they police raised questions about their objectivity and conflicts of interest, and the commission imposed a $50 limit on gifts as a result.)

In Texas, as in most states, regulators prioritize their work to make sure the most essential inspections get done. Complaints and spills top the list, along with new well construction.

But the Texas auditor’s report found that 30 percent of all spills were inspected “either late or not at all.”

“It is quite clear to management that inspecting 100 percent of these notices … is not possible with current resources,” the Railroad Commission wrote in its response to the audit. “To the extent resources become available in future legislative sessions, the Commission could witness more activities.”

A spokeswoman for the commission said its workload decreased when drilling activity slowed in 2008, so the staffing situation has improved. She said the agency conducted 128,270 inspections in 2009, and visits every site it deems essential.

“Texas has maintained and will continue to maintain a strong enforcement effort for our environmental rules, regulations and policies,” the spokeswoman, Stacie Fowler, said in an e-mail.

But the commission’s Web site also makes clear that facilitating energy production is a priority and the state won’t slow drilling while inspections catch up. It advertises the current waiting period for approval of new drilling permits: three days.

According to ProPublica’s analysis, the number of new wells drilled each year in Texas has jumped 75 percent since 2003. However, staffing increased just 5 percent during that period and enforcement actions increased only 6 percent.

Records show that the Railroad Commission’s budget for monitoring and inspections has decreased 10 percent since 2005. Fowler said the agency had requested more staffing from the state legislature at least three times in the last five years and been turned down every time.

From the industry’s view, the paucity of enforcement staffing sometimes means it is up to the drilling companies to follow the rules as best they can.

“I never saw a Railroad Commissioner on one of the sites,” said Dale Henry, a hydraulic fracturing expert who worked in Texas for the global services company Schlumberger for several decades. Henry said companies abided by the law whether regulators were there or not, but he also said the normal work schedule meant that they often avoided regulators. Inspectors worked 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays, and “all the work in the field is done by operators between 5 p.m. and 6 a.m. and on weekends.”

A Schlumberger spokesman said that the company works closely with regulators and that it is the nature of the process to work through the night.

Even when regulators do inspect problematic sites, the oversight can be patchy.

In September 2007, a field inspector working in the Barnett Shale outside of Fort Worth made a routine stop at an underground injection disposal well site. His formal report (PDF) found no problems and stated: “Well area clean.”

This photo, taken Oct. 5, 2007, is of the underground injection disposal well site outside Fort Worth, Texas, that had passed the Railroad Commission’s inspection on Sept. 27, 2007. On their second visit two months later, inspectors found several violations, including dikes that did not meet the facility’s holding capacity. (Photo courtesy of Sharon Wilson)
Inspectors returned 61 days later after a resident complained of spilled oil, overflowing dikes and green-colored fluid in standing puddles. According to their report (PDF), they found that “oil-stained soil” had seeped several inches into the ground around a large tank, that the “containment dike will not hold estimated capacity” and that standing rainwater had oil in it.

When asked about the discrepancy, Fowler, the Railroad Commission spokeswoman, said conditions can change at a site on a daily basis. But Fowler did not address perhaps the most remarkable finding in the inspectors’ report (PDF): State records showed that the well site was not being used, when in fact it was actively being injected with hazardous waste.

“We looked at some records and found that the well was never technically shut in,” said Charles Morris, the now-retired inspector who wrote the second report about the troubled well. “That happens all the time in the field, too. I hate to say it, but the commission, sometimes their record keeping is not what it should be.”

Part of a Pattern

Texas’ staffing challenges match a pattern across the states where drilling is most active.

The number of new wells drilled in West Virginia increased 53 percent from 2003 to 2008. Since 2003 its regulatory staffing increased 20 percent. Enforcement actions, meanwhile, remained relatively constant, though they temporarily dropped by more than half during a peak in drilling in 2007.

North Dakota saw a 987 percent increase in new wells drilled each year since 2003, but took 13 percent fewer enforcement actions, even though it added five regulators.

Click to see our database of wells and inspection staff per state.
In Ohio, where the number of new wells drilled each year doubled between 2003 and 2008, four new staffers were hired but the number of formal actions dropped 33 percent.

Not every state saw a drop in enforcement actions.

In Pennsylvania, a state with intensive new Marcellus Shale drilling, state regulators doubled their enforcement staffing last year. Between 2003 and 2009 enforcement actions increased by 60 percent.

Of the 21 states that supplied data on their enforcement actions, five substantially increased those actions even as their staff-to-well ratio lagged. In Louisiana, for example, staffing was flat or falling until 2007, when more inspectors were hired and enforcement actions began shooting up. As a result, the state took almost twice as many enforcement actions between 2003 and 2008, even though the overall staff growth was just 3 percent and the number of new wells drilled annually more than doubled.

The federal government, which separately regulates a large proportion of the drilling on federal land in Western states, is also struggling to police its territory. It has seen a 31 percent increase in drilling since 2003.

A 2005 report (PDF) from the U.S. Government Accountability Office said that the Bureau of Land Management’s ability to meet its obligations had been lessened by intense growth, and that “staff had to devote increased time to processing drilling permits, leaving less time for mitigation activities, such as environmental inspections.”

The agency has significantly expanded its staffing since then. But even so, a 2009 analysis of its enforcement activity by the Western Organization of Resource Councils, a group of environmental organizations, found that the agency issued fewer enforcement actions in 2007, the last year for which data was available, than it did in 1999.

The analysis, which focused on BLM enforcement and inspection in five Western states, found that BLM inspectors spent a third less time on environmental inspections and completed only 15 percent of the highest-priority inspections. In Farmington, N.M., for example, BLM inspectors completed just 82 of 1,257 high-priority inspections. In Buffalo, Wyo., they finished just 136 of 3,527 red-flag jobs, according to a federal database.

Signs point in all directions to drilling sites in Wyoming. (Abrahm Lustgarten/ProPublica)
“If you ask any BLM staff who has been dealing with the oil and gas industry, they admit they don’t have the staff do deal with this. It hasn’t been a priority,” said Daniel Patterson, an Arizona state representative and southwest regional director for the group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, which works to convey confidential views of its government employee members. “It’s pretty much up to the operator to decide if they are going to operate legally or if they are going to cut corners that lead to more pollution. That’s a problem.”

State and federal regulatory officials say that there is no such thing as a proper ratio of enforcement actions to wells, and that there is no way to measure how effective informal warnings between inspectors and operators are as a deterrent. Such warnings are not recorded in regulators’ statistics. They also say there are myriad ways to increase the effectiveness of their oversight, including investing in new technology that improves efficiency and writing stronger laws.

Colorado, which has seen a 149 percent increase in the number of wells drilled each year since 2003, is one state that has done both.

In 2006 the state hired several new inspectors and began computerizing its records and equipping field regulators with laptops full of everything from well histories to violations. In April the state instituted new drilling regulations that are widely seen as some of the toughest in the country.

“We now have more prescriptive rules and policies, which will help to prevent problems that could otherwise evolve into violations triggering the need for enforcement,” said David Neslin, director of the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission.

Whether that is enough to do the job remains to be seen. One new hire is Chuck Browning, who came on eight months ago as a field inspector for the northwest part of the state and said the magnitude of the job can be overwhelming. With two other inspectors, Browning shares responsibility for some 25,000 wells. He bounces back and forth between the Utah and Wyoming borders, tallying 17,000 miles on his Trailblazer since March.

“I’m off in some far-flung remote area of the country side and there’s thousands of wells around me,” said Browning, a former geologist who has worked in the oil industry for 20 years. “I just pick my way out of the woods knocking them out as best I can.”

Not long ago, Browning was wandering through the Rangely field — an eight-mile wide swath of oil, gas and injection wells that stick up out of the brown arid plain of Northern Colorado like candles in a cake — when he stumbled on an unmarked open pipe jutting out of the dirt. Gas fumes wavered six inches in the air and when Browning dropped a pebble into the hole, he heard a kurplunk as it struck liquid. Abandoned wells are supposed to be capped and dry — but this one was about to overflow.

In his truck he fired up his laptop, accessing topographic maps, records and aerial photos of some 88,000 wells across the state, searching for this one. But it didn’t appear anywhere.

“I still absolutely have no idea how many wells are up in Rangely. It’s well over 1,000,” he said. “This one is definitely a potential hazard.”

It was the kind of puzzle that can take a day to sort through, and at least another day to bring in the equipment and crews to begin to take care of the abandoned well. It’s a wild card that can play havoc with the 10-wells-per-day inspection schedule Browning and so many other regulators are forced to keep.

New York State

If Texas and Colorado — the first- and eighth-ranked states in the country for number of natural gas wells — can provide a lesson, states like New York may have the most to learn.

New York, which sits atop the Marcellus Shale, has found itself at the epicenter of the nation’s drilling boom and the epicenter of the debate over drilling’s effect on the environment. The state’s relatively small oil and gas division currently oversees some 13,684 wells, but it is under intense pressure from drilling companies, which would like to see thousands more wells drilled.

Chesapeake Energy, one of the nation’s largest natural gas companies, has gobbled up more than a half a million acres of land leases in New York, and earlier this month Exxon said it would pay $31 billion for XTO Energy, a gas company that also holds extensive rights to drill in Pennsylvania and West Virginia’s Marcellus Shale.

The site of one of Canada-based Gastem USA’s wells in Otsego County, N.Y. (Joaquin Sapien/ProPublica)
The state has delayed that development, however, to study the environmental consequences of hydraulic fracturing and investigate a chorus of objections from people who fear that drilling will contaminate drinking water. Just last week New York City called for a ban on drilling inside its watershed, citing a consultant’s report that said it could jeopardize the drinking water for nine million residents.

At the same time, however, Gov. David Paterson, reeling from one of the worst state financial shortfalls in the nation, has made gas development a cornerstone of his draft energy plan.

New York regulators say that they have a better environmental record than most states when it comes to regulating oil and gas, and that a suite of proposed rules will put the state’s drilling laws on par with Colorado’s. Yet New York is the only state examined by ProPublica that has cut its regulatory staffing in recent years. Since 2003 New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation has reduced its oil and gas division field inspector staffing by 20 percent (its overall enforcement-related staff, when including management and office positions, dropped 10 percent), stoking concerns that when the drilling kicks into high gear, the state will suffer the same sort of problems that have plagued West Virginia and Texas.

Gruskin, the New York DEC’s executive deputy commissioner, says that the agency is committed to good oversight and that energy companies that want to drill in New York will simply have to adapt to the agency’s pace.

“It’s going to go slow. Very slow,” he said. “If we only have a certain number of inspectors available in that region, people are going to have to wait until they are available. And that’s just reality, that’s the way it’s going to be.”

But Gruskin’s promise not to let drilling outpace his headcount doesn’t match the recent past. Even as the regulatory staffing was being reduced, the DEC allowed a 676 percent increase in new wells drilled each year, a statistic that makes New York one of the fastest-growing drilling states in the nation. Meanwhile, the state’s 16 field inspectors took only three more enforcement actions against drilling companies in 2008 than they did in 2003.

If the flat enforcement statistics were a problem, Gruskin said, the number of spills and environmental problems would have gone up — something he points out hasn’t happened.

And unless it does, the state appears content to play chicken.

“I don’t think the industry believes that our resources have become so thin that they are not going to get caught.” Gruskin said. “There are a lot of eyes on what is going on.”

ProPublica reporter Sabrina Shankman contributed to this report. So did ProPublica’s director of research Lisa Schwartz and researcher Kitty Bennett.