Turtle Bayou oilfield cleanup opens nature preserve
Wednesday October 12, 2016
Until recently, Turtle Bayou was like many places in Texas abandoned by oil and gas development: alligators, bald eagles and bobcats lived among unplugged oil wells. Nonetheless, risks remained for the nature preserve's wildlife and human visitors–potential oil spills, waste pits and possible contaminants in the water.
But ultimately cleaning up remnants of the defunct oil field became an imperative for protecting drinking water quality for the Chambers-Liberty Counties Navigation District, which owns the 511-acre preserve. With help from the Texas Railroad Commission, which put more than $1 million o into the project, the preserve's wells were plugged and its oilfield sites cleaned up.
The rehabilitated preserve opened to the public on Friday as a free, safer place to hike, kayak and observe a rich mixture of wildlife that live that call the wetlands, prairie and forest home.
It allows us to have peace of mind,†said Matt Singer with the Galveston Bay Foundation, which has a conservation easement on the land. There is not going to be a gas leak or an oil spill out there.â€
The preserve is part of the Turtle Bayou Oil Field, which was discovered in 1952 along Lake Anahuac between Houston and Beaumont. Â Both federal and state funds financed the cleanup of the site, with most coming from the Railroad Commission's Oil and Gas Regulation and Cleanup Fund, a pot of money filled by fees taken from the oil and gas industry.
The money is used in areas like Turtle Bayou, where operators left wells unplugged. The commission also used $176,300 from its Brownfield Response Program, a five year $500,000 grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection agency to cleanup abandoned oil and gas sites.