ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, December 3, 1996 TAG: 9612030055
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: B-6 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: OBLONG, ILL.
SOURCE: MATT KELLEY ASSOCIATED PRESS
Laird Dart stops his pickup in the middle of a huge patch of bare ground in a cornfield.
``This is all sterile,'' he says with a sweep of his hand across the patch, which runs 660 feet long and 18 feet wide. ``Nothing will grow here. You can't keep it from washing away.''
The culprit: a long-abandoned oil well whose rusty pipes are leaking salt water into the soil Dart farms. A soil conservation expert once estimated 900 tons of dirt had washed away from the patch, Dart says.
``There's rules and regulations that's supposed to keep this from happening,'' he says in disgust.
Oil wells leak salt water because Illinois crude is mixed with salt water to begin with.
Most oil producers take the leftover salt water from their wells and pump it back into the ground to put pressure on the remaining oil, making it easier to pump out of the well. But pressurizing the underground system also can force oil and salt water out of abandoned wells that tap the same system.
The underground water many people use for drinking supplies is above the oil zone, and leaking oil wells can contaminate this water as well.
In the Crawford County hamlet of Hardinville, for example, residents pay up to $50 a month for treated water because oil and brine have contaminated many wells.
``Most of the people around here get city water, even though it's expensive,'' said Bill Rosborough, a farmer and real-estate broker living in Hardinville.
Dart and Rosborough belong to a group of farmers seeking a solution. Their work is complicated, they said, by politics and economics.
Much of the blame lies in lax state regulations and poor environmental practices by oil companies, said Lelan Russell, executive vice president of the Illinois Oil and Gas Association.
Until recently, the state required oil drillers to sign a bond agreeing to cap their wells when they were finished pumping. When operators of thousands of wells went out of business during the 1980s, many forfeited those bonds to the state. So, the state was left with debts that are difficult to collect and the job of capping wells dating back to 1900.
Now, oil producers pay a fee to the state to fund the abandoned wells program.
``We have to figure out how to deal with our past sins,'' he said. ``The state didn't realize they were going to inherit all of these thousands of wells when the bonds were forfeited.''
Another part of the problem, the farmers said, is that big oil companies sold their Illinois wells more than a decade ago when oil prices plunged. That left a legion of smaller companies, many financially unstable, with the job of operating the wells and capping them properly.
The farmers' group has backed a plan to form a state task force on the abandoned wells issue.
But the plan is stalled. The state Department of Natural Resources refuses to name members to such a panel, saying the Department of Mines and Minerals is plugging the wells.
The farmers said they will not give up until the problem is solved.
``We don't want to see this mess left to the next generation,'' Dart said.
LENGTH: Medium: 68 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. John Shore stands next to one of more than 300by CNBabandoned oil wells, many of them leaking, on his farm in Cumberland
County, Ill. color.