§ 127.004.Exclusions

Five exclusions, and each names a risk the industry allocates by contract for its own reasons.

Personal injury, death, or property injury that results from radioactivity. Radioactive sources are used in logging tools, and the consequences of a lost or breached source are catastrophic and specialised.

Property injury that results from pollution, including cleanup and control of the pollutant.

Note the limit: property injury only. Personal injury or death from pollution is not excluded, so the chapter continues to void indemnity for a negligent party’s pollution injuring people.

Property injury that results from reservoir or underground damage, including loss of oil, gas, other mineral substance, or water or the well bore itself.

Downhole risk is the classic subject of contractual allocation in this industry. A stuck string or a ruined reservoir can cost more than the whole contract, and the parties are left free to decide who carries it.

Personal injury, death, or property injury that results from the performance of services to control a wild well to protect the safety of the general public or to prevent depletion of vital natural resources.

This exclusion is about who will answer the call. Well control specialists work in the most dangerous conditions in the industry, and voiding their indemnity would make the work harder to obtain when it is most needed.

The stated purposes — public safety and preventing depletion of vital natural resources — are the justification, and they are not the ordinary commercial reasons the chapter otherwise refuses to credit.

Cost of control of a wild well, underground or above the surface. The final exclusion covers the expense of the operation itself, as distinct from injuries occurring during it.