"The program is basically a paper tiger," said Mario Salazar, a former senior technical advisor to the Environmental Protection Agency who worked with its injection regulation program for 25 years. While wells that handle hazardous waste from other industries have been held to increasingly tough standards, Salazar said, Class 2 wells remain a gaping hole in the system. "There are not enough people to look at how these wells are drilled … to witness whether what they tell you they will do is in fact what they are doing."
Thanks in part to legislative measures and rulemaking dating back to the late 1970s, material from oil and gas drilling is defined as nonhazardous, no matter what it contains. Oversight of Class 2 wells is often relegated to overstretched, understaffed state oil and gas agencies, which have to balance encouraging energy production with protecting the environment. In some areas, funding for enforcement has dropped even as drilling activity has surged, leading to more wells and more waste overseen by fewer inspectors.
"Class 2 wells constitute a serious problem," said John Apps, a leading geoscientist and injection expert who works with the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "The risk to water? I think it's high, partially because of the enormous number of these wells and the fact that they are not regulated with the same degree of conscientiousness."
In response to questions about the adequacy of oversight, the EPA, which holds primary regulatory authority over injection wells, reissued a statement it supplied to ProPublica for an earlier article in June.
"Underground injection has been and continues to be a viable technique for subsurface storage and disposal of fluids when properly done," a spokesperson wrote. "EPA recognizes that more can be done to enhance drinking water safeguards and, along with states and tribes, will work to improve the efficiency of the underground injection control program."
Some at the EPA and at the Department of Justice, which prosecutes environmental crimes, say the system's blind spots suggest that many more violations likely go undiscovered – at least until they mushroom into a crisis.
That's what happened at Rosharon.
The accident prompted the EPA to examine what else had been dumped at the site, ultimately exposing a scheme by a company that was not involved in the explosion, Texas Oil and Gathering, to pass off deadly chemicals from a petroleum refining plant as saltwater from drilling.
The switch saved the company substantial fees by allowing it to dispose of the material in a Class 2 well, instead of a more stringently controlled well for hazardous waste, federal investigators said.
Texas Oil and Gathering's owner and operations manager were convicted of conspiring to dump illegal waste and violating the Safe Drinking Water Act. Both declined to comment for this article.
Texas officials acknowledged that they had not looked beyond the paperwork submitted by the operators using the well. The delivery trucks weren't inspected; the wastewater was not sampled.
"Staff had no reason to believe at the time that such testing was necessary at this facility,'' Ramona Nye, a spokeswoman for the Railroad Commission of Texas, which regulates the oil and gas industry activity in the state, wrote in an email. "The likelihood of unpermitted material being disposed of is low.''
William Miller, the EPA's chief investigator on the case, points out that the only reason anyone was held accountable for injection-related violations was because the site blew up.
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6 Comments
Add CommentI am beginning to see how all those distopian movies can easily become reality. Well, maybe if we didn't have to eat, or drink, or breathe, it wouldn't be so bad.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisProtecting the environment is too much of a burden. All regulation does is drive up costs; so, regulations are the enemy.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCorporations: all the privileges of person-hood, with none of the responsibilities.
As is evident through Congress, you can on the one hand say marijuana has no medical value, while on the other hand own the patents describing its medical uses in great detail.
The shills in power deserve to be brought low to the ground. Rewriting definitions and history books should not be the role of government.
I know that this is a silly idea but how about this: we enforce the laws that are already on the books instead of writing new laws to superceede the laws that are already not being enforced.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe situation is hopeless. Dumb people run the world. Its only a matter of time. It is bad for us, but I really feel bad for my children.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI knew that oil and gas companies somehow were exempt from EPA hazardous material regulations, but this article was so informative of the specifics of how those laws were passed and circumvented. It was educational, and yes, exhaustive; I applaud the subject, length, and content.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe price of nat gas has dropped from $9/unit to about $2/unit since fracking became the industry standard practice. Certainly there is the ability for these companies to contribute substantially to the cost of proper over site. Imagine what they paid in campaign contributions to lobby legislators in Washington and in numerous states.
There are those who maintain that the users of public services should be the ones that pay for them. This is why there are tolls on roads, fees for national parks, fees for documents like marriage licenses, birth certificates, drivers licenses, etc. While I do not agree with those fees, those same supporters claim corporations are people and have rights. Why then should gas companies not pay the cost of public over site necessary to protect natural resources such as drinking water aquifers?
The largest underground aquifer in the USA is in the West, just east of the Rocky Mtns, spanning ND to NM. There are now more than a 100,000 waste wells that make deposits below that resource. No matter how well you check that water supply, by the time we find contamination, it will be too late to do anything about it. As stated in the article above, the waste cannot be extracted from where it was put, much less where it travels to over time.
The waste is sometimes pumped into these wells under similar pressures to the fracking operation. Well it seems reasonable that in a 100,000 such wells, that the rock between the deposits and the aquifer will at some place be compromised. Given that 1/2 the population and most of the food production relies on this one aquifer, it is amazing that we permit any waste wells there. It makes one feel so hopeless that common sense takes a back seat to wealthy industrial giants.
If nat gas prices returned to historic levels such as the $9/unit mentioned, there would be more than enough revenue to these companies to eliminate the class II classification and treat hazardous waste as what it is.
Technology exists to purify the fracking waste water, no matter what well or company was the source. One engineering company claims they can make any of that water pure enough to drink. The cost of these methods are not unrealistic. I think the public needs to push on this issue. Thanks for the article.
So in the case of Texas Oil and Gathering, two people committed federal crimes that directly lead to the deaths of 3 people. Last I heard, that qualifies as first degree murder. Where is the richly deserved death penalty?
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