"If you can get the stuff down the well how is anyone ever going to know what it was?" said Miller, who retired from the EPA in 2011. "There is no way to recover it. It's an easy way to commit a crime and not have any evidence left of it afterwards."
States and Industry Resist Environmental Protections
One reason that Texas Oil and Gathering was able to dump toxic waste for years without getting caught is that environmental regulations governing how the oil and gas industry disposes of material underground were weakened almost as soon as they were written.
A series of injection accidents beginning in the 1960s – involving pesticide waste in Colorado, dioxins in Beaumont, Texas, and drilling waste that spread for miles through a drinking water aquifer in Arkansas – prompted lawmakers to impose tougher rules on injection wells.
Wells were divided into classes, depending on the source of the waste they handled. Class 1 wells for chemical, pharmaceutical and other industrial wastes, along with Class 2 wells for the oil and gas industry, were subjected to tough controls under the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974. From the start, the EPA says, oil and gas waste was treated as less toxic than waste from other industries, but all such material was seen as dangerous to drinking water.
Companies drilling the wells were required to do geological modeling to ensure that surrounding rock layers would not allow waste to escape through fissures or fault lines. They also were required to check for the presence of other wells that could be a conduit for contamination. The EPA set baseline standards and mandated periodic inspections for defects. In many cases, states oversaw their implementation.
The ink had barely dried on the new regulations when the oil and gas industry – aided by sympathetic state regulators who thought their existing oversight was sufficient – began arguing that its waste should be treated differently.
Industry officials lobbied for state oil and gas agencies, some of which already had rules in place, to oversee Class 2 wells, not federal or local environmental officials. Some argued state energy regulators had greater expertise in well construction and regional geology.
In 1980, California Rep. Henry Waxman sponsored a measure that allowed the EPA to delegate authority to oversee Class 2 injection to state oil and gas regulators, even if the rules they applied varied from the Safe Drinking Water Act and federal guidelines.
A few years later, Dick Stamets, New Mexico's chief oil and gas regulator at the time, told a crowd of state regulators and industry representatives that the Waxman amendment was a biblical deliverance from oppressive federal oversight for the drilling industry.
"The Pharaoh EPA did propose regulations and there was chaos upon the earth," Stamets said. "The people groaned and labored, and great was their suffering until Moses Section 1425 (the Waxman amendment) did lead them to the Promised Land."
In the late 1980s, the EPA moved to impose more stringent measures on injection wells after Congress banned injection of "hazardous" waste. The new rules barred underground dumping unless companies could prove the chemicals weren't a health threat. To earn permission to inject the waste, companies would have to conduct exhaustive scientific reviews to dispose of hazardous materials, proving their waste wouldn't migrate underground for at least 10,000 years.
The energy industry moved preemptively to shield itself from these changes, too. The Safe Drinking Water Act prohibited the EPA from interfering with the economics of the oil and gas industry unless there was an imminent threat to health or the environment. The industry argued that its waste was mostly harmless brine and that testing and inspecting hundreds of thousands of wells for waste that would qualify as "hazardous" would delay drillers or cost them a fortune.
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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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