"It would have been crippling to U.S. oil and gas production," said Lee Fuller, vice president of government relations for the Independent Petroleum Association of America. Fuller was a former staff member for the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, whose ranking member at the time, the late Texas Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, led the fight against the hazardous waste rule. "So yes, the industry was very aggressively seeking some mechanism to address those consequences."
Bentsen had won the industry a temporary reprieve in 1980 by persuading Congress to redefine any substance that resulted from drilling – or "producing" – an oil or gas well as "non-hazardous," regardless of its chemical makeup, pending EPA study. In 1988, the EPA made it permanent, handing oil and gas companies a landmark exemption. From then on, benzene from the fertilizer industry was considered hazardous, threatening health and underground water supplies; benzene derived from wells for the oil and gas industry was not.
The effect was that the largest waste stream headed for underground injection, that from the oil and gas industry, was exempted from one of the most effective parts of environmental rules governing hazardous waste disposal.
"A blanket exemption without any sense of what the actual chemistry of these wastewaters is, is very concerning," said Briana Mordick, a geologist at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Other protections also began to unravel, widening the gap between Class 1 and Class 2 well regulations. Both regulators and the industry regularly refer to drilling waste as "salt water" even though, according to a 2002 EPA internal training document obtained by ProPublica, "on any given day, the injectate of a Class II-D well has the potential to contain hazardous concentrations of solvents, acids, and other… hazardous wastes."
Once the wastes were defined as nonhazardous, there was little justification for holding Class 2 wells to the same rules as other waste being injected deep underground.
Today, for example, Class 1 wells for hazardous waste are tested for pressure continuously and are supposed to be inspected for cracks and leaks every 12 months. Oil and gas wells – though the goal is to inspect their sites annually – have to be tested only once every five years.
Injection wells are known to cause earthquakes, so Class 1 wells usually have rigorous seismic and geologic siting requirements. Often, Class 2 wells do not. An EPA staff member might spend an entire year reviewing an application for a new hazardous waste well. Class 2 wells are often permitted in bulk, meaning hundreds can be green-lighted in a matter of days.
Where Class 1 hazardous waste is injected, companies have to inspect a two-mile radius for old wells, making sure contaminants will have no avenue to shoot back up into drinking water aquifers or to the surface. The minimum standard for oil and gas companies is to inspect within 400 yards, even though it is widely believed, according to internal EPA memorandums obtained by ProPublica, that such a rule is arbitrarily defined, runs against "much existing evidence" and "may not afford adequate protection" of drinking water.
EPA officials acknowledge that their Class 1 regulations represent the best practices to keep water safe and that the risk of a Class 2 well leaking is no different than the risk of a Class 1 well leaking. The contrast in regulations reflects "varying legal authorities, not varying levels of confidence," an agency spokeswoman wrote in an email, referring to the mandate not to let environmental rules interfere with the nation's drilling progress.
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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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