In 2009, Lewis was convicted of a felony charge for gaming the safety tests on Roseclare's wells and was sentenced to 3 years probation and a $5,000 fine. He maintains his innocence, saying the wells were rigged by his father, who ran the company's local operations until his death, but said such practices were typical in Kentucky's oil and gas industry. "I'd say it's pretty common," said Lewis, whose probation was commuted in 2011. "But it's not something people go around talking about either."
From Lewis' perspective, injection well operators sometimes have little choice but to try to fool inspectors. Many wells are decades old and were drilled before the current regulations were written. Some are decrepit, their cement aging and cracked. They also can't be easily – or cheaply – repaired.
Lewis, who is now a part-owner of Roseclare and continues to run its operations, said that before wells were due for EPA inspections he would pretest them himself. If one failed, he'd enter problem-solving mode, prepping the site for the EPA's arrival. Two of his employees testified that he ordered them to fabricate and install the diverters.
"You go and work in it and try to get it to hold and it won't hold," Lewis said of the wells. "What are you going to do? It's kind of a ‘Don't ask, don't tell.'"
Randy Ream, the Assistant U.S. Attorney for Kentucky's Western District who prosecuted the case against Lewis, called his scheme unusually elaborate but agreed that efforts to get around the rules for injection wells are common. Sometimes, he said, they result in the contamination of private drinking water wells.
"We have people who have constructed wells that are not certified injection wells, or we have people who will put their brine in a tank and carry it over and put it in somebody else's well," Ream said. "One guy, he's got oil coming out of his shower head."
"There is just so much brine," Ream added, "and you have to get rid of it."
So Many Wells, So Few Inspectors
One obstacle to more effective enforcement in Kentucky and elsewhere, Ream said, is that regulators cannot always keep up with well tests and inspections.
According to EPA records, Kentucky has 3,403 Class 2 wells, which are supposed to be tested for mechanical integrity once every five years. But since 2007, an average of just 253 wells a year have been tested, less than half as many as there should have been to remain on schedule.
A spokeswoman for the EPA's regional office in Atlanta said in an email that only half of Kentucky's injection wells are actively used and only active wells can be tested. She said mechanical integrity tests are performed on each well every 36 months, but did not address the discrepancy between this schedule and the number of tests reflected in EPA data.
The EPA employs just six people to check its wells across the southeast, not just in Kentucky, but in Tennessee and Florida, too. Those same people are also responsible for working with state inspection programs in North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, which have their own inspection staffs.
Most states aim to visit injection sites at least once a year, and some meet or exceed that schedule, EPA records show. Ohio, for example, recently added staff dedicated exclusively to injection oversight and visits its active injection sites every 12 weeks. (Ohio also insists that Class 2 wells meet many of the more stringent testing and permitting regulations it uses for Class 1 hazardous waste wells.)
"Ohio's [rules] are based on what we felt we needed to develop to continue to alleviate any concerns," said Tomastik, of Ohio's Department of Natural Resources. "Obviously without regulatory presence in the field, the operator is not concerned about operating within the requirements."
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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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