But understaffing seems to be endemic across drilling states, especially where state regulatory agencies are responsible for checking both producing oil and gas wells and injection wells for waste or to enhance production.
In Montana, EPA auditors noted that inspectors are choosing which wells to inspect and have a "significant" workload. In North Dakota, EPA auditors also noted the pressures of "exponential" growth and an "increasing workload."
To meet the goal of inspecting each well annually, Texas inspectors would have to visit eight wells a day, every day, including Sundays and Christmas. That's after Texas' Railroad Commission hired 65 staffers last year to help inspect the state's 428,000 wells.
Nye, the commission's spokeswoman, said the state had sufficient funding and inspected each of its commercial disposal wells twice last year.
"The Commission has a stringent and comprehensive review process for these wells," Nye wrote in an email. "Railroad Commission staff work diligently to ensure saltwater disposal wells are not and will not be a problem."
But inspectors don't check on private disposal wells, which are far more numerous, with the same regularity. Nor do they keep a schedule for when officials should conduct such visits.
Other states are struggling under similar burdens. In Wyoming, inspectors would also have to check eight wells a day for each well to be checked once a year – a pace possible if wells are clustered together, experts said, but otherwise difficult to achieve. In West Virginia and Kansas, inspectors would have to check seven wells per day.
Visiting injection wells often ranks low among inspectors' priorities unless there is an accident or spill, according to a 2007 Texas auditor's report. The most urgent responsibility for regulators, beyond responding to emergencies, is typically overseeing the development of new oil and gas wells.
The result is that several years can pass between inspections of many injection well sites. In 2010, state regulators visited less than half of the Class 2 sites that a federal well inventory shows they were responsible for monitoring, ProPublica's analysis showed. EPA inspectors checked on such wells even less frequently, visiting less than one-quarter of the sites under their jurisdiction in 2010.
"I don't give a darn whether you have federal regulations, or a squeaky clean permitting system," said Bill Bryson, a member of the Kansas Geological Survey and the former head of Kansas' oil and gas commission. "If you don't have somebody going out and looking at the wells it doesn't do any good, and if you don't have the right people looking … it doesn't do any good either."
Much of the problem with oversight comes down to money, critics say. In some states, budgets and staff for oil and gas agencies have dropped relative to the number of new wells being drilled over the last nine years.
Kansas employs about the same number of inspectors as it did in 2003, even though it drills four times as many new wells. New drilling has nearly doubled in Louisiana over the same period, but the state's enforcement staff has remained static and its oil and gas budget has increased modestly. In Illinois, drilling has nearly doubled, while the number of enforcement staff has been reduced.
Since the Underground Injection Control program is run under a federal mandate, states rely partly on money from the EPA to fund oversight and enforcement. Federal dollars make up 20 percent of Texas' budget, for example. But in the last 22 years, the EPA's annual operating budget for injection has remained about the same: $10 million. Taking inflation into account, funding has dropped at least 40 percent from 1990 to 2012, though the regulations for all well classes have only grown more complex.
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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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