Toxic Oil & Gas Wastewater Literally Pouring Out Of Ground; OK State Regulators Failed To Do Anything About It
In January 2020, Danny Ray started a complicated job with the Oklahoma agency that regulates oil and gas. The petroleum engineer who’d spent more than 40 years in the oil fields had been hired to help address a spreading problem, one that state regulators did not fully understand. The year prior, toxic water had poured out of the ground — thousands of gallons per day — for months near the small town of Kingfisher, spreading across acres of farmland, killing crops and trees.
Such pollution events were not new, but they were occurring with increasing frequency across the state. By the time Ray joined the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, the incidents had grown common enough to earn a nickname — purges. When oil and gas are pumped from the ground, they come up with briny fluid called “produced water,” many times saltier than the sea and laden with chemicals, including some that cause cancer. Most of this toxic water is shot back underground using what are known as injection wells. Wastewater injection had been happening in Oklahoma for 80 years, but something was driving the growing number of purges. Ray and his colleagues in the oil division set out to find the cause. As they scoured well records and years of data, they zeroed in on a significant clue: The purges were occurring near wells where companies were injecting oil field wastewater at excessively high pressure, high enough to crack rock deep underground and allow the waste to travel uncontrolled for miles.
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But Ray would come to learn that at the commission, identifying the causes of the purges was one thing. Stopping them — and preventing new ones — was a very different matter. “I don’t know if we’re ever going to fix it or not,” said Ray, 72, who resigned in frustration three years later. “They don’t want to listen.” A yearlong investigation by The Frontier and ProPublica reveals that the Oklahoma Corporation Commission did not mandate that responsible companies clean up the pollution belowground, as state law requires “when feasible.” Regulators say that once tainted by oil field brine, polluted groundwater is virtually impossible to treat. That makes preventing purges all the more critical — something the commission also failed to do, according to current and former employees. At times, records show, agency leadership sidelined employees who criticized the agency’s response.
Field reports from agency staff referred to individual incidents as “a threat to the environment and the safety of persons” or “a hazard to the ground water.” These notes describe orphan wells spewing toxic water near homes or into streams, leaving scars of salt residue. A homeowner reported that his grandchildren often play near a purging well. Ranchers have lost calves, which, drawn to the salty water, died after drinking it. But the full scale of Oklahoma’s purge problem — and state regulators’ awareness of it — has never previously been reported. Officials with the agency’s oil division acknowledged in an interview with The Frontier and ProPublica that overpressurized wells are contributing to the purges. They say some of these incidents are a result of historic pollution in a state where oil and gas was extracted long before modern regulations, beginning in the 1960s, required companies to protect the environment and plug inactive wells with cement. They noted that the state has taken steps to reduce injection pressures on new wells in recent years and is committed to “doing the right thing, holding operators accountable, protecting Oklahoma and its resources, and providing fair and balanced regulation.”
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https://www.propublica.org/article/oklahoma-oil-gas-wastewater-pollution