This story was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center. It is part three in a four-part series. Read part one here and part two here.OD...

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This story was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center. It is part three in a four-part series. Read part one here and part two here.

ODESSA, Texas — For retired pastor Columbus Cooper, life can be divided into two periods: the time when he could still drink water out of his tap, and the time after.


When Cooper and his wife bought their home in West Odessa in the heart of the Permian Basin, the U.S.’s most productive oil field, they knew they were surrounded by tank batteries holding spent fuel or fracking fluid and injection wells injecting that waste fluid back into the Earth.

But as lifelong Odessans, they weren’t worried — until their water started tasting funny and the stench crept in. Until, six years ago, two people died in a pump house down the street. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) later confirmed what many already suspected: The very infrastructure that had fueled the region’s economic boom was exposing the people who lived there to dangerous toxins.

Without access to city water, West Odessa residents — like rural Texans across oil country — largely depend on water from wells drilled into the aquifer below. Frequently those wells are as little as a few hundred yards from oil and gas wells or other infrastructure linked with toxic pollution — which are just one explosion or spill away from ruining them.

Now, Cooper laughs when he thinks about their decision to move to the neighborhood. “I assumed they would be regulated,” Cooper told The Hill, pointing to a tank battery venting invisible, noxious gas. “I assumed somebody would be making sure we were safe.”

The oil and gas industry has long been a cornerstone of the Texas economy, and has brought a flood of new jobs and money to the Permian Basin in recent years as production has climbed to new highs. In 2024 alone, the industry paid a record $27 billion in state taxes and royalties and employed nearly half a million people, many earning more than $124,000 a year.

The industry and Texas lawmakers argue that beyond the economy, the state’s fossil fuel production is important for American energy independence — and the environment. The Permian is the regional wellhead of a vast outpouring of oil and — particularly — gas that both the U.S. government and Western oil industry tout as a means of redirecting global markets away from more-polluting energy sources like coal and foreign producers they say produce dirtier products.


Every country is concerned about three things in descending order: national security, energy security and the health of its land and water, ConocoPhillips CEO Ryan Lance said in March at CERAWeek by S&P Global. “Natural gas,” he said, “delivers on all fronts.”

But for many Texans on the doorstep of the state’s staggering fossil fuel expansion of the past decade, the boom has come at a cost. Millions of Texans now live within striking distance of oil infrastructure — exposed to airborne chemicals, groundwater contamination and, in extreme cases, sudden, violent failures of aging wells, all of which creates public concern. “You don’t want to live close to any of this development — particularly if you’re surrounded by wells,” Gunnar Schade, a Texas A&M atmospheric chemist, told The Hill.

Fracking, the increasing use of which has driven the past decade’s oil and gas boom, has been central to much of the mounting pollution concern. Environmentalists and researchers have warned that the technique, in which cocktails of chemicals are pumped underground to shatter rock and release oil and gas, can contaminate groundwater — accusations the industry has fought for years.


A 2016 EPA study has been cited by both environmentalists and the industry as support for their positions on the issue. The report found that while direct fracking-related water contamination — penetrating from subterranean oil wells to water wells — was possible, it was rare.

Industry groups such as the Texas Oil and Gas Association point to the steps operators take to wall off wells from surrounding groundwater behind “layers of steel casing and cement, as well as thousands of feet of rock.” And the Independent Petroleum Association of America points to “no fewer than two dozen scientific reviews,” including the EPA study, that “have concluded that fracking does not pose a major threat to groundwater.”

But much of that discourse has centered on the direct impact of the fracking process, which leaves out a great deal of oil and gas operations. The EPA study also identified multiple other ways that the fuels’ extraction threatens water supplies — like spills or deliberate dumping. In the Permian, for example, The Hill observed numerous pumpjacks and storage tanks dripping “produced water,” or wastewater resulting from the fracking process, on the soil, sometimes in close proximity to farms. This water can resurface tainted with salt, heavy metals, benzene, toxic “forever chemicals” and even radioactive isotopes.
SOURCE: https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/5195603-oil-gas-toxic-pollution-texas-permian-basin/

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