Toxic Wastewater From Oil Fields Keeps Pouring Out of the Ground. Oklahoma Regulators Failed to Stop It.In January 2020, Danny Ray started a com...
Published on by Water Network Research, Official research team of The Water Network
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.
What Causes a Purge
Injection wells shoot oil field wastewater back underground at high pressure. This can fracture a hard layer of rock meant to contain the fluid. It can also push wastewater up through Oklahoma’s large number of inactive wells that have not been properly plugged with cement.
Haisam Hussein for ProPublica
By November 2020, at least 10 sites were expelling polluted water, according to internal agency emails obtained through public records requests.
The number of purges has grown steadily since. A Frontier and ProPublica analysis of pollution complaints submitted to the agency found more than 150 reports of purges in the past five years. Throughout that time, state officials were aware of the environmental and public health crisis as Ray and others at the agency investigated the proliferating purges and uncovered a complex stew of causes.
Ray often likens his home state, where oil has been drilled for more than a century and is a major industry, to a block of Swiss cheese, punctured with the nation’s second-highest number of “orphan” wells — inactive wells whose owners have abandoned them without properly plugging them with cement. The state has catalogued about 20,000 orphan wells, but federal researchers believe the true number may be over 300,000, based on historic industry data and airborne imaging techniques that identify old wells underground. These old wells provide easy pathways for the injected wastewater to zoom up thousands of feet to the surface, contaminating drinking water sources along the way.
Ray particularly worried about the volume of wastewater being crammed underground by high-pressure injection — tens of billions of gallons each year, enough to fill the Empire State Building over 300 times. Oklahoma’s vast landscape of unplugged holes combined with its large number of injection wells operating at high pressures creates conditions ripe for purges.
Number of Injection Wells in Top Oil-Producing States
Oklahoma has the third-largest number of injection wells in the country, much more than other prolific oil states, because of its long history of oil and gas extraction and distinct geology.
Sources: Environmental Protection Agency, Energy Information Administration
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.”
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https://www.propublica.org/article/oklahoma-oil-gas-wastewater-pollution?utm_source=flipboard&utm_content=ProPublica/magazine/All+StoriesTaxonomy
- Energy
- Produced Water From Oil & Gas Industry
- Water Wells
- Well Drilling
- Water Well Casing
- Oklahoma, United States
- Water and Wastewater