TITLE: ‘Monster Fracks’ Are Getting Far Bigger. And Far Thirstier.
EXCERPT: The Times documented the surging water usage by examining an industry database in which energy companies report the chemicals they pump into the ground while fracking. But the database also includes details on their water usage, revealing the dramatic growth.
The problem is particularly acute in Texas, where the state’s groundwater supply is expected to drop one-third by 2070. As the planet warms, scientists have predicted that Texas will face higher temperatures and more frequent and intense droughts, along with a decline in groundwater recharge. Some experts have warned that water issues could even constrain oil and gas production.
In the western portion of the Eagle Ford, one of the state’s major oil-producing regions, aquifer levels have fallen by up to 58 feet a year, a 2020 study by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin found, and fracking’s water demands could result in further regional declines of up to 26 feet.
Since 2011, BP has dug at least 137 groundwater wells in Texas for its oil and gas operations and reported using 9.1 billion gallons of water nationally during the past decade. EOG, one of the country’s largest frackers, consumed more than 73 billion gallons of water for fracking at the same time. Apache Corporation, Southwestern Energy, Chevron, Ovintiv and other major operators also have intensified water usage, the Times analysis found.
Oil companies require no permits to drill their own groundwater wells and there is no consistent requirement that groundwater used for fracking be reported or monitored. As drought has gripped Texas and the surrounding region, many communities have instituted water restrictions for residents even as fracking has been allowed to continue unabated.
TITLE: In West Virginia, Plan to Clean up Radioactive Fracking Waste Ends in Monster Lawsuit
EXCERPT: “Produced water is by far the largest wastestream created by the upstream oil and gas industry and over 90 percent of it is injected in disposal wells,” said J. Blake Scott, a 30-year industry veteran, who used to run an oilfield service company. He is now president of Waste Analytics, a Texas-based oilfield waste data firm. Given the problems with injection wells, and transporting the wastewater to them, Scott said, the industry has pursued a variety of projects to treat and clean the waste, providing “the potential to make large sums of money for waste disposal companies.”
In a 2019 report, Florida-based financial services firm Raymond James & Associates recommended that potential investors should do their homework on the oilfield wastewater sector.
“Most investors are simply unaware of the fact that as crude production grows, produced ‘dirty’ water grows even faster,” the report said. “This growing dirty water problem should create opportunities for investors.”
But a combination of loose regulations and a lack of official data on oilfield brine has left industry free to shape the narrative for investors and the public on fracking waste treatment, painting this complex and dangerous wastestream as relatively harmless, DeSmog has found.
Both government and academic researchers have established that, despite the innocent-sounding name, brine contains toxic levels of salt, heavy metals such as lead and arsenic, and the radioactive element radium. “Analyses of the water produced with the gas commonly show elevated levels of salinity and radium,” a 2011 U.S. Geological Survey report noted. The best spots to look for gas, said a report on the Marcellus published in 2008 by the Pennsylvania Geological Survey, is not necessarily where the shale is thickest, but where levels returned by the Geiger counter are highest. “To put it simply,” the report states. “RADIOACTIVITY = ORGANIC RICHNESS = GAS.”
Pennsylvania regulators have found radium in brine of the Marcellus formation at levels thousands of times above the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) safe drinking water limits, and hundreds of times above the level at which the EPA formally defines a wastestream as “radioactive waste.” Information provided by the EPA indicates the sludge that forms on the bottom of tanks and trucks that hold brine can contain even higher concentrations of radium, and also striking amounts of radioactive lead and polonium.
Fracking has added to this onslaught of toxic waste. Chemicals used in the fracking process return to the surface in the weeks and months after a well comes online, as a highly dangerous wastestream called “flowback.”
The EPA does not keep track of amounts of brine and flowback that issue from wells. But according to a 2021 report of the Oklahoma-based Groundwater Protection Council, the United States produces some three billion gallons of brine and flowback every day from both conventional wells and unconventional (fracked) wells. If a year’s worth of this oilfield wastewater were put into a standard oil barrel, and the barrels were then stacked atop one another, they would reach the moon and back nearly 22 times.
TITLE: EPA Approves Permit for Controversial Fracking Disposal Well in Pennsylvania
EXCERPT: In a day’s work, a typical injection well pumps millions of gallons of toxic wastewater from fracking thousands of feet below ground at high pressure into the old, abandoned well. Currently, there are 14 such injection wells operating in the state.
“We’re seeing a trend of these conventional well operators repurposing non-producing conventional wells into injection wells.” said Gillian Graber, executive director and founder of Protect PT, an organization focused on educating Pennsylvanians living in the state’s southwestern counties on the impacts of fossil fuel drilling on their communities.
“These conventional wells are just simply not engineered for this purpose,” she said.
Injecting oil and gas waste down a well repurposed for disposal can test the limits of its materials. “If you’re risking using an old well for many decades to come, it’s going to be repressurized many times at pressures higher than it ever saw as a gas well,” said Tony Ingraffea, a professor emeritus of engineering at Cornell University. Ingraffea, who has served as a consultant for residents fighting the proposed new well, added that repressurizations occur with each delivery, of which there can be several a day.
The new well would be the second in Plum Borough, which is 19 miles northeast of Pittsburgh in Allegheny County.