In partnership with ProPublica, DeSmog and Inside Climate News.
The oil and gas industry’s wastewater problem is a trillion-gallon ticking time bomb beneath our feet. For decades, drillers have injected this toxic waste product of oil and gas production back underground. But increasingly, it doesn’t stay where it should. Instead, it’s spreading for miles, irreversibly contaminating drinking water or blasting back to the surface.
In the past few months, a series of groundbreaking investigations have shed light on the industry’s wastewater crisis. Together, they show that this problem isn’t isolated to a few rural oil fields. It’s threatening land, water and people all over the country.
A cache of government documents dating back nearly a century casts serious doubt on the safety of the oil and gas industry’s most common method for disposing of its annual trillion gallons of toxic wastewater: injecting it deep underground. The documents show there may be little scientific merit to industry’s and government’s claims that injection wells are a safe means of disposal — putting drinking water and mineral resources in communities across the country at risk of contamination and jeopardizing local economies and public health. Oil and gas industry wastewater can contain toxic levels of salt, carcinogens, heavy metals and more than enough of the radioactive element radium to be defined by the EPA as radioactive waste.
Today, we are seeing the catastrophic results of lax regulation play out in communities across the country. In Oklahoma, wastewater from local oil and gas operations is spreading uncontrollably belowground, blasting out of old wells and contaminating drinking water. Documents show regulators failed to stop pollution or hold companies accountable.
In Texas, a small oil company contaminated water that the city of Midland was counting on for its future needs. State regulators did not issue fines, and the company used the bankruptcy process to move on while the public paid the price. The saga continues to this day. The pollution is still being cleaned up more than two decades after its discovery.
In this session, ProPublica’s Mark Olalde joins fellow investigative reporters from other news organization to break down their findings and illuminate the systemic failures fueling the nation’s oil and gas wastewater crisis. Submit your questions for our panelists below when you register.
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The Frontier launched in 2015 as Oklahoma’s premier investigative outlet.
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