In the article, Nobel discusses oil and gas wastewater injection across the country and spotlights the injection wells and prevalence of oil and gas waste in Southeastern Ohio, right across the Ohio River from my hometown of Parkersburg.
“The U.S. oil and gas industry produces 25.9 billion barrels of wastewater each year (or 1.09 trillion gallons), according to the most recent data available, a 2022 report from Groundwater Protection Council that relies on 2021 data,” Nobel observes. “That’s enough to form a line of waste barrels to the moon and back 28 times.”
Nobel shares that, “This wastewater — variously referred to by the industry as ‘produced water,’ ‘brine,’ ‘salt water,’ or simply ‘water’ — comes to the surface naturally during extraction of oil and gas. Some 96%, 24.8 billion barrels, is disposed of by injecting it back underground.
“In 2020, there were 181,431 injection wells (referred to in some regions as saltwater disposal wells or SWDs) in the United States, according to an EPA fact sheet — roughly 11 injections wells for every Starbucks across the country.”
While “water” or “brine” may sound harmless, Nobel observes that "oil and gas industry wastewater can contain toxic levels of salt, carcinogenic substances, and heavy metals, and often far more than enough of the radioactive element radium to be defined by the EPA as radioactive waste.
“Other industries also use injection wells to dispose of dangerous waste, such as the pharmaceutical and steel industries, slaughterhouses, and pesticide manufacturers.”
Injection wells have ‘100 years of alarm bells’
The core thesis of Nobel’s piece is that there have been “a hundred years of alarm bells” concerning injection wells. At a four-day “Underground Waste Management and Environmental Implications” symposium in Houston in December 1971, Nobel quotes and paraphrases United States Geological Survey hydrologist John Ferris as stating the following regarding storage of injected waste in so-called “impermeable rock” underground:
“'The term ‘impermeable’ is never an absolute. All rocks are permeable to some degree,” said Ferris. Wastewater will inevitably escape the injection zone and ‘engulf everything in its inexorable migration toward the discharge boundaries of the flow system,’ such as a water well, a spring, or an old oil or gas well.'”
Nobel also quotes engineering professor emeritus at Cornell University, Anthony Ingraffea, stating “One might be tempted to believe that well construction designs, materials and techniques on wells constructed decades ago were vastly different than those of today. This is false.”
“Advocacy groups that have spent decades tracking the EPA’s oil and gas waste rules,” Nobel writes, “point out that the business model of the U.S. fracking industry depends on operators being able to get rid of waste cheaply.”
West Virginia is not known for injection wells the way Southeast Ohio is, but pollution doesn’t care about state boundary lines. Even big, expensive facilities like the Antero Clearwater Facility in Doddridge County — designed to process 60,000 barrels of Marcellus shale “flowback” or “produced water” per day for reuse in the fracking process — produce wastes like a landfill for sludge and salt residue.
The water Antero once treated is only for reuse in the fracking process. It can never again — at least on human life timescales — safely reenter the water table for use or consumption by humans and other living things. Efficiently treating wastewater, as Antero claims it did, can allow for repeated reuse, but often requires mixing in fresh water as the contaminants make repeat treatment very difficult.
Antero's $275 million facility been idled since September 2019 for “cost-effectiveness evaluation." Following a major legal dispute between Antero Midstream and its contractor, Veolia Water Technologies, regarding the effectiveness of the actual performance of the treatment process. As a side note, on Feb. 13, Antero Resources reached an $11.1 million settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice and West Virginia for air pollution violations at 242 other facilities.
As with the coal industry, plastics and petrochemicals industries and others, the oil and gas industry should be held responsible for its enormous and incredibly dangerous wastes. Whether it's methane and other greenhouse gas emissions, other air pollutants or fracking wastewater, the industry must be held accountable for finding solutions. The days of privatizing profits while socializing risks and dumping these burdens on ratepayers and taxpayers must come to a swift end.
Tragically, our federal and state governments are only making matters worse.
Eric Engle, of Parkersburg, is board president of Mid-Ohio Valley Climate Action.
