Oil & Gas Waste Is Exempt From Regulation, And The Industry Injects 18 Billion Barrels/Year Into The Ground

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What to do with the toxic and often radioactive waste created by drilling is a problem so large and untenable that one of Nobel’s sources calls it “the secret of the century.” Despite the scale of the problem—the American Petroleum Institute has estimated that the industry generates 18 billion barrels of waste fluids every year—it’s an issue that has escaped public scrutiny for decades. And because oil and gas waste is exempted from hazardous waste regulations under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, it has also largely escaped regulatory scrutiny. (Another source in the book refers to the waste disposal situation in Pennsylvania as “the wild west” because of the lack of oversight.)

Injection wells, once seen as a flawed short-term solution, now account for 96 percent of the oil and gas industry’s wastewater disposal, Nobel said. “If you kept out all the injection wells,” he said, “you would actually shut this industry down because they couldn’t operate without them.” Nobel spoke with Inside Climate News about his experiences interviewing workers, scientists, advocates and residents about oil and gas waste; the methods for disposal that have been used historically and those that are still being used now; and how the industry is changing the way it deals with waste.

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The other issue is the waste leaking out. John Ferris, a U.S. Geological Survey research hydrologist, explains that “impermeable is never an absolute. All rocks are permeable to some degree,” so that immediately disintegrates EPA’s defense of injection wells that we’re injecting into this target zone that can hold the waste. Ferris says the idea that any rock layer could act as a cork to seal off the waste is simply wrong. He says, “Waste will always and inevitably escape the injection zone and engulf everything in its inexorable migration toward the discharge boundaries of the flow system.”

What he’s saying is that the waste is always leaking. We do not have an underground storage locker below ground. We have this environment in which you have injected this bulb of waste and it’s slowly expanding out. Initially it may actually push other things occupying that pore space down there out of the way, such as water, which is often what occupies porous layers underground. A farmer’s well or a spring on the side of the hill may actually flow even more copiously with fresh water. What’s happening is there’s this bulb of waste underground, pushing the water at pressure, creating that pressure that allows the spring to flow faster.

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/09072024/oil-gas-waste-investigation-book/