Oil and gas injection wells risk to groundwater in Texas
A legal filing to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by a group of NGOs alleges that tens of thousands of oil and gas injection wells pose threats to groundwater. EPA has launched an investigation.
In December 2023, highly saline wastewater surged the surface at a private ranch in Crane County, Texas, thought to be erupting from an old oil and gas well. The release ruined 30 acres of land owned by a rancher named Bill White. The well, spewing waste at a rate of 33 barrels per hour, was not brought under control until late January. The large pool of wastewater killed vegetation, and grazing cattle may now be impossible.
But White said contaminated land was not his only concern. “The water thing is the bigger damage. If it’s getting into groundwater, that damage is a lot more than just the 30 acres,” White told a local news station.
Nearly two years earlier, a similar incident occurred just a mile away. A geyser of wastewater that had been injected underground shot 100 feet into the air and contaminated the land.
“If it’s something man made, then we need to quit doing that,” White said.
These two incidents were cited in a petition filed to the U.S. EPA in March, submitted by Commission Shift, a Texas-based NGO that advocates for energy industry regulatory reform, and Clean Water Action, an environmental NGO. They are represented by the legal nonprofit Earthjustice.
They argue that the practice of injecting fracking waste underground may pose a danger to drinking water across Texas, as catastrophic leaks occur with alarming regularity. In late May, the EPA responded and said it would begin investigating the matter.
During the hydraulic fracturing process, companies drill wells, then fracture them with enormous volumes of water and chemicals, pumped underground at high pressure. Oil and gas seeps out through the fissures and flows up through the well.
But toxic wastewater is also brought to surface. Such water can contain heavy metals, toxic chemicals, and even radioactivity. Operators need to dispose of that water somehow, and often opt to pump it into deep underground “injection wells.”
Separately, a larger number of injection wells are used to pump CO2 underground in order to extract additional volumes of oil and gas, a process known as “enhanced oil recovery,” or EOR.
Both processes — wastewater disposal and EOR wells — are regulated under a federal law that is supposed to protect drinking water. Wells are divided up into different “classes” depending on what they contain. Wells that deal with oil and gas injections — fracking wastewater and EOR — fall under the “Class II” category.
The EPA has the authority to regulate Class II wells. However, the EPA can delegate that authority to state regulators, an arrangement preferred by the industry because it has broadly led to more lax oversight. In 1982, Texas became the first state to obtain that delegated authority — known as “primacy” — from the EPA. The state has overseen the underground injection well programme ever since.
In the ensuing decades, Texas has permitted tens of thousands of injection wells. Nearly three-quarters of them are used in EOR; most of the rest are for wastewater disposal.
Drinking water contamination
The petition from Commission Shift alleges the Texas Railroad Commission (RRC) — the state entity that regulates the oil and gas industry — has put Texas’ drinking water at risk by permitting tens of thousands of injection wells.
“Through mismanagement and inadequate resourcing, the State of Texas has utterly failed to implement and enforce strong protections to ensure the oil and gas waste from Class II underground injection wells do not contaminate aquifers,” the petition states.
The petition calls upon the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to revoke Texas’ authority to regulate Class II injection wells. If that were to occur, it could potentially suspend new permitting.
“In delegating that authority, the EPA said, ‘Okay, you can manage this program, but you have to ensure that drinking water is protected.’ So, that’s a requirement that RRC needs to abide by in order to effectively manage this program under the law,” Allison Brouk, a senior attorney at Earthjustice, told Gas Outlook.
The document indicates that the Texas RRC has presided over a programme that has resulted in extensive environmental damage, including impacts that go beyond groundwater contamination.
“Due to the vast number of injection wells that scatter the State, Texas frequently experiences significant events related to well operations, including uncontrolled well blowouts, larger and more frequent earthquakes, growing sinkholes, and, most importantly here, contaminated [underground sources of drinking water].”
As the document notes, injection wells can lead to an increase in earthquakes, a phenomenon known as “induced seismicity.” That has occurred in many parts of Texas, but also in Ohio, Oklahoma, and even further afield — in Argentina, and the UK.
Texas has also seen an increase in sinkholes and ground uplift — when the ground surges in elevation — which is believed to be linked to injection wells. A Wall Street Journal visual investigation earlier this year depicted the enormous changes in the landscape that have occurred in Texas in recent years.
“They pretty much approve all injection well permits,” Virginia Palacios, executive director of Commission Shift, told Gas Outlook, referring to the RRC.
Palacios said the RRC does not adequately take these risks into account. “They’re kind of just like working from muscle memory, right? They just approve, approve, approve,” she said. “They’re not taking a time to like stop and say, ‘hm, maybe not this one.’”
In one particularly egregious example, an old oil well has been spewing contaminated water and toxic gas in such large volumes that it has formed a lake in the middle of the desert. Researchers who visit “Lake Boehmer,” as it is nicknamed, must wear hazmat suits, which provide protection from hazardous agents. The Texas RRC denies it has any jurisdiction over the site, claiming that is a decades-old well, and was long ago legally converted into a water well.
However, the RRC continues to issue permits for new injection wells into the same geologic formation, which critics say is only adding to underground pressure and the environmental mess in the region.
“It’s flowing at a rate of 200 to 600 gallons per minute. It has high readings of radionuclides and hydrogen sulfides coming from it,” Palacios said. “And here we are, allowing more injection into the same formation that that well is exploding from.”
The RCC won’t take responsibility and help clean up Lake Boehmer, but “nor will they address the injection that is likely causing Lake Boehmer,” Palacios said.
The Railroad Commission did not respond to questions from Gas Outlook.
CO2 storage in injection wells
Meanwhile, there is a growing interest in using injection wells for permanent CO2 storage and sequestration. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act even provides a subsidy for geologic storage, making it more lucrative to inject CO2 underground.
CO2 storage pose serious safety risks. If leaked, it can suffocate people in the vicinity, as one infamous 2020 incident in Mississippi demonstrates. Additionally, when CO2 interacts with groundwater, it can form carbonic acid, and it can mobilise heavy metals — resulting in groundwater contamination.
The problem in Texas is that CO2 storage is supposed to be regulated as a Class VI well, which has its own set of technical requirements and regulations. But Palacios said there is a danger that companies may obtain Class II permits under the guise of using it for enhanced oil recovery, and then convert them to Class VI permits.
“It’s a much easier process to get a Class II injection well permit, and then you could turn it into a long-term Class VI storage facility by going through a much easier administrative process, not having to do all the stuff that you have to do if you’re just starting out as a Class VI well,” Palacios said.
Even as Texas fails to address the growing environmental fallout from drilling waste, it may be on the verge of compounding the problem with a growing trend of CO2 storage.
“I think they’re real risks to the public of that kind of a process being allowed to take place,” Palacios said.
She added that the broader concern is if Texas obtains “primacy” for Class VI wells. Just as Texas has regulated its own Class II injection well programme for decades — instead of the U.S. EPA — it is now trying to secure the same arrangement for CO2 wells under the Class VI program.
“This is going to speed up the whole process,” Palacios said. “That’s the whole point of Texas getting primacy — so they can permit more wells, faster.”
It is unclear how long the EPA investigation will take, but Brouk said that the record of failure by the Texas RRC was clear, and she hopes EPA will intervene. “The EPA needs to ensure that drinking water will be protected,” she said.
“They need to look at the long history of instances of well failures, see what the causes of that are, and put a halt to the permitting program until they can ensure that these don’t continue to happen in the future.”