Above, Chris Wright, the Grifter in Chief now at Department of Energy, from a 2019 video where he demonstrated that fracking fluid, the stuff that gets pumped down into frack wells, is so safe you can drink it.
As I’ve pointed out before, the lie here is that people aren’t worried about the fluid that goes down the tube – it’s what comes back up that is causing the damage.
The Hill:
Fracking, the increasing use of which has driven the past decade’s oil and gas boom, has been central to much of the mounting pollution concern. Environmentalists and researchers have warned that the technique, in which cocktails of chemicals are pumped underground to shatter rock and release oil and gas, can contaminate groundwater — accusations the industry has fought for years.
But much of that discourse has centered on the direct impact of the fracking process, which leaves out a great deal of oil and gas operations. The EPA study also identified multiple other ways that the fuels’ extraction threatens water supplies — like spills or deliberate dumping. In the Permian, for example, The Hill observed numerous pumpjacks and storage tanks dripping “produced water,” or wastewater resulting from the fracking process, on the soil, sometimes in close proximity to farms. This water can resurface tainted with salt, heavy metals, benzene, toxic “forever chemicals” and even radioactive isotopes.
The EPA has also pointed to risks that come from the disposal of such wastewater in underground injection wells.
And in Texas, all of these risks have escalated as the amount of water being used to frack ever-deeper wells has risen — leading to new challenges in disposing of the resulting wastewater.
Each year, Texas oil and gas wells generate more than 12 billion barrels of wastewater — 4 billion of them in the Permian alone, more than all other U.S. oil fields combined. Texas is one of the only states moving forward with plans to allow this produced water to be disposed of in aboveground creeks and rivers. For example, in south Texas’s Eagle Ford Shale, researchers found 700 million gallons per year of produced water was being dumped legally into rivers and creeks that cattle drank.
Much of the rest goes back into the Earth. Permian drilling companies inject about 6 billion barrels per year into disposal wells, a process meant to keep it away from drinking water.
But the subsurface that those wells cut into is riven with underground cracks and fissures and pocked with as many as hundreds of thousands of “zombie wells,” oil and gas wells that were improperly sealed or left open to deteriorate. Many have rusted-out casings, making them potential pathways between underground water sources and the wastewater being forced into disposal wells. For decades, geologists have warned that underground injection wells could interact with these abandoned legacy wells and contaminate the underground water sources they are connected to.
Deep injection wells also lubricate faults in the Earth, sometimes causing earthquakes bad enough to crack home walls and foundations. One quake last July was strong enough to break municipal water pipes. After a decade of local outcry about fracking earthquakes, companies began injecting more shallowly. But this gave rise to another issue: Fracking fluid began bursting from the state’s old, failing or forgotten wells.
The tendency of fracking fluid to come back to the surface has turned cleanup into a game of “whack-a-mole,” as Kirk Edwards, a local oil and gas executive and former chair of the Permian Basin Petroleum Association, put it.
Zombie wells are “a black eye for the industry,” Edwards told The Hill. He warned that oil producers had perhaps a year to solve the issue before they would face local revolt. The area needed, he said, “a Manhattan Project for water” to treat and reuse fracking fluid.