“This is kind of like the oil field apocalypse.' West Texas landowners fear that injections of fracking waste could threaten aquifers. With insideclimate:
Decades of research have linked injection wells to earthquakes, but much less is known about how the combination can affect groundwater. Although injection wells are intended to hold their contents forever and protect aquifers from contamination, oozing wells and bubbling lakes of gassy brine in a nearby part of West Texas show that things underground don’t always go according to plan.
Every barrel of Permian oil comes up with several barrels of mucky fluid called “produced water” — mostly hypersalty water that has stewed for millions of years underground with hydrocarbons, mixed with the proprietary chemical cocktails injected by drillers to fracture shale. Millions of barrels surface every day.
“A link between injection wells and induced seismicity is well established. The link between injection wells and groundwater qualities is lesser known,” said Zacariah Hildenbrand, a research professor at the University of Texas at El Paso who hasLast month, at the Permian Basin Water in Energy Conference in Midland, environmental attorney Adam Friedman gave a presentation warning of potential liabilities if injection disposal wells contaminate groundwater.
Subterranean pollution in the oil patch is hard to track. A century of booms and busts in West Texas have left many areas with groundwater pollution ofFor Shifflett, waiting for certain proof of groundwater contamination means waiting until it’s too late. He hasn’t had any problems yet. But just up State Highway 17, his neighbor Ashley Giesbrecht has noticed troubling signs.A worker offloads wastewater at a disposal well at Reeves County in February.
“The oil field’s kind of notorious for messing up the groundwater,” he said. “My idea is to sell enough water to where I could save up and buy somewhere else if they do ruin the water.”Drillers have made thousands of holes in the ground. They all run through the aquifers and then continue thousands of feet down to hydrocarbon deposits and pressurized waste pits. The holes are cased in cement and steel, which corrode over time. If a big earthquake hits, there’s no telling what could break.
In an email, a spokesperson for the agency, R.J. de Silva, said that the commission “takes all precautions to ensure the safety of residents and the environment” and that injection wells were designed to keep their contents separate from freshwater. According to Katie Smye, a researcher who studies injection wells at the UT-Austin’s Bureau of Economic Geology, new wells are typically built to satisfactory standards. It’s the thousands of old wells drilled before wastewater injection that concern her.Injection increases pressure in formations used for disposal, she said. That pressure can affect the old wells that pass through those formations, creating pathways between the wastewater and the freshwater aquifers.
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