Toxic, Saline Fracking Waste Spills In TX Total At Least 148 Million Gallons Over Ten Years

[hatrack]

The prolific oil and gas wells of Texas also generate billions of gallons of salty liquid known as produced water. A lot of this toxic water, just like crude oil, tends to get spilled. Not just occasionally, but hundreds of times a year. From a large spill of 756,000 gallons into the Delaware River in West Texas that sent chloride levels soaring, to hundreds of small spills in one Permian Basin county, there’s hardly a corner of Texas not impacted. But messy record-keeping and ambiguous rules at the Railroad Commission of Texas, which regulates oil and gas drilling, have long obscured the scope and severity of these spills from the public.

The Railroad Commission has never formally adopted 2009 draft guidelines for reporting and cleaning up produced water spills. The agency delegated the authority to set different reporting thresholds to district offices, in a system that relies on self-reporting by offenders and includes little enforcement to assure accuracy and compliance. A commission spokesperson said that produced water spills must be reported and that the agency fully investigates and mitigates all spills. But the agency has never adopted official produced water spill guidelines and numerous companies are under the impression they are not required to report spills at all.

Inside Climate News has conducted the first-ever public analysis of produced water spills in Texas, working from data provided in response to open records requests to the Railroad Commission. Over the decade from 2013 and 2022, the analysis found that oil and gas companies reported more than 10,000 individual spills totaling more than 148 million gallons of produced water. Where possible, companies use vacuum trucks to suck up as much spilled water as they can. But only about 40 percent of the water reported spilled from 2013 to 2022 was recovered.

The spills ranged from small leaks of less than 10 gallons to massive incidents—19 of the reported spills exceeded 500,000 gallons. Although they represented a tiny minority of spills, with about 350 reported in the data, some of the most damaging incidents took place when produced water was spilled directly into streams, rivers or lakes.

EDIT

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/31102023/oil-gas-companies-spill-wastewater-in-texas/

[czarjak]

1. Someone is getting rich though.

Priorities.