Shocked, Shocked: Oil Industry And Government Alike Knew For Decades That Injecting Drilling Waste Would Be Disastrous
A cache of government documents dating back nearly a century casts serious doubt on the safety of the oil and gas industry’s most common method for disposing of its annual trillion gallons of toxic wastewater: injecting it deep underground. Despite knowing by the early 1970s that injection wells were at best a makeshift solution, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) never followed its own determination that they should be “a temporary means of disposal,” used only until “a more environmentally acceptable means of disposal [becomes] available.”
The documents include scientific research, internal communications, and talks given at a December 1971 industry and government symposium. And they come from multiple federal agencies, including the EPA, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). The documents show there may be little scientific merit to industry and government claims that injection wells are a safe means of disposal — putting drinking water and other mineral resources in communities across the country at risk of contamination, and jeopardizing local economies and public health.
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No one at the (Ed. - 1971) conference critiqued the practice of injection as meticulously as a USGS hydrologist named John Ferris. “The term ‘impermeable’ is never an absolute. All rocks are permeable to some degree,” Ferris told the symposium. Wastewater would inevitably escape the injection zone, he continued, and “engulf everything in its inexorable migration toward the discharge boundaries of the flow system,” such as a water well, a spring, or an old oil or gas well. While the advancing front of waste might initially cause wells and springs to surge with freshwater, the contamination “would become apparent at ever-increasing distances from the injection site,” he concluded. “Where will the waste reside 100 years from now?” asked Orlo Childs, a Texas petroleum geologist, in his closing remarks. “We may just be opening up a Pandora’s box.”
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The impacts of injection well leakage and blowouts have become visible from space. In a 2024 study using satellite observations, a team of Southern Methodist University scientists found that so much wastewater has been injected underground that it has raised land in one area of the Permian Basin by 16 inches in just two years, and created a high-pressurized underground lake that will lead to more sky-high wastewater gushers. “We have established a significant link between wastewater injection and oil well blowouts in the Permian Basin,” the authors wrote in the academic journal, Geophysical Research Letters. Once “a little cottage industry of mom and pops,” injection wells have become “a much bigger business,” says Kurt Knewitz, a consultant who runs an injection well information site called BuySWD.com. A case in point, says Knewitz, is Pilot Water Solutions, which operates injection wells in Texas and is a division of Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s Pilot Travel Centers, the multinational energy and logistics company owned by Warren Buffet. “You look at the Permian Basin and you think it’s a huge oil play, but it produces three to four times as much produced water as oil,” says Knewitz. “So the Permian is really a produced water play that on the side produces some oil and gas.”
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https://www.desmog.com/2026/02/12/the-oil-industrys-latest-disaster-trillions-of-gallons-of-buried-toxic-wastewater/
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I dare you!
