"They can drink water when they're dead."–Big Oil's motto.
This past summer, California State officials suddenly
closed 11 waste-injection wells. This was the result of a few years investigation into the complete and utter
criminal negligence on the part of
both oil companies and state regulators.
Oil companies in drought-ravaged California have, for years, pumped wastewater from their operations into aquifers that had been clean enough for people to drink. [...]
Instead, the state allowed companies to drill more than 170 waste-disposal wells into aquifers suitable for drinking or irrigation, according to data reviewed by The Chronicle. Hundreds more inject a blend of briny water, hydrocarbons and trace chemicals into lower-quality aquifers that could be used with more intense treatment.
The good news, maybe, is that there has been little to no contamination of nearby ... supposedly.
But the federal Environmental Protection Agency, which helped uncover the practice, is threatening to seize control of regulating the waste-injection wells, a job it has left to California officials for over 30 years. The state faces a Feb. 6 deadline to tell the EPA how it plans to fix the problem and prevent it from happening again.
“If there are wells having a direct impact on drinking water, we need to shut them down now,” said Jared Blumenfeld, regional adminstrator for the EPA. “Safe drinking water is only going to become more in demand.”
The bad news is that there is very little reason to believe much of anything they say. Why is this even an issue?
California produces more oil than any state other than Texas and North Dakota, and its oil fields are awash in salty water. A typical Central Valley oil well pulls up nine or 10 barrels of water for every barrel of petroleum that reaches the surface. [...]
“If we’re not able to put the water back, there’s no other viable thing to do with it,” said Rock Zierman, chief executive officer of the California Independent Petroleum Association, which represents smaller oil companies in the state. “If you were to shut down hundreds of injection wells, obviously that’s a lot of jobs, a lot of tax revenue.”
I had to take a break to wipe my eyes after Rock Zierman's moving elegy to California's working man. It's times like these, with names like "Rock Zierman" speaking for petroleum, that you wonder if you need to invest in tinfoil haberdashery. As with most arguments concerning lost "revenues" and disappearing "jobs," it's six of one, half a dozen of the other. The farmers that rely on underground irrigation systems will be screwed if chemicals and the like leach into the fresh water systems. The only jobs that will be "created" by this kind of catastrophe would be those generated for construction crews building battle walls to fend off the steam-punk dressed hordes coming for our petroleum.
While I believe that most of us can agree that this should have never even been an issue in the first place (fresh drinking water in one hand, fresh drinking oil in the other), it is even more pressing now.