The Natural Resources Defense Council and FracTracker Alliance came out with a new report Wednesday titled
Fracking’s Most Wanted: Lifting the Veil on Oil and Gas Company Spills and Violations. One of the environmental advocacy group's key findings, however, was that it's tough to lift that veil because less than a handful of states out of the 36 that have oil and gas development make records of spills and other eco-violations readily accessible to the public:
We found that information about the frequency and nature of oil and gas company violations is only public[ly] accessible in three states. Although 36 states have active oil and gas development, most state and federal oil and gas regulatory agencies publish little or no information regarding oil and gas companies’ compliance records.
Yet in states where data are available, we found significant violations both in number and severity. These violations include a wide range of dangerous infractions like improper
well casing, illegal air pollution, failure to conduct safety tests, improper construction or maintenance of waste pits, various spills, contamination of drinking water sources or
other water bodies, and non-functional blow-out preventers.
And even in those three states—Colorado, Pennsylvania and West Virginia—the available records often don't include essential data, such as how bad a spill was, or the names of bodies of water it may have contaminated.
We searched the public data from Colorado, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia for records associated with 68 of the largest oil and gas companies operating in the
country, based on publicly-available data regarding the amount of acreage leased by each company.
At the end of 2011, these 68 companies held leases covering at least 141 million net acres—more than 6 percent of the country and approximately the size of California and Florida combined.
One of the report's co-authors, Amy Mall, a senior policy analyst at the NRDC
told HuffPost Green's Kate Sheppard: "Because these companies operate right in people's backyards—and sometimes they operate in peoples' backyards that don’t want them there, and they won't benefit—people should know who these companies are and whether they're good actors."
Not all illegal acts are written up as violations, the report says, and not all are detected. State enforcement is underwhelming, to say the least. Companies repeatedly caught violating environmental rules are allowed to continue operations. And the penalties for non-compliance are ridiculously low. For instance, the report's researchers found that in Colorado in 2012, the statewide total of fines was $287,600 for all oil and gas violations by every company with a permit. "These costs are min[u]scule compared to the millions of dollars it costs to drill a single unconventional well and the potential profit of tens of millions of dollars per well, and are not economically meaningful incentives for compliance," they wrote.
Check out more of the report's findings below the fold.
Pennsylvania did not order the U.S. Energy Development Corporation to stop operating until after the company had committed 302 violations in a two-year period. The number of violations overall is not small. For example, in Pennsylvania alone, Chesapeake Energy had 589 violations at 2,618 wells. It's hard to imagine that the 33 states where records are less accessible to the public are doing a better job at monitoring oil and gas operations and holding them accountable.
The report named "Fracking's Ten Most Wanted," the companies with the most violations in the three states with the best record-keeping. In order of most violations, they are Chesapeake Energy, Cabot Oil and Gas, Talisman Energy, Range Resources, EXCO Resources, ExxonMobil, EQT Corporation, Anadarko Petroleum Corporation, Shell and Penn Virginia Corporation.
The researchers also found that the database on federal violations is not very user-friendly. A spokeswoman for the Environmental Protection Agency told Sheppard efforts are being made to improve that.
The authors came up with several reasonable recommendations for dealing with the situation. Among them: Collect, centralize and make publicly available information about spills, blowouts, violations, citizen complaints, worker injuries and penalties assessed. Set a clear penalty structure with a floor on fines. Do not allow inspectors to reduce penalties on their personal discretion. Pay for an ample team of inspectors and enforcement agents. Bar repeat offenders from getting permits for new operations and require them to certify that their existing operations comply with all the environmental and safety rules and that they have fulfilled any penalties and other obligations associated with violations.
Naturally, adopting these recommendations, straightforward and obvious though they be, would run into the usual demurrers from industry and from state legislators who all too often are in its backpocket. We've all heard the litany before, topped off with Voluntary compliance works fine and We're environmentally conscious stewards. If that PR flackery were actually true, there would be no need for reports like the NRDC's.