Seven environmental organizations—including the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Center for Health, Environment and Justice—filed suit against the Environmental Protection Agency Wednesday to force the first upgrade in three decades of disposal rules covering hydraulic fracturing waste. Among other things, the injection of waste water from this fracking has been linked to earthquakes in Kansas and other states. Fracking itself has been linked to drinking water contamination in Wyoming, but the lawsuit doesn’t address that.
Alejandro Davila Fragoso at ThinkProgress writes:
Environmentalists also claim the RCRA requires the EPA to review regulations and state guidelines at least every three years and, if necessary, revise them. They allege the agency determined in 1988 that revisions were necessary but hasn't acted since. “Updated rules for oil and gas wastes are almost 30 years overdue, and we need them now more than ever,” said Adam Kron, senior attorney at the Environmental Integrity Project, in a statement. “EPA’s inaction has kept the most basic, inadequate rules in place. The public deserves better than this.”
The complaint states:
2. Over the past decade, the oil and gas industry has grown exponentially and expanded into new areas of the United States. This growth is largely a result of the mainstream use of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing technologies and the application of these technologies to unconventional oil and gas formations. As a consequence of this rapid growth, the industry now generates vast amounts and wide varieties of liquid and solid wastes during exploration and production, including wastewater, drill cuttings, residual waste, and drilling muds. All of these wastes can contain harmful constituents ranging from heavy metals to hydrocarbons to naturally occurring radioactive materials. [...]
3. [The EPA] has failed to meet continuing nondiscretionary duties under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) to review and revise regulations and guidelines to keep up with this growing source of wastes and the threats these wastes pose to human health and the environment. [...]
One impact of this increased use of injection wells is the occurrence of earthquakes due to ‘induced seismicity [...]
Although industry and its advocates for years denied any sparking of earthquakes from frack waste injections, the U.S. Geological Survey noted in a report last month that its studies “have shown a strong connection” between deep injections of fluids and increased earthquakes in the central and eastern United States. It also attributed a very small number of earthquakes directly to fracking itself, apart from waste water injections.
The USGS said there was an average of 21 quakes measuring a magnitude 3 or greater from 1973 to 2008. But from 2009 to 2013, at a time when fracking operations had soared and increased both oil and natural gas production, there was an average of 99 such quakes a year. And in 2014, there were 659 such quakes. Before 2009, earthquakes were spread across the United States. Beginning that year, however, “the earthquakes are tightly clustered in a few areas (central Oklahoma, southern Kansas, central Arkansas, southeastern Colorado and northeastern New Mexico, and multiple parts of Texas),” the USGS reported.
According to the Energy Information Administration, fracked wells produce 67 percent of U.S. natural gas production and 51 percent of crude oil production.