How the Feds Let Industry Pollute the Nation's Underground Water Supply
Federal officials have given energy and
mining companies permission to pollute aquifers in more than 1,500
places across the country, releasing toxic material into underground
reservoirs that help supply more than half of the nation's drinking
water.
In many cases, the Environmental Protection Agency has granted these
so-called aquifer exemptions in Western states now stricken by drought
and increasingly desperate for water.
EPA records show that portions of at least 100 drinking water
aquifers have been written off because exemptions have allowed them to
be used as dumping grounds.
"You are sacrificing these aquifers," said Mark Williams, a
hydrologist at the University of Colorado and a member of a National
Science Foundation team studying the effects of energy development on
the environment. "By definition, you are putting pollution into them.
... If you are looking 50 to 100 years down the road, this is not a good
way to go."
As part of
an investigation into the threat to water supplies from underground injection of waste, ProPublica set out to identify which aquifers have been polluted.
We found the EPA has not even kept track of exactly how many
exemptions it has issued, where they are, or whom they might affect.
What records the agency was able to supply under the Freedom of
Information Act show that exemptions are often issued in apparent
conflict with the EPA's mandate to protect waters that may be used for
drinking.
Though hundreds of exemptions are for lower-quality water of
questionable use, many allow grantees to contaminate water so pure it
would barely need filtration, or that is treatable using modern
technology.
The EPA is only supposed to issue exemptions if aquifers are too
remote, too dirty, or too deep to supply affordable drinking water.
Applicants must persuade the government that the water is not being used
as drinking water and that it never will be.
Sometimes, however, the agency has issued permits for portions of
reservoirs that are in use, assuming contaminants will stay within the
finite area exempted.
In Wyoming, people are drawing on the same water source for drinking,
irrigation and livestock that, about a mile away, is being fouled with
federal permission. In Texas, EPA officials are evaluating an exemption
for a uranium mine — already approved by the state — even though
numerous homes draw water from just outside the underground boundaries
outlined in the mining company's application.
The EPA declined repeated requests for interviews for this story, but
sent a written response saying exemptions have been issued responsibly,
under a process that ensures contaminants remain confined.
"Aquifer Exemptions identify those waters that do not currently serve
as a source of drinking water and will not serve as a source of
drinking water in the future and, thus, do not need to be protected," an
EPA spokesperson wrote in an email statement. "The process of exempting
aquifers includes steps that minimize the possibility that future
drinking water supplies are endangered."
Yet EPA officials say the agency has quietly assembled an unofficial
internal task force to re-evaluate its aquifer exemption policies. The
agency's spokesperson declined to give details on the group's work, but
insiders say it is attempting to inventory exemptions and to determine
whether aquifers should go unprotected in the future, with the value of
water rising along with demand for exemptions closer to areas where
people live.
Advances in geological sciences
have deepened regulators' concerns about exemptions, challenging the
notion that waste injected underground will stay inside the tightly
drawn boundaries of the exempted areas.
"What they don't often consider is whether that waste will flow
outside that zone of influence over time, and there is no doubt that it
will," said Mike Wireman, a senior hydrologist with the EPA who has
worked with the World Bank on global water supply issues. "Over decades,
that water could discharge into a stream. It could seep into a well. If
you are a rancher out there and you want to put a well in, it's
difficult to find out if there is an exempted aquifer underneath your
property."
Aquifer exemptions are a little-known aspect of the government's
Underground Injection Control program, which is
designed to protect water supplies from the underground disposal of waste.
The Safe Drinking Water Act explicitly prohibits injection into a
source of drinking water, and requires precautions to ensure that oil
and gas and disposal wells that run through them are carefully
engineered not to leak.
Areas covered by exemptions are stripped of some of these
protections, however. Waste can be discarded into them freely, and wells
that run through them need not meet all standards used to prevent
pollution. In many cases, no water monitoring or long-term study is
required.
The recent surge in domestic drilling and rush for uranium has
brought a spike in exemption applications, as well as political pressure
not to block or delay them, EPA officials told ProPublica.
"The energy policy in the U.S is keeping this from happening because right now nobody —
nobody
— wants to interfere with the development of oil and gas or uranium,"
said a senior EPA employee who declined to be identified because of the
sensitivity of the subject. "The political pressure is huge not to slow
that down."
Many of the exemption permits, records show, have been issued in
regions where water is needed most and where intense political debates
are underway to decide how to fairly allocate limited water resources.
In drought-stricken Texas, communities are
looking to treat brackish aquifers
beneath the surface because they have run out of better options and
several cities, including San Antonio and El Paso, are considering
whether to build new desalinization plants for as much as $100 million
apiece.
And yet environmental officials have granted more than 50 exemptions
for waste disposal and uranium mining in Texas, records show. The most
recent was issued in September.
The Texas Railroad Commission, the state agency that regulates oil
and gas drilling, said it issued additional exemptions, covering large
swaths of aquifers underlying the state, when it brought its rules into
compliance with the federal Safe Drinking Water Act in 1982. This was in
large part because officials viewed them as oil reservoirs and thought
they were already contaminated. But it is unclear where, and how
extensive, those exemptions are.
EPA "Region VI received a road map — yes, the kind they used to give
free at gas stations — with the aquifers delineated, with no detail on
depth," said Mario Salazar, a former EPA project engineer who worked
with the underground injection program for 25 years and oversaw the
approval of Texas' program, in an email.
In California, where nearly half of the nation's fruits and
vegetables are grown with water from as far away as the Colorado River,
the perennially cash-strapped state's governor is proposing to spend $14
billion to divert more of the Sacramento River from the north to the
south. Near Bakersfield, a private project is underway to build a water
bank, essentially an artificial aquifer.
Still, more than 100 exemptions for natural aquifers have been
granted in California, some to dispose of drilling and fracking waste in
the state's driest parts. Though most date back to the 1980s, the most
recent exemption was approved in 2009 in Kern County, an agricultural
heartland that is the epicenter of some of the state's most volatile
rivalries over water.
The balance is even more delicate in Colorado. Growth in the Denver
metro area has been stubbornly restrained not by available land, but by
the limits of aquifers that have been drawn down by as much as 300
vertical feet. Much of Eastern Colorado's water has long been piped
underneath the Continental Divide and, until recently, the region was
mulling a $3 billion plan to build a pipeline to bring water hundreds of
miles from western Wyoming.
Along with Wyoming, Montana and Utah, however, Colorado has
sacrificed more of its aquifer resources than any other part of the
country.
More than 1,100 aquifer exemptions have been approved by the EPA's
Rocky Mountain regional office, according to a list the agency provided
to ProPublica. Many of them are relatively shallow and some are in the
same geologic formations containing aquifers relied on by Denver metro
residents, though the boundaries are several hundred miles away. More
than a dozen exemptions are in waters that might not even need to be
treated in order to drink.
"It's short-sighted," said Tom Curtis, the deputy executive director
of the American Water Works Association, an international
non-governmental drinking water organization. "It's something that
future generations may question."
To the resource industries, aquifer exemptions are essential. Oil and
gas drilling waste has to go somewhere and in certain parts of the
country, there are few alternatives to injecting it into porous rock
that also contains water, drilling companies say. In many places, the
same layers of rock that contain oil or gas also contain water, and that
water is likely to already contain pollutants such as benzene from the
natural hydrocarbons within it.
Similarly, the uranium mining industry works by prompting chemical
reactions that separate out minerals within the aquifers themselves; the
mining can't happen without the pollution.
When regulations governing waste injection were written in the 1980s
to protect underground water reserves, industry sought the exemptions as
a compromise. The intent was to acknowledge that many deep waters might
not be worth protecting even though they technically met the definition
of drinking water.
"The concept of aquifer exemptions was something that we 'invented'
to address comments when the regulations were first proposed," Salazar,
the former EPA official, said. "There was never the intention to exempt
aquifers just because they could contain, or would obviate, the
development of a resource. Water was the resource that would be
protected above all."
Since then, however, approving exemptions has become the norm. In an
email, the EPA said that some exemption applications had been denied,
but provided no details about how many or which ones. State regulators
in Texas and Wyoming could not recall a single application that had been
turned down and industry representatives said they had come to expect
swift approval.
"Historically they have been fairly routinely granting aquifer
exemptions," said Richard Clement, the chief executive of Powertech
Uranium, which is currently seeking permits for new mining in South
Dakota. "There has never been a case that I'm aware of that it has not
been done."
In 1981, shortly after the first exemption rules were set, the
EPA lowered the bar for exemptions
as part of settling a lawsuit filed by the American Petroleum
Institute. Since then, the agency has issued permits for water not
"reasonably expected" to be used for drinking. The original language
allowed exemptions only for water that could never be used.
Oil companies have been the biggest users of aquifer exemptions by
far. Most are held by smaller, independent companies, but Chevron,
America's second-largest oil company, holds at least 28 aquifer
exemptions. Exxon holds at least 14. In Wyoming, the Canadian oil giant
EnCana, currently embroiled in an investigation of water contamination
related to fracking in the town of
Pavillion, has been allowed to inject into aquifers at 38 sites.
Once an exemption is issued, it's all but permanent; none have ever been reversed.
Permits dictate how much material
companies can inject and where, but impose little or no obligations to
protect the surrounding water if it has been exempted. The EPA and state
environmental agencies require applicants to assess the quality of
reservoirs and to do some basic modeling to show where contaminants
should end up. But in most cases there is no obligation, for example, to
track what has been put into the earth or — except in the case of the
uranium mines — to monitor where it does end up.
The biggest problem now, experts say, is that the EPA's criteria for
evaluating applications are outdated. The rules — last revised nearly
three decades ago — haven't adapted to improving water treatment
technology and don't reflect the changing value and scarcity of fresh
water.
Aquifers once considered unusable can now be processed for drinking water at a reasonable price.
The law defines an underground source of drinking water as any water
that has less than 10,000 parts per million of what are called Total
Dissolved Solids, a standard measure of water quality, but historically,
water with more than 3,000 TDS has been dismissed as too poor for
drinking. It also has been taken for granted that, in most places, the
deeper the aquifer — say, below about 2,000 feet — the higher the TDS
and the less salvageable the water.
Yet today, Texas towns are treating water that has as high as 4,000
TDS and a Wyoming town is pumping from 8,500 feet deep, thousands of
feet below aquifers that the EPA has determined were too far underground
to ever produce useable water.
"You can just about treat anything nowadays," said Jorge Arroyo, an
engineer and director of innovative water technologies at the Texas
Water Development Board, which advises the state on groundwater
management. Arroyo said he was unaware that so many Texas aquifers had
been exempted, and that it would be feasible to treat many of them.
Regarding the exemptions, he said, "With the advent of technology to
treat some of this water, I think this is a prudent time to reconsider
whether we allow them."
Now, as commercial crops wilt in the dry heat and winds rip the dust
loose from American prairies, questions are mounting about whether the
EPA should continue to grant exemptions going forward.
"Unless someone can build a clear case that this water cannot be used
— we need to keep our groundwater clean," said Al Armendariz, a former
regional administrator for the EPA's South Central region who now works
with the Sierra Club. "We shouldn't be exempting aquifers unless we have
no other choice. We should only exempt the aquifer if we are sure we
are never going to use the water again."
Still, skeptics say fewer exemptions are unlikely, despite rising
concern about them within the EPA, as the demand for space underground
continues to grow. Long-term plans to slow climate change and clean up
coal by sequestering carbon dioxide underground, for example, could
further endanger aquifers, causing chemical reactions that lead to water
contamination.
"Everyone wants clean water and everyone wants clean energy," said
Richard Healy, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey whose work is
focused on the nexus of energy production and water. "Energy
development can occur very quickly because there is a lot of money
involved. Environmental studies take longer."
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may
not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the
source.
Abrahm Lustgarten
Abrahm Lustgarten is a former staff writer and contributor for
Fortune, and has written for
Salon,
Esquire, the
Washington Post and the
New York Times since receiving his master's in journalism from Columbia University in 2003. He is the author of the book
China’s Great Train: Beijing’s Drive West and the Campaign to Remake Tibet, a project that was funded in part by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Source:
Truth Out
