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| A class 2 brine disposal well in western Louisiana near the Texas
border. The well sat by the side of the road, without restricted access.
(Abrahm Lustgarten/ProPublica) |
Over the past several decades, U.S. industries have injected more
than 30 trillion gallons of toxic liquid deep into the earth, using
broad expanses of the nation's geology
as an invisible dumping ground.
No company would be allowed to pour such dangerous chemicals into the
rivers or onto the soil. But until recently, scientists and
environmental officials have assumed that
deep layers of rock beneath the earth would safely entomb the waste for
millennia.
There are growing signs they were mistaken.
Records from disparate corners of the United States show that wells
drilled to bury this waste deep beneath the ground have repeatedly
leaked, sending dangerous chemicals
and waste gurgling to the surface or, on occasion, seeping into shallow
aquifers that store a significant portion of the nation's drinking
water.
In 2010, contaminants from such a well bubbled up in a west Los
Angeles dog park. Within the past three years, similar fountains of oil
and gas drilling waste have appeared in
Oklahoma and Louisiana. In South Florida, 20 of the nation's most
stringently regulated disposal wells failed in the early 1990s,
releasing partly treated sewage into aquifers that may one day be needed
to supply Miami's drinking water.
There are more than
680,000 underground waste and injection
wells nationwide, more than 150,000 of which shoot industrial fluids
thousands of feet below the surface. Scientists and federal regulators
acknowledge they do not know how many of the sites are leaking.
Federal officials and many geologists insist that the risks posed by
all this dumping are minimal. Accidents are uncommon, they say, and
groundwater reserves — from which
most Americans get their drinking water — remain safe and far exceed any
plausible threat posed by injecting toxic chemicals into the ground.
But in interviews, several key experts acknowledged that the idea
that injection is safe rests on science that has not kept pace with
reality, and on oversight that doesn't always work.
"In 10 to 100 years we are going to find out that most of our
groundwater is polluted," said Mario Salazar, an engineer who worked for
25 years as a technical expert with
the EPA's underground injection program in Washington. "A lot of people
are going to get sick, and a lot of people may die."
The boom in oil and natural gas drilling is deepening the
uncertainties, geologists acknowledge. Drilling produces copious amounts
of waste, burdening regulators and demanding hundreds of additional
disposal wells. Those wells — more holes punched in the ground — are
changing the earth's geology, adding man-made fractures that allow water
and waste to flow more freely.
"There is no certainty at all in any of this, and whoever tells you
the opposite is not telling you the truth," said Stefan Finsterle, a
leading hydrogeologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who
specializes in understanding the properties of rock layers and modeling
how fluid flows through them. "You have changed the system with pressure
and temperature and fracturing, so you don't know how it will behave."
A ProPublica review of well records, case histories and government
summaries of more than 220,000 well inspections found that structural
failures inside injection wells are routine. From late 2007 to late
2010, one well integrity violation was issued for every six deep
injection wells examined — more than 17,000 violations nationally. More
than 7,000 wells showed signs that their walls were leaking. Records
also show wells are frequently operated in violation of safety
regulations and under conditions that greatly increase the risk of fluid
leakage and the threat of water contamination.
Structurally,
a disposal well is the same as an oil or gas well.
Tubes of concrete and steel extend anywhere from a few hundred feet to
two miles into the earth. At the bottom, the well opens into a natural
rock formation. There is no container. Waste simply seeps out, filling
tiny spaces left between the grains in the rock like the gaps between
stacked marbles.
Many scientists and regulators say the alternatives to the injection
process — burning waste, treating wastewater, recycling, or disposing of
waste on the surface — are far more expensive or bring additional
environmental risks.
Subterranean waste disposal, they point out, is a cornerstone of the
nation's economy, relied on by the pharmaceutical, agricultural and
chemical industries. It's also critical to a future less dependent on
foreign oil: Hydraulic fracturing, "clean coal" technologies, nuclear
fuel production and carbon storage (the keystone of the strategy to
address climate change) all count on pushing waste into rock formations
below the earth's surface.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which has primary
regulatory authority over the nation's injection wells, would not
discuss specific well failures identified by ProPublica or make staffers
available for interviews. The agency also declined to answer many
questions in writing, though it sent responses to several. Its director
for the Drinking Water Protection Division, Ann Codrington, sent a
statement to ProPublica defending the injection program's effectiveness.
"Underground injection has been and continues to be a viable
technique for subsurface storage and disposal of fluids when properly
done," the statement said. "EPA recognizes that more can be done to
enhance drinking water safeguards and, along with states and tribes,
will work to improve the efficiency of the underground injection control
program."
Still, some experts see the well failures and leaks discovered so far
as signs of broader problems, raising concerns about how much pollution
may be leaking out undetected. By the time the damage is discovered,
they say, it could be irreversible.
"Are we heading down a path we might regret in the future?" said
Anthony Ingraffea, a Cornell University engineering professor who has
been an outspoken critic of claims that wells don't leak. "Yes."
***
In September 2003, Ed Cowley got a call to check out a pool of briny
water in a bucolic farm field outside Chico, Texas. Nearby, he said, a
stand of trees had begun to wither,
their leaves turning crispy brown and falling to the ground.
Chico, a town of about 1,000 people 50 miles northwest of Fort Worth,
lies in the heart of Texas' Barnett Shale. Gas wells dot the landscape
like mailboxes in suburbia. A short distance away from the murky pond,
an oil services company had begun pumping millions of gallons of
drilling waste into an injection well.
Regulators refer to such waste as salt water or brine, but it often
includes less benign contaminants, including fracking chemicals, benzene
and other substances known to cause cancer.
The well had been
authorized by the Railroad Commission
of Texas, which once regulated railways but now oversees 260,000 oil
and gas wells and 52,000 injection wells. (Another agency, the Texas
Commission on Environmental Quality, regulates injection wells for waste
from other industries.)
Before issuing the permit, commission officials studied mathematical
models showing that waste could be safely injected into a sandstone
layer about one-third of a mile beneath the farm. They specified how
much waste could go into the well, under how much pressure, and
calculated how far it would dissipate underground. As federal law
requires, they also reviewed a quarter-mile radius around the site to
make sure waste would not seep back toward the surface through abandoned
wells or other holes in the area.
Yet the precautions failed. "Salt water" brine migrated from the
injection site and shot back to the surface through three old well holes
nearby.
"Have you ever seen an artesian well?" recalled Cowley, Chico's
director of public works. "It was just water flowing up out of the
ground."
Despite residents' fears that the injected waste could be making its
way toward their drinking water, commission officials did not sample
soil or water near the leak.
If the injection well waste "had threatened harm to the ground water
in the area, an in-depth RRC investigation would have been initiated,"
Ramona Nye, a spokeswoman for Texas' Railroad Commission, wrote in an
email.
The agency disputes Cowley's description of a pool of brine or of
dead trees, saying that the waste barely spilled beyond the overflowing
wells, though officials could not identify any documents or staffers who
contradicted Cowley's recollections. Accounts similar to Cowley's
appeared in an article about the leak in the Wise County Messenger, a
local newspaper. The agency has destroyed its records about the
incident, saying it is required to keep them for only two years.
After the breach, the commission ordered two of the old wells to be
plugged with cement and restricted the rate at which waste could be
injected into the well. It did not issue any violations against the
disposal company, which had followed Texas' rules, regulators said. The
commission allowed the well operator to continue injecting thousands of
barrels of brine into the well each day. A few months later, brine began
spurting out of three more old wells nearby.
"It's kind of like Whac-a-Mole, where one thing pops up and by the
time you go to hit it, another thing comes up," Cowley said. "It was
frustrating. ... If your water
goes, what does that do to the value of your land?"
Deep well injection takes place in 32 states, from Pennsylvania to
Michigan to California. Most wells are around the Great Lakes and in
areas where oil and gas is produced: along the Appalachian crest and the
Gulf Coast, in California and in Texas, which has more wells for
hazardous industrial waste and oil and gas waste than any other state.
Federal rules divide wells into six classes based on the material
they hold and the industry that produced it. Class 1 wells handle the
most hazardous materials, including fertilizers, acids and deadly
compounds such as asbestos, PCBs and cyanide. The energy industry has
its own category, Class 2, which includes disposal wells and wells in
which fluids are injected to force out trapped oil and gas. The most
common wells, called Class 5, are a sort of catch-all for everything
left over from the other categories, including storm-water runoff from
gas stations.
The EPA requires that Class 1 and 2 injection wells be drilled the
deepest to assure that the most toxic waste is pushed far below drinking
water aquifers. Both types of wells are supposed to be walled with
multiple layers of steel tubing and cement and regularly monitored for
cracks.
Officials' confidence in this manner of disposal stems not only from
safety precautions, but from an understanding of how rock formations
trap fluid.
Underground waste, officials say, is contained by layer after layer
of impermeable rock. If one layer leaks, the next blocks the waste from
spreading before it reaches groundwater. The laws of physics and fluid
dynamics should ensure that the waste can't spread far and is diluted as
it goes.
The layering "is a very strong phenomenon and it's on our side," said
Susan Hovorka, a senior research scientist at the University of Texas
at Austin's Bureau of Economic Geology.
According to
risk analyses cited in EPA documents, a significant well leak that leads to water contamination is highly unlikely — on the order of one in a million.
Once waste is underground, though, there are few ways to track how
far it goes, how quickly or where it winds up. There is plenty of
theory, but little data to prove the
system works.
"I do think the risks are low, but it has never been adequately
demonstrated," said John Apps, a leading geoscientist who advises the
Department of Energy for Lawrence Berkeley National Labs. "Every
statement is based on a collection of experts that offer you their
opinions. Then you do a scientific analysis of their opinions and get
some
probability out of it. This is a wonderful way to go when you don't have
any evidence one way or another... But it really doesn't mean anything
scientifically."
The hard data that does exist comes from well inspections conducted
by federal and state regulators, who can issue citations to operators
for injecting illegally, for not maintaining wells, or for operating
wells at unsafe pressures. This information is the EPA's primary means
of tracking the system's health on a national scale.
Yet, in response to questions from ProPublica, the EPA acknowledged
it has done very little with the data it collects. The agency could not
provide ProPublica with a tally of
how frequently wells fail or of how often disposal regulations are
violated. It has not counted the number of cases of waste migration or
contamination in more than 20 years. The agency often accepts reports
from state injection regulators that are partly blank, contain
conflicting figures or are missing key details, ProPublica found.
In 2007, the
EPA launched a national data system to centralize reports on injection wells. As of September 2011 —
the last time the EPA issued a public update — less than half of the state and local regulatory agencies overseeing injection were contributing to the database. It
contained complete information from only a handful of states, accounting for a small fraction of the deep wells in the country.
The EPA did not respond to questions seeking more detail about how it
handles its data, or about how the agency judges whether its oversight
is working.
In a 2008 interview with ProPublica, one EPA scientist acknowledged
shortcomings in the way the agency oversees the injection program.
"It's assumed that the monitoring rules and requirements are in place
and are protective — that's assumed," said Gregory Oberley, an EPA
groundwater specialist who studies injection and water issues in the
Rocky Mountain region. "You're not going to know what's going on until
someone's well is contaminated and they are complaining about it."
***
ProPublica's analysis of case histories and EPA data from October
2007 to October 2010 showed that when an injection well fails, it is
most often because of holes or cracks in the well structure itself.
Operators are required to do so-called "mechanical integrity" tests
at regular intervals, yearly for Class 1 wells and at least once every
five years for Class 2 wells. In 2010, the tests led to more than 7,500
violations nationally, with more than 2,300 wells failing. In Texas, one
violation was issued for every three Class 2 wells examined in 2010.
Such breakdowns can have serious consequences. Damage to the cement
or steel casing can allow fluids to seep into the earth, where they
could migrate into water supplies.
Regulators say redundant layers of protection usually prevent waste
from getting that far, but EPA data shows that in the three years
analyzed by ProPublica, more
than 7,500 well test failures involved what federal water protection
regulations describe as "fluid migration" and "significant leaks."
In September 2009, workers for
Unit Petroleum Company
discovered oil and gas waste in a roadside ditch in southern Louisiana.
After tracing the fluid to a crack in the casing of a nearby injection
well, operators tested the rest of the well. Only then did they find
another hole — 600 feet down, and just a few hundred feet away from an
aquifer that is a source of drinking water for that part of the state.
Most well failures are patched within six months of being discovered,
EPA data shows, but with as much as five years passing between
integrity tests, it can take a while
for leaks to be discovered. And not every well can be repaired. Kansas
shut down at least 47 injection wells in 2010, filling them with cement
and burying them, because their mechanical integrity could not be
restored. Louisiana shut down 82. Wyoming shut down 144.
Another way wells can leak is if waste is injected with such force
that it accidentally shatters the rock meant to contain it. A
report published by scientists
at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and
the University of Texas said that high pressure is "the driving force"
that can help connect deep geologic layers with shallower ones, allowing
fluid to seep through the earth.
Most injection well permits strictly limit the maximum pressure
allowed, but well operators — rushing to dispose of more waste in less
time — sometimes break the rules, state regulatory inspections show.
According to data provided by states to the EPA, deep well operators
have been caught exceeding injection pressure limits more than 1,100
times since 2008.
Excessive pressure factored into a 1989 well failure that yielded new clues about the risks of injection.
While drilling a disposal well in southern Ohio, workers for the
Aristech Chemical Corp. (since bought by Sunoco, and sold again, in
2011, to Haverhill Chemicals) were overwhelmed by the smell of phenol, a
deadly chemical the company had injected into two Class 1 wells nearby.
Somehow, perhaps over decades, the pollution had risen 1,400 feet
through solid rock and was progressing toward surface aquifers.
Ohio environmental officials — aided by the EPA — investigated for
some 15 years. They concluded that the wells were mechanically sound,
but Aristech had injected waste into them faster and under higher
pressure than the geologic formation could bear.
Though scientists maintain that the Aristech leak was a rarity, they
acknowledge that such problems are more likely in places where
industrial activity has changed the underground environment.
There are upwards of 2 million
abandoned and plugged oil and gas wells
in the U.S., more than 100,000 of which may not appear in regulators'
records. Sometimes they are just broken off tubes of steel, buried or
sticking out of the ground. Many are supposed to be sealed shut with
cement, but studies show that cement breaks down over time, allowing
seepage up the well structure. Also, if injected waste reaches the bottom of old wells, it can quickly be driven back toward aquifers, as it was in Chico.
"The United States looks like a pin cushion," said Bruce Kobelski, a
geologist who has been with the agency's underground injection program
since 1986. Kobelski spoke to
ProPublica in May, 2011, before the EPA declined additional interview
requests for this story. "Unfortunately there are cases where someone
missed a well or a well wasn't indicated. It could have been a well from
the turn of the [20th] century."
Clefts left after the earth is cracked open to frack for oil and gas
also can connect abandoned wells and waste injection zones. How far
these man-made fissures go is still
the subject of research and debate, but
in some cases they have reached as much as a half-mile, even
intersecting fractures from neighboring wells.
When injection wells intersect with fracked wells and abandoned
wells, the combined effect is that many of the natural protections
assumed to be provided by deep underground geology no longer exist.
"It's a natural system and if you go in and start punching holes
through it and changing pressure systems around, it's no longer
natural," said Nathan Wiser, an
underground injection expert working for the EPA in its Rocky Mountain
region, in a 2010 interview. "It's difficult to know how it would behave
in those circumstances."
EPA data provides a window into some injection well problems, but not
all. There is no way to know how many wells have undetected leaks or to
measure the amount of waste
escaping from them.
In at least some cases, records obtained by ProPublica show, well
failures may have contaminated sources of drinking water. Between 2008
and 2011, state regulators reported 150 instances of what the EPA calls
"cases of alleged contamination," in which waste from injection wells
purportedly reached aquifers. In 25 instances, the waste came from Class
2 wells. The EPA did not respond to requests for the results of
investigations into those incidents or to clarify the standard for
reporting a case.
The data probably understates the true extent of such incidents, however.
Leaking wells can simply go undetected.
One Texas study
looking for the cause of high salinity in soil found that at least 29
brine injection wells in its study area were likely sending a plume of
salt water up into the ground unnoticed. Even when a problem is
reported, as in Chico, regulators don't always do the expensive and
time-consuming work necessary to investigate its cause.
"The absence of episodes of pollution can mean that there are none,
or that no one is looking," said Salazar, the EPA's former injection
expert. "I would tend to believe it is
the latter."
***
The practice of injecting waste underground arose as a solution to an environmental crisis.
In the first half of the 20th century, toxic waste collected in
cesspools, or was dumped in rivers or poured onto fields. As the
consequences of unbridled pollution became
unacceptable, the country turned to an out-of-sight alternative. Drawing
on techniques developed by the oil and gas industry, companies started
pumping waste back into wells drilled for resources. Toxic waste became
all but invisible. Air and water began to get cleaner.
Then a host of unanticipated problems began to arise.
In April, 1967 pesticide waste injected by a chemical plant at Denver's Rocky Mountain Arsenal destabilized a seismic fault,
causing a magnitude 5.0 earthquake
— strong enough to shatter windows and close schools — and jolting
scientists with newfound risks of injection, according to the U.S.
Geological Survey.
A year later, a corroded hazardous waste well for pulping liquor at
the Hammermill Paper Co., in Erie, Pa., ruptured. Five miles away,
according to an EPA report, "a noxious black liquid seeped from an abandoned gas well" in Presque Isle State Park.
In 1975 in
Beaumont, Texas, dioxin and a highly acidic herbicide injected underground by the
Velsicol Chemical Corp.
burned a hole through its well casing, sending as much as five million
gallons of the waste into a nearby drinking water aquifer.
Then in August 1984 in Oak Ridge, Tenn.,
radioactive waste was turned up by water monitoring near a deep injection well at a government nuclear facility.
Regulators raced to catch up. In 1974, the Safe Drinking Water Act
was passed, establishing a framework for regulating injection. Then, in
1980, the EPA set up the tiered
classes of wells and began to establish basic construction standards and
inspection schedules. The EPA licensed some state agencies to monitor
wells within their borders and handled oversight jointly with others,
but all had to meet the baseline requirements of the federal Underground
Injection Control program.
Even with stricter regulations in place, 17 states — including Alabama, North Carolina, South Carolina and Wisconsin —
banned Class 1 hazardous deep well injection.
"We just felt like based on the knowledge that we had at that time
that it was not something that was really in the best interest of the
environment or the state," said
James Warr, who headed Alabama's Department of Environmental Management
at the time.
Injection accidents kept cropping up.
A
1987 General Accountability Office review
put the total number of cases in which waste had migrated from Class 1
hazardous waste wells into underground aquifers at 10 — including the
Texas and Pennsylvania sites. Two of those aquifers were considered
potential drinking water sources.
In 1989,
the GAO reported 23 more cases
in seven states where oil and gas injection wells had failed and
polluted aquifers. New regulations had done little to prevent the
problems, the report said, largely because most of the wells involved
had been grandfathered in and had not had to comply with key aspects of
the rules.
Noting four more suspected cases, the report also suggested there
could be more well failures, and more widespread pollution, beyond the
cases identified. "The full extent to which injected brines have
contaminated underground sources of drinking water is unknown," it
stated. The GAO concluded that most of the contaminated aquifers could not be
reclaimed because fixing the damage was "too costly" or "technically
infeasible."
Faced with such findings, the federal government drafted more rules
aimed at strengthening the injection program. The government outlawed
certain types of wells above or near
drinking water aquifers, mandating that most industrial waste be
injected deeper.
The agency also began to hold companies that disposed of hazardous
industrial waste to far stiffer standards. To get permits to dispose of
hazardous waster after 1988, companies had to prove — using complex
models and geological studies — that the stuff they injected wouldn't
migrate anywhere near water supplies for 10,000 years. They were already
required to test for fault zones and to conduct reviews to ensure there
were no conduits for leakage, such as abandoned wells, within a
quarter-mile radius. Later, that became a two-mile minimum radius for
some wells.
The added regulations would have prevented the vast majority of the
accidents that occurred before the late 1980s, EPA officials contend.
"The requirements weren't as rigorous, the testing wasn't as rigorous
and in some cases the shallow aquifers were contaminated," Kobelski
said. "The program is not the same as it was when we first started."
Today's injection program, however, faces a new set of problems.
As federal regulators toughened rules for injecting hazardous waste,
oil and gas companies argued that the new standards could drive them out
of business. State oil and
gas regulators pushed back against the regulations, too, saying that
enforcing the rules for Class 2 wells — which handle the vast majority
of injected waste by volume — would be expensive and difficult. Ultimately, the energy industry won a critical change in the federal government's legal definition of waste:
Since 1988, all material resulting from the oil and gas drilling process is considered non-hazardous, regardless of its content or toxicity.
"It took a lot of talking to sell the EPA on that and there are still
a lot of people that don't like it," said Bill Bryson, a geologist and
former head of the Kansas Corporation Commission's Conservation
Division, who lobbied for and helped draft the federal rules. "But it
seemed the best way to protect the environment and to stop everybody
from just having to test everything all the time."
The new approach removed many of the constraints on the oil and gas
industry. They were no longer required to conduct seismic tests (a
stricture that remained in place
for Class 1 wells). Operators were allowed to test their wells less
frequently for mechanical integrity and the area they had to check for
abandoned wells was
kept to a minimum — one reason drilling waste kept bubbling to the
surface near Chico.
Soon after the first Chico incident, Texas expanded the area
regulators were required to check for abandoned waste wells (a rule that
applied only to certain parts of the
state). Doubling the radius they reviewed in Chico to a half mile, they
found 13 other injection or oil and gas wells. When they studied the
land within a mile
— the radius required for review of many Class 1 wells — officials
discovered another 35 wells, many dating to the 1950s.
The Railroad Commission concluded that the Chico injection well had
overflowed: The target rock zone could no longer handle the volume being
pushed into it. Trying to cram in more waste at the same speed could
cause further leaks, regulators feared. The commission set new limits on
how fast the waste could be injected, but did not forbid further
disposal. The well remains in use to this day.
In late 2008, samples of Chico's municipal drinking water were found
to contain radium, a radioactive derivative of uranium and a common
attribute of drilling waste. The
water well was a few miles away from the leaking injection well site,
but environmental officials said the contaminants discovered in the
water well were unrelated, mostly because they didn't include the level
of sodium typical of brine.
Since then, Ed Cowley, the public works director, said commission
officials have continued to assure him that brine won't reach Chico's
drinking water. But since the agency keeps allowing more injection and
doesn't track the cumulative volume of waste going into wells in the
area, he's skeptical that they can keep their promise.
"I was kind of like, 'You all need to get together and look at the
total amount you are trying to fit through the eye of the needle,'" he
said.
***
When sewage flowed from 20
Class 1 wells near Miami into the Upper Floridan aquifer, it challenged some of scientists' fundamental assumptions about the injection system.
The wells — which had helped fuel the growth of South Florida by
eliminating the need for expensive water treatment plants — had passed
rigorous EPA and state evaluation throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
Inspections showed they were structurally sound. As Class 1 wells, they
were subject to some of the most frequent tests and closest scrutiny.
Yet they failed.
The wells' designers would have calculated what is typically called the "zone of influence" — the space that waste injected into
the wells was expected to fill. This was based on estimates of how much fluid would be injected and under what pressure.
In drawings, the zone of influence typically looks like a Hershey's
kiss, an evenly dispersed plume spreading in a predictable circular
fashion away from the bottom of the
well. Above the zone, most drawings depict uniform formations of rock
not unlike a layer cake.
Based on modeling and analysis by some of the most sophisticated
engineering consultants in the country, Florida officials, with the
EPA's assent, concluded that
waste injected into the Miami-area wells would be forever trapped far
below the South Florida peninsula.
"All of the modeling indicated that the injectate would be confined
in the injection zone," an EPA spokesperson wrote to ProPublica in a
statement.
But as Miami poured nearly half a billion gallons of partly treated
sewage into the ground each day from the late 1980s through the mid
1990s, hydrogeologists learned that the earth — and the flow of fluids
through it — wasn't as uniform as the models depicted. Florida's
injection wells, for example, had been drilled into rock that was far
more porous and fractured than scientists previously understood.
"Geology is never what you think it is," said Ronald Reese, a
geologist with the United States Geological Survey in Florida who has
studied the well failures there. "There
are always surprises."
Other gaps have emerged between theories of how underground injection
should work and how it actually does. Rock layers aren't always neatly
stacked as they appear in
engineers' sketches. They often fold and twist over on themselves. Waste
injected into such formations is more likely to spread in lopsided,
unpredictable ways than in a uniform cone. It is also likely to channel
through spaces in the rock as pressure forces it along the weakest
lines.
Petroleum engineers in Texas have found that when they pump fluid
into one end of an oil reservoir to push oil out the other, the injected
fluid sometimes flows around the reservoir, completely missing the
targeted zone.
"People are still surprised at the route that the injectate is taking
or the bypassing that can happen," said Jean-Philippe Nicot, a research
scientist at the University of
Texas' Bureau of Economic Geology.
Conventional wisdom says fluids injected underground should spread at
a rate of several inches or less each year, and go only as far as they
are pushed by the pressure inside the well. In some instances, however,
fluids have traveled faster and farther than researchers thought
possible.
In
a 2000 case
that wasn't caused by injection but brought important lessons about how
fluids could move underground, hydrogeologists concluded that
bacteria-polluted water migrated horizontally underground for several
thousand feet in just 26 hours, contaminating a drinking water well in
Walkerton, Ontario, and sickening thousands of residents. The fluids
traveled 80 times as fast as the standard software model predicted was
possible.
According to the model, vertical movement of underground fluids
shouldn't be possible at all, or should happen over what scientists call
"geologic time": thousands of years or
longer. Yet a
2011 study in Wisconsin found that human viruses had managed to
infiltrate deep aquifers, probably moving downward through layers believed to be a permanent seal.
According to a study published in
April in the journal Ground Water, it's not a matter of if fluid will move through rock layers, but when.
Tom Myers, a hydrologist, drew on research showing that natural
faults and fractures are more prevalent than commonly understood to
create a model that predicts how chemicals
might move in the Marcellus Shale, a dense layer of rock that has been
called impermeable. The Marcellus Shale, which stretches from New York
to Tennessee, is the focus of intense debate because of concerns that
chemicals injected in drilling for natural gas will pollute water.
Myers' new model said that chemicals could leak through natural
cracks into aquifers tapped for drinking water in about 100 years, far
more quickly than had been thought. In
areas where there is hydraulic fracturing or drilling, Myers' model
shows, man-made faults and natural ones could intersect and chemicals
could migrate to the surface in as little as "a few years, or less."
"It's out of sight, out of mind now. But 50 years from now?" Myers
said, referring to injected waste and the rock layers trusted to entrap
it. "Simply put, they are not impermeable."
Myers' work is among the few studies done over the past few decades
to compare theories of hydrogeology to what actually happens. But even
his research is based on models.
"A lot of the concepts and a lot of the regulations that govern this
whole practice of subsurface injection is kind of dated at this point,"
said one senior EPA hydrologist who was not authorized to speak to
ProPublica, and declined to be quoted by name.
"It's a problem," he said. "There needs to be a hard look at this in a new way."
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