http://truth-out.org/news/item/13285-how-the-feds-let-industry-pollute-the-nations-underground-water-supply
How the Feds Let Industry Pollute the Nation's Underground Water Supply
Wednesday, 12 December 2012
09:57
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 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.
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore
Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph:
410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
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master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought
the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while
the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially
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