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.
Not exact matches
Each gas
drilling well requires 5 acres of road and well pad, 4 to 9 million gallons of water mixed with 50,000 gallons of hundreds of different chemicals — many of them highly toxic carcinogens, neurotoxins and endocrine disrupters (as well as many untested synergistically on living beings) forced
into a spider web of miles of pipeline that is soon thick coated with radioactive radium when 60 % of that toxic brew is on its way back upward as gas
waste «brine.»
There are fewer injection wells in the East, however, so much of the
waste from
drilling in the Marcellus Shale was initially discharged
into surface waters.
Hydraulic fracturing, along with other processes used to
drill wells, generates emissions and millions of gallons of hazardous
waste that are dumped
into open - air pits.
But Keller, a natural resource manager for the Army Corps of Engineers, has seen a more ominous effect of the boom, too: Oil companies are spilling and dumping
drilling waste onto the region's land and
into its waterways with increasing regularity.
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.
The BLM's rule will also bring millions of dollars
into the public coffers as
drilling companies must pay royalties when they
waste natural gas on public lands.
In California, state officials have admitted to allowing oil companies to
drill injection wells
into protected aquifers and dispose of oil
waste fluid
into underground water supplies across the state.
To get permission for the new well — the first of its kind
drilled after new national environmental rules went
into effect — Aristech needed to prove to the Environmental Protection Agency that its
waste would remain trapped for at least 10,000 years.
The dead zone in this otherwise lush mountain country meant one thing to Parrish: Gas
drillers had been illegally dumping briny water mixed with chemicals, and the
waste had killed everything from the rusty well head all the way downhill
into a creek.