Oklahoma Knew About 600+ Wells Illegally Injecting Fracking Waste Into The Ground. They Did Nothing.

Five years ago, Oklahoma oil regulators took on a project with an impressive name: the Source of Truth. State officials wanted a comprehensive database capturing all vital information about the more than 11,000 wells in Oklahoma that shoot the toxic byproduct of oil production back underground. I’d heard about this project from several people during the 18 months I had spent reporting on the growing number of cases where oilfield wastewater blasted out of old wells, known as purges, after being injected underground at high pressures.

State employees also referenced the project in internal communications that I received after filing nearly a dozen public records requests to the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, which regulates the oil and gas industry. Just before the new year, the Source of Truth itself landed in my inbox in response to an unrelated records request. And it was explosive, revealing a pattern of rule violations by oil and gas companies that state regulators allowed to continue. The project was supposed to clean up or fix state data regarding how much wastewater was being injected and the pressures at which it was being pushed underground. The agency’s databases, many of which were based on decades-old paper records, were riddled with contradictory or missing information. In many cases, the agency failed to update its records.

More than 1,300 errors were identified.But the Source of Truth found more than just messy data. It also allowed regulators to pinpoint nearly 600 wells that were operating illegally: injecting wastewater above their permitted pressures or volumes.

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But after the report was completed, in 2021, regulators did not act on its findings. They did not make oil and gas operators comply with the injection limits on their permits or establish limits on older wells to bring them up to modern standards, agency employees said. They never made the report accessible to the wider agency staff, according to my agency sources and internal documents.In the meantime, the number of oilfield purges grew steadily, from about a dozen in 2020 to more than 150 over the next five years, according to a Frontier and ProPublica analysis of pollution complaints submitted to the agency. As agency employees investigated these pollution events, they identified plenty of problematic wells that, unbeknownst to many of them, had already been flagged in the Source of Truth. “The Oklahoma Corporation Commission looked into using the Source of Truth database in the past and elected not to use this form of data collection,” said Jack Money, an agency spokesperson, without saying why.

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https://www.propublica.org/article/oklahoma-injection-wells-oil-regulators-database