Part 2 of 3 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
Cleanup efforts are taking place at three out of the four sites that were sampled and tested by the team from Duke. This was reported by a North Dakota State Health Department official who had been asked to comment on the Duke report. However, the contamination at the fourth site was not currently being dealt with. The official was critical of the research done by the Duke team because he said that the researchers had failed to do any serious testing at other sites where there had been extensive cleanup work.
The four sites that were tested by the Duke team included the areas where two of the biggest spills in the history of North Dakota occurred. At one of the sites, almost three million gallons of wastewater was released in 2015. Two smaller spill sites from 2011 were also tested. The samples from all four of the sites were collected in 2015. The National Science Foundation and the Natural Resources Defense Council provided funds for the Duke study.
In the past decade, about nine thousand seven hundred wells have been drilled in North Dakota in the Bakken Shale and Bottineu oilfield region. Doing the math, there has been roughly one spill reported for every three wells that have been drilled.
Avner Vengosh is a professor of geochemistry and water quality at Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment. When the Duke study was published, he commented that “Until now, research in many regions of the nation has shown that contamination from fracking has been fairly sporadic and inconsistent. In North Dakota, however, we find it is widespread and persistent, with clear evidence of direct water contamination from fracking.”
One of the most difficult problems for the shale industry has been handling the wastewater produced by drilling and fracking. The shale industry often pumps its toxic wastewater underground in a process referred to as wastewater injection. Every day, about two billion gallons of oil and gas wastewater in injected back into the ground across the U.S. Wastewater injection has been linked to swarms of earthquakes. This has resulted in legal challenges to the injection process.
The enormous volume of wastewater generated by the shale industry has often been beyond the coping ability of state regulators. This is especially true because federal law created an exemption for the fracking waste from the normal hazardous waste handling laws in the 1980s, regardless of how toxic or dangerous the waste is. Policing the waste from the shale industry has largely been left to individual states. Regulations vary from state to state and enforcement is often difficult.
Budgets for regulators have often failed to keep pace with the rapid expansion of the shale industry. For example, in North Dakota the number of wells per state inspector rose from about three hundred and sixty each in 2012 to five hundred each in 2018. The ratios are even worse in other fracking states. Wyoming oil and gas inspectors were each responsible for almost three thousand wells in 2015. As a result of the recent crash of oil and gas prices, funds for oil and gas inspections have also fallen in many states.
Please read Part 3