Oil and gas companies spill millions of gallons of wastewater in Texas

The prolific oil and gas wells of Texas generate billions of gallons of salty liquid known as produced water. And a lot of this toxic water, just like crude oil, tends to get spilled — not just occasionally but hundreds of times a year.

From a spill of 756,000 gallons into the Delaware River in West Texas that sent chloride levels soaring to hundreds of small spills in one Permian Basin county, there’s hardly a corner of Texas not impacted. But messy record-keeping and ambiguous rules at the Railroad Commission of Texas, the state agency charged with regulating oil and gas drilling, have long obscured the scope and severity of these spills from the public.

The Railroad Commission has never formally adopted 2009 draft guidelines for reporting and cleaning up produced water spills. The agency delegated the authority to set different reporting thresholds to district offices, in a system that relies on self-reporting by offenders and includes little enforcement to assure accuracy and compliance.

A commission spokesperson said that produced water spills must be reported and that the agency fully investigates and mitigates all spills. But because the agency has never adopted guidelines, numerous companies are under the impression they are not required to report spills at all.

Inside Climate News has conducted the first-ever public analysis of produced water spills in Texas using data provided in response to open records requests to the Railroad Commission.

Over the decade from 2013 to 2022, the analysis found that oil and gas companies reported more than 10,000 spills totaling more than 148 million gallons of produced water. Where possible, companies use vacuum trucks to suck up as much spilled water as they can. But only about 40% of the water reported spilled from 2013 to 2022 was recovered.

The spills ranged from small leaks of less than 10 gallons to massive incidents, with 19 reported spills exceeding 500,000 gallons. Although they represented a tiny fraction of spills, with about 350 reported in the data, some of the most damaging incidents took place when produced water was spilled directly into streams, rivers or lakes.

Both conventional oil and gas drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, rely on large quantities of water, sand and proprietary chemicals, some of which are toxic, to free the oil and gas from geologic formations deep underground. Produced water is the liquid waste that comes back to the surface and contains both the proprietary drilling fluids and naturally occurring hazardous compounds from the earth, including arsenic and organic compounds such as benzene, a carcinogen.

The highly saline water can render land barren for years. Residents have filed lawsuits detailing damages from contaminated well water to poisoned cattle.

In East Texas’ Anderson County, cattle rancher Tate Willfong noticed a produced water spill on his property from Vista Energy Consulting’s pipeline in July that killed the grass his cattle graze on. He said he reported the spills to the Railroad Commission but only got help after he went to a local television reporter at KETK in Tyler. Vista Energy Consulting did not respond to a request for comment.

“I ain’t got a beef with the Railroad Commission at this time,” Willfong said. “But I didn’t get a lot out of them in the beginning.”

In Lamesa, the county seat of Dawson County in the high plains where Permian Basin oil production borders cotton farms and towering wind turbines, Doty Huff and Saul Torres filed a lawsuit against an energy firm named Enhanced Midstream, alleging that two leaks from one of the company’s produced water pipelines contaminated their well water and caused a “total loss of fair market value” of their property. Enhanced Midstream did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

In Knox County, north of Abilene, rancher Tim Foote sued after his cattle knocked down a fence around a Texcel Exploration tank where produced water and oil was stored. The livestock came into contact with spilled produced water and 132 cattle died. An appeals court recently upheld a trial court’s decision that the company cannot be held responsible.

“There’s a reason why you salted your enemy’s land in the Bible,” said Sarah Stogner, an oil and gas lawyer in the Permian Basin, who has documented damages from produced water spills….