How billions of barrels of toxic oil and gas waste are falling through regulatory cracks
Joel Dyer
Workers attempt to clean up a toxic site in Wyoming.
The
oil and gas industry has a dirty little secret, make that a dirty big
secret … no, make that one of the biggest, dirtiest secrets in U.S.
history.
What
is no secret these days is that the potential for negative
environmental and health impacts as a result of oil and gas exploration
and production activity is very real.
Concern
over fracking, with its toxic cocktail composed of some combination of
between 300 and 750 chemicals, 70 percent of which are known to be
harmful to humans because they are carcinogenic or endocrine disruptors,
etc., gets most of our collective attention these days. But this
industry practice is not the only or largest contamination problem our
nation faces as the result of oil and gas development.
In
fact, the oil and gas industry’s other contamination problems are so
large, they have literally been deemed impossible to prevent or even
clean up by both industry and government. As a result, an unimaginable
tonnage of contamination is being placed into our environment every year
thanks to the near total lack of regulations over oil and gas
exploration and production wastes.
The story behind this unregulated onslaught of contamination is so bizarre as to seem impossible, but it isn’t.
We
often hear of the “Halliburton loophole,” a name used to describe a
regulatory exemption that was created for the industry in 2005 to
relieve fracking fluid of the burden of the Safe Drinking Water Act. But
the Halliburton loophole is just one small exemption to federal
regulations for the oil and gas industry. There are many others.
The
mother of all oil and gas waste exemptions had its beginnings in 1978
when the EPA proposed reduced requirements for a couple of types of
large-volume wastes associated with the oil and gas industry, namely
produced water and drilling muds.Read more...http://www.boulderweekly.com/article-12516-americarss-dirtiest-secret.html
