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California Farms Are Using Drilling Wastewater to Grow Crops

posted by janrinok on Sunday July 12 2015, @12:48AM   Printer-friendly
from the every-bit-helps dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

California's epic drought is pushing Big Oil to solve a problem it's struggled with for decades: what to do with the billions of gallons of wastewater that gush out of wells every year.

Golden State drillers have pumped much of that liquid back underground into disposal wells. Now, amid a four-year dry spell, more companies are looking to recycle their water or sell it to parched farms as the industry tries to get ahead of environmental lawsuits and new regulations.

The trend could have implications for oil patches across the country. With fracking boosting the industry's thirst for water, companies have run into conflicts from Texas to Colorado to Pennsylvania. California could be an incubator for conservation efforts that have so far failed to gain traction elsewhere in the U.S.

If you were thinking California's drought might accelerate desalinization technology, you're wrong. It's actually helping the oil and natural gas industries make more money.

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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Monday July 13 2015, @01:31AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday July 13 2015, @01:31AM (#208291) Journal

    Right now, the regulations are written for rain water, that has not had a lot of stuff added to it. They haven't been written expecting whatever mysterious compounds the oil companies have been using for drilling or fracking.

    Nonsense. If this loophole existed, then all manner of industrial plants would be exploiting it. You'd have farms in the middle of Houston, for example, for the express purpose of dumping waste water from many chemical plants in the area.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @03:38AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @03:38AM (#208327)

    From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], with plenty of sources, including the law and amendments themselves, for your perusal:

    The 1974 act authorized EPA to regulate injection wells in order to protect underground sources of drinking water. Congress amended the SDWA in 2005 to exclude hydraulic fracturing, an industrial process for recovering oil and natural gas, from coverage under the UIC program. This exclusion has been called the "Halliburton Loophole". Halliburton is the world's largest provider of hydraulic fracturing services

    Through the Energy Policy Act of 2005, the Safe Drinking Water Act was amended to exclude the underground injection of any fluids or propping agents other than diesel fuels used in hydraulic fracturing operations from being considered as "underground injections" for the purposes of the law [gpo.gov].

    The fluids used in fracking are completely unregulated and ignored by the law and legally aren't even considered contaminants.