A year ago, the Environmental Defense Center (EDC) based out of Santa Barbara released the report Dirty Water: Fracking Offshore California detailing unknown-to-the-public instances of hydraulic fractured wells in federal waters off the Central Coast.
Since that time, the organization has filed several rounds of Freedom of Information Act requests with the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, met with various federal agencies to chat about concerns, and made policy recommendations.
“Now, a year later, it doesn’t seem like anything’s changed,” said Brian Segee, a senior attorney with the EDC. And in response to that lack of change, Segee said they filed a lawsuit at the beginning of December against the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, and the U.S. Department of the Interior.
The EDC alleges the federal government failed to provide public access and environmental analysis before approving 51 oil-drilling permits that allow fracking and acidizing in the Santa Barbara Channel. Those 51 permits have all been issued in the last 18 months, according to Segee, who added that the Dirty Water report covered historical and ongoing drilling permits, while the permits referred to in the lawsuit are all relatively new.
He said one of the biggest issues is the fact that information about permits being granted in federal waters isn’t readily available to the public, which isn’t super transparent. The EDC is concerned, of course, about the environmental implications that come with injecting chemicals into wells bores. These include wells drilled through hydraulic fracturing—pushing a mix of chemicals into the well bore at a high enough pressure to crack the rock formations below, allowing the oil to seep out—and acidizing—a mix of chemicals that etches its way into the rock formation, enabling oil to find pathways out.
The majority of the wells the lawsuit deals with were permitted for acidizing. Regardless of which of the two methods are used, the chemicals are the concerning part of it all.
“The chemicals being used: The entire life form of those chemicals presents risks,” Segee said.
That life includes transportation to the offshore oil platforms, the produced water that comes out after the chemical mix is injected into the earth, and the potential for wastewater to be released into the marine environment. Federal laws surrounding oil drilling do allow for some platforms to release their wastewater into the Pacific Ocean.
The EDC hasn’t gotten a response to its lawsuit yet, but Segee said that’s not uncommon and he doesn’t expect any of the agencies named as defendants to respond outside of the litigation process. He estimates that it could take a year or more for the suit to come to some sort of conclusion.
“The judicial process generally grinds away pretty slowly,” he said.
Check out the lawsuit that was filed at edcnet.org/news/Press_Room.html.
This article appears in Dec 11-18, 2014.