Regulations Dry Up Wastewater Wells

Fracking ▶ Trying to reduce fracking-related earthquakes in Oklahoma ▶ “The profits used to be fabulous. Those days are gone”

In 2010, as fracking was taking off in Oklahoma, Jeff Andrews, a former oil rig manager and drilling consultant, had an idea for how to cash in on the boom. Rather than drill a well that would produce oil, Andrews decided to drill one that could be used to dispose of all the salty, toxic wastewater that comes up with it.

It seemed like a sure thing. For every barrel of oil produced in Oklahoma, drillers produce an average of about 10 barrels of wastewater. While other states tend to treat and recycle their wastewater, Oklahoma has a history of shooting it back down into the ground.

By mid-2014, oil production in Oklahoma had jumped to 300,000 barrels a day. That summer, Andrews was injecting about 9,000 barrels of wastewater down his disposal well daily—and charging about 75¢ a barrel. He and his partners were on their way to recouping the $3.2 million they’d invested in the business. But there was one problem: Oklahoma was fast becoming the earthquake capital of the U.S., and scientists started to connect wastewater wells to a sharp rise in seismic activity.

Andrews’s well has gone from a cash cow to a money pit. Not only have oil prices crashed, causing a slowdown in the entire oil and gas industry, but regulations aimed at reducing quakes have put tight restrictions on hundreds of disposal wells. On March 7 the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, the state’s oil and gas regulator, ordered the operators of 400 disposal wells in central Oklahoma to cut the amount of water they inject underground. The goal is to reduce total wastewater volume in the area by 40 percent, or about 300,000 barrels a day.

“I’m probably going to have to shut my doors,” Andrews says. Under the new rules, he’ll have to cut back to 679 barrels of wastewater per day. The crash in oil prices has lowered the rate he can charge to about 35¢ a barrel, cutting his revenue to a couple hundred dollars a day.

Since 2009 the amount of wastewater disposed of in Oklahoma has increased 81 percent, to more than 1 billion barrels a year. The number of earthquakes measuring 3 or higher on the Richter scale jumped to 900 in 2015 from fewer than 2 in 2008. In

the past year, OCC has imposed