Five years ago, Oklahoma oil regulators embarked on a project with an impressive name: the Source of Truth. State officials wanted a comprehensive database of all vital information about Oklahoma’s more than 11,000 wells that discharge toxic byproducts of oil production underground.
I had heard about this project from several people during the 18 months I had spent reporting on the growing number of cases where oilfield wastewater was leaking out of old wells, called blowdowns, after being injected underground at high pressure. State employees also referenced the project in internal communications I received after filing nearly a dozen public records requests with the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, which regulates the oil and gas industry.
Just before the new year, the Source of Truth itself landed in my inbox in response to an unrelated records request. And it has been explosive, revealing a series of rule violations by oil and gas companies that state regulators have allowed to continue.
The project was supposed to clean or correct state data regarding the amount of wastewater injected and the pressures at which it was pushed underground. The agency’s databases, many of which relied on decades-old paper records, were riddled with conflicting or missing information. In many cases, the agency has not updated its records. More than 1,300 errors were identified.
But the Source of Truth found more than just messy data. It also allowed regulators to identify nearly 600 wells that were operating illegally: They were injecting wastewater above their permitted pressures or volumes.
Excessively high injection pressures and volumes can result in blowdowns and groundwater pollution.
That wasn’t all. The report also shows that regulators allowed more than 1,400 other older injection wells to operate for decades without any limits on injection pressures or volumes – grandfathering in from an earlier era of permissive oversight.
During my report on oil and gas pollution in Oklahoma, I discovered systemic underregulation by the state – as well as some crucial crossroads moments, instances where state regulators could have taken action to bring the industry into compliance with their own rules.
The completion of the Source of Truth was part of it.
With that report, the agency had a long list of potentially problematic wells that were injecting above legal limits or missing limits altogether. These wells represented nearly a fifth of the active injection wells in the state. They deserved scrutiny, my agency sources told me.
But once the report was completed in 2021, regulators did not act on its findings. They have not required oil and gas operators to follow injection limits on their permits or set limits on older wells to bring them up to modern standards, agency employees said. They never made the report available to all agency staff, according to my agency sources and internal documents.
At the same time, the number of oilfield purges rose steadily, from a dozen in 2020 to more than 150 over the next five years, according to a Frontier and ProPublica analysis of pollution complaints submitted to the agency.
As agency employees investigated these pollution events, they identified numerous problem wells that, unbeknownst to many, had already been reported in the Source of Truth.
“The Oklahoma Corporation Commission has studied the possibility of using the Source of Truth database in the past and has chosen not to use this form of data collection,” said Jack Money, an agency spokesman, without explaining why.
Money did not explain why regulators did not force oil companies to comply with the limits they had agreed to, why the agency chose not to set limits on older wells or why it did not widely share the Source of Truth. He did not respond to follow-up questions.
Inject without limits
The central problem identified by Source of Truth dates back to 1981, when Oklahoma asked the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to take over regulation of oil and gas injection operations.
Before the federal government agreed to cede control, the state had to prove its regulations would protect groundwater, as required by the federal Safe Drinking Water Act. The 1974 law created basic standards to regulate underground injection.
This meant big changes in Oklahoma. For decades, the state has routinely approved parcels of land for drilling, as well as groups of injection wells that contribute to oil production. This type of injection well collects wastewater after it has been separated from the oil and returns it underground to push more oil to the surface – a technique known as water flooding.
The state proposed approving each injection well individually, setting a maximum pressure and volume for each to “prevent contamination of fresh water,” according to Oklahoma’s request to the EPA. Setting such limits would ensure that injected wastewater would not fracture the rock surrounding the well and pollute groundwater.
Oklahoma gained EPA approval, becoming one of the first states to gain direct control of underground oil and gas injection. Today, more than 30 states have authority to regulate underground oil and gas injection.
Oklahoma did not retroactively apply its new standards. And the EPA never forced him to do so. Thousands of existing wells have been allowed to continue injecting without limits on volume or pressure.
Federal regulators’ hands appear tied by the language of the Safe Drinking Water Act, which allows injection without limits for “the life of the well,” according to Joseph Robledo, a spokesman for the EPA regional office that oversees Oklahoma.
“EPA recognizes that because oil and gas activity began in Oklahoma well before statehood, [underground injection] regulations, many wells in Oklahoma do not meet modern standards,” Robledo wrote in an email.
He said Oklahoma has taken steps to modernize its oil and gas inventory and is submitting regular reports to the EPA.
But my reporting shows that state regulators have not directly addressed the issue of wells without injection limits.
I have consulted with more than half a dozen oil and gas injection experts, including lawyers, about these wells being operated to outdated standards. No one had any idea that so many of Oklahoma’s injection wells were grandfathered in and out of compliance with volume and pressure limits. Several noted, however, that federal law is unclear about what state regulators were allowed – or required – to do; The Safe Drinking Water Act prohibited states from interfering with oil and gas operations that existed before the law’s passage – unless those operations put drinking water at risk.
Because the state has never investigated these wells, no one can say for sure whether they actually threaten drinking water. But my reports show that excessively high injection pressures and volumes caused massive pollution in Oklahoma.
The state’s most recent data indicates that 88 percent of the 1,400 wells identified by the Source of Truth as having no pressure or volume limits are listed as active, injecting more than a hundred million gallons of wastewater underground last year.
Establishing pressure and volume limits for each of these wells would have been an enormous task, requiring regulators to approve new permits for each.
Still, experts say responsible regulation of underground injection requires, at a basic level, knowing how much — and with what force — water is being pushed underground.
“Pressure and volume limits are essential to ensure that injection wells do not primarily endanger groundwater, but also to avoid harmful consequences like earthquakes and blowdowns,” Adam Peltz, a lawyer who directs the energy office of the Environmental Defense Fund, a nonprofit advocacy organization, told me.
Problematic wells near purges
In the years following the completion of the Spring of Truth, purges increased across the state, with toxic sewage gushing to the surface, polluting farmland and water sources.
A particularly serious series of purges took place in a rural area of Carter County in south-central Oklahoma. Huge volumes of sewage spilled from the ground for months starting in 2021.
In an internal email chain from August 2022 discussing the response to ongoing sewage blowouts, an environmental supervisor pointed out that the Source of Truth could have been of “tremendous assistance” to his team as they assessed injection wells near the blowdowns – but they did not have access to them.
After obtaining the documents from the Source of Truth, I checked to see if any wells reported as problematic had been identified by the agency as being located near purges in recent years. There have been at least 30 matches. If the agency had proactively investigated problem wells to see if wastewater was spreading widely underground, it might have been able to identify several oil fields where pressure injection would later cause blowdowns.
In theory, the EPA could still force Oklahoma to improve its regulations on oil and gas injection if federal authorities found that its wells were systematically threatening groundwater. There is precedent for this, but it is rare.
In California, federal authorities helped carry out an audit state’s oilfield wastewater injection policies in 2011 and found it failed to properly protect aquifers. State and federal officials then developed a plan to revise California’s regulations on underground injection. No state has ever had its oversight of oil and gas injection revoked.
Similar scrutiny is unlikely in Oklahoma under President Donald Trump, whose EPA is radically loosening regulations on the industry.
Robledo, the spokesperson for the EPA, noted in an email that there are certain circumstances that would require Oklahoma to impose limits on these old wells, including when they contaminate drinking water or violate other state rules.
But state regulators wouldn’t know if these wells are contaminating drinking water if they don’t investigate them.
I asked state regulators if they would address the many wells that are still injecting under outdated regulations, a situation created four decades ago and highlighted by the Source of Truth.
They didn’t respond.