Is Oil Field Waste Making You Sick?

The following is an adapted excerpt from “Petroleum 238: Big Oil’s Dangerous Secret and the Grassroots Fight to Stop It,” published this week on Karret Press.

Every day across the U.S., billions of pounds of toxic and radioactive waste is produced by oil and gas wells. My journey into this topic started when an Ohio community organizer told me that someone had used radioactive oil field waste to make a liquid deicer for home driveways and patios — one that was supposedly “Safe for Pets” and that he’d been selling at Lowe’s. Unraveling how that came to be turned into a 20-month Rolling Stone magazine investigation, a set of shocking Truthdig investigations, and a book published this week, “Petroleum 238: Big Oil’s Dangerous Secret and the Grassroots Fight to Stop It.” 

“Petroleum 238” is the story of how a powerful industry spreads harm across the land and sickens the American people, especially their very own workers. This industry puts enormous resources into making sure no one ever put all the pieces together, and no one ever has — until now. Many people tell me there is nothing to see here, the levels aren’t that bad, but unfortunately this is the same thing the oil and gas industry’s shadow network of radioactive waste workers have often been told. So, they work on, shoveling and scooping waste, mixing it with lime and coal ash and ground up corn cobs in an attempt to lower the radioactivity levels, without appropriate protection, sometimes in T-shirts, eating lunch and smoking cigarettes and having cookouts in absurdly contaminated workspaces. Sludge splatters all over their bodies, liquid waste splashes into their eyes and mouths, they inhale radioactive dust as waste eats away their boots, soaks their socks and encrusts clothes that are often brought home and washed in the family washing machine, further spreading contamination. Oil field waste has been spilled, spread, injected, dumped and freely emitted across this nation. And contamination has been discharged — sometimes illegally, often legally — into the same rivers America’s towns and cities draw their drinking water from. 

The other month, I visited an abandoned fracking waste treatment plant on a large U.S. river where unknowing local kids had been partying. Littered with beer cans and condoms, parts of it were more deeply contaminated with radioactivity than most of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. I was there with a former Department of Energy scientist and his Geiger counter issued a terrifying alarm and reading of around 2 milliroentgens per hour. He had samples tested at a radiological analysis lab and discovered the radioactive element radium to be 5,000 times general background levels.  

It’s all right there in the industry’s own research and reports. And this is the beauty of science as a record of our world and its ways; like a sacred language, it moves through time, collecting new bits and building. One can go back to 1904, when a 25-year-old Canadian graduate student named Eli described “experiments with a highly radioactive gas obtained from crude petroleum.” Or to 1982, when a report of the American Petroleum Institute’s Committee for Environmental Biology and Community Health stated, “Almost all materials of interest and use to the petroleum industry contain measurable quantities of radionuclides that reside finally in process equipment, product streams, or waste.” Radium, they warned, was “a potent source of radiation exposure, both internal and external,” while the radioactive gas radon and its polonium daughters “deliver significant population and occupational exposures.” Radon is America’s second leading cause of lung cancer deaths and naturally contaminates natural gas. Which means it is being emitted out of home stoves in parts of the country at levels high enough to generate public health risks, and over time, cancer and deaths. The 1982 American Petroleum Institute report concluded, “regulation of radionuclides could impose a severe burden on API member companies.”

And the industry has triumphed: the radioactivity brought to the surface in oil and gas development has never been federally regulated. Instead, the industry was granted a federal exemption in 1980 that legally defined their waste as nonhazardous, despite containing toxic chemicals, carcinogens, heavy metals and all the radioactivity. The same 1980 exemption allows radioactive oilfield waste to be transported from foreign countries seamlessly across America’s borders and deposited in the desert of West Texas. I have been there.

“With fossil fuels, essentially what you are doing is taking an underground radioactive reservoir and bringing it up to the surface where it can interact with people and the environment,” the nuclear forensics scientist Dr. Marco Kaltofen has told me. “Radiation is complex and difficult to understand but it leaves hundreds of clues.” 

Known to precious few people, the mineral scale and sludge that accumulates in our 321,000-plus miles of natural gas gathering and transmission pipelines can be filled with stunning levels of the same isotope of polonium assassins used in 2006 to murder former Russian security officer Alexander Litvinenko by placing an amount smaller than a grain of sand in his tea at a London hotel bar. Natural gas pipeline sludge, reads a 1993 article on oilfield radioactivity published in the Society of Petroleum Engineers’ Journal of Petroleum Technology can become so radioactive it requires “the same handling as low-level radioactive wastes.” And yet U.S. law still considers it nonhazardous. Unlike the cosmic radiation an airline passenger is exposed to, or the X-rays of a CT scan, moving around radioactive oil field sludge or scale invariably creates dust and particles that an unprotected worker can easily inhale or ingest into their body, where they can decay and fire off radiation in the intimate and vulnerable space of the lungs, guts, bones or blood.

This is an astonishing scientific story about worker and environmental justice. Because oil and gas happens to bring up some of Earth’s most notorious radioactive elements, we live on a radioactive planet. These elements can be concentrated in the oil and gas-bearing geologic formations deep underground and further concentrated by the industry’s processes at the surface. From day one, which in the United States was 1859 — when the first commercial oil well was drilled in Titusville Pennsylvania — the U.S. oil and gas industry has had no good idea what to do with this waste. Modern fracking has only worsened the problem by tapping into even more radioactive formations, bringing drilling closer to communities, and vastly increasing the amount of waste.

In a 1979 Congressional hearing, Texas oil field regulators, using figures calculated by the American Petroleum Institute, provided a clue as to what regulations that labeled the oil field’s most dangerous waste as hazardous might mean for the industry: a “one time cost of over $34 billion to bring existing operations into compliance” and “as high as $10.8 billion per year.” That number would be drastically higher today, but no one has done the math, in part because the full picture of costs and harms remains unknown.

Whether it is a multinational company out of Paris, or the guy in rural Pennsylvania who stashed fracking waste beneath a courthouse, readers will be surprised at how deep this rabbit hole goes — and how close it may touch to the place they call home and the things they cherish.