By Justin Nobel
https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/08/19/north-dakota-regulators-oil-gas-spill-exxon-valdez
In July 2015 workers at the Garden Creek I Gas Processing Plant, in Watford City, North Dakota, noticed a leak in a pipeline and reported a spill to the North Dakota Department of Health that remains officially listed as 10 gallons, the size of two bottled water delivery jugs.
In July 2015 workers at the Garden Creek I Gas Processing Plant, in Watford City, North Dakota, noticed a leak in a pipeline and reported a spill to the North Dakota Department of Health that remains officially listed as 10 gallons, the size of two bottled water delivery jugs.
But a whistle-blower has revealed to DeSmog the incident is actually on par with the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska, which released roughly 11 million gallons of thick crude.
The Garden Creek spill “is in fact over 11 million gallons of
condensate that leaked through a crack in a pipeline for over 3 years,”
says the whistle-blower, who has expertise in environmental science but
refused to be named or give other background information for fear of
losing their job. They provided to DeSmog a document that details remediation efforts and verifies the spill’s monstrous size.
“Up to 5,500,000 gallons” of hydrocarbons
have been removed from the site, the 2018 document states, “based upon
an…estimate of approximately 11 million gallons released.”
Garden Creek is operated by the Oklahoma-based oil and gas service company, ONEOK
Partners, and processes natural gas and natural gas liquids, also
called natural gas condensate, brought to the facility via pipeline from
Bakken wells.
Neither the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which monitors coastal spills, nor the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
could provide records to put the spill’s size in context, but according
to available reports, if the 11-million-gallon figure is accurate, the
Garden Creek spill appears to be among the largest recorded oil and gas
industry spills in the history of the United States.
However, the American public is unaware, because the spill remains
officially listed as just 10 gallons. That is despite the fact that a
North Dakota regulator has acknowledged the spill was much larger, and
even the official record, right after stating the spill was 10 gallons,
notes that the area was “saturated with natural gas condensate of an
unknown volume,” and thus may have been larger.
Scott Skokos, Executive Director of the Dakota Resource Council, an
organization that works to protect North Dakota’s natural resources and
family farms, questioned whether it was legal for the state to cover up
or downplay spills.
“I have seen many instances where it
appears spills are being covered up, and there appears to be a pattern
of downplaying spills, which makes the narrative surrounding oil and gas
development look rosy and makes the industry look better politically,”
says Skokos. “If this pattern is as widespread as it seems, then we have
a government that is conspiring to protect the oil industry. This is
not only reckless and unethical, but also potentially illegal.”
“In my view,” Skokos added, “this is not
looking out for the best interest of the state or the people who live in
the state, it is only looking out for corporations. And these are not
even corporate citizens of this state, they are corporate citizens of
somewhere else.”
The Challenge of Oversight
Spills are pervasive in North Dakota’s oil industry and have been the
focus of numerous media reports. “State regulators have often been
unable — or unwilling — to compel energy companies to clean up their
mess,” ProPublica reported in a 2012 investigation.
A 2015 Inside Energy
article noted state reports “are riddled with inaccuracies and
estimates” and cited a 2011 spill of oil and gas wastewater by a
Texas-based company listed as 12,600 gallons but later determined to be
at least two million gallons. An eight-year database of spills compiled
by the New York Times in 2014 showed two spills of roughly one million gallons.
But no news agency has reported on any spill in North Dakota near the magnitude of Garden Creek.
Gas processing plants are sprawling industrial facilities and contain
numerous pipes and towers that help clean and separate the stream of
natural gas and natural gas liquids like ethane, butane, and propane
carried in gathering pipelines that originate at wellheads.
The explosion of fracking across the U.S.
and the booming development of America’s gas-rich shale plays have
planted gas processing plants, which emit a near-continuous stream of
greenhouse gases and carcinogens, from the Pittsburgh suburbs and Ohio’s
Amish country to the high plains of Colorado and the badlands of
North Dakota.
“There should be ongoing investigations of
these facilities regularly,” says Emily Collins, Executive Director of
Fair Shake, an Ohio-based nonprofit environmental law firm. But
there isn’t.
“There is so much to keep track of for
these regulators that spills, among other things, are lost in the mix,”
says Collins. “The old formula of having inspections and investigations
where you show up once a year clearly doesn’t work here, not with the
pace, not with how many places are at issue all of the sudden. We are
just not able to handle it all.”
Meanwhile, examination of the industry, its spills, and its placid regulators has made its way to the U.S.
Congress. The Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources of the
House’s Natural Resource Committee has been holding hearings on the
impacts of oil and gas development on local communities, landowners,
taxpayers, and the environment.
In May, Collins testified before the subcommittee, along with
71-year-old North Dakota farmer Daryl Peterson. He shared harrowing
stories about decades of spills of toxic oil and gas industry waste on
his farmland, and the utter neglect of the issue by his
state’s regulators.
“In my experience, regulators have been
reluctant to enforce compliance,” Peterson told Congress. “And have
minimized the impacts, rather than holding the oil
companies accountable.”
North Dakota Regulator Disputes Size of Spill
On April 29, 2019, oversight of spills shifted from the North Dakota
Department of Health to a new agency, the Department of Environmental
Quality, but the state’s Spill Investigation Program Manager has
remained Bill Suess.
“I know for a fact that Bill Suess was made
aware of Garden Creek’s size in October of 2018 after a 3-year
investigation was completed to assess size and scope,” the
whistle-blower told DeSmog. “Bill and state staff were presented an
updated version of the spill size…at the state Gold Seal building in a
PowerPoint presentation.”
In a phone conversation with DeSmog in mid-July, Suess explained that
he had never seen a document showing the spill’s size to be any number
other than 10 gallons, and he rejected the fact that the spill was 11
million gallons.
“That would be by far the largest spill on land in U.S.
history. I mean you are talking 261,000 barrels,” Suess said. “That
would be significant, and I will guarantee you it is not that volume. I
have received no documentation and I have no scientific evidence to show
it is anywhere near that volume.”
Suess readily acknowledged that the officially listed spill size was
too low. “We know it is significantly bigger than 10 gallons. We have
known that since Day One,” Suess continued. Yet he defended the state’s
decision to continue to list the spill as just 10 gallons.
“In North Dakota we do not regulate based
on volume,” Suess added. “Whether we put a 10 there, a 100 there, a
1,000 there is not going to change our response to the spill, it is not
going to change what the responsible party has to do, not going to
change their remediation, it is not going to change anything other than
your curiosity.”
Crestwood
discovered a 1 million gallon brine spill from its Arrow pipeline on
July 8, 2014. Located north of Mandaree, North Dakota, on the Fort
Berthold Reservation. Mandaree is one of the six segments on Fort
Berthold and where most Mandan and Hidatsa people live. Courtesy of Lisa DeVille
DeSmog presented details of the Garden Creek spill to North Dakota
environmental attorney Fintan Dooley, who leads the North Dakota Salted
Lands Council, an organization dedicated to remediating spills.
“You got a big fish hooked here,” he said.
“This has all the signs of a civil conspiracy. If instead of 10, it was
110 or 1010 gallons, one could make the determination the original
report was a mistake, but to leave uncorrected a mistake this big is not
an accident, it smells of deception and deliberation and this is not
the first incident of deceptive record-keeping in North Dakota — I think
a good question to ask is, how many state officials are implicated in
covering up this story?”
The North Dakota Century Code, which contains all state laws, covers perjury, falsification, and breach of duty in Chapter 12.1-11. Subsection 05, “Tampering with public records,” states the following:
“A person is
guilty of an offense if he: a. Knowingly makes a false entry in or false
alteration of a government record; or b. Knowingly, without lawful
authority, destroys, conceals, removes, or otherwise impairs the verity
or availability of a government record.”
The offense, “if committed by a public servant who has custody of the
government record,” is a felony. The crime carries a possible five-year
prison sentence.
DeSmog confronted Suess with this portion of the code, and asked him
if he believed he, or someone, was guilty of falsifying government
records. “No, I am not guilty, but if I changed that number I would be,”
he said. “If I were to go in there and just change that [10 gallons] to
a larger number that I don’t have any scientific evidence or
documentation for, then I would be falsifying it.”
The environmental attorney Fintan Dooley does not buy that officials
behaved appropriately. “There has been a lot of talk around the state
capitol lately about official breach of public trust, and I am just
wondering how far this practice of falsification of records will be
allowed to go?” he said. “The whole thing can be prosecuted, and if this
presents an opportunity to prosecute, I think that is just wonderful.”
Any decisions regarding prosecution, he stresses, are up to a
state attorney.
When asked exactly who would be charged with a crime, Dooley said,
“If anyone is going to file a criminal charge, they must file it against
an individual. If there was a whole series of people involved, the best
practice would be to identify all of them.”
Spill Cleanup Amid Dakota Access Protests
Natural
gas flares from a flare-head at the Orvis State well on the Evanson
family farm in McKenzie County, North Dakota, west of Watford City. Credit: Tim Evanson, CC BY-SA 2.0
Garden Creek I became operational in January 2012. The project was
applauded by state and industry officials for its ability to reduce the
release of the prominent greenhouse gas methane in the oilfield by
containing and processing that and other natural gas byproducts. Flaring, or burning, natural gas is common in the region’s oilfields.
“The completion of this facility is a positive step toward reducing flaring activities in North Dakota,” ONEOK president Terry Spencer told a Watford City newspaper in 2012. In 2015, at the time the spill was noticed, ONEOK
was in the process of constructing a network of additional gas
processing plants across the Bakken. In one industry press release, the
company bragged of “better-than-expected plant performance at existing
and planned processing plants.”
“There was motive to cover up the actual
size of the spill to allow their infrastructure to be completed,” says
the whistle-blower. Furthermore, by the summer of 2016, as the cleanup
at Garden Creek I was moving along, protests against the construction of
the Dakota Access pipeline (DAPL)
at the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation were in full swing. One
major concern voiced by the tribe was that a spill could destroy
farmland and contaminate drinking water for thousands of people.
“Public outcry against gas collection could have threatened ONEOK’s
expansion plans and might have stood in the way of the state’s flaring
reduction goals,” says the whistle-blower. “It’s also possible that it
could have further galvanized public opinion against the DAPL
project. In short, it’s possible that the North Dakota Department of
Health faced heavy pressure from both state and industry to keep this on
the down low.”
David Glatt, Director of North Dakota’s Department of Environmental
Quality, said, “The state makes public all spill reports it receives, so
there is no under reporting by the state.” ONEOK
has not responded to DeSmog’s questions on this incident. DeSmog has
filed an open records request with the State of North Dakota for
additional information and details related to the Garden Creek I spill.
In July, Suess told DeSmog, “Remediation is still ongoing. It is
going to be a slow process, it will be a few years, I think.” Suess said
he was planning to revisit the spill site but did not expect anything
he found there would lead him to alter the officially recorded spill
size. “I have a schedule to go out there later this month, but I still
probably wouldn’t change that 10-gallon number because I still won’t
have an accurate number,” he said.
North Dakotans Grapple With Impacts of Spills
In May, just as North Dakota’s planting season was beginning, I met
with several North Dakota residents whose farms or communities had been
marred by oil and gas industry spills, including the land of farmer
Daryl Peterson, whose 2,500 acres of grains, soybeans, and corn have
been contaminated by more than a dozen spills of brine.
This oil and gas waste product is loaded with salt and also contains
toxic heavy metals and radioactivity. Peterson pointed to dead zones on
his land that are unfit for crops though still fit for government taxes.
The spills have also tainted his groundwater.
Daryl
Peterson's North Dakota farm has suffered from more than a dozen oil
and gas industry brine spills. Courtesy of Daryl Peterson
“State regulators declare most spills are cleaned up to EPA
standards and land productivity is restored but very often this has not
been the case,” said Peterson, who, together with his wife Christine,
has farmed this land in Bottineau County, near the Canadian border, for
more than 40 years.
“The oil industry controls politics in
North Dakota and long-term consequences to our precious land, air, and
water resources are being ignored with this gold rush mentality. With
the prospect of 40,000 more wells in North Dakota, the future of our
bountiful agriculture state is in great jeopardy,” said Peterson.
Suess defended his agency’s methods. “What I believe the North Dakota
public wants to know is not how big is it, but is this spill a risk to
me,” he said. “Personally, I have actually been told by others that we
are one of the most transparent agencies out there. My boss is the North
Dakota taxpayer, and my door is always open, any citizen can walk in at
any time and talk to me.”
However, other North Dakota residents dealing with spills strongly
disagree. In May DeSmog also toured spills on the Fort Berthold Indian
Reservation, in the heart of the Bakken oil boom in western North
Dakota, with Lisa DeVille and her husband Walter DeVille Sr. The couple
lives in the community of Mandaree and helps lead an environmental
advocacy group called Fort Berthold Protectors of Water & Earth Rights, or POWER.
“You can see the earth slowly dying,” said
Lisa, who has two master’s degrees in business and returned to school to
get a master’s degree in environmental science so she could better
monitor all the spills and contamination on her land and advocate for
her community.
“Every day we have a spill,” she said.
“Whether it is frac sand spilled, trucks that stall out and drop their
oil on roads, trucks wrecking on the road and spilling oil and gas waste
product, or our invisible spill, the methane released into the air from
flaring and venting.”
“The North Dakota Spill Investigation
Program Manager can say that his door is open, but North Dakota is
protecting industry, not people, and it is upsetting to me,” Lisa added.
“My people — the Mandan, Hidatsa, and
Arikara Nation — have been here for centuries, there have been many
broken promises, and they have been lied to and are still being lied to
about all this oil and gas contamination. No one knows the amount of
spills on Fort Berthold because industry will lie to our tribal leaders.
Also, there is no data for the public to see. There are no studies,
research, or analysis to create laws or codes for
environmental justice.”
In July 2014, one million gallons of oil and gas waste spilled from a
pipeline and into a ravine that drains into the tribe’s main reservoir
for drinking water. In a 2016 paper, Duke University researchers, including geochemist Avner Vengosh, revealed the spill, as well as several others in the Bakken, had laced the land with heavy metals and radioactivity.
When asked in May 2019 if he was aware of this research, Glatt,
director of the North Dakota Department of Environmental Quality, said
he questioned Vengosh’s “initial premise” and believed the researchers
were “looking for the worst case scenario.”
“I haven’t seen his report; I just didn’t
even know it was out there,” said Glatt. “I knew he was in the state.
This is the first time I hear that he wrote a report.”
‘Lack of Accountability’
As lawsuits against the oil and gas industry
for climate impacts continue and a growing web of grassroots groups
spotlight the industry’s wide arc of pollution, the uncovering of the
oil and gas industry’s vast closet of toxic skeletons seems inevitable.
“Ultimately I am fed up with the rushed
drilling programs and the lack of accountability when it comes to
environmental impacts,” says the whistle-blower. “I am also disgusted
with how state officials and city council members view these threats and
deem it acceptable to potentially harm human health.”
Why, the whistle-blower added, “are we shielding the truth from public scrutiny?”
Main image: The Exxon Valdez. Credit: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, public domain
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