A journalist who spent the past few years making public records requests of the Oklahoma Corporation Commission says he found a state-funded study revealed nearly 600 wells operating illegally in the state, but regulators did nothing about the problem.
Writing for The Frontier and ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network, author Nick Bowlin the report entitled Source of Truth also showed regulators had allowed more than 1,400 other older injection wells to operate for decades without any limits on injection pressures or volumes. It was a case of the wells injected wastewater above their permitted pressure or volumes.
Bowling wrote his efforts led to his uncovering systemic underregulation by the state — as well as a few crucial fork-in-the-road moments, instances when state regulators could have taken action to bring the industry into compliance with their own rules. But he found the regulators failed to act on the findings of the study and they also did not make oil and gas operators comply with the injection limits.
“They never made the report accessible to the wider agency staff, according to my agency sources and internal documents,” continued Bowlin.
In the meantime, the number of oilfield purges grew steadily, from about 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.
Click here for Frontier and ProPublica