During an oil and gas industry conference I attended in Midland, Texas in early 2023 I learned that oil companies in Texas aren’t required to report spills of produced water, the salty, toxic liquid that comes out of the ground in the drilling process. Intrigued, I started making public records requests to the Railroad Commission of Texas, which regulates the oil and gas industry.
Companies are not required to report the spills, but many voluntarily do, and soon the Railroad Commission delivered hundreds of pages of logs recording produced water spills. The trouble was, they were completely disorganized. I couldn’t calculate the volumes of the spills or their geographical distribution.
Enter data journalist Peter Aldhous. We worked together for many hours to clean the data, organizing the logs into a coherent dataset.
Then Peter built a database to allow us to easily search and sort the spills. I complemented his work with reporting on the ground in the Permian Basin, observing legacy produced water spills and interviewing sources. I also searched court documents and numerous lawsuits where property owners alleged damages from these spills.
In October 2023, Inside Climate News published the full database for anyone to use. The messy, error-ridden logs were now navigable. My analysis found more than 148 million gallons of produced water were spilled between 2013 and 2022. Most of the more than 10,000 individual spills occurred on land, with about 350 contaminating bodies of water. My reporting showed that, while regulations remain vague and inconsistent, these spills have disastrous impacts.
Since publishing, landowners and oil and gas industry professionals have reached out to thank us for the database, which has allowed them to identify spills that the state did not disclose to the public.
People living in the oilfields also have thanked us for coverage of an overlooked issue. One of my sources, a petroleum engineer, said multiple companies asked him whether their own spills showed up in the data. I was invited to speak at a seminar organized by an Austin-based law firm and attended by hundreds of landowners who have oil and gas drilling on their properties, and other stakeholders.
Our reporting cracked an open secret of the oilfields—that produced water frequently spills in massive quantities—and turned it into a documented, quantifiable problem that could be fixed.
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