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energy policy, fossil fuels, fracking, Keystone XL, oil pollution, tar sands

Common Dreams: The Guardian/UK: Quebec’s Lac-Mégantic Oil Train Disaster Not Just Tragedy, But Corporate Crime

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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/07/12
Published on Friday, July 12, 2013 by

At the root of the explosion is deregulation and an energy rush driving companies to take ever greater risks
by Martin Lukacs

megantic
The town burns following a train derailment and explosion in Lac Megantic, Quebec, early July 6, 2013. The train was hauling about 50,000 barrels of crude from North Dakota’s Bakken shale development to Irving Oil’s 300,000 barrel per day (bpd) plant in Saint John, New Brunswick. (REUTERS/Jean Gauthie)

Five days after a train carrying crude oil derailed and exploded in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, the rural town resembles a scene of desolation. Its downtown is a charred sacrifice zone. 50 people are likely dead, making the train’s toll one of the worst disasters in recent Canadian history.

In the explosion’s aftermath, politicians and media pundits have wagged their finger about the indecency of “politicizing” the event, of grappling with deeper explanations. We can mourn, but not scrutinize. In April, prime minister Stephen Harper even coined an awkward expression – “committing sociology” – to deride the search for root causes about horrifying events, in the wake of an unrelated, alleged bombing attempt.

The recklessness of these corporations is no accident. Under the reign of neoliberalism over the last 30 years, governments in Canada and elsewhere have freed them from environmental, labor and safety standards and oversight, while opening up increasingly more of the public sphere for private profit-seeking.

But to simply call the Lac-Mégantic explosion a “tragedy” and to stop there, is to make it seem like an accident that occurred solely because of human error or technical oversight. It risks missing how we might assign broader culpability. And we owe it to the people who died to understand the reasons why such a disaster occurred, and how it might be prevented in the future.

So here’s my bit of unwelcome sociology: the explosion in Lac-Mégantic is not merely a tragedy. It is a corporate crime scene.

The deeper evidence about this event won’t be found in the train’s black box, or by questioning the one engineer who left the train before it loosened and careened unmanned into the heart of this tiny town. For that you’ll have to look at how Lac-Mégantic was hit by a perfect storm of greed, deregulation and an extreme energy rush driving companies to ever greater gambles with the environment and human life.

The crude carried on the rail-line of US-based company Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway – “fracked” shale oil from North Dakota – would not have passed through Lac-Mégantic five years ago. That’s because it’s part of a boom in dirty, unconventional energy, as fossil fuel companies seek to supplant the depletion of easy oil and gas with new sources – sources that are harder to find, nastier to extract, and more complicated to ship.

Like the Alberta tar sands, or the shale deposits of the United States, these energy sources are so destructive and carbon-intensive that leading scientists have made a straightforward judgment: to avert runaway climate change, they need to be kept in the ground. It’s a sad irony that Quebec is one of the few places to currently ban the “fracking” used to extract the Dakotan oil that devastated Lac-Mégantic.

But fossil fuel companies, spurred by record profits, have deployed a full-spectrum strategy to exploit and carry this oil to market. That’s one of the reasons for a massive, reckless increase in the amount of oil shipped by rail. In 2009, companies shipped a mere 500 carloads of crude oil by rail in Canada; this year, it will be 140,000.

Oil-by-rail has also proved a form of insurance against companies’ worst nightmare: a burgeoning, continent-wide movement to block pipelines from the Alberta tar sands. A group of Canadian businessmen is pursuing the construction of a 2,400-kilometre rail line that could ship 5m barrels of tar sands oil from Alberta to Alaska. Companies are also trucking it and entertaining the idea of barging it down waterways. This is the creed of the new energy era: by any means necessary.

The recklessness of these corporations is no accident. Under the reign of neoliberalism over the last 30 years, governments in Canada and elsewhere have freed them from environmental, labor and safety standards and oversight, while opening up increasingly more of the public sphere for private profit-seeking.

The railway in Canada has hardly been exempt. Up until the mid 1980s, the industry, publicly-run, was under serious regulation. By the time the Thatcherite Progressive Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney was finished with his reforms, it was deregulated, and companies had rewritten the safety rules. That launched an era of cost-cutting, massive lay-offs, and speed-ups on the job, and eventually, the full privatization of companies and rail-lines.

The Liberal government completed the job by turning over what regulation remained to rail companies themselves. A report issued in 2007 by a safety group spelled out the result: Canada’s rail system was a disaster in the waiting.

It’s little wonder, then, that today’s oil and rail barons have cut corners with ease. They’ve been using old rail cars to ship oil, despite the fact that regulators warned the federal government they were unsafe, as far back as 20 years ago. A more recent report by a federal agency reminded the government that the cars could be “subject to damage and catastrophic loss of hazardous materials.” All were ignored. To top it off, the federal government gave the go-ahead last year to Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway to operate with just one engineer aboard their trains.

All of which means it will not suffice to find out if a brake malfunctioned the night of the disaster, or limit ourselves to pointing at the failings of lax regulation. The debate should be about the need for another kind of brake, over the mad pursuit of infinite resources, and the unshackling of reckless corporations, on a finite and fragile planet.

Canada’s political class will not be pleased by the lessons to be drawn. The government needs to get back into the business of heavily regulating corporations – through incentives, through taxes, and through sanctions. And this will involve not just grappling with the dangers of the transport of oil – which will remain unsafe, whether by rail or by pipeline – but starting a rapid transition away from an extreme energy economy entirely. That will not happen as the result of any government inquiry, but a noisy social movement that puts it on the public agenda.

That’s why the most fitting response to Lac-Mégantic actually happened two weeks ago, by US residents 100 miles across the border in Fairfield, Maine. They were arrested blockading a train carrying the same fracked oil from the same oilfields of Northern Dakota, to the same refinery in New Brunswick, Canada. Their message was about ending our reliance on oil, not soon but now. For those who never knew the victims of Lac-Mégantic, there could be no better way to honor them.

fracking, Keystone XL, national ocean politics, natural resource management, tar sands

Ecowatch: U.S. State Department Doesn’t Know Exact Keystone XL Route

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http://ecowatch.com/2013/state-department-doesnt-know-keystone-xl-route/

July 9, 2013
Greenpeace

By Connor Gibson

tarsands-300x197
Greenpeace activists from Canada, the U.S. and France placed a giant banner reading “Tar Sands: Climate Crime” blocking the giant tar sands mining operation at the Shell Albian Sands outside of Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada onTuesday, September 15, 2009.

The U.S. government doesn’t know exactly where TransCanada wants to lay pipe for the northern section of its Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, according to the results of a 14-month Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) request to the U.S. State Department. In its final answer to a FOIA request by Thomas Bachand of the Keystone Mapping Project, the State Department admitted:

Neither Cardno ENTRIX nor TransCanada ever submitted GIS information to the Department of State, nor was either corporation required to do so. The information that you request, if it exists, is therefore neither physically nor constructively under the control of the Department of State and we are therefore unable to comply with your FOIA request.

Yes, you read that right. The U.S. State Department published its draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS)—supposedly an official account of the potential hazards of TransCanada’s proposed pipeline on U.S. waterways, wildlife and other major considerations like global climate change—without knowing exactly where TransCanada wants to dig.

Ongoing Conflicts of Interest in State Department Environmental Assessments

The State Department is already facing legitimate criticism for contracting companies with ties to TransCanada and other oil companies for its environmental impact estimates, which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has slammed for being “insufficient.” State looked no further than oil industry contractors to run the draft SEIS—companies like Cardno ENTRIX, which calls TransCanada a “major client,” and ERM Resources, a dues paying member of the American Petroleum Institute which is being investigated by the State Department’s Inspector General for trying to hide its prior consulting for fossil fuel giants like ExxonMobil, BP and Shell. In fact, TransCanada chose ERM Resources to do the Keystone XL SEIS review for the State Department, and one of ERM’s people working on the review was formerly employed by TransCanada.

TransCanada has stacked the deck, wagering American waterways and private property against the promise to profit from continued extraction of dirty tar sands petroleum.

Tar Sands Pipelines Spill

The potential is too high for Keystone XL to leak just like TransCanada’s existing Keystone I pipeline has repeatedly done, or rupture like ExxonMobil’s Pegasus tar sands pipeline in Mayflower, AK, earlier this year, or Enbridge’s tar sands pipeline spill in the Kalamazoo River in Michigan. The southern leg of Keystone XL is already under construction, and the if the cracks, dents and other faults in the “new” pipe are any indication, pollution from oil spills looks inevitable. Beyond being a disaster waiting to happen, Keystone XL guarantees the continued disaster that is tar sands mining, a process that has already poisoned entire regions—and peoples’ communities—in northern Alberta, Canada.

With President Obama’s recently unveiled Climate Action Plan, it would be a limp gesture to approve the Keystone XL pipeline. You’d think with the State Department having its environmental analysis run by oil industry consultants, they’d listen to the oil industry’s own guarantees that Keystone XL would increase demand for tar sands mining. That’s bad news for our climate—something the State Department cannot ignore if they do a reasonable review of the “unprecedented” amount of public comments on its draft SEIS on Keystone XL.

What remains to be seen is if the State Department will be reasonable in the last leg of its review, or if it will continue letting TransCanada and Big Oil control the process to the bitter end.

Visit EcoWatch’s KEYSTONE XL page for more related news on this topic.

climate change, fossil fuels, fracking, oil pollution, tar sands

Reuters Analysis: Quebec rail disaster shines critical light on oil-by-rail boom

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http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/07/us-train-rail-analysis-idUSBRE9660KZ20130707

Is anyone concerned that this train was being piloted automatically, as in, without human pilots aboard? DV

By Scott Haggett, Dave Sherwood and Cezary Podkul
Sun Jul 7, 2013 6:59pm EDT

(Reuters) – The deadly train derailment in Quebec this weekend is set to bring intense scrutiny to the dramatic growth in North America of shipping crude oil by rail, a century-old practice unexpectedly revived by the surge in shale oil production.

At least five people were killed, and another 40 are missing, after a train carrying 73 tank cars of North Dakota crude rolled driverless down a hill into the heart of Lac-Megantic, Quebec, where it derailed and exploded, leveling the town center.

It was the latest and most deadly in a series of high-profile accidents involving crude oil shipments on North America’s rail network. Oil by rail – at least until now – has widely been expected to continue growing as shale oil output races ahead far faster than new pipelines can be built.

Hauling some 50,000 barrels of crude, the train was one of around 10 such shipments a month now crossing Maine, a route that allows oil producers in North Dakota to get cheaper domestic crude to coastal refiners. Across North America, oil by rail traffic has more than doubled since 2011; in Maine, such shipments were unheard of two years ago.

“The frequency of the number of incidents that have occurred raises legitimate questions that the industry and government need to look at,” said Jim Hall, managing partner of consultants Hall & Associates LLC, and a former chairman of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board.

“The issue here is: are they expanding too rapidly?” he said. “Are they in a rush to accommodate and to make the economic advantage of carrying these?”

MUCH AT STAKE
There are many unanswered questions about the Quebec disaster that will likely shape the public and regulatory response, including why a parked freight train suddenly began rolling again, and why carloads of crude oil – a highly flammable but not typically explosive substance – caused such widespread disaster.

“There may have been some vapors, maybe? I don’t know. We don’t know exactly what happened,” Edward A Burkhardt, chairman of Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway, said in an interview on Saturday when asked about why the tankers may have exploded.

Apart from the human toll, the disaster will draw more attention to environmental risks of transporting oil.

Much is at stake: Oil by rail represents a small but important new source of revenue for big operators like Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd and Warren Buffett’s BNSF, which have suffered a drop in coal cargo. It is also a flexible and cheaper option to more expensive European or African crude for refiners like Irving Oil, which confirmed on Sunday that the train was destined for its 300,000 bpd plant in Saint John, New Brunswick.

And for producers like Continental Resources Inc which have pioneered the development of the Bakken fields in North Dakota, railways now carry three-quarters of their production; new pipelines that can accommodate more oil are years away.

Saturday’s train wreck may also play into the rancorous debate over the $5.3 billion Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to the U.S. Midwest, which is hinging on President Barack Obama’s decision later this year.

Obama said last month that approval for the line would ultimately depend on its impact on carbon-dioxide emissions. An earlier draft report from the State Department suggested that rejecting the project would not affect emissions because crude would still be shipped by rail.

As a result, the incident may strengthen the resolve of those opposed to the Keystone pipeline rather than soften resistance. The oil industry at large is already broadly supportive of both rail and pipeline transport.

“Committed critics … could conceivably seize upon the Lac-Megantic incident – in tandem with recent pipeline spills – to argue against oil production, irrespective of its mode of transport,” said Kevin Book, managing director of Research at ClearView Energy Partners.

MOVE IT BY RAIL
The railway industry has this year mounted a more robust effort to counter the suggestion that rail is a riskier way to transport crude than pipelines.

The American Association of Railroads has declined to comment on Lac-Megantic, but previously said its spill rate – based on the number of gallons of crude oil spilled versus every million miles of transport per barrel – is less than half that for pipelines.

The AAR also said the number of train accidents involving the release of hazardous material has dropped by 26 percent since 2000, and by 78 percent since 1980.

Since the beginning of the year, U.S. railroads moved nearly 360,000 carloads of crude and refined product, 40 percent more than in 2012, according to the AAR. In Canada, year-to-date traffic is up 24 percent.

With that growth has come a number of high-profile spills and accidents, many on Canadian Pacific Railway’s network, which runs through Alberta, the largest oil exporter to the United States, and the Bakken field.

Canadian Pacific suffered the industry’s first serious spill in late March, when 14 tanker cars derailed near Parkers Prairie, Minnesota, and leaked 15,000 gallons of crude. Regulators have not released the results of their investigation into the incident, and Canadian Pacific declined to comment.

Even before Saturday’s disaster, the practice of shipping oil by rail was stirring opposition in Maine.

“It’s a wake-up call of the worst kind,” said Meaghan LaSala, an organizer with 350 Maine, a group that opposes the hydraulic fracturing – or “fracking” – technology that makes shale production possible. “They say rail is the safest method, but there simply is no guaranteed way to transport such highly toxic and explosive materials.”

TOO SOON TO SAY
Many observers say it is too soon to say if the Lac-Megantic disaster will quell the crude-by-rail boom. Refiners not connected to the Midwest pipeline network will still use rail to access the cheapest crudes.

“On the face of it this should be a boost for pipeline solutions, especially given the improvements in pipeline technology over the past five decades,” said Ed Morse, managing director of commodity research at Citi Group.

But he and other analysts noted that not every devastating tragedy leads to new policy.
“We need all forms of transportation for oil, whether they’re rail, whether they’re pipeline, and no system is failsafe,” Charles Drevna, president of American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, said in a phone interview.

For Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway, crude oil shipments are a relatively new phenomenon. With just 510 miles of line, the small railway primarily carried paper and forest products until the financial crisis, and had suffered in the years after until the shale boom came along.

In the first four months of the year, it carried about 16,500 barrels per day (bpd) of crude, 10 times more than a year before and up from zero in early 2011, according to data from the Maine Department of Environmental Protection.

“In the 10 years or so we’ve been in business, this is the only serious derailment we’ve ever had,” Burkhardt told Reuters in the interview.

Henry Posner III, a former business partner who invested with Burkhardt in a railroad in Estonia, said he could not recall any incidents similar to what happened in Quebec during the 5-1/2 years they were in business together.

“Safety is the most important component of railway culture in North America and that’s one of the things we’re most proud of having exported to Estonia,” said Posner, who chairs Railroad Development Corporation, a Pittsburgh-based company that invests in railroads.

(Reporting by Scott Haggett in Calgary, Alberta, Dave Sherwood in Portland, Maine, and Cezary Podkul in New York; additional reporting by P.J. Huffstutter in Chicago, Jonathan Leff in New York and David Ljunggen in Ottawa; editing by Tiffany Wu and Matthew Lewis)
U.S.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

fossil fuels, fracking, oil pollution, tar sands

Common Dreams: Lac-Megantic: Ecological Tragedy Unfolds Amid Human Loss. Dozens still missing as questions emerge about scale of environmental damage

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Published on Monday, July 8, 2013 by Common Dreams

– Jon Queally, staff writer

lac
The downtown core lays in ruins as fire fighters continue to water smoldering rubble Sunday, July 7, 2013 in Lac-Mégantic,, Quebec after a train derailed ignited tanker cars carrying crude oil. (Photo: Ryan Remiorz/The Canadian Press)

In addition to the human deathtoll from the disaster in the town of Lac-Megantic, Quebec—which local officials say is almost sure to rise—fears over the ecological destruction caused by Saturday’s oil train derailment and explosion are also beginning to emerge.

While Quebec’s emergency management agency has confirmed that both Lac-Megantic itself and the Chaudière River have both been contaminated by the spill, Canadian environmental groups are warning that the impact on the region’s water and air quality could be impacted for years to come.

The spilled oil and other toxins contained within it, says Greenpeace Canada’s Keith Stewart, will create lasting pain for the region. “It gets into the ecosystem, it gets into the water, it gets into the soil,” he told the Montreal Gazette. “Depending on the amount of oil spilled, the effects can be big, and they can mitigate the damage but not get rid of them entirely.”

In this case, because of the fires and amount of fuel that was burned, a large concern is the air pollutants that were created.
In fact, it is the fires that have delayed the cleanup so far, making the long-term impacts possibly much worse. “The longer term impacts are effects on water and on soil, which are hard to clean up, and normally you want to clean them up as soon as possible to reduce damage,” Stewart explained.

One of the lingering unknowns, says Stewart, is exactly what kind of oil the train cars were carrying. “If it’s (heavy oil) bitumen, it sinks so you actually have to go down to the riverbed, but if it’s light crude, it will float and you can [try to] skim it off the top,” Stewart said.

“We suspect that the oil is coming from North Dakota, and that would means it’s shale oil,” said Steven Guilbeault, co-founder and deputy director of the Quebec-based group Équiterre. “It’s not the oil people are used to. Beyond that, (it’s a question of whether) it’s light crude or heavy crude. … Depending on the type of crude oil, the environmental impacts, safety issues, decontamination issues are very different because of what’s in the oil.”

As was the case regarding recent oil spills in Kalamazoo, Michigan and Mayflower, Arkansas—both of which involved Canadian tar sands oil—these heavier crudes prove much more difficult to clean up, especially when they enter bodies of water.

“Typically what they have to do is try to scoop it up out of the water and dig up the soil that’s been contaminated and they can never get all of it,” said Guibeault. “It gets into the ecosystem, it gets into the water, it gets into the soil. Depending on the amount of oil spilled, the effects can be big, and they can mitigate the damage but not get rid of them entirely.”

________________________________

fossil fuels, tar sands

E&E: U.S. well sites in 2012 discharged more than Valdez

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Mike Soraghan, E&E reporter
Published: Monday, July 8, 2013
Story Tools sponsored by America’s Natural Gas

It went up orange, a gas-propelled geyser that rose 100 feet over the North Dakota prairie.
But it was oil, so it came down brown. So much oil that when they got the well under control two days later, crude dripped off the roof of a house a half-mile away. “It had a pretty good reach,” said Dave Drovdal, who owns the land where the Bakken Shale oil well, owned by Newfield Exploration Co., blew out in December near Watford City, N.D. “The wind was blowing pretty good. Some of it blew 2 miles.”

SPECIAL SERIES

There are thousands of oil spills at the nation’s onshore oil and gas well sites every year. But the data are scattered amid databases, websites and even file drawers of state agencies across the country. EnergyWire spent four months mining the data for the most comprehensive report available on the spills that result from the nation’s booming oil and gas industry.

It was one of the more than 6,000 spills and other mishaps reported at onshore oil and gas sites in 2012, compiled in a months-long review of state and federal data by EnergyWire. That’s an average of more than 16 spills a day. And it’s a significant increase since 2010. In the 12 states where comparable data were available, spills were up about 17 percent.
Drilling activity in those states, though, rose 40 percent during that time. More common than the Newfield blowout are 100-gallon leaks that are contained to the well site and get cleaned up the same day.

But together they add up to at least 15.6 million gallons of oil, fracking fluid, wastewater and other liquids reported spilled at production sites last year. That’s more than the volume of oil that leaked from the shattered hull of the Exxon Valdez in 1989. About 11 million gallons gushed from that ship.

And 15.6 million gallons is almost certainly an under count, because reports in drilling-heavy states such as Colorado, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania often exclude spill amounts. That figure also doesn’t include spills from interstate pipelines or offshore wells. Companies reported that at least one-third of the spill volume from well sites was recovered.

The frequency of the onshore spills shows companies aren’t doing enough to stop them, said Wilma Subra, a Louisiana-based environmental scientist who monitors the oil and gas industry. “They admit that it happens all the time,” Subra said.
People who live amid the country’s newly booming oil fields say the carelessness they see makes them worry about not only environmental damage, but also health and safety. “Every incident does make you pause and wish they weren’t so close to homes,” said Drovdal, a longtime Republican state legislator who goes by “Skip.”

Kristen Mesker and her husband have a 1,200-acre ranch in Burke County, N.D., amid the Bakken boom. They’ve seen a pasture and two wetlands (called “prairie potholes”) destroyed by a hot water spill and had a calf die after falling in a waste pit. “All this stuff happens to our fences and cattle,” said Mesker, who testified at the state Capitol earlier this year for legislation to keep wells farther from homes. “You wonder when that’s going to happen to a family.”

Kristi Mogen said it has affected her family’s health. One of her daughters had nosebleeds for days on end after a blowout last year that sent a stream of vaporized drilling chemicals into the air 2 miles from their house near Douglas, Wyo. A physical shortly after the incident showed she and her husband had depleted oxygen levels in their blood. “You feel helpless,” said Mogen, who traveled to Washington, D.C., earlier this year to press Congress for stronger regulation of drilling. “It’s not just us. It’s happening all over the United States.”

Oil and gas industry officials say companies have a good overall record of safety and environmental protection. “We do take safety seriously. It is a top priority,” Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute, said in a brief interview during a recent API safety and reliability conference in Washington. “Over the years, based on the nature of producing energy, there are risks associated with it. But we do have a strong safety record.”

An API spokesman provided a 2009 study indicating that overall oil spillage in the United States has decreased by more than 75 percent since the late ’60s. But it looks only at federal data, not the more detailed state data that EnergyWire reviewed. It also shows that the decreases were offshore, while inland spills increased.

Gerard stressed the job creation and other economic benefits of the country’s “game-changing” oil and gas boom. Drovdal said there’s a difficult balance. “As a landowner, I’m very conscious of the damage done to the land,” he said. “As a business owner, the checks are nice.”

Different types of spills

There is no central repository of spill records from oil and gas production sites. The Bureau of Land Management keeps a record of spills on public lands, but the rest are kept in the databases, and sometimes the file drawers, of state agencies across the country. EnergyWire assembled the records of thousands of spills into a central database for comparison. The reports highlight the vast variety of ways that spills can happen.

In the Newfield spill, there was a mechanical failure of well tubing. The drill pipe fired out of the hole like a bullet and lodged in the rig tower, spraying toxic mist into the wind. Newfield spokesman Keith Schmidt said the spill has been almost entirely cleaned up, and company officials “anticipate no lasting impact to human health.” It was one of the more spectacular accidents last year, but at 50,000 gallons of oil, 30,000 gallons of salty wastewater and 2 million cubic feet of gas, it was far from the largest.

More than a million gallons of salty “produced water” from coal bed methane drilling was released outside Gillette, Wyo., in August 2012. Earlier this year, there was a similar spill of nearly 3 million gallons. The water produced from shallow coal bed methane formations in that area can be clean enough for humans to drink, but the salt content can turn farmland hard as concrete.

More than 300,000 gallons of oil and produced water spilled from a Citation Oil & Gas Corp. well site in Healdton, Okla., in April 2012, down a dry wash and into pastureland.

Less dramatic accidents are far more common. Tanks overflow. Lightning strikes equipment and causes malfunctions. Valves get left open, letting oil or wastewater trickle into a ditch until the next crew comes in. Sometimes wandering cattle knock things loose. Pits and tank batteries can leak into groundwater for years before anyone notices. That’s what a crew found last year at an old well near an irrigation ditch and reservoir outside Greeley, Colo. Tests showed the groundwater had 300 times the state’s allowable limit for benzene.

Anadarko Petroleum Corp. is contending with a long legacy of pollution from old wells in the Salt Creek field near Casper, Wyo. The company reported about 50 spills in the field in 2012 as it cleaned them up in preparation for using carbon dioxide to flush out more oil.

Not all spills are accidental. Drillers reported vandalism at 21 Colorado well sites in 2012. And state officials are finding that truck drivers paid to haul briny drilling wastewater to approved disposal sites sometimes just dump it instead. Near Walden, Colo., last year a woman reported that she watched a waste hauler open the valves on his tanks. She followed his truck until he pulled into a nearby gas production site, leaving a trail of foul-smelling drilling wastewater on the county road. In Arkansas last summer, officials discovered at least 32 instances of wastewater haulers dumping their loads in the woods near well sites.

Who spills the most? Hard to say

North Dakota had the highest number of spills last year, 1,129, and one of its dominant producers, Continental Resources Inc., had more reported spills than any other company. But industry officials say that’s likely because companies in North Dakota have to report more spills than in other states. In North Dakota, they have to report any spill of more than 1 barrel (42 gallons). In Texas, the threshold is five barrels. And in Oklahoma and Montana, it’s 10 barrels. “The number of reports does not necessarily equate to large volumes, but more to achieving the transparency desired through state regulations,” said Continental President and Chief Operating Officer Rick Bott said in a lengthy statement. Records show that of Continental’s 233 spills in 2012, at least 90 were less than five barrels.

Continental, which got extra attention in 2012 when CEO and founder Harold Hamm served as an adviser to Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, adopted a “no spill” policy focused on reporting, spill reduction and, ultimately, elimination, Bott said. It also has formed spill reduction task force teams to review incidents and implement solutions. Well sites are built and managed by a bevy of contractors, and Bott said Continental has a contractor management program that evaluates the firms’ environmental performance. Continental’s largest spill was in May 2012 in North Dakota’s Divide County. The company’s Hampton 1-2H well spilled about 80,000 gallons of produced water. No action was taken, state officials said, because it was contained to the site.

North Dakota officials stressed that nearly 80 percent of the spills in the state were contained to the well site. “That’s the important thing,” said Alison Ritter, spokeswoman for the state Department of Mineral Resources. “If a spill is contained to the site, the environmental damage is going to be a lot less severe.” Utah companies reported that 78 percent of spills were contained. In Colorado, the figure for how many were contained within a berm was lower, 38 percent.

Occidental Petroleum had the second-highest number of spills, with 207, followed by BP PLC with 190, XTO and Exxon Mobil with a combined 172, and COG Operating at 122. Occidental spokesman Eric Moses said the company’s spills have dropped dramatically in the past four years. The net volume of crude oil and condensate releases has dropped 80 percent, he said. “Preventing releases of crude oil is a priority in our operations,” Moses said.

Exxon spokesman Patrick McGinn said the company has sophisticated systems and training in place to prevent spills. He said most of its spills were water produced during operations. The rest, he said, “were small, and practically all were held within secondary containment systems without impacting the environment.”

Subra, though, cast skepticism on the idea that spills are contained as often as industry officials say they are, noting that state agencies rely on companies to self-report their spills. “You always say it was contained,” Subra said. “If you say it wasn’t, you have to answer a lot of questions. The easiest thing to say is that it was contained.”

Special thanks to Richard Charter