Court says La. must test water from rigs for radiation

29th June 2011   ·   1 Comment

By Susan Buchanan
The Louisiana Weekly

Residents of Japan aren’t the only ones worried about what radioactive water might do to health and habitats. Along the Gulf, “produced waters”—toxic byproducts of offshore oil and gas facilities—are a decades-old problem. Earlier this month, the Louisiana State Court of Appeal ordered the state Dept. of Environmental Quality, or DEQ, to test and monitor the impact of radioactive waters.

Offshore oil rigs cough up nearly as much water laced with chemicals and heavy metals as they do oil. Rigs pump up saltwater that was trapped in rock to the surface, where it’s separated from oil. Saltwater contains naturally occurring radium that becomes a health hazard when it accumulates in oilfield piping and sludge.

A lawsuit on produced waters, filed by nonprofit-group Louisiana Environmental Action Network, or LEAN, charged that DEQ didn’t conduct state-required studies on waste water from rigs. The court decided this month that DEQ failed to protect the public’s interest.

When asked how serious radium is relative to other threats, LEAN’s attorney, Stuart Smith of Smith Stag, LLC, said “radium 226 is one of the most hazardous substances known to man, and is a risk to anyone eating Gulf seafood. The DEQ has broken state law by not monitoring for it.”

He added “the oil and gas industry doesn’t want tests and studies done on radium because of what those tests would find.”

If you have relatives working in oil and gas, and tank your car up once a week, you may turn a deaf ear to complaints that Louisiana is cozy with the energy industry. We don’t live in a tidy principality where everyone heads to office buildings in the morning. Extracting resources from the ocean floor provides local jobs, supports other businesses and provides tax revenue. But oil and gas pollutes, and it may be taking years off our lives.

Last week, Tulane University law professor Oliver Houck said “the state has been reluctant to regulate any aspect of the oil and gas industry for the past 90 years.” Produced water is one of many areas, including access canals, pipelines, air emissions, waste pits and deepwell injections, that need more oversight, he said. In the case of produced water, he said “sadly, the substances are particularly nasty.”

Louisiana would be in worse shape without the federal government and lawsuits, Houck said. “What regulations and protections we enjoy have been federally imposed, often by citizen lawsuits,” he said. “But the oil and gas industry, led by our Congressional delegation, has managed to neuter much federal regulation.”

For its part, DEQ says it monitors discharges more closely than the feds do in federal waters. State waters end at three miles out, and deep water rigs operate beyond that limit.

Rodney Mallet, DEQ spokesman, said “DEQ’s produced-water discharge permit for offshore drilling rigs is more stringent than either the Environmental Protection Agency’s federal permit or Texas’ territorial-seas, discharge permit for the same material. We require facilities to provide monthly reports on radium 226 and 228 on a facility-by-facility basis, while Texas and federal waters don’t require that.”

Thirty-three shallow and deep water rigs are drilling in Louisiana now, and two offshore rigs are active in Texas.

Companies operating rigs in Louisiana must submit quarterly, discharge-monitoring reports, Mallett said. “They are required, based on flow, pipe depth and pipe diameter, to monitor for certain pollutants on a weekly, monthly or quarterly basis.”

All waste water and produced water from Louisiana’s rigs must be treated by facilities before being discharged to protect human health and the environment, he said. ”There are a variety of ways to treat the water, but our main goal is for companies to meet permit limits.”

Mallet said “offshore facilities have marine sanitary devices, which are like small package plants, to treat water. They do bio-toxicity testing for each discharge, using little bugs and other marine animals in the water to make sure it’s not toxic.”

Federal and state programs operate with hiccups, shift course and can be terminated during changes in administrations. Mallet provided some history on produced water permits in Louisiana. “In 1993, EPA issued guidelines that required testing of offshore oil and gas discharges,” he said. “In 1997, EPA issued field-wide permits for rigs in Louisiana for offshore discharges and produced waters. Those permits expired in 2002, however.”

He continued, saying, “from 2002 to 2009, DEQ issued produced water permits to qualified rig applicants on an individual basis, instead of a field-wide basis. Other facilities treated and discharged wastewater in offshore Loui­siana, operating under expired permits, but under DEQ authorization.”

Over the course of three days last week, the EPA was unable to comment on its role in oversight and permitting, with a spokesman saying a key employee was out of the office until June 27.

At DEQ, Mallet discussed the agency’s LAG 26 permit, effective for rigs in territorial Louisiana as of Jan. 1, 2010. That permit is the subject of LEAN’s lawsuit. He said “this newly issued, general permit allows us to know exactly how many active and inactive permits are out there. We have since monitored discharges at all of the state’s offshore oil and gas facilities.”

The LAG 26 permit governs produced water discharges at rigs, along with deck drainage, well treatment and work-over fluids, and hydrostatic test and other waste waters related to oil and gas exploration, development and production.

Mallett said “we have studies on offshore waters, but none of it shows them as unsafe because of discharges. Statewide, we have data showing water quality is the best since the federal Clean Water Act of 1972 and air quality is the best since the Clean Air Act of 1963.”

DEQ provided the court with a mid-1996 Environmental Impact Statement by EPA that said Louisiana territorial waters are turbid, full of energy and well mixed because of river discharges, waves and currents—all of which prevents cumulative, produced water under permits from crossing an environmentally significant thres­hold, the report said.

But Louisiana’s court said this month that EPA’s 1996 statement was too general in nature to provide guidance to DEQ. And the court noted that EPA said back then that radioactivity was an ongoing concern to be addressed through state regulatory programs.

EPA approved the LAG 26 permit in 2009, but expected the state to do follow-up testing and bio-monitoring on produced waters, according to this month’s court order. Early this month, the court said DEQ didn’t do that, and instructed the agency to test produced water to protect the public. By law, DEQ is expected to test sediment and marine life to verify that discharged water has not harmed the environment.

Mallett said “the court asked us to provide more information on radium, and that is what we’re in the process of doing.“ He added “discharge-monitoring reports for all regulated facilities are available on DEQ’s online, data-management system.”

At Tulane, Houck said that DEQ operates in a hostile, political arena, surrounded by industries that control the state legislature and the White House. “DEQ will go no further than Louisiana’s governor and his aides allow it to,” he said. Houck also said that DEQ is happy to blame the federal government for problems when it can.

Worries about offshore radium surfaced in the 1950s. And in the 1980’s, U.S. scrap metal dealers set off alarm bells about radioactivity in oilfield pipes, according to a U.S. Geological Survey report. In 1988, the DEQ under Louisiana Governor Buddy Roemer issued a statement saying that, while radiation may have been released by offshore oilfields for at least 40 years, the state had little information about its effects on aquatic life and the food chain. Today, anyone catching or consuming Gulf fish and shellfish may be exposed to at least some radiation, scientists say.

This article originally published in the June 27, 2011 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.