By Dylan Baddour and Pu Yin Huang
March 10, 2023
A fracked well in West Texas can produce five times as much wastewater as oil. Every day, fleets of tanker trucks haul hundreds of millions of gallons of this toxic brine to loosely regulated disposal facilities that line the rural highways.
There, companies inject it deep underground into rock formations, where they hope it will stay forever.
The situation troubles David Shifflett, a farmer who irrigates his crops and draws his drinking water from the ground, which has started to heave and bulge in recent years. One tremor left a broad hump and a half-mile crevice in his land, not far from his water wells, raising fears among him and other landowners that underground storage spaces could fracture and leak their toxic contents into aquifers and wells.
“They’re pumping so much pressure in there,” said Shifflett, a towering, gray-haired man from a long line of farmers. “The oil companies are going to ruin our water.”
