Inside Energy (https://insideenergy.org/series/the-oilfield-spill-problem/page/2/)
Oil and wastewater spills can damage farmland for generations. Inside Energy investigates what is – and isn’t – being done to keep spills from happening.
Montana Department of Environmental Quality | The oil spill in Montana’s Yellowstone River is the second of its kind in five years. Can the nation’s aging pipeline system keep up with its oil and gas boom?
Horizontal drilling and fracking have prompted an oil boom in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin, Alisa Barba reported earlier this week. But an increase in drilling — 590 oil wells have been drilled and completed in the Powder River Basin since January of 2009 — has its consequences. Mead Gruver from Associated Press reported yesterday that 2014 has already been the state’s worst year for oil spills since 2009.
Jordan Wirfs-Brock | As oil booms in North Dakota, the rate of spills has been growing, Emily Guerin reported. Thousands of barrels of oil spill each year, but something more dangerous comes with it: saltwater. A by-product of oil extraction, saltwater can destroy farmland for years. Finding detailed data on saltwater spills – more than 800 happened in North Dakota in the past year – was hard. Really hard.
Saltwater spills are more damaging than oil. And in North Dakota, they’re happening a lot more frequently than they used to.
Oil spills, whether they are increasing or not, are not being communicated to local communities
A huge salt water spill in North Dakota threatens a reservoir.
