Oil and gas companies ignore water-use reduction orders

While residents, businesses and farmers struggle with reducing water consumption to buffer the drought’s effects on present and future supply, California’s oil and gas industries campaign contributions apparently exempted them from Gov. Brown’s Emergency Drought Proclamation water-use reduction.

This industry consumes at least 2 million gallons daily to frack oil financed by hedge funds and sold to foreign markets. They are buying from water districts and vigorously pumping agricultural and drinking water aquifers. They are mixing it with irremovable cancer-causing chemicals, and injecting fracking wells which run horizontally for miles beneath residential and agricultural properties.

In 2014, 387,000 acre feet of “produced water” (chemically contaminated) was surfaced and partially evaporated in open, unlined and unregulated holding ponds poisoning our air, soil and water.

Although there’s been token oversight of this industry’s water usage and contamination, in 2014 the Central Valley Regional Water Board shut down nine fracking wells after determining they had injected three billion gallons of toxic water into drinking and farm water irrigation aquifers causing irreparable harm — violations of both the Federal Clean Water and the California Safe Water Drinking Acts.

Is the new green really brown, or just greener for the oil and gas industry?

This story was originally published August 6, 2015 at 6:57 AM with the headline "Oil and gas companies ignore water-use reduction orders."