comes to the surface at an oil and gas well than just the oil and gas. The U.S. oil and gas industry produces 3 billion gallons of brine a day, and despite the innocent name, it can contain toxic levels of salt, elevated levels of heavy metals like lead and arsenic, and dangerous amounts of the radioactive element radium. My reporting journey into this topic started when an Ohio community organizer told me someone made a liquid de-icer out of oilfield brine.
At 17 I left high school and went to the barges. Scrap metal, coal, lime. That was really good money. I was a young guy going down the river like Huck Finn. Ohio on the right, West Virginia on the left and I am cruising right smack dab in the middle. After the barges I did contracting around the country. I built military vehicles in Cincinnati. I built helicopters in Connecticut. I worked in silver mines in Montana, and a copper mine right outside of Phoenix, Arizona.
I came out of prison and back to Ohio. I didn’t have anything but the clothes on my back. As the frack boom came on, I had a job at a facility down by the Ohio River. I said, What do you need a conveyor belt for? And they said, Moving sand. And I said, Well then you need a covered belt, what is called a tube belt, because you are going to have sand blowing all over the place. But they didn’t want a covered belt, because that was more expensive.
There are three main pathways companies take in getting into the oilfield waste business. One is just a matter of taking your business cards, scratching something out and putting something else in. That is how septic companies got into hauling brine. If he’s sucking the shit out of a porta-john or he’s sucking the shit out of an oilfield brine tank he don’t care, nobody cares. He doesn’t know about any contamination or radioactivity. They just suck stuff.
What is happening here is the government has made an exemption to call oilfield waste nonhazardous even though it is filled with radioactive waste and all sorts of other hazardous shit, and then these workers are getting this nonhazardous shit slopped all over their chests, their hands, their feet, their toes, their faces, and they are breathing this in, and ingesting it, and drinking their sodas and eating their sandwiches and smoking their cigarettes and chewing their dip all while covered in...
We are dealing with high pressure lines in this industry. Most of us don’t even know anything about them. We don’t know about most of the stuff on site. What is this bud? It’s a ring gasket. Where’s it go? Right there. Okay cool. No specifications, no torque specs, no nothing. But later on somebody is going to be pushing 15,000 pounds of fluid through there and it’s probably going to leak. Nobody gives a shit. And what happened to all that stuff that spilled on the ground? Nobody cares.
But if an audit comes and someone says, did you receive any training about radiation, they can say yes.