“...A system of interconnected pools in which oil operators were disposing of what's known in the industry as "produced water"—the water operators bring to the surface along with oil that's laced with both naturally occurring contaminants and industry chemicals used during drilling or extraction operations. For every barrel of oil pulled from the ground in California, operators produce about 17 barrels of water on average. Operators have several options for disposing of produced water: They can clean it up and reuse it for enhanced oil recovery techniques like cyclic steaming or for agriculture irrigation, inject it back underground into aquifers not used for drinking water, or dump it in ponds designed to let percolation or evaporation run its course. Percolation ponds are by far the most economical option for oil operators.
California is one of last oil states in the nation to allow the use of unlined percolation ponds for produced water. Pond permits are under the purview of the state and regional water boards, which require operators to show that the industry wastewater will not percolate down into freshwater reservoirs used for drinking water or agriculture. The vast majority of those pits are in the Central Valley, not only because the region is home to some of the state's highest-producing oil fields, but also because the groundwater was long believed to be too salty to grow most crops. In other words, there was little risk of produced water percolating down into useable water.
"A common convention was that there's no high quality groundwater on the west side of Kern, and so it's been treated as a sacrificed zone," says Andrew Grinberg, the national campaigns special projects manager with the environmental group Clean Water Action. But in recent years, research has shown that high-quality groundwater is more abundant in the Central Valley—where roughly a quarter of the food consumed in the United States every year is produced—than previously thought. One 2016 paper, for example, found three times as much fresh groundwater in the Central Valley as previous estimates.
"Oil companies have dumped what they want and pretended they aren't impacting useable groundwater." Grinberg says, "That's not the case. The monitoring reports are starting to show that there is high-quality groundwater over there and that these activities are impacting it."
The McKittrick ponds take in an average of 2.8 million gallons of wastewater a day. All the produced water has to go somewhere. "Oil operators claim that shutting down ponds such as McKittrick would jam up their operations," Grinberg says. "If polluting groundwater is a necessary part of producing oil in Kern County, then the industry needs to rethink its business model, because that is not an acceptable cost of doing business."
Starrh Family Farms' main ranch on the west side of California's Kern County, in a stretch of some 6,000 contiguous acres farmed by the Starrhs that straddles the towns of McKittrick and Lost Hills. The almond and pistachio orchards on this part of their property are almost entirely dependent on water deliveries from the California State Water Project, a public works project that shuttles water from the wet, northern part of the state to its parched, southern reaches via the California Aqueduct, as the groundwater beneath the groves is filled with dissolved salts, minerals, and metals at levels that would be unbearable for the trees.
The California Aqueduct, built in the 1960s and financed largely by the agriculture industry, promised to transform the region, providing Central Valley farmers with a steady supply of surface water for the first time and allowing agriculture to flourish on the west side of Kern. The canal's bounty is split among 29 water agencies. The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which supplies water to nearly 20 million people across Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego, Riverside, San Bernardino, and Ventura counties, has an entitlement for two million acre-feet of water a year (an acre-foot is a measurement of the volume of liquid it takes to cover one acre of land with one foot of water); Kern County has an entitlement for one million acre-feet; and another one million acre-feet is divided among the remaining 27 agencies.
In 2001, the Starrh family sued Aera Energy, the operator of the ponds and a limited liability company owned by Shell Oil Company and ExxonMobil, waging a 13-year legal battle against the oil producer. After two jury trials and two appeals, the Starrhs finally settled out of court. In a statement to Pacific Standard, Aera Energy notes that the appeals court found that the Starrh's groundwater was "too salty to use for irrigation of most agricultural crops."
Still, the oil operator says it is moving away from the use of percolation ponds thanks to "improved technology," noting that 97 percent its produced water is recycled as steam for oil production or re-injected underground. The company says that it now recycles 100 percent of the water produced from its operations on the Belridge oil field. More than a decade ago, Aera's ponds next to the Starrh's ranch were drained, their outlines still visible where the oil-slicked earth was excavated. But the oil industry is still dumping wastewater into hundreds of pits all over the state, and the Starrh's groundwater remains contaminated...”