The Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality is starting to look at how to better quantify emissions from oil and gas wastewater disposal facilities. The facilities treat the water that flows up the well along with the oil and gas.
Previous studies have identified wastewater facilities as potentially large emitters of volatile organic compounds, which contribute to ozone pollution and can cause health problems, but that’s not reflected in the facilities' models of their own emissions.
“We’ve always looked at these facilities and thought about how to monitor them," said Cara Keslar, supervisor for the DEQ’s monitoring division. "It’s just taken a while to get a really good process in place to achieve the goal of developing a tool for the facilities to use to estimate their emissions.”
The study will focus on two facilities in the Upper Green River Basin, which has had ozone problems in the past.
The DEQ's program comes at the same time as several environmental groups are threatening to sue the federal Environmental Protection Agency over its guidelines for handling oil and gas waste, saying they are inadequate to protect human health and safety.