‘Water Is the New Oil’ as Texas Cities Square Off Over Aquifers, Two cities and the Texas A&M University System are suing to stop a project that would pump up to 89 million gallons per day of groundwater 80 miles away to other boomtowns in Central Texas by Dylan Baddour, March 31, 2025
In Central Texas, a bitter fight over a $1 billion water project offers a preview of the future for much of the state as decades of rapid growth push past the local limits of its most vital natural resource.
On one side: Georgetown, the fastest growing city in America for three years straight, which in 2023 signed a contract with an investor-funded enterprise to quickly begin importing vast volumes of water from the Simsboro Formation of the Carrizo Wilcox Aquifer, 80 miles to the east.
On the other side: the cities atop the Simsboro that rely on its water. Bryan, College Station and the Texas A&M University System, a metro area with almost 300,000 people, have sued the developer to stop the project. A trial is set for the first week of May.
“We’re going to fight this thing until the end,” said Bobby Gutierrez, the mayor of Bryan. “It effectively drains the water source of the cities.”
The pump and pipeline project to Georgetown, developed by California-based Upwell Water, is the largest of at least a half dozen similar projects recently completed, under construction or proposed to bring rural Carrizo Wilcox aquifer water into the booming urban corridor that follows Interstate 35 through Central Texas.
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It would eventually pump up to 89 million gallons per day, three times the usage of the city of Bryan, to Georgetown and its neighboring cities.
“That basically stops all the economic development we have,” Gutierrez said. “We’re talking about our survival.”
The fight over the Upwell project could well be a prelude for the broader battles to come as cities across Texas outgrow their water supplies. Lawmakers in the state Capitol are pushing to avert a broad scarcity crisis with funding to desalinate seawater, purify salty groundwater and treat oilfield wastewater to add to the supply. But all of these solutions remain years from realization. In the near term, only import projects from freshwater aquifers will continue to meet the growing water demands of thirsty Texas cities.
Regulation of such projects falls to a patchwork of small, rural agencies called groundwater conservation districts, which might not be fully equipped or empowered to manage plans for competing regional water needs that can affect entire cities for generations to come.
Texas law offers limited clarity, generally preferring a landowner’s right to pump their own groundwater over regulations on private property. Despite fierce denunciations of the Upwell project from nearby city leaders, no one has alleged that its developers have broken any laws.
“We’re following the rules. Why are we being vilified?” said David Lynch, a managing partner at Core Capital investment firm in Houston and a partner in the Upwell project. “I think they feel uncomfortable about what’s coming and their reaction is to make us go away.”
After all, he’s not the only one doing this. Five years ago, San Antonio started pumping up to 49 million gallons per day through a 140-mile pipeline from the Carrizo Wilcox Aquifer. Another pipeline was completed last year and will soon begin pumping to the city of Taylor and the new Samsung microchip manufacturing complex there. Another, scheduled for completion this year, will take water into the cities of Buda and Kyle.
After the lawsuit delayed the Upwell project’s tight timeline, Georgetown commissioned two other pipeline projects from the same aquifer.
“People are starting to pay enough for water to make these sorts of projects work,” Lynch said, driving his black Ford Super Duty Platinum truck down the dirt roads of Upwell’s 9,000-acre farm property and well field in Robertson County. “There’s no cheap water left in Texas.”
In the middle of all this is the little Brazos Valley Groundwater Conservation District, based in the small town of Hearne and also a defendant, alongside Upwell, in the lawsuit.
District manager Alan Day feels for the cities of Bryan and College Station. To an extent, he said, they are right. The more pumping from the aquifer, the sooner everyone will reach conditions of scarcity, though he doesn’t think it will happen as quickly as city leaders say.
At the same time, he said, “Bryan can’t claim the water.” Groundwater is a private property right in Texas as sacred as any other. Everyone is allowed to pump whatever their land produces.
“Water is the new oil,” said Day, a former ranch manager of 27 years. “They have a commodity that can be sold and they have every right to sell it.”
At this time, he said, he has no authority to stop landowners from pumping as long as they fulfill the requirements of the permitting process, which Upwell did. Even if he could do it, Day chuckled at the notion that state leaders would let his tiny office put the brakes on development along the I-35 corridor, home to manufacturing campuses of Tesla, Samsung and Apple, and offices of Amazon, Meta and Google, as well as one of the nation’s largest clusters of data centers and its fastest growing cities.
However, Day said, there will come a day when that changes. The laws for his district, like all others in Texas, specify a threshold at which new rules kick in. It’s called the “desired future condition,” or DFC, a level below which the district is not willing to go. When they get there, everyone will face restrictions on pumping and the days of groundwater abundance will be over for the Simsboro portion of the aquifer. To date, no district in Texas has hit its DFC.
Day said he’s only following the rules. He’ll honor the property rights of landowners who want to pump, and when they hit the DFC, he’ll implement restrictions district-wide.
“What does that do to the growth of Bryan and College Station and Texas A&M and anyone else who is depending on Simsboro?” Day asked. “It stops it.”
The Texas Miracle
This situation follows a generation of steep growth and development that state leaders have dubbed the “Texas Miracle.” The population of Williamson County, seated in Georgetown, 28 miles north of Austin, doubled in seventeen years to 700,000 people while its median household income increased by more than 90 percent. Neighboring counties share similar stories, where sprawling subdivisions and shimmering tech campuses now cover former ranchlands.
Georgetown needs to add millions of gallons per day to its water supply within the next several years. When it signed the pipeline contract in 2023 that stipulated deliveries beginning in 2030, it was acting on a much tighter timeline than decades that are typically considered for large scale water planning.
“Based on hyper growth that we’ve seen in our water territory, we’ve seen the need for higher levels of contracted water sooner than we originally anticipated,” said city manager David Morgan.
Most of the new water will serve new residential areas, he said, and will be used primarily to irrigate lawns and other neighborhood landscaping. Williamson County is also courting a cluster of five large data centers that it expects would bring another 100,000 people to the county.
But what if Bryan, and the cities of the Brazos Valley, want data centers, too? The region is currently pursuing ambitious opportunities in semiconductors, nuclear energy, aerospace, defense and life sciences, said Susan Davenport, president of the Greater Brazos Partnership, an economic development group.
“These sectors, along with the growing workforce and families who support them, are directly dependent on access to our local water resources,” she said.
Gold Rush on Water
Although many major projects importing groundwater into Central Texas are just now being realized, the plans have been in the works for decades, according to Michelle Gangnes, a retired finance lawyer and co-founder of the Simsboro Aquifer Water Defense Fund.
In 1998, Gangnes moved from Austin to rural Lee County. That same year, San Antonio, 140 miles away, announced plans to import 49 million gallons per day from wells in Lee County on the site of an old Alcoa aluminum smelter. A prolonged fight ensued and the project was never realized, but many others would follow.
“That’s what started the whole gold rush on water,” Gangnes said. “It resulted in all these groundwater districts being formed, trying to resist the water rush on the Simsboro.”
The groundwater districts were formed by an act of the Texas legislature in 2001. But, when the time came to make groundwater rules, powerful interests kept them loose, according to Ken Kramer, who previously directed the Texas office of the Sierra Club for 24 years. Chief among them was T. Boone Pickens, the iconic Texas oilman who also wanted to export groundwater from his land holdings in the Panhandle.
“There was heavy lobbying by groundwater exporters to make sure that groundwater districts could not stop exports,” Kramer said. “Groundwater then became more of the target for moving water to growing areas and populations.”
Under a principle in Texas called the “right of capture,” landowners are allowed to pump from their land whatever they are able to. Changes made to the Texas Water Code in 2001 stipulated that withdrawals are allowed so long as they don’t affect other permit holders “unreasonably,” which lacks a firm legal definition. That leaves lots up to interpretation for the groundwater districts of Texas.
“They live in a difficult world where it’s unclear exactly what their power is to tell somebody no,” said Robert Mace, executive director of the Meadows Center for Water and the Environment at Texas State University. “If you tell somebody no you’re almost guaranteed to get sued.”
In recent years, several major pipeline projects into Central Texas came online. San Antonio eventually got its Carrizo Wilcox Aquifer water through a 6-foot-wide, 140-mile-long Vista Ridge pipeline which began drawing water from Burleson County in 2020, causing levels in neighboring landowners’ wells to plummet.
The old Alcoa wells in Burleson County were also put to use. A developer called Xebec Holdings bought the 50-square-mile property in 2022 and signed deals to pipe almost 18 million gallons per day to the City of Tyler.
“There’s constantly people out there trying to lease water rights to see if they could do a project to sell water,” said Gary Westbrook, general manager of the Post Oak Savannah Groundwater Conservation District. “We’re going to have to find a way to regulate. You can’t just say no.”
The Gatehouse Pipeline is currently under construction to Georgetown, with another one called Recharge in development. Morgan, the Georgetown city manager, said those two projects were identified and accelerated after the lawsuit challenged the Upwell project.
“We believe the lawsuit is going to likely delay getting that fully resolved,” he said.
The Upwell Project
Upwell Water, a San Francisco-based financing firm, announced in 2020 that it had raised $1 billion from investors “to monetize water assets.”
Upwell partnered with CoreCapital investors in Houston, which bought its 9,000-acre Robertson County farm property in 2021. Lynch, the managing partner at CoreCapital, said he expected to sit on the property for ten years until the economics of water made it attractive to develop a major export project.
But as soon as he entered the market, he found eager buyers willing to pay well.
“We bought it and all of a sudden we had everybody calling saying we need water,” Lynch said. “Then we said, we have more demand than we can supply, let’s talk to the neighbors.”
Upwell recruited seven neighboring landowners to put company wells on their property and contribute to the export project.
These aren’t regular irrigation wells, which in this area can tap water 40 feet down. These are 1,400 feet deep, cased in 2-foot-wide steel pipe, able to produce large volumes.
“It’s a million-dollar hole,” said Mark Hoelscher, one of the neighboring landowners involved in the project, as he looked up at one of the diesel-powered well installations. “It’s big time.”
In October 2022, Upwell received permits for 16 wells to pump nearly 45 million gallons per day without any challenges in the hearing process. Four months later it received its permit to export the water out-of-district. Then in September 2023, the district issued permits for another 32 wells belonging to the seven adjoining landowners to produce an additional 45 million gallons per day.
Until that point, authorities in the Bryan-College Station metro area, some 30 miles south, apparently remained unaware of the project transpiring in Robertson County. Not until September 2024, when the district considered applications for updated permits to export the combined 89 million-gallon-per-day production of all 48 wells, did Texas A&M University enter into the proceedings, filing a request for review by the State Office of Administrative Hearings.
Texas A&M University declined to comment for this story.
“No one has questioned the fact that we own the land and we have rights to the water underneath it,” said Hoelscher, a third generation landowner in the Brazos River Valley. “The fact of the matter is the water is ours.”
The Lawsuit
One week later, A&M filed a lawsuit in state district court seeking a temporary injunction stopping the groundwater district from recognizing any of the permits associated with the Upwell project until a hearing is held.
A&M argued that the previously issued permits should be open for re-examination because some board members of the groundwater district were ineligible for service at the time the permits were originally approved.
In November, Bryan and College Station filed papers to join the lawsuit. It said their “ability to produce groundwater from their Simsboro wells and the economic vitality of the region will be adversely affected if the Contested Applications are granted.”
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College Station Mayor John Nichols, a former professor of agricultural sciences at Texas A&M, said in a statement: “The transfer of groundwater from our district to users in other areas is one of the most significant issues facing the College Station/Bryan area. I’m a staunch proponent of private property rights, but we are deeply concerned about the long-term impact of excessive extraction on our community.”
He called on lawmakers to adopt statewide groundwater regulations ensuring the rights of current permit holders over new water users.
None of that, however, matters to the trial that will take place in early May. All the judge will decide is whether or not A&M and the cities have rights to challenge the previously issued permits.
In court filings, Upwell argued A&M’s petition “demands that the Court turn back time and recognize a non-existent ‘right’ to administratively contest final groundwater permits that the Brazos Valley Groundwater Conservation District properly noticed and issued to Intervenors months and years prior—all without any complaint or contest by any party, including Plaintiff.”
If the judge denies A&M’s request, the permits will be issued and work will begin on the Upwell project pipeline.
If the judge grants A&M’s request, the permits will head into a potentially yearslong process of state administrative hearings that could threaten the viability of the project and its promised returns to investors.
Desired Future Condition
Whether or not the pipeline gets built, other similar projects are likely to follow. The situation is headed in one direction: towards the DFC, the threshold at which restrictions begin.
In the Brazos Valley and surrounding districts, that threshold is a 262-foot drop in water wells from levels measured in 2000. In the 25 years since then, pumping has led the wells’ water to drop by one quarter of that allotted reduction, according to district manager Day, suggesting ample water supplies remain.
But, that remains to be seen. In total, Day said his district has issued permits for up to 291 million gallons per day of pumping from the Simsboro Formation, averaged yearly, of which 89 million gallons per day are associated with the Upwell project. However, only a fraction of that permitted volume is actually pumped.
If all permitted pumping were to suddenly come online, Day said, computer models showed they would hit the DFC in six years.
In reality it won’t happen quite that fast. The Upwell project plans to scale up its pumping gradually over years. And many farmers hold irrigation permits to pump much more water than they ever actually will, unless they also encounter the opportunity to join an export project.
When the aquifer hits the DFC, the rules say it mustn’t fall further. That means all users would face mandatory curtailment. It’s unclear how such unprecedented measures would be enforced in Texas.
For Gutierrez, the mayor of Bryan, this management method creates a contest for investors to tap the water-wealthy Simsboro Formation and sell off its bounty before time runs out.
“They want to exploit everything we have for their personal benefit,” he said. “It’s a race of who can take the most amount of water in the least amount of time to deplete a resource for their pocketbooks.”
***
@faithfulpolaris:
America is going to be such a shithole in 10 years.
Ten years? More like 1, if that long, and, it’ll likely be waterless in many MAGA states.
@LFTH_Alex:
So this is what you say when you’re about to poison the water table right
Leaked Memo Reveals Insane Ban on Words Agriculture Department Can Say, The Department of Agriculture is no longer allowed to use the phrase “safe drinking water.” by Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling, March 31, 2025, The New Republic
Forget DEI buzzwords—the Trump administration’s government censorship ordinance is now infringing on language that will make it nearly impossible for agencies to do their job.
A leaked memo from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Research Service division revealed Sunday that the agency has banned some key language from its vocabulary, including the words
“climate” and
“vulnerable,” as well as the phrase
“safe drinking water.”
Other baffling entries on the memo’s banned language list are
“greenhouse gas emissions,”
“methane emissions,”
“sustainable construction,”
“solar energy,” and
“geothermal,” as well as
“nuclear energy,”
“diesel,”
“affordable housing,”
“prefabricated housing,”
“runoff,”
“microplastics,”
“water pollution,”
“soil pollution,”
“groundwater pollution,”
“sediment remediation,”
“water collection,”
“water treatment,”
“rural water,” and
“clean water,” among dozens of others.
“When evaluating agreements, those entries that include these terms or similar terms cannot be submitted,” wrote Sharon Strickland, the USDA’s Northeast area financial management, travel and agreements section head, in an internal March 20 email. The review will “ensure that we maintain compliance with the Administration’s EOS.”
It’s unclear how the guidance would do anything other than completely hinder the department’s ability to monitor the health and edibility of crops, or aid America’s rural development—some of its primary functions.
What is clear, however, is that purging such basic speech will stifle scientific research and discourse.
2025:
2015:
2011:
Donald Trump began censoring the government as soon as he returned to office. In January, the Office of Management and Budget held tens of billions in federal funding hostage, requiring executive branch agencies to purge language related to “environmental justice,” abortion, DEI initiatives, “woke gender ideology,” and “illegal aliens” in their reports and missions. Otherwise, they would forgo their congressionally appropriated funds, per an OMB memo.
That threat has since rolled its way through the American legal system. Last week, an appeals court upheld a block on the sweeping freeze, agreeing with a previous court’s ruling that the 22-state coalition that brought the lawsuit would “irreparably suffer” under Trump’s ordinance.
“These harms included the obligation of new debt; the inability to pay existing debt; impediments to planning, hiring, and operations; and disruptions to research projects by state universities,” wrote Chief Judge David Barron.
Barron’s ruling echoed a similar decision issued by Judge Loren AliKhan in February, in which the federal judge indefinitely blocked Trump’s effort.
“In the simplest terms, the freeze was ill-conceived from the beginning,” AliKhan wrote in her ruling. “Defendants either wanted to pause up to $3 trillion in federal spending practically overnight, or they expected each federal agency to review every single one of its grants, loans, and funds for compliance in less than twenty-four hours. The breadth of that command is almost unfathomable.”
Radioactive Shadow Workers.The treatment of oil and gas field waste is a dirty industry’s dirtiest secret by Justin Nobel, Photos by Rebecca Kiger, March 24, 2025, Sierra Clulb
Sean Guthrie, at home in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, believes that Fairmont Brine was negligent.
UNDER A GROVE OF PINES in Maryland’s Appalachian Mountains, Nick Fischer gathered his childhood friends around a campfire on a June night in 2023. Tucker wore a trucker cap and sported a beard. Bobbie’s flowing dress glowed green and blue in the light of the flames. They passed around beers and settled in. Then Fischer let his story unravel: His former job, he believes, destroyed his health. “I am falling apart,” he said. “I don’t know where to begin.”
Not all jobs in oil and gas country involve pulling fossil fuels out of the ground. During the extraction, an incredible amount of waste—often loaded with carcinogens, heavy metals, and shocking amounts of radioactivity—comes to the surface, and an invisible workforce inside the oil and gas industry toils away handling it. Fischer was part of it.
His introduction to the world of treating fracking wastewater started in November 2017, when he got a job at Clearwater in Doddridge County, West Virginia. The newly opened $255 million plant was a product of globalization: located in northern West Virginia but operated jointly by a Colorado energy company, Antero Resources, and the French environmental services firm Veolia. Clearwater was a hulking complex of strange tanks and pipes that pulled salts out of the wastewater from nearby gas wells. Once run through the treatment system, the water would be used to frack new wells, and the salts would be used as a deicer or even on food, explained Conrad Baston, a facility engineer, at a 2015 community meeting. “If anybody wants some, I can get you a big bag of it,” he said. “I thought about calling it Taste of the Marcellus,” he added, referring to the gas-rich geologic formation that produced the waste. The process was a model for closed-loop resource use. Earl Ray Tomblin, West Virginia’s former Democratic governor, applauded Clearwater in 2015 before it opened, and in 2019, one Antero official dubbed it “The best project like this in the world. Bar none. Period.”
Twenty-two months later, the plant shuttered. Fischer said he and his colleagues were dismissed without warning. “Clearwater was a failure,” reads a lawsuit Antero filed against Veolia in 2020. The fracking wastewater turned out to be a radioactive brew, and the salts a soupy mess. After combining the salts with fly ash—also toxic—Fischer had been required to scoop, transport, and grade the mixture with his bulldozer, building a controversial landfill adjacent to the plant that locals vehemently opposed, worried it would leach radioactivity into their rivers and contaminate drinking water.
Nick Fischer, who has lived with many health issues since treating radioactive oil and gas field waste, rests in his camper in Little Orleans, Maryland.
Neither Antero nor Preston Contractors, Fischer’s employer at Clearwater, have replied to questions. In January 2023, the District Court of Denver County, Colorado, decided the case in Antero’s favor, awarding the company $242 million for breach of contract and fraud. Last December, the Colorado Court of Appeals upheld this ruling. “This decision unfairly punishes innovators like Veolia,” which “conducts its business in an honest and loyal manner,” spokesperson Alexis Madelain told Sierra. Veolia has not responded to multiple requests for comment on whether the company informed workers at the facility about radioactivity risks.
FISCHER BELIEVED THAT he was part of “greening” an important American industry by treating fracking wastewater for reuse and helping generate beneficial products from oil and gas waste. Yet his job entailed working 12-to-14-hour days and scooping a mixture so corrosive it ate metal machines and rubber boots. He had to continuously breathe in its dust. Fischer maintains that no one told him radioactivity was a problem he had to worry about.
At the campfire in 2023, as bright embers drifted through the treetops and mingled with the light of the stars, Fischer said, “I truly thought I was helping the company.” He wondered why he and his coworkers were not informed of the health risks.
Tucker offered Fischer a campfire classic—a hot dog on a stick—but Fischer abstained and tugged at his belt, showing he was down to his last notch. Unable to keep down food, he had lost 40 pounds that year. At 38 years old, he has difficulty breathing; he experiences arthritic pain in his neck, spine, and knees; and he inexplicably loses feeling in his arms for months at a time. “I have no energy and spend most of my time in bed,” he said. No longer able to do heavy manual labor, he moved from West Virginia to his Maryland hometown to take up a job cleaning a campground. Fischer gestured at the campsite where he had parked the camper van he lives in and said, “Now I’m the maintenance man.”
The oil and gas industry has experienced record profits in recent years, and its CEOs take home multimillion-dollar earnings. Meanwhile, its working muscle—the people who perform the jobs supporting the industry—face a harm that few in the public see. “The companies are just fighting over the money,” Fischer said. “I’m stuck holding the radioactive bag at the end of this thing.”
Workers like Fischer, who want to shine a light on the unsafe conditions they were exposed to, face companies protecting themselves with a formidable shield made of greenwashing and attorneys. (Veolia recently ran a series of sponsored content ads in The New York Times to promote its role in halting climate change. “Ultimately,” reads one ad, “everything will come back to health.”) There are significant risks in speaking out. Even Fischer’s parents told him it was a bad idea.
But Bobbie reassured Fischer in the glow of the fire. “You’re doing the right thing,” she said. “Somebody has gotta say something.”
WE LIVE ON A RADIOACTIVE PLANET. Soil, rocks, and even the air we breathe and the water we drink contain what’s called background radiation. Oil and gas extraction bring to the surface some of Earth’s most interesting, and notorious, radioactive elements. Radium levels in the deposits accumulated on the inside of oil and gas pipes can be 400,000 times those of background radiation. Yet radioactive oil and gas waste, unlike that from the nuclear and medical industries, is not regulated by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The Environmental Protection Agency does not regulate it either. In fact, a sweeping 1980 federal exemption—the Bentsen and Bevill Amendments to the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act—defines radioactive oil and gas field waste as “non-hazardous.”
Boots contaminated with high levels of radium belonged to a worker at the Austin Master Services plant in Martins Ferry, Ohio. | Photo by Dane D’Aquila
Many of the oil and gas industry’s radioactive troubles stem from a waste stream referred to as “brine,” “produced water,” or “saltwater.” These names are deceptively benign. Brine can be loaded with toxic levels of salt, heavy metals, and radium thousands of times higher than the EPA’s safe drinking water limit and hundreds of times greater than the threshold that defines a liquid waste stream as radioactive. America’s oil and gas industry generates a trillion gallons of brine per year. Put into oil barrels and stacked atop one another, they would reach the moon and back at least 25 times. The industry wants the oil and gas. It doesn’t want the waste, which operators have never had a good solution for.
About 96 percent of the oil and gas industry’s brine is disposed of at facilities called injection wells, where high-pressure pumps push the waste deep underground. Although the EPA regulates these wells—there are 181,431, or roughly 11 for every Starbucks in the United States—the US Geological Survey has linked them to earthquakes across the country. In Ohio and Texas, they have been documented leaking fracking wastewater back to the surface, contaminating surface water, pastureland, and other oil and gas wells. Occasionally, wastewater spews from the earth in cinematic geysers.
In the early 1970s, as injection wells proliferated across the nation, top EPA officials were skeptical of the process. “We really do not know what happens to the wastes down there. We just hope,” stated Stanley Greenfield, a former EPA assistant administrator for research and monitoring, at a 1971 Texas symposium. In recent years, the industry has tried to pivot away from these wells, and that has meant a greater focus on setting up facilities to treat wastewater. New Mexico’s Democratic governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham, believes that treating fracking wastewater will help solve the state’s water crisis, and an article published last year in the journal Nature touted the “substantial extractable lithium” that wastewater from fracking could yield. As sweet as these solutions sound on the front end—industry discards a burden, farmers get water, critical minerals enter the market—their proponents fail to acknowledge that wastewater treatment plants pose significant and understudied risks to air quality, drinking water systems, food networks, and the general environment. And no group has been more contaminated, and inappropriately informed about the risks, than the oil and gas industry’s own workers.
“There [are] night and day differences between radioactivity protections received by a worker in the nuclear industry and that of an oil field worker, and it is not fair,” said Phil Egidi, a former staff scientist in the EPA’s Radiation Protection division. Before retiring, Egidi worked on radiation and environmental safety for four decades, and he has spoken at conferences around the globe on oil and gas radioactivity. “This issue doesn’t have a bumper sticker,” he explained. “It doesn’t have a mascot. It doesn’t have a cute phrase. It doesn’t have a politician carrying it in a briefcase.”
Except for one. Democratic Pennsylvania state senator Katie Muth grew up in southwest Pennsylvania’s oil and gas country and studied sports medicine at Penn State, then at A.T. Still University in Arizona. She moved back to Pennsylvania in 2015, shortly before Donald Trump was elected president. Around the same time, Sunoco’s Mariner East pipelines began carrying propane, butane, and ethane—a plastics feedstock—through her county. This region, which includes suburbs of Philadelphia, is critical terrain connecting the state’s western gas fields to the coast. Muth, a skeptic of corporate America and its politicians and a proponent of climate action, was repulsed by the new president and by the shameless way the oil and gas boom had infiltrated Pennsylvania. In 2018, she decided to run for state senate—in a red suburban district and with no political experience—on a campaign focused on holding corporations accountable, including the oil and gas industry. She won, and then won again in 2022.
“I won a lot of independents and a lot of Republicans who care about the environment and the preservation of open space,” said Muth. There are landfills in her district that receive oil and gas waste, and tracing its trail has led her back to oil and gas country, and to the industry’s workers.
“We have no regulatory protection for these workers, and no one is calculating the cumulative radiation exposure they are receiving. This is a government failure on so many levels,” said Muth, who is up for reelection in 2026. “If you are going to harm people, I am at least going to fight for them,” she said. “I am not a martyr, but I am willing to listen.” With so many workers and their families still suffering in silence, it is an important start.
SHANNON AND MICHAEL LUTZ met in the mid-1990s while working at a West Virginia mall kiosk. “The movie Mallrats was our life,” Shannon said. The couple took office jobs in the same communications company, which led them to Buffalo, New York, where they lived together in a city for the first time and then had a child. But their love story ran headlong into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Their jobs disintegrated, and they returned to West Virginia with their young son, moving in with Shannon’s parents. Michael was into computers, not oil and gas, but in 2009, unable to find better work, he got a job at a fracking wastewater treatment plant in Fairmont called AOP Clearwater—not related to the Clearwater where Fischer worked.
Shannon Lutz’s husband, Michael, treated radioactive oil and gas waste at AOP Clearwater. He died from glioblastoma in 2023.
Radium attaches to dust particles. At oil and gas waste treatment facilities, inhalation of this contaminated dust can expose workers to significant radiation, according to the nuclear forensics scientist Marco Kaltofen, who has studied radioactivity contamination all over the world. “There are a lot of ways to bring radioactivity home with jobs like this,” he said. “It will be in the floor mats in your vehicle, on your clothes, in your septic system, and therefore in your yard.”
“I just knew there was exposure,” said Shannon. “[Michael’s] shoes and clothes got damaged, the bottom of his pants were crunchy and hard from the salt and chemicals, and the dust was crazy! He would come home filthy, and I would have to wash his clothes.”
The other main route of radium exposure is ingestion, from eating, drinking, or smoking in the workplace with dirty fingers. Shannon said Michael grilled ribs in the AOP Clearwater parking lot, and she would come by with their son to drop off dessert.
In 2018, Michael was diagnosed with an aggressive form of brain cancer called glioblastoma. He passed away in March 2023. Another coworker at the plant died of stomach cancer in 2022. Michael donated his body to the West Virginia University School of Medicine’s Human Gift Registry so that doctors could try to figure out what caused his cancer, to keep this from happening to other people in the future.
“I want health providers to learn about where their patients live,” said Ned Ketyer, president of Physicians for Social Responsibility Pennsylvania and formerly a pediatrician in southwest Pennsylvania’s oil and gas country. “Ask patients about where their water comes from. Look at a map and see what’s around them. Consider environmental exposure for every differential diagnosis.”
Living in Appalachia comes with a baseline carcinogenic risk. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention statistics show Kentucky and West Virginia are among the three states with the highest death rates from cancer. The risks of working with radioactive oil and gas waste specifically have been documented in scientific journals and the industry’s own reports. Taken together, the toxic substances that oil and gas waste workers are exposed to “can cause cancer, heart and brain damage, liver and kidney problems, central nervous system issues, and poor birth outcomes and birth defects, among other health concerns,” said Alison Steele, executive director of the Pennsylvania-based Environmental Health Project.
Legal cases from the oil and gas fields of Louisiana and Mississippi have been successful in linking the harms to the bones and bodies of the workers themselves, but in the science field, longitudinal cancer attribution studies are much more difficult to pull together. People face repeated exposure to a variety of carcinogens in their daily lives, and such studies require decades of consistent data to be valid. Workers in industries such as oil and gas tend to move around, making the link—or even locating people—difficult. A scientific conclusion about whether laborers in Appalachia’s Marcellus and Utica oil and gas fields, and other formations across America, have been harmed by their work may come long after many of them have died.
IN FAIRMONT SITS the now-abandoned fracking wastewater treatment plant that AOP Clearwater sold to Fairmont Brine in 2012. When I visited in 2023 with Yuri Gorby, a former Department of Energy scientist, and Jill Hunkler, an Ohio organizer, the place had become a party spot for local kids. One of the processing buildings was littered with empty beer cans, and there was a fire circle in the parking lot. A soiled mattress and an inexplicably crashed speedboat floated in a pit in front of the main building. Gorby scanned parts of the site with his Geiger counter, which conveyed more radioactivity than 99 percent of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.
Gorby and Hunkler sampled the water in the pit and sediment near the edge of the parking lot, not that far from the fire circle. They had the samples tested at Eberline Analytical, a radiological analysis lab in Tennessee. The water results showed elevated levels of radium and thorium, while the soil recorded radium at 5,072 picocuries per gram, more than 5,000 times general background radiation levels. “There are going to be long-term chronic effects from this,” said Gorby. After the EPA assessed the plant, the agency stated that “contamination at the site is uncontrolled,” adding that “human exposure to radio-nuclides by inhalation, absorption, or ingestion is possible.” Dave Moniot, president and CEO of Venture Engineering & Construction, the Pennsylvania-based company that operated Fairmont Brine, said that to his knowledge, “Fairmont Brine followed all regulations.”
The former operations manager at Fairmont Brine, Sean Guthrie, listed several problems with the facility, including difficulty in disposing of radioactive sludge accrued in the treatment process and oppressive amounts of salty dust that hung in the air of the processing room. Without personal protective equipment, he and his coworkers had been forced to breathe in that dust. There were also regular incidents in which equipment broke down or backed up, resulting in improperly treated salty wastewater overflowing. Guthrie said he was informed that some materials were radioactive, but the harms were downplayed. “I would like to see some accountability,” Guthrie said.
Fairmont Brine in West Virginia closed in 2018, leaving behind a contaminated site.
Industry lobbyists and politicians build walls between environmentalists and oil and gas workers, but the stories of the people who work with the industry’s waste show a more nuanced reality. These are Americans with an appreciation for public land, clean water and air, and a livable planet. Some of the industry workers I have met can name every species of tree on their land—and sometimes even the salamander species. When they take their families on vacation, it is not to Thailand, the Caribbean, or Europe but often to a campsite in a state park.
For a lot of people living in extraction zones, the oil and gas industry may be problematic, but at least it provides work. And when an employer makes grand claims that the job they’re offering can actually solve a waste problem—even transform it into a public good—backed by company scientists and state governors, then that offer can be hard to turn down.
“I felt good about the job,” said Guthrie, “and thought we were doing something beneficial for the environment.”
IN 2022, AN APPALACHIAN advocacy group called Concerned Ohio River Residents sampled a public roadway in Martins Ferry, Ohio, and discovered a trail of radioactivity that led to the door of Austin Master Services. This plant was located in an old steel mill on the Ohio River, just down the street from the high school football stadium and the city’s water wells. Its function was to treat a second level of waste, downstream of treatment plants like Clearwater and Fairmont Brine. The radioactive sludge that had been removed from the wastewater at treatment plants and had accumulated on the bottom of tanks and trucks holding brine arrived here, along with other waste from the treatment process such as spent filters.
A list of rules for operating a food truck in Ohio is 14 pages long, but companies interested in treating radioactive oil and gas waste in the 2010s, such as Austin Master Services, merely had to answer questions on a one-page application (it’s now two pages). A special order from the chief of the oil and gas division of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources then allowed such companies to operate. Austin Master received its authorization in 2014, earning the right to take in 120 million pounds of radioactive oil and gas waste annually. Workers mixed this waste with lime or coal ash in an attempt to lower radioactivity levels enough so the waste could be taken to regional landfills rather than low-level radioactive waste disposal facilities. The latter are in remote locations out west. By not using these facilities, the oil and gas operators that produced the waste, such as EQT Corporation and CNX Resources, saved money, although exactly how much has never been properly calculated.
In addition to testing the public roadway, Concerned Ohio River Residents worked with Kaltofen to collect samples of sludge caked on Austin Master worker David Duvall’s boots and hard hat, then sent them to Eberline Analytical. The group learned that radium levels in the samples were 17 times higher than what the EPA allows in the soil at Superfund sites. I met Duvall in 2022 at a gas station coffee shop in southwest Pennsylvania, about an hour east of the plant where he once worked. “They treat you like garbage,” he said. As was the case with Fischer, Duvall was not informed of even basic risks. “Workers would eat, drink, and smoke cigarettes one after the other with dirty hands,” he said. “I did the same thing.”
We spoke for over an hour. Not long after, Duvall disappeared back into the shadows. The organizer who connected us has also lost track of him. Duvall is yet another worker who won’t show up in a longitudinal cancer study. As Jesse Lombardi, who worked as a manager in the fracking waste industry told me, “It’s part of the trick of the industry. The waste company they worked for will be gone, and they will die in agony in the trailer park they came from, and no one will give a fuck. I came, I conquered, I got what I wanted, I’m out.”
Last year, Republican Ohio attorney general Dave Yost filed a lawsuit against Austin Master, alleging that the company had “committed egregious violations of Ohio law.” The facility shut down in early 2024 and remains filled with radioactive waste that is scheduled to be removed later this spring.
MANY OF THE LEGAL CASES that make the connection between oil and gas jobs and cancer were brought by the late New Orleans attorney Stuart Smith, who defended workers against the likes of Shell, Chevron, and ExxonMobil—known collectively with other top global producers as “the big majors.” Smith linked many of the industry’s most common jobs to radioactivity risks that pile up over time and may lead to lethal cancers. His legal team used an analysis program developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for nuclear weapons workers to show that, with over 99 percent certainty, the leukemia as well as the lung, liver, and colon cancers his clients developed were caused by radiation exposure during their work in the oil and gas industry. “These men are guinea pigs,” Smith told me in 2020. “All of the big majors have done tests to determine exactly what risks workers are exposed to.” Smith won his cases and crafted a thriving business suing some of the world’s largest firms for oil and gas radioactivity. “Once you have the information,” said Marvin Resnikoff, a nuclear physicist who served as an expert witness, “it is indisputable.” Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Shell have not replied to repeated requests for information about Smith’s cases and the radioactivity risks that remain for oil and gas workers.
Smith’s legal theory is backed by the industry’s own documents. A 1982 report from the American Petroleum Institute’s Department of Medicine and Biology acknowledged the dangers of radium and radon in oil and gas waste and warned that regulating waste “could impose a severe burden on API member companies.” The industry consultant Peter Gray, writing in 1993 in the Society of Petroleum Engineers’ Journal of Petroleum Technology, stated that “contamination of oil and gas facilities with naturally occurring radioactive materials is widespread” and discussed several jobs that could “present a serious health hazard to industry personnel,” including cleaning out pipeline sludge; removing the radioactive scale that forms in pipes, pumps, and valves; and handling the radioactive sludge that accumulates in tanks and trucks. Much of the material removed from these contaminated facilities and infrastructure “must be handled as low-level radioactive waste and disposed of accordingly,” wrote Gray.
Still, government reports on oil and gas radioactivity can be deceptive, at times containing placid conclusions that don’t jibe with their own damning findings. “The radiation link has not been appropriately looked at for oil field workers,” said Egidi, the former EPA staff scientist. “We are screwing these workers just like we screwed the uranium miners.” When I reconnected with Egidi in December, he told me he planned to spend his retirement fighting to reverse this. “First you have outrage,” he said, “then you get legislation.”
LAST AUGUST, I RECEIVED an urgent text message from Muth, the Pennsylvania state senator. “Can you talk? I have a bomb of a story,” the text read. Another fracking wastewater treatment plant appeared to be in trouble; this one, operated by Eureka Resources, was in north-central Pennsylvania. The company claimed to be “a pioneer and leader in development of innovative, cost-effective, and environmentally responsible solutions” for treating the fracking industry’s wastewater. Eureka packaged the salts it pulled from this waste and, in 2017, several chain stores began selling the product branded as Clorox pool salts. As of late January, both Walmart and BJ’s were still selling the salts online. Neither company has responded to questions, nor has Clorox.
Muth arranged to meet a few whistleblowing workers from the plant in the conference room of a local hotel—14 showed up, including Patrick McIntosh, a former maintenance and operations manager. They described the harrowing conditions that led to the death of one coworker when a salt tank exploded. They also told Muth about a scheme in which food-grade salts were allegedly used to mask lab results and contaminated batches of pool salts were sent to stores, and about an idled site containing leaking tanks and dumpsters that discharged directly into the Susquehanna River, which flows into Chesapeake Bay.
The whistleblowers in this shadow world are still emerging. If there is hope in this situation, it lies in unexpected alliances—like a state senator in America’s most politically divided state taking the time to travel many miles from the boundaries of her urban constituency to meet with workers in conservative oil and gas country.
Last autumn, I traveled to Wysox, Pennsylvania, to meet McIntosh, who lives down the street from the plant. As we sat at the picnic table in his backyard, his wife tended the garden, and one of their three young kids played with chickens. McIntosh said he missed his coworker, Jeremy, who died in the explosion at the plant—a “kindhearted man” whose home was “filled with the laughter of children and the love of a good family.” McIntosh attributed the accident to the CEO’s consistent refusal to upgrade equipment and spend money on maintenance. McIntosh, like other Eureka workers I spoke to, worried that in the industry’s rush to find novel ways to dispose of its waste, it wasn’t contaminating just one facility, its workers, and the adjacent community but also swimming pools and the children who swim in them across America.
In September 2024, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection sent members of its Radiation Protection Program to the plant site, after receiving a complaint that it may be radioactive. In their report, inspectors noted finding “rejected processed salt containing elevated levels of radium” and radiation levels in at least one area that were 30 times higher than the International Association of Oil & Gas Producers’ definition of a contaminated workspace. Although Eureka had a Radiation Protection Action Plan for this site, the inspectors found evidence of only four employees receiving awareness and safety training.
I sent detailed questions to Jerel Bogdan, vice president of engineering at Eureka Resources, and Dan Ertel, the CEO, asking how the company ensured the safety of its pool salts and treated its workers. Bogdan’s reply made me wonder if he forgot to remove me from the email chain.
“Once you engage with these crackpots,” he wrote, “they just keep digging at you until they get whatever sensational data or information that they are after to get eyeballs on their publications. Let him write his stupid piece.”
Justin Nobel is a science journalist. His book, Petroleum-238: Big Oil’s Dangerous Secret and the Grassroots Fight to Stop It, was published last year. More articles by this author
Rebecca Kiger is an independent photographer in the rust belt of Appalachia whose work has appeared in Time, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.
Refer also to:
2015: Fracking Is Significantly Dangerous, Elon Musk Says
2012:
2011:
Encana dumping waste on same foodland as above. This land is on the Rosebud River Coulee top, rains and snow melt run off take the waste into river, creeks, and drinking water aquifers.
2006-2015: Steve Harper, when he was PM, worked fast to destroy federal protections for waterways across Canada.
