Monday May 23, 2022
Inside Climate News —
California is heading into its dry season after one of the driest winters on record, preceded by a brief reprieve from the worst drought in its history. No wonder water managers in the Central Valley’s parched farm belt are increasingly interested in a controversial practice: reusing oil field wastewater to grow crops.
Last fall, the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board assured critics that it had reviewed studies of the practice and found no elevated risks to human health or crop safety. The board focused primarily on one question—are crops grown with produced water safe to eat?—and considered as beyond the scope of its responsibility the wider range of potential harms associated with recycling the oil industry’s wastewater.
The board acknowledged that it did not study how long-term use of oil companies’ “produced water” might affect crops and soil that are irrigated with it, or whether toxic chemicals in the wastewater could accumulate over time in the nuts, oranges and grapes that are sent around the world. Nor did the board consider the ecological risks of spreading oil field wastewater across the land in a county where at least 20 threatened or endangered species live within about a mile of an oil field, a proximity that has already resulted in millions of gallons of oil and wastewater inundating their habitat.