New book exposes the environmental costs of oil and gas production

When you think about the potential health hazards of exposure to oil and petroleum products, smog and air pollution or toxic chemicals and heavy metals used in hydraulic fracking often come to mind.

But a just-released book uncovers how radioactive materials, such as radium, have long been released during the production of oil, putting workers and nearby communities in danger. The result of seven years of research, Petroleum 238 explores the radioactive hazards of oil and petroleum production and the regulatory loopholes that have left workers and communities unprotected for over a century.

How the Investigation Started

Author Justin Nobel stumbled into this story about radioactive contamination caused by oil production. A community activist in Ohio mentioned a de-icing product sold at a home improvement chain that was radioactive. Nobel discovered that the product was created from oil field wastewater and it did, indeed, contain high levels of radium. That revelation led him to research the dangers of radioactive materials in the production of oil and gas. He spoke with scientists, oil and gas workers, and community activists and looked at research and government documents from the past century.

Radioactive secrets revealed 

Nobel uncovered how the oil and gas industry has been aware that workers were being exposed to dangerous chemicals and has not done enough to protect them and the public.

One can go back to 1904, when a 25-year-old Canadian graduate student named Eli described “experiments with a highly radioactive gas obtained from crude petroleum.” Or 1982, when a report of the American Petroleum Institute’s Committee for Environmental Biology and Community Health stated: “Almost all materials of interest and use to the petroleum industry contain measurable quantities of radionuclides that reside finally in process equipment, product streams, or waste.

Before the book was published, Nobel presented some of the work he was doing in Rolling Stone. Stories like this one from an oil rig worker were common:

In a squat rig fitted with a 5,000-gallon tank, Peter criss crosses the expanse of farms and woods near the Ohio/West Virginia/Pennsylvania border, the heart of a region that produces close to one-third of America’s natural gas. He hauls a salty substance called  “brine,” a naturally occurring waste product that gushes out of America’s oil-and-gas wells to the tune of nearly 1 trillion gallons a year, enough to flood Manhattan, almost shin-high, every single day. At most wells, far more brine is produced than oil or gas, as much as 10 times more. It collects in tanks, and like an oil-and-gas garbage man, Peter picks it up and hauls it off to treatment plants or injection wells, where it’s disposed of by being shot back into the earth.

One day in 2017, Peter pulled up to an injection well in Cambridge, Ohio. A worker walked around his truck with a hand-held radiation detector, he says, and told him he was carrying one of the “hottest loads” he’d ever seen. It was the first time Peter had heard any mention of the brine being radioactive.

“A lot of guys are coming up with cancer, or sores and skin lesions that take months to heal,” he says. Peter experiences regular headaches and nausea, numbness in his fingertips and face, and “joint pain like fire.”

He says he wasn’t given any safety instructions on radioactivity, and while he is required to wear steel-toe boots, safety glasses, a hard hat, and clothes with a flash-resistant coating, he isn’t required to wear a respirator or a dosimeter to measure his radioactivity exposure — and the rest of the uniform hardly offers protection from brine. “It’s all over your hands, and inside your boots, and on the cuticles of your toes, and any cuts you have — you’re soaked,” he says.

Nobel found many workers throughout the country were being diagnosed with — and dying of — cancer. But not only is there little effort taken by oil and gas companies to provide better protection, there is little public knowledge of the risks. The tainted wastewater that isn’t turned into other products, like the de-icer that started the whole investigation, is transported over highways, injected underground, dumped into waterways, and stored in dumps that may not be set up to handle radioactive materials:

“Essentially what you are doing is taking an underground radioactive reservoir and bringing it to the surface where it can interact with people and the environment,” says Marco Kaltofen, a nuclear-forensics scientist at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. “Us bringing this stuff to the surface is like letting out the devil,” says Fairlie. “It is just madness.”

Besides radioactive contaminants like radon, industrial fracking operations are known to use a variety of toxic chemicals like heavy metals and benzene in the process of extracting oil and gas. In many cases, operators are not required to disclose the types of chemicals they’re using or their quantities, leaving workers and nearby communities in the dark about the dangers they may be facing.

How We Help Victims of Toxic Chemical Exposure

Seek justice with the help of our experienced attorneys. Our Dallas, Texas, benzene law firm has battled corporate giants on behalf of individuals like you for 20 years, aggressively fighting to hold them responsible for dangerous chemicals and the personal injuries and cancers they cause. If you have suffered a catastrophic injury caused by dangerous products, we can help.