Quality of groundwater threatened

   My name is Michael Skalicky, and I am president of Texana Groundwater Conservation District in Edna.  

   A few months ago we protested the application of 12 injection wells associated with the Hilcorp West Ranch project.  

   The Hilcorp West Ranch project is a huge project that is supposed to inject carbon dioxide into the oil bearing formation to recover every last drop of oil while sequestering carbon from coal fired power plants. This sounds great! Awesome idea – until we as a district, charged with protecting the groundwater for our county, protested the injection wells because of the lack of a groundwater monitoring network in their project.  

   This area of our county, because of the previous oil and gas activity, has a very limited supply of drinkable quality ground water. In fact, the Industrial School District and the town of Lolita, share the only well that has good water. 

The Hilcorp project is very near this well and has a high probability of contaminating the water supply for this area of the county!  

   TGCD has unsuccessfully tried to negotiate with Hilcorp to provide a groundwater monitoring network as to avoid the unnecessary contamination of the drinking water supply. We have asked for bonds to be provided for mitigation of surrounding landowners loss of water in case anything were to happen and contamination were to occur and ruin the land for future use. TGCD went all the way to the Railroad Commission and argued our case before the hearing examiners and the result was the hearing examiners agreed with us. They agreed that the project needed water monitoring as well as found 34 high risk contamination points (old dilapidated well bores) that needed to be addressed before permits could be approved.

   But here is the point where things get bad, the railroad commissioners struck all of the examiners recommendations and approved the permits for the injection wells! What is the point of having a railroad commission if they are going to rule against their own examiners and put our county at risk of polluting our resources? 

   I initially looked at this project as a way to clean up our air and fight global warming, but now all we are doing is polluting another resource, the ground water. The sad part is it doesn’t have to happen.  

   All we want is for them to address the contamination points, and set up a monitoring network so that if there were to be any contamination, we would catch it before it became a disaster.  

   Please help us get the word out so people will know what is happening in our county so that maybe something could be done to find a better way to protect our resources besides allowing the railroad commission to ignore their own experts recommendations and rule in favor of big oil at the expense of our groundwater.

Michael Skalicky

Ganado, Texas