EIP Environmental Integrity Project January 26, 2023
Oil’s Unchecked Outfalls
Water Pollution from Oil Refineries and EPA’s Failure to Enforce the Clean Water Act
Executive Summary
Although petroleum refineries are well known as major sources of air pollution, they also discharge nearly half a billion gallons of wastewater every day into rivers, streams, and estuaries. That’s enough to fill 712 Olympic swimming pools every 24 hours with wastewater loaded with toxic metals, ammonia and other forms of nitrogen, oil and grease, industrial salts and other dissolved solids. These pollutants can be dangerous to fish, aquatic life, and human health. Pollution from refineries clogs public waterways with algae, corrodes drinking water intakes with industrial salts and, in the case of toxic metals like chromium or selenium, lurks at the bottom of rivers, lakes, and estuaries for hundreds of years.
The Clean Water Act requires EPA to limit the discharges of harmful refinery pollutants based on the best available wastewater treatment methods, and to tighten those limits at least once every five years where data show treatment technologies have improved.
But the standards for refineries have not been revised in nearly four decades, since 1985, and apply to only a small handful of pollutants. These weak and outdated standards do not reflect advances in treatment methods or the expansion and modification of refinery operations over the last four decades. While a few state agencies have included several additional discharge limits in refinery wastewater permits, EPA and state environmental agencies rarely enforce them or penalize violations.
EPA’s failure to act has exposed public waterways to a witches’ brew of refinery contaminants. Based upon an Environmental Integrity Project (EIP) analysis of the industry’s own monitoring data, permit applications, and toxic release reports, 81 refineries in the U.S. discharged an estimated 60,000 pounds of selenium into waterways in 2021, along with 10,000 pounds of nickel, 15.7 million pounds of nitrogen, and 1.6 billion pounds of chlorides, sulfates, and other dissolved solids.
Selenium and nickel are toxic to fish and other aquatic life. Selenium can cause reproductive harm in animals and bioaccumulates and biomagnifies through the food chain, threatening birds and other creatures. At high levels chloride can also kill fish and destroy plants that are critical to the ecosystem. Excess nitrogen can fill waterways with algae, making rivers and streams unsuitable for swimming or fishing, while also robbing fish and shellfish of the oxygen they need to survive. Water overloaded with chloride, sulfates, or other dissolved solids is corrosive and foul-smelling and must be decontaminated (at public expense) before it is fit to drink.
In addition to these pollutants, according to an EPA report, oil refineries in 2017 discharged 14,200 pounds of cyanide into U.S. waterways, along with 2.5 million pounds of oil and grease, and 128,000 pounds of heavy metals including arsenic, chromium, copper, lead, mercury, and zinc (as well as nickel and selenium).1 Both the Environmental Integrity Project’s 2021 calculations, and EPA’s earlier 2017 estimates are likely to be low as they focus on wastewater discharged from refinery processes and generally exclude contaminants that are released during spills or stormwater runoff, or which are contained in wastewater sent offsite to public wastewater treatment plants that are usually not designed to remove heavy metal compounds and other refinery pollutants.
U.S. refineries discharged about 60,000 pounds of selenium into waterways in 2021. Selenium can be toxic to fish and is likely the cause of the spinal deformity occurring in the pictured Sacramento Splittail.
Snip…see full report;
