Five years ago, Oklahoma oil regulators took on a project with an impressive name: the Source of Truth. State officials wanted a comprehensive database capturing all vital information about the more than 11,000 wells in Oklahoma that shoot the toxic byproduct of oil production back underground.
I’d heard about this project from several people during the 18 months I had spent reporting on the growing number of cases where oilfield wastewater blasted out of old wells, known as purges, after being injected underground at high pressures. State employees also referenced the project in internal communications that I received after filing nearly a dozen public records requests to the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, which regulates the oil and gas industry.
Just before the new year, the Source of Truth itself landed in my inbox in response to an unrelated records request. And it was explosive, revealing a pattern of rule violations by oil and gas companies that state regulators allowed to continue.
The project was supposed to clean up or fix state data regarding how much wastewater was being injected and the pressures at which it was being pushed underground. The agency’s databases, many of which were based on decades-old paper records, were riddled with contradictory or missing information. In many cases, the agency failed to update its records. More than 1,300 errors were identified.
