Geologists concerned over surface impacts oil drilling could leave in Big Cypress National Preserve/NPS file
By all regards, the Tamiami Trail that streaks from Naples on the west coast of Florida to Miami on the east was an engineering wonder when it was built a century ago. More than 2.5 million sticks of dynamite were used to crumble the limestone hidden under the surface muck, and it was used to build a stout roadbed that not only funneled vehicles east and west across South Florida but which also created a dam that blocked the river of grass on its way to Florida Bay.
Today, of course, the state and federal governments are spending billions of dollars to restore the watery flow of the Everglades, and part of that work involved lifting up sections of the Tamiami Trail -- U.S. 41 -- and placing them on bridges to allow the water to flow on south unimpeded towards the bay. You can see the successes by driving along the Trail as it cuts right through the heart of Big Cypress National Preserve, a 720,000-acre watery slice of natural wonderment, a wild landscape lurked by Florida panthers, bobcats and black bear and festooned in spring with Cardinal airplants, a species considered endangered by the state, that clutch onto dwarf cypress trees.
Against the costly work of what is known as the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, there are ongoing efforts to seek oil beneath Big Cypress that could result in construction of miniature "dams" that could impact the river of grass as well by altering the flow of water. The damage would not be equal to that done by the Tamami Trail when it was built, but there would be impacts just the same.
While the actual practice of drilling oil out from under the national preserve does not greatly concern two geologists well-familiar with the underpinnings of South Florida, the surface infrastructure needed to drill for oil is a concern when risks to the preserve are explored, they told the Traveler in separate interviews.
“The issue, at least in my opinion in terms of hydrology and groundwater contamination and those kinds of issues, relates to the surface facilities around the well," said Tom Missimer, who spent 34 years consulting on oil drilling before heading into academia at Florida Gulf Coast University a little more than a decade ago. "The key to me is really not the construction of the well. The issue is if they’re maintaining surface facilities.”
Those facilities might include large tanks to store the recovered oil before it's trucked it off to a refinery, or a pipeline system to pump the oil away. Also involved are containment systems for the briny water that is separated from the oil.
"Your potential points of contamination are around the site where they collect the oil and water," Missimer explained during a recent phone call. "The water is disposed of in class-two injection wells. Shallow monitoring wells are required around these facilities to monitor if anything escapes.”
The roads needed to reach the well pads also are of a concern in the preserve, he said.
"To me, the real issues are the infrastructure and the roads. The rest of the stuff is standard industrial practices," said Missimer. "Temporarily, the roads have to be above water so you can get trucks in and out or a pipeline, however they’re going to produce. To me that’s the only issue.”
Two-hundred-and-fifty miles north of Missimer, in Gainesville, Florida, Jim Gross shares much the same concerns. A former geologist who worked in the geothermal industry and who now is executive director of Florida Defenders of Environment, Gross doesn't worry much about contamination to the preserve or the Floridan aquifer coming from the practice of actually drilling for oil.
"The major problem with drilling in the Everglades is not so much the issue with potentially damaging water supplies or people," said Gross. "It has more to do with damaging the natural hydrology of the Everglades. These are very fragile systems at the surface. The landscapes for the most part are not suited for roads. Which is why when we built the first roads east and west across the Everglades we had to build them up with a base, because it’s not really solid. It’s mushy, gushy organic muck.
"So when we send drilling equipment down there and start messing around with the land surface to get equipment in and out, they not only just tear down vegetation, but in some cases they sort of have to build roadways to get equipment in and out," he continued. "Drilling rigs are big things, and they come in on big trucks, and the stuff that comes out is on big trucks. So it’s a kind of operation that inherently interferes with the land surface, a land surface that depends mightily on a very even hydraulic gradient for surface water to flow."
Burnett Oil Co. spent parts of 2017 and 2018 conducting seismic testing in Big Cypress in a search for oil. While the Texas company hasn't publicly stated what that testing indicated, in late January it applied to both the state of Florida and the National Park Service at Big Cypress for the necessary permits to develop two well pads from which to snake drill bits horizontally beneath the preserve landscape and, hopefully, into economically rich oil reservoirs.
That exploration work left impacts on the Big Cypress landscape. How great those impacts are vary depending on whom you ask. Park Service officials have been satisfied with what's been done so far to remove the tracks and trenches left by 33-ton vibroseis trucks that create sound waves by shaking the earth with their great weight, sound waves that geologists study to determine if they passed through oil beds.
Environmental groups including the National Parks Conservation Association, Natural Resources Defense Council, and South Florida Wildlands Association believe much work needs to be done to return the vehicle impacts to the land's natural contours.
Beyond the impacts from exploration, there is reason to be concerned about infrastructure impacts related to well development, beyond those concerns raised by Missimer and Gross. Back in April 2019 a watchdog group, Florida Food & Water Watch, pointed out that "(A)lthough Florida is currently home to only 87 wells, Food & Water Watch found that between 2015 and 2018, production led to 35 spills, averaging 9 a year."
"From June 2015 to October 2018 at least 330 gallons of oil and 27,746 gallons of wastewater spilled into soil, water, farmland, and land near schools," the group added. "Collier County, just next to the Everglades, experienced one of the largest volume oil spills in the state when a tank holding 10,000 gallons of wastewater and oil ruptured in 2015."
While Burnett has submitted its drilling plans to the Park Service, the agency has not yet released them to the public. Big Cypress Superintendent Tom Forsyth said they would be released when his staff releases a draft environmental assessment it's preparing on the drilling proposal. No date has been announced for the release of the draft EA.
That the Park Service has chosen to do an EA and not a more extensive and thorough investigation into possible impacts via an environmental impact statement has raised concerns from environmental groups, especially because it's believed that the last time the Park Service closely examined potential drilling impacts was for its 1991 General Management Plan.
"There is no way that the (EA) analyzes and discloses to the public the impacts with new drilling technologies, like directional or horizontal drilling, which is being proposed by Burnett Oil, much less any well stimulation techniques they may use, such as fracking or acidizing," Alison Kelly, a lands attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, told the Traveler in February.
Back at Florida Gulf Coast University, Missimer scratched his head over the thought of using the park's three-decade old General Management Plan and its analysis of oil drilling impacts to evaluate Burnett's proposal.
"Thirty years ago horizontal offset drilling wasn’t around. These rigs today are quite elaborate," he said.
In Gainesville, Gross frankly wondered why the drilling proposal was even being entertained by the state and federal agencies.
"It seemingly can’t avoid having some adverse impacts on an ecosystem that has already suffered enormously over the last few decades with our desire to make wet areas dry and dry areas wet, as one former governor put it," he said.
"There’s only one Everglades anywhere in the world. It’s an oft-repeated saying, but it merits saying it, and we should be working to try to restore the plumbing, that major plumbing system down there," Gross added. "We’ve been delaying for decades in doing it, and this is just going in the wrong direction."
Past Traveler stories pertaining to this project include:
Mixing Oil And Water At Big Cypress National Preserve
Army Corps Finds Big Cypress National Preserve Oil Exploration Caused Adverse Impacts
Army Corps Reverses Position On Oil Company's Impacts On Big Cypress National Preserve
Groups Want Florida To Purchase Big Cypress National Preserve Mineral Rights
Burnett Oil Inching Towards Drilling At Big Cypress National Preserve
Oil Drilling At Big Cypress National Preserve Might Not Require EIS
Comments
I've already commented on this topic many times. Although I've sincerely tried to be brief, my comments have tended to be long and criticized as too long. However, although what has previously been written about this looming fiasco has admittedly touched most, if not all, the bases, this article has made me wonder whether some aspects of NEPA might not have been fully or clearly covered. Bear with me.
In the article, Jim Gross shared his concern that "the natural hydrology of the Everglades" is "very fragile" and that the "landscapes for the most part are not suited for roads." I certainly agree. If you disturb surface or subsurface water flows, the water goes where it wants, which is after all why we have the Grand Canyon. But, while I was pondering how that kind of erosion would be a disaster for the Everglades further south, my mind kept going back to something glaring in an earlier section of the article.
In that earlier part of the article, Tom Missimer opined that what bothers him are the "surface facilities" that include facilities "to store the recovered oil before it's trucked it off to a refinery ...or a pipeline system to pump the oil away" and "containment systems for the briny water that is separated from the oil." He acknowledged that roads "are of a concern in the preserve," but added that "the roads have to be above water so you can get trucks in and out or a pipeline, however they're going to produce." It's those "trucked it off to a refinery ...or a pipeline system to pump the oil away" and "however they're going to produce" parts that were and are bothering me.
In my past comments, I related how industries that want to do what they please, especially on public lands, will often try to downplay and minimize the apparent scope of what they really want to do in an effort to quietly slip by with only a categorical exclusion or an Environmental Assessment (EA) instead of going through the more extensive public scrutiny of a full Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). One of the most common, as well as illegal, ways to downplay and minimize the apparent scope of a larger agenda is to break that larger agenda into smaller, incremental, less noticeable, and seemingly less significant actions so that each individual incremental action can be dishonestly stuffed within the boundaries of a Finding Of No Significant Impact (FONSI). It's sort of like a death of a thousand cuts, like justifying a clearcut by filing the environmental paperwork on one tree at a time, or like foiling the environmental review on construction of Hoover Dam by breaking it into a hyundred thousand individual loads of concrete. It's called "segmentation" and it's illegal. To properly comply with the NEPA, you're "supposed" to disclose and review the entire action comprehensively so that the public can see and scrutinize the entire potential environmental impact and risk of the related actions as a whole and not just as a piecemeal puzzle that camouflages the full picture.
I believe a valid case can be made that it is actually every incremental activity involved in the potential production of oil from Big Cypress National Preserve that needs to be scoped and reviewed as a comprehensive whole under NEPA and I'm ashamed that I failed to make that more clear from the beginning. I believe that, from the beginning, the goal of Burnett Oil, from Texas, has always been the production of commercial quantities of oil and the NPS, in Florida and Atlanta, has been facilitating the initial steps toward that goal. Burnett Oil is not in the business of oil exploration for the sake of oil exploration; it is in the business of producing commercial quantities of oil and oil exploration is simply the incremental steps toward that goal. In 2017 and 2018 when Burnett Oil brought in 33-ton vibroseis trucks to conduct seismic testing in the preserve, they weren't doing that for sport or to develop information for grad studies at some university; they were "in a search" for commercial quantities of oil and that seismic testing was the first incremental step in producing oil on the preserve. Today, as Burnett Oil seeks "the necessary permits to develop two well pads from which to snake drill bits horizontally beneath the preserve landscape and, hopefully, into economically rich oil reservoirs," the actions they seek to take are not "for fun" and would not be taken separately from the goal of eventually producing oil from those "economically rich oil reservoirs." To address the environmental impacts of these two initial steps in the production of commercial quantities of oil from the preserve is simply an effort to "segment" the initial steps in that production agenda and to thereby evade the more extensive public scrutiny of a full Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) that comprehensively covers all aspects of that action.