The Colorado River provides drinking water for 40 million Americans. But what those Americans don’t know is what happens in Utah! The Colorado River runs through Utah and one of the most polluted areas in the United States — the Uinta Basin — where oil and gas drilling is rampant. Yes, all of those industrial pollutants are ending up in the Colorado River and your drinking water!
More than 13,000 active gas and oil wells exist in eastern Utah’s Uinta Basin. Local environmentalists have called the place Mordor after J.R.R. Tolkien’s industrial hellscape. The air is drenched in the smell of oil, and the quality is so bad that it has been compared to Beijing, China. This air quality frequently violates the Clean Air Act, but corrupt politicians pay off the EPA officials.
Utah political leaders are pushing to quadruple oil and gas production in the Uinta basin. 70% of the land in the Uinta basin is public, encompassing the Uintah and Ourey Native American reservations, home of the Ute tribe. Besides the Native Americans that live in the area, it also has federally protective wildlife, including endangered cacti and fish. In recent years, the sage grouse has had a 40% decline and it’s future is bleak.
In April 2003, the US Bureau of land management announced plans to auction off 9000 more acres in the basin for more drilling. The Uinta basin has also experienced extreme fracking, with more than 2000 permits for new oil and gas wells annually. Utah will approve more drilling permits in 2023 than any year for almost a decade!
The Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act bans any solar or wind development on public land unless at least 2,000,000 acres of land are auctioned off for oil and gas drilling. The result of all this new drilling will be the creation of greenhouse gases equivalent to 57,000 cars!
If you paddle down the Colorado River and Utah, you will smell VOCs. You’ll even encounter black puddles of oil that have seeped out of the ground along the river. Well heads blow out, pipelines rupture, and even tanker trucks crash and leak oil. There have been 25 tanker truck spills in the basin in 2023 already!
But oil leaks and spills are just the beginning of the water contamination. During fracking, energy companies inject massive amounts of water into the ground to widen cracks in the rock to access oil and gas. The water comes back out with oil or gas, heavy metals, and toxic chemicals. These energy companies then dispose of most of what is produced by injecting it back into the ground. They also truck a significant amount of the toxic water to evaporation ponds, which are shallow football field size pits lined with rubber. The freshwater evaporates, and the toxins concentrate at the bottom of the pit until the mess is taken to hazmat disposal. These disposal pits are fraught with leaks. But even worse, many of these energy companies don’t even get the water to the pits. The toxic water is dumped directly into the rivers!
The point is the Colorado River water is contaminated with oil, heavy metals, toxic chemicals, VOCs, and more from all of this oil and gas drilling in Utah. And with all the permits issued for more drilling, water quality will worsen! That means you shouldn’t drink the water without a multistage filtration system like in our water ionizers! You also shouldn’t swim or raft in it until all of this pollution stops.
