Interior to Lease Texas Water Supply for Oil and Gas Drilling

The Biden administration next week will lease parts of a Corpus Christi, Texas, drinking water reservoir for oil and gas drilling in a rare auction that has environmentalists worried that further fracking in the area could leak contaminants into the drinking water supply.

The Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management will lease drilling rights to 6,971 acres in and around Choke Canyon Reservoir, Corpus Christi’s largest drinking water source south of San Antonio. Wells on the leases are expected to produce more than 628,000 barrels of oil.

The lease sale is occurring Aug. 15 in a region of south Texas in the midst of an oil and gas boom in the Eagle Ford shale. The area also has widespread surface water quality impairments, according to Environmental Protection Agency data.

The city of Corpus Christi and five environmental groups previously objected to a Trump-era lease sale at Choke Canyon Reservoir over possible water pollution threatening the city’s drinking water. The Trump administration dismissed those concerns, saying the city lacked evidence that the drilling would pollute the city’s drinking water.

The Biden administration said it will proceed with the latest lease sale because fracking can be done safely, and oil and gas drilling around the lake and in the region is so widespread that the impacts will be negligible.

“Leasing for oil and gas, and subsequent exploration and development, is a regular and ongoing activity in the region,” the BLM said in its finding of no significant environmental impact.

But Environmental Protection Agency data show that water in the lake and its watershed is impaired under Section 303(d) of the Clean Water Act due to bacteria, algae or excessive salts, possibly an effect of oil and gas development, drought and other factors in the area.

The BLM received no official protests against the 2024 lease sale, an agency spokesman said in an email.

However, the bureau received five public comments earlier in its environmental review of the lease sale, all raising concerns about oil and gas drilling’s impacts on water quality, air quality, climate change, and the environment. The BLM also received a request to cancel the oil and gas lease sale. The bureau did not identify the commenters in its environmental assessment.

The Center for Biological Diversity, which led the groups protesting the 2017 auction, didn’t comment or file a protest against the lease sale because the group learned about it too late in order to comment or file a protest by the BLM’s June 12 protest deadline, said Wendy Park, a senior attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity.

“They’re not notifying interested parties that could be affected by the lease sale,” she said. “BLM hardly has any land in Texas,” and groups rarely think to look out for bureau leasing activity in Texas where most onshore oil and gas are managed by the state.

‘Loss of Public Trust’

Corpus Christi officials were vehemently opposed to leasing in the reservoir in 2017 and asked the BLM to withdraw proposed leases in the lake.

In its 2017 protest letter, then-city manager Margie Rose said the city worried that, like this year’s lease sale, the parcels being auctioned were within or adjacent to the city’s drinking water supply even though Choke Canyon Reservoir is surrounded by oil and gas activity.

“The city is concerned about the high-risk this places on the safety of the water quality within each reservoir,” the city wrote. “If a water quality incident were to occur as a result of the proposed lease, the City would pursue all available remedies, but that would not be adequate recovery to the potential millions of dollars lost in economic benefit and loss of public trust.”

The BLM responded to the city’s concerns, saying Corpus Christi officials couldn’t substantiate their concerns and that oil and gas companies wouldn’t be allowed to disturb the surface of the leased land because they’d be drilling from a distance. Similar stipulations will be imposed on the new leases this year.

Rose, who has since left Corpus Christi city government, did not respond to a request for comment.

The city didn’t protest the Aug. 15 lease sale, but Corpus Christi Water officials are monitoring today’s oil and gas activities around the reservoir, Corpus Christi Water spokeswoman Judy Lapointe said.

She declined to comment about the city’s current position on leasing in the reservoir and what may have changed since 2017.

The Bureau of Reclamation consented to leasing parcels of the reservoir so long as drilling can occur from surrounding non-federal lands and drilling companies can demonstrate that their operations are “not likely” to affect Choke Canyon Reservoir, bureau spokesman Sterling Rech said.

Sacrifice Zone

Environmental groups say the Biden administration is contributing to the environmental impacts of drilling in Texas which has very little federally-controlled land and minerals.

The BLM has “blown off” concerns about water quality in a region that has become a sacrifice zone to oil and gas drillers, said Park of the Center for Biological Diversity.

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, could make abandoned oil wells in the area leak hydrocarbons into the reservoir, she said.

“Every extra well that’s drilled adds to the cumulative risk,” said Luke Metzger, executive director of Environment Texas, one of the five groups that protested the 2017 lease sale.

Oil and gas leasing on Bureau of Reclamation lands is rare. The BLM has issued only 12 leases on Bureau of Reclamation lands in the BLM region covering Texas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma over the last decade, 11 of which are in Texas, BLM spokesman David Howell said.