Last week, a Truthout report exposed new details on the use of fracking technology in undersea oil-and-gas wells in the Gulf of Mexico, where fossil-fuel firms are allowed to dump billions of gallons of wastewater mixed with chemicals. From 2010 to 2014, federal regulators approved hundreds of permits and permit modifications to allow private companies to use fracking, acid treatments and other technologies to maximize oil-and-gas production in the Gulf, according to a trove of government documents released under the Freedom of Information Act. The Center for Biological Diversity, which fought in court to have the documents released, used 1,200 of these permit documents to map out fracked wells in the Gulf, including one well that was connected to a flow line that spilled 90,000 gallons of oil into the Gulf last month. The Center and Truthout are still waiting on federal officials to release more records, so the scope of fracking in the Gulf is likely even larger.
(Courtesy: The Center for Biological Diversity)
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