Pondera County, environmental groups petition EPA over refinery wastewater

Pondera County and several advocacy groups have filed a petition against the Environmental Protection Agency in federal court to stop an energy company from dumping wastewater into a nearby aquifer.

Montana Renewables, a Great Falls biofuels company, has an agreement with the owner of the wells to dispose of wastewater into two old oil wells near Valier, which feeds into the Madison aquifer. The aquifer underlies eight states and provinces in the United States and Canada. 

The EPA exemption permit is for more than 300 million gallons of water per well, and Montana Renewables estimated it will need to get rid of more than 230,000 gallons per day, according to a December 2024 environmental assessment.

There are concerns from local politicians and advocacy groups that the water could be hazardous to human or animal health — the company, in response to questions from the Daily Montanan, sent a fact sheet which states the wastewater, “​​comes from cleaning agricultural feedstocks like canola and corn oil” and in a press release called it, “non-hazardous wash water.” 

The water is apparently too contaminated to be accepted by the City of Great Falls for water treatment, a Northern Plains Resource Council press release states. 

“Montana Renewables is aware of the referenced petition. Montana Renewables would like to emphasize that it has not been issued any permits associated with the activities described in the petition, as we are already fully permitted to produce and ship non-hazardous water,” Lanni Klasner, a spokesperson for Montana Renewables wrote in an email. “We don’t comment on specific business relationships.”  

Long-term drought in the area has the agricultural industry and natural resource groups both concerned as well. The groups fighting the wastewater discharge permit filed the petition against the EPA decision in the Ninth Circuit United States Court of Appeals this week. 

The EPA granted an exception in May for the aquifer, which would allow Montana Renewables to discharge wastewater there. Montalban Oil and Gas technically owns the wells and is the company with the permit being challenged.

Local politicians have been hearing about the wastewater issue as well, and it’s taken up a significant chunk of their time for about two years, Pondera County commissioners, who are all Republican, said in a Monday interview. 

Following massive renewable energy funding under former President Joe Biden, the EPA began reviewing the petition to use the wells from Montana Renewables, which is “the leading independent producer of renewable fuels in the US,” according to its website. 

The project received $1.6 billion in federal loans to expand its operation. The company has been mum on what’s in the water, advocates say.

The process has frustrated Pondera County, including commissioners Jim Morren and Zane Drishinski, who spoke to the Daily Montanan during a phone call Monday. They feel like they’ve been unheard throughout the process.

“We’ve asked for one thing all this time,” Morren said Monday. “A sample of water.”

The worry is that the water, containing unknown substances, will leech back into the ground water. There hasn’t been a hydrological study, the two commissioners said, and an ask for a road usage agreement — trucks will likely be needed to move the water — hasn’t gone anywhere. Increased road traffic could be hard on the blacktop, commissioners said.

“We sent them a sample of a road agreement and it came back with more red ink on it than your fourth-grade school teacher,” Morren said.

The company has also promised a wastewater treatment plant, with an EPA environmental assessment saying it could treat up to 300,000 gallons per day and “to specification for onward discharge to the City’s publicly owned (wastewater treatment plant) and/or for internal water recycling.”

Residents and environmentalists, including Millie Whalen, with Golden Triangle Resource Council, are wondering why the treatment plant hasn’t been built.

“They should have thought about this from the very beginning,” Whalen said in an interview Monday. “How are we going to treat this?”

The company, at least at the time of the 2024 environmental assessment, shipped its water to “permitted disposal locations” in Idaho. It may also be being shipped by rail to injection wells in Wisconsin and Texas, but Pondera County commissioners said they are in the dark about much of that process as well.

“Everything they’re doing is for their advantage, not for the common good in any way, shape, or form,” Morren said.

The commission has reached out to the Governor’s Office for support, they said, but nothing materialized there either. Questions sent to the Governor’s Office asking their opinion on the issue and whether they had looked to help Pondera County were unreturned.

Any political support that materializes now, Drishinski worries, is, “maybe too late and I don’t know if it would do any good or not.”

It also has local citizens concerned and the nearby Blackfeet Nation submitted public comment in-person to the EPA, tribal officials said.

Gerald Wagner, the Director of the Blackfeet Environmental Program, read the comment they submitted during public comment on the project on Monday. Tribal officials asked for more clarity around the history of the wells, if there were issues when the wells were taken offline, types of pressures being used in the disposal and asked for copies of the waste logs.

“We would like the EPA to pay close attention to other wells that fall within the one-and-a-half mile radius of the area of review to ensure that there is no possibility of wastewater polluting underground drinking water via the injection wells,” Wagner read.

Documents filed with the project also include responses to public comment by the federal agency whose mission is to, “protect human health and the environment.”

The EPA held several public comment sessions in the lead-up to the final decision. The agency’s computer models say the water will move extremely slowly from the wells, which are more than 3,000 feet deep, public comment response states. 

Additionally, the EPA also said the Madison Aquifer, which the project could impact, is, “an important source of drinking water in many places, but it is not a potential source of drinking water everywhere.”

The EPA goes on to say the area that could be impacted isn’t being used for drinking water anyways. Some agricultural users aren’t exactly buying it, as the irrigation district that the petition pertains to — about 80,000 acres — could use the extra water. 

“My whole livelihood, like most of my neighbors, depends on access to clean water,” Lisa Schmidt, a member of the Madison Aquifer Coalition, who operates a sheep and cattle ranch, said in a press release. “Every year that water is getting less and less reliable. It makes no sense to me to put our fragile water supplies at further risk by injecting industrial wastewater into the Madison Aquifer.”

Commissioner Drishinski has been told using the water for irrigation would be too expensive. That’s one of the rationales for moving ahead with the water discharge into the wells, he added.

“Not affordable, not economically feasible, and that Pondera County is a dying population, anyway, so nobody’s going to care about what happens or goes on here,” Drishinski said. “But those 80,000 acres that are under that irrigation district, if we could find an alternative source of water, it would be a wonderful thing, and if we go ahead and contaminate what’s there, that might take that off the table even further.”

But the EPA says the water impacted by the project will never be usable for consumption and that the portion of the Madison is an “unsuitable” source of drinking water. It would be too expensive to pull out and treat the water, and, additionally, there are better alternative water sources in the area, the EPA added in project documents.

“EPA disagrees that approval of the aquifer exemption expansion at this site would impact public health or eliminate drinking water resources,” project documents state. “EPA determined that the Madison aquifer at this location will not be used as a source of drinking water now or in the future, and EPA has included final permit conditions to prevent the fluids from contaminating (Underground Source of Drinking Water) outside of the exempted portion of the aquifer.”