Blog

  • How to fight Texas wastewater permits

    All five Permian discharge applications—for the Pecos River basin—are currently under TCEQ review and comments are open now. You can submit comments or request a public meeting through TCEQ’s eComment site.

    • NGL Water Solutions Permian (Reeves County) — #WQ0005445000 — Proposed permit details —
    • Solaris Water Midstream (Reeves County) — #WQ0005471000 — Proposed permit details —
    • Solaris Water Midstream No. 2 (Culberson County) — #WQ0005474000 — Proposed permit details —
    • Texas Pacific Water Resources (Reeves County) — #WQ0005454000 — Proposed permit details —
    • Select Water Solutions (Reeves County) — #WQ0005495000 — Proposed permit details —

    Readers living in Texas can also subscribe to TCEQ’s permit notices, which allow Texas residents to get notice of projects planned for their zip code—or monitor its long list of pending wastewater permits.

    Anyone can comment, but those who are directly impacted by these discharges—downstream landowners, irrigators, water users, and people who rely on the Pecos—can go further. If enough write in, they can push the agency into a contested hearing—a trial-like proceeding where they can challenge the permit’s facts. And if they’ve commented, they can establish the standing to challenge a project in court.

    At some point in the coming months, the agency will start issuing draft permits, which will start a 30 day counter, after which comment will close.

    For those who are impacted, environmental advocates say, the key things to do are are:

    1. Taking good records of how you use the affected waterway for business, recreation or irrigation
    2. Commenting within 30 days of the issuance of a draft permit to establish standing, and
    3. Getting organized before the permits drop, because once they do, things move fast.

    Veterans of this process emphasize that the odds of successfully getting a permit denied or revoked are low. But contested hearings, court battles and local comments form a broader drama of local democracy that can sway elected officials, persuade companies to seek greener pastures, and become grist for electoral or legislative efforts at reform—as the grassroots campaigns against data centers have shown.

    If you or someone you know relies on water near the proposed discharge sites, owns or works affected land, irrigates downstream, or has information that could help document the risks, contact Future Heist. We can help connect people with public-interest environmental lawyers following these cases.

  • TCEQ Air Quality Event Data

    Every year, Texas chemical plants, refineries, and industrial facilities report thousands of air quality events to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. These aren’t routine emissions—they’re excess releases, equipment failures, and spills that the companies are legally required to disclose.

    What’s in here

    • 100,000+ incidents
    • ~2,000 chemicals
    • Full incident details

    This dataset brings that scattered reporting into one place: 100,000+ incidents, with details on what was released, where, how much, and what the company said about what happened.

    Download the data

    Complete incident database

    All incidents with full details: date, facility, chemicals, duration, and company responses, incidents.csv.zip

    All incidents by chemical, incident_contaminants.csv.zip 

    Chemical breakdown

    Top 50 compounds by frequency — Which chemicals show up most? Where? How often? Rankings with year-by-year trends and by unit type.

    About the data

    Source: TCEQ’s public Exception Event Reporting system. This is the official channel through which facilities legally must report excess emissions, spills, and accidents.

    What it captures: Planned maintenance, equipment failures, weather events, accidents, and other incidents that trigger reporting requirements. This is not routine day-to-day emissions—it’s the stuff companies have to announce because something went wrong or exceeded limits.

    What it doesn’t capture: Routine emissions within permitted levels, permitted flaring, or incidents companies may have failed to report. TCEQ enforcement actions are separate.

    Data quality: Company descriptions are entered by facility staff. They range from precise (times, volumes, cause) to vague (“operational issue”). This dataset preserves what was reported, not what a regulator independently confirmed.

    Data & Questions

    Full data, the tools to download it yourself, documentation, or questions: See the GitHub repository

  • We Built a Map of Every Texas Well at Risk of Leaking Toxic Oilfield Wastewater

    Texas pumps billions of barrels of oilfield wastewater back underground every year. That pressure has to go somewhere — one place it can end up is the nearest old well, a zombie well, plugged and forgotten, coming back to life as a live path to the surface.

    25,719 of Texas’s plugged wells score Critical for zombie risk. Another 52,921 score High. 934 injection wells statewide have a documented casing failure — a leak between tubing and casing, the clearest sign a wellbore has already given out. Nearly 2 in 5 Texas schools and daycares have one of these wells within a mile.

  • The Texas Oil Industry Wants to Dump Its Toxic Wastewater on Farms. Regulators Need To Protect The Public.

    Texas wants to let oil and gas companies treat produced water, the salty and often radioactive waste from oil wells, and spray it on farmland across the state. We think that rule’s not ready. It tests for the things you’d find in sewage, not for things like radioactive elements, forever chemicals, or cancer-causing chemicals like benzene — all common in oilfield waste. The setbacks were built around odor complaints rather than spills. And it lets companies keep the test data quiet and leave the cleanup to neighbors and, eventually, taxpayers.

    New Mexico looked at the same waste and banned it. Texas is rushing the other way.

  • Texans Want Their Land and Health Protected from Toxic Oilfield Wastewater

    TCEQ asked whether oil and gas companies should be allowed to spread treated produced water on Texas land. Forty-six people wrote in. We read them and pulled out what each person said.

    Zero commenters supported the rule outright (as of 2026/06/15 at 1:30 pm). Nearly everyone was concerned or hostile. Texans don’t want this wastewater on their land or in their water.

    Browse the comments below. See the breakdown by stance and topic, and read the original letters yourself.

  • Texas Deleted Its Data About Which Towns Have Dangerous Water. We Grabbed it for You.

    Texas audits cities’ water every year — but state regulators just deleted 15 years of those records from the web, making it nearly impossible to check your town’s past.

    We saved the files and built this map so you can see the actual pollution in your area. Use it to find out what is in your water, so you can fight for better water.

  • She Thought Her Daughter Was Faking Sick. Then She Found Out Her Elementary School Was Built on a Drilling Waste Site.

    When hundreds of North Texas homeowners bought into a new planned community, no one told them about the drilling waste dump that lay beneath the site — until Future Heist reporting revealed its history.

    Now, amid reports of sick kids in the local elementary, the company that sold those homes insists that it acted better than other developers would. It insists the ground is clean. Just don’t ask to see the results.

  • Whistleblower Says Radioactive Fracking Waste Site Melted His Jaw. Now There’s an Elementary School There.

    In a North Texas county where dozens of cattle died from “forever chemical” poisoning, an oil and gas whistleblower claims he dumped “radioactive” drilling waste on a site hosts an elementary school.

    And with the Dallas-Fort Worth suburbs expanding over the dumping grounds of fracking’s Ground Zero, that site is probably only unique in one way: that you’re hearing about it at all.