Sunflower Alliance v. California Department of Conservation (Cal. Ct. App. - Sept. 6, 2024)

When you pump oil out from the ground (at least out here in California), you get a lot of water alongside the oil. You then have to do something with the water -- which is oily water, so neither drinkable nor of any real use. So oil companies generally just pump it back into the ground, though federal law says you can only pump it back in if the aquifer you're pumping it back into isn't drinkable anyway. (Which, I suspect, is generally the case, since the underground aquifer is probably pretty oily anyway, since you're getting oil from there. But maybe there are circumstances in which the water at one level is fine but at another level -- the level you're pumping the oil from -- it's not.)

The Reabold oil company pumps a lot of oil out of the Brentwood Oil Field, and has done so for over 60 years. Lots of oil, lots of water. There's one particular oil well out there that they're not using any more, since it's over an area where they've already pumped out all the oil that's economically feasible to remove.  So they plugged that well, but now they want to fix the thing to inject into the ground all the dirty water that comes out of all the other surrounding (still productive) oil wells. That'll stop them from having to truck the dirty water to the existing place where they dump all that dirty water back into the ground.

The question at issue is whether Reabold needs to get a CEQA permit to do so. The statute says that you don't have to get a permit for something that involves only a "negligible or no expansion" of the use of an existing facility; here, the oil well.

The trial court says that this exemption doesn't apply, since Reabold is turning an existing well that's currently doing . . . nothing . . . into a well that's proposed to be doing something (e.g., dumping dirty water into an aquifer). The Court of Appeal reverses, holding that the exception applies.

I totally understand why it probably makes a ton of sense to dump the dirty water back into an already-dirty aquifer nearby, instead of trucking it -- with associated pollution etc. -- to a different already-dirty aquifer somewhere else. But I'm not entirely sure as to why California can't (or doesn't) allegedly require a permit to make sure that dumping the already-dirty water back into an (allegedly) already-dirty aquifer isn't actually dumping water into an otherwise clean (or useful) aquifer, or -- textually -- why turning nothing into something allegedly involves "negligible or no expansion" of that facility.

Seems to me it's a big deal to make sure that our drinking water is, in fact, clean. (Or already so dirty that it doesn't matter.)

It's maybe also a testament to modern society -- or maybe just longstanding geology -- that we already have underground water supplies that are so completely dirty and disgusting that we feel totally confident making them even more polluted.