Oil companies violated state injection permits 822 times in 2014

California’s beleaguered oil regulating agency on Thursday released a long-overdue report showing the number of permits it issues each year to petroleum companies that want to dispose of their wastewater by injecting it underground — and the number of times those businesses break the rules.

The report from the state’s Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources found 822 instances last year of the oil companies violating conditions of their permits — governing such things as injection rates and water pressure — while pumping their wastewater underground. In 17 cases, companies started injections before receiving the division’s approval.

The division, which is part of the state’s Department of Conservation, has come under intense criticism for allowing oil companies to repeatedly inject leftover water from oil field operations into aquifers that were supposed to be protected by federal law. The scandal, detailed in a Chronicle investigation in February, revealed an understaffed, disorganized agency struggling to regulate California’s oil industry.

A 2010 state law required the division to send the Legislature annual updates on the number of underground injection projects approved each year. Until Thursday, however, the division had issued only one such report, in February 2011. The report released Thursday covers every year since then.

“This is an extensive report,” said Steve Bohlen, the division’s supervisor, who was appointed by Gov. Jerry Brown in June 2014 to overhaul the agency. “One of the promises I made to the governor was to bring all the problems of the division into light, bring them out into the bright sunshine, so we can fix them.”

The report also includes an in-depth and unflattering study of the division’s operations in the Los Angeles basin, which still produces a significant amount of oil. Auditors found incomplete records for many injection wells, with necessary engineering studies missing and paper documents scattered among several locations. Required annual reviews of injection projects were rarely performed on time, usually delayed more than five years.

“Regulators have let the oil industry virtually drill at will in the L.A. area, and those poorly regulated injection wells pose an enormous risk to underground water,” said Hollin Kretzmann, a staff attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity environmental group, which has been one of the division’s fiercest critics.

Statewide, the report found that the number of injection project permits sought by the oil industry rose each year through 2013 before falling sharply in 2014. The types of permit violations cited by the division’s staff varied from year to year, in part because the division’s management asked its enforcement officers to focus on different activities in different years. For example, the number of violations related to the potential integrity of wells dropped from 227 in 2011 to 29 the following year, then rose to 85 in 2013.

The division handled the vast majority of violations by simply notifying the oil companies.

“It really has to do with taking limited resources and moving their focus around,” Bohlen said. “What we’re trying to do now is greatly improve our number of inspections in the field. We’re working harder, we’re hiring more staff, we’re getting more people in the field.”