Cleaning-Up Superfund : A Proposal for Permanent Cleanups and Returning Land Back to Nature - With Application to the Petroleum Industry

The reauthorization of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act ("CERCLA") affords Congress and the states with the opportunity to clean-up numerous sites that have been contaminated by oil and gas waste. In this article I review CERCLA's statutory scheme and urge that based on history and geological reality we must give-up the quest for the perfect cleanup. When some cleanups are estimated by EPA to take up to 2,000 years, it is folly to invest limited resources, both financial and manpower, to these sites. Thus, EPA and other agencies working on our behalf must be prepared to return certain contaminated lands; especially those polluted by the oil & gas industry, back to nature and let her work at cleaning them up. Some of the real property vehicles that can be used include the conservation easements or land trusts, which would be shielded from liability. I review here the long-standing history of contamination by the oil & gas history, which dates back to 1897, when John D. Rockefeller, was churning-out profits and concomitantly despoiling the land. Three sites heavily contaminated with oil & gas waste are employed as case studies. The first, the Louisiana Gulf Coast Vacuum Services site, contains PCBs, VOCs, arsenic, barium and other pit waste. The second site, the PAB Oil and Chemical Site, also in Louisiana, was like the Gulf Coast site studied throughout the 1980s. Finally, the third site is the J& B Refining and Southern Tanks site in Oklahoma. It has not been fully evaluated. Therefore, it is a prime target for "giving" it back to nature. EPA in each of these sites has focused on non-cleanup goals, contrary to its statutory mandate. It is this mindset that must be changed by Congress