The Operation: What Oasis Is Doing on MHA Land

Oasis Petroleum North America LLC runs a Class II saltwater disposal well called the Rupple 1-4 SWD on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota. Here is what that actually means.

• Saltwater disposal wells receive the toxic brine that comes back up from oil and gas extraction. This fluid contains naturally occurring radioactive materials, heavy metals, and the chemical cocktail used in drilling and hydraulic fracturing. It is injected underground under pressure.
• The well sits at coordinates 47.836159 latitude, -102.212987 longitude, inside the exterior boundaries of the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. The MHA Nation governs this land. Their drinking water and the underground formations beneath their territory are directly implicated by what happens in this well.
• The EPA originally issued the well permit in October 2012 to QEP Energy Company. When Oasis took ownership, the EPA revised the permit in February 2022 to reflect the new owner. Oasis became the responsible permittee from that point forward.
• The permit requires Oasis to submit Annual Monitoring Reports by February 15 each year. Each report must include a summary of monitoring data and the lifetime cumulative injected volume, the total amount of toxic wastewater forced underground over the entire operational life of the well.

The Non-Financial Ledger: What Does Not Show Up in the Settlement

There is a document at the center of this case that no one is talking about loudly enough. It is called a lifetime cumulative injected volume report. It sounds bureaucratic. It is not. It is the running total of how much toxic oilfield waste has been pumped underground beneath the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation since this well started operating. Oasis withheld that number for more than two years after the first time they were required to provide it. The EPA’s enforcement response was a fine worth less than what a roughneck earns in a week.

The Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation has governed this land since long before North Dakota was a state. Their territory was already taken. Their river, the Missouri, was flooded in 1953 when the federal government built the Garrison Dam, displacing thousands of tribal members and drowning the most fertile farmland on the reservation. The oil boom that followed brought promises of economic sovereignty. What it also brought was thousands of injection wells, pipelines, flares, and spills on land the MHA Nation owns but cannot always fully regulate.

When a company is required to tell regulators how much waste it has put underground and declines to do so for two years, the people most exposed to the consequences of that underground injection are the last to know. The MHA Nation depends on the EPA to enforce federal underground injection controls on their land because federal law reserves that authority until a tribe formally assumes it. That structural dependency is not the tribe’s failure. It is a feature of how extraction has always worked on Native land: the risk stays, the profit leaves, and the paperwork arrives late or incomplete.

The EPA signed this consent agreement on September 26, 2024. It was filed November 18, 2024. The case was opened and closed on the same day. Oasis neither admitted nor denied what happened. The fine is $3,681. No corrective injection monitoring was ordered beyond what Oasis had already done by the time the penalty was assessed. There is no independent verification in this document that the underground formations beneath the reservation are unaffected. There is only Oasis’s eventually submitted data and the EPA’s acceptance of a $3,681 check.

Read that again. The tribe governs their land. They do not get to enforce the rules protecting the water beneath it. That is not an accident of bureaucracy. That is the architecture of extraction.

Legal Receipts: What the Document Actually Says

The following quotes come directly from EPA Docket No. SDWA-08-2024-0042. Each one is reproduced verbatim from the source document.

“Respondent submitted its 2022 Annual Monitoring Report on February 27, 2023. The 2022 Annual Monitoring Report lacked the required lifetime cumulative injected volume.”

• This confirms the first violation: the report was filed 12 days after the February 15 deadline, and the most critical data point, total lifetime underground injection volume, was omitted entirely.
• Lifetime cumulative injected volume is the metric that tells regulators and the public how much toxic wastewater has been forced underground over the full life of the well. Without it, there is no way to assess whether injection pressures or volumes are approaching thresholds that could threaten underground drinking water sources.

“Respondent submitted its 2023 Annual Monitoring Report on March 7, 2024. The 2023 Annual Monitoring Report lacked the required lifetime cumulative injected volume.”

• Oasis repeated the same violation the following year. The 2023 report was filed 21 days late. The lifetime cumulative volume was missing again. This is not a data entry oversight. This is a pattern across two consecutive reporting cycles.
• After two consecutive violations of the same permit requirement, the EPA’s final penalty was $3,681. The statutory maximum for violations of this type is $13,946 per day of violation, up to $348,671 total. The EPA assessed 1.05% of the maximum possible penalty.

“Respondent submitted the lifetime cumulative injected volume as of the end of 2023 on August 14, 2024.”

• Oasis finally provided the data more than 18 months after it was first required. By the time this number was delivered, the EPA was already preparing to settle the case.
• The document does not indicate whether the EPA independently verified this data against operational records, or whether any follow-up inspection of the well or surrounding geological formations was conducted.

“Respondent neither admits nor denies the specific factual allegations in this Agreement.”

• This is standard language in EPA consent agreements, but it has a material consequence: Oasis faced no requirement to formally acknowledge that it failed to protect the public record of underground injection on tribal land. The case closed without any admission of wrongdoing.
• The company waived its right to a hearing and agreed to pay $3,681. In exchange, it received resolution of all federal civil penalty liability for these violations. The settlement is final.

“Having considered the seriousness of the violation, the economic benefit resulting from the violation, the Respondent’s history of such violations, Respondent’s good-faith efforts to comply with the applicable requirements, the economic impact of the penalty on the violation, and other matters as justice may require…”

• The EPA is legally required to consider economic benefit when setting penalties. Economic benefit in this context means money Oasis saved by not complying on time. The document does not state what that figure was calculated to be.
• The document credits Oasis with “good-faith efforts to comply.” Those good-faith efforts consisted of filing two incomplete reports late and then providing the missing data only after an enforcement action was initiated.

Societal Impact Mapping: Who Pays When Oasis Doesn’t Report

Public Health

Underground injection wells near drinking water sources require continuous, accurate monitoring. Missing or delayed data creates real gaps in the ability to detect contamination before it reaches the water supply.

• The Rupple 1-4 SWD well is a Class II saltwater disposal well, meaning it injects produced water from oil and gas operations. Produced water can contain benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, xylene, naturally occurring radioactive materials (NORM), and heavy metals, all of which are toxic to humans at low concentrations.
• The Fort Berthold Indian Reservation’s water resources are directly beneath and adjacent to the injection zone. When cumulative injection volume data is withheld for 18 months, the public health record for that water system has a documented blind spot for at least that entire period.
• EPA Region 8 administers the underground injection program for the MHA Nation’s land because the tribe has not yet assumed primary enforcement authority. The MHA Nation has no independent legal mechanism to compel timely reporting from Oasis outside of the federal process that produced a $3,681 fine.
• Fort Berthold communities have documented concerns about water quality since the Bakken oil boom intensified extraction activity on the reservation beginning around 2008. The existence of thousands of injection wells and a documented pattern of spills makes complete and timely monitoring data a functional necessity, not a paperwork exercise.

Economic Inequality

The penalty structure of the Safe Drinking Water Act was designed to deter violations. When the fine for two years of incomplete reporting at a well on tribal land is less than $4,000, the deterrence function collapses.

• The statutory maximum for these violations, based on $13,946 per day of violation up to a ceiling of $348,671, was approximately 95 times larger than the penalty assessed. The EPA chose $3,681.
• The economic benefit to Oasis from non-compliance is not stated in the document. Compliance costs money: staff time, data management systems, and the legal exposure that comes with accurate disclosure of how much waste has been injected into the ground. Delaying or omitting that disclosure defers those costs. A $3,681 fine does not recover them.
• Oasis Petroleum (now operating under Chord Energy after a merger with Whiting Petroleum in 2022) reported approximately $3.6 billion in combined revenue in 2022. The fine represents roughly 0.0001% of that figure. At that ratio, a household earning $60,000 a year would face the equivalent of a $0.06 fine for two years of failure to report.
• The MHA Nation receives royalties from oil production on tribal land, which creates a structural tension: the tribe’s economic survival is partially tied to the same extraction industry that exposes them to environmental and health risks. This dependency limits the tribe’s leverage in demanding stronger enforcement from federal regulators who have historically assessed minimal penalties.
• Under the consent agreement, Oasis is explicitly barred from deducting this penalty for federal tax purposes under Section 162(f)(1) of the Internal Revenue Code. That provision was necessary to include because without it, corporate fines like this are routinely written off as a business expense, reducing the actual after-tax cost even further.

The “Cost of a Life” Metric

What Now? Who Is Accountable and What You Can Do

The consent agreement names Kevin Kelly (email: kevin.kelly@chordenergy.com) as Oasis Petroleum’s authorized representative, operating under the Chord Energy corporate structure. The EPA Region 8 enforcement attorney on record is Mia Bearley. These are the names attached to a $3,681 resolution of two years of incomplete tribal water monitoring.

The Watchlist: Regulatory Bodies That Have Authority Here

• EPA Region 8 (Denver): The office that administered this enforcement action. Region 8 oversees Underground Injection Control permits on tribal lands in its jurisdiction, including Fort Berthold. Public comments on consent agreements are a mechanism the public can use before final approval; the SDWA and EPA’s Consolidated Rules of Practice require public notice and a comment period before the agreement is ratified.
• EPA Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights: Holds authority to investigate whether EPA programs are being administered in ways that create disparate environmental burdens on tribal and minority communities. The gap between the $348,671 maximum and the $3,681 assessed is the kind of disparity this office exists to examine.
• Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA): Manages trust land relationships and has a role in oversight of resource extraction on tribal lands. The BIA can be a pressure point for strengthening tribal capacity to assume primary enforcement authority under the SDWA.
• MHA Nation Government (Three Affiliated Tribes): The tribal government has standing to engage directly with EPA Region 8 on permit conditions, enforcement priorities, and the process by which the tribe could assume primary UIC enforcement authority under 42 U.S.C. § 300h-1. Tribal assumption of enforcement authority would remove the dependency on federal regulators who have demonstrated they will settle violations like this for $3,681.
• Senate Committee on Indian Affairs / House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Indigenous Peoples: Congressional oversight committees with jurisdiction over tribal environmental enforcement gaps. The structural problem in this case, where tribes lack enforcement authority on their own land, requires legislative attention.

Mutual Aid, Local Organizing, and Grassroots Resistance

• Support tribal water monitoring capacity directly. Organizations working on Fort Berthold environmental health, including the Fort Berthold Community Water Advocate network, operate with minimal funding. Direct financial support and volunteer technical expertise in water testing and data analysis are concrete contributions.
• File public comments on future EPA consent agreements. The SDWA requires a public comment period before a consent agreement is approved by the Regional Judicial Officer. EPA consent agreements are published in the Federal Register. Setting up a Federal Register alert for “SDWA” and “EPA Region 8” costs nothing and puts you in position to comment before the next $3,681 settlement is locked in.
• Demand tribal primacy funding in federal budgets. The process by which tribes assume primary UIC enforcement authority requires resources: legal capacity, technical staff, and regulatory infrastructure. Advocacy targeting EPA and BIA budget allocations for tribal environmental program development is a direct lever on this structural problem.
• Amplify MHA Nation water and land sovereignty organizing. The Three Affiliated Tribes have been documenting oil and gas impacts on their land and water for over a decade. Share their public statements, reports, and testimony. Economic and political pressure on Chord Energy’s social license to operate is more durable than a $3,681 EPA fine.
• Track Chord Energy’s investor relations communications. Chord Energy (the post-merger entity) reports to shareholders. Environmental liabilities and enforcement actions are material disclosures. Shareholder activists and ESG-focused funds have leverage that federal regulators, as this case demonstrates, are choosing not to use.