Martha Oil Field News Archive

Each of us remembers different things that have happened in the Martha Oil Field over the years.  It’s been so many years that sometimes it’s hard to keep things straight.  So we created an archive of news articles that have been written over the past several years.  These news articles usually have a short summary online.  Sometimes you have to pay a fee to see the whole article.  On the right side of the page are the first articles in chronological order.  We will add more as you point them out to us.

Yatesville Lake: Dead Sea II?...almost

Yatesville Lake was finished in 1991 when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dammed Blaine Creek in Lawrence County, Kentucky.  The headwaters of Blaine Creek lie in the Martha Oil Field.  We have an interesting view into the politics of Yatesville Lake from the memoirs of Brig. Gen. Richard S. Kern who was commanding general of the Ohio River Division of the US Army Corps of Engineers at the time Yatesville was built.

Gen. Kern, from page 301…

When I arrived, I found myself faced with a lot of pressure from Congressman Perkins to get started on building 18-mile long Yatesville Lake.  At the same time, there were questions on the environment.  Huntington District came in one day and said, “We have a major problem.  We’ve tested the waters of the river, and it has an extremely high brine content because the Martha Oil Field is located just above it.”

Ashland Oil was operating this oil field, and they had a low-level extraction procedure going on.  Long ago the wells were basically finished, and now they were pumping brine into the wells to force out oil.  They were reaping very little, like a barrel a week, from some of them.

They were running that brine straight down the hillside into the streams, heading towards the creek that became the river that was going to become the lake behind Yatesville Dam.  Huntington District said, “We’re going to have Dead Sea II here if we build this lake.  It will be too briny; it will not support fishing or anything else.”

When that had been passed to Congressman Perkins, he said, “It’s all false.  Best bass fishing in the world is right there where those two tributaries come together and where we were going to build that dam.  I catch bass there all the time.  Best bass fishing in the world.”

When you reviewed the brine content of samples measured by Huntington District, you knew that we had two views of the world here [laughter].

So Congressman Perkins was determined to get his Yatesville Lake, come hell or high water, so to speak.  And Huntington District of the US Army Corps of Engineers was afraid Yatesville Lake would become Dead Sea II because Ashland Oil was dumping so much brine water into the creeks that would feed Yatesville.  Now back to Gen. Kern on page 302…

I asked for further analysis to be done on where the flows were coming from.  Meanwhile, I’d gone down to the Martha Oil Field and walked it, and I was appalled – absolutely appalled – to see what Ashland Oil was dumping down those hillsides.  I mean, you’d go up there and you’d see this eroded ditch coming out of a wellhead, running down the hill toward a stream, and it would be brown-orange colored from the stuff that had come out of there over time.  It was just running raw down the hillside – an absolute disregard for the environment.  I was really appalled.

Gen, Kern, the really appalling thing is what you couldn’t see, the radioactivity that was brought up from the shale formation by the brine water.  How are you going to build a lake with Ashland’s pollution feeding it?  Back to Gen. Kern, page 302…

Meanwhile, as mentioned, we had Huntington District doing further studies as to how the stuff got to the Big Sandy River and to the potential lake and what would happen.  What we discovered was that there were two components, surface runoff and ground water.  We also found a fault area through there, so we traced that.

What we found was that the way the fault lay, the subsurface water, the ground water, would be cut off before it got to the lake area and would go elsewhere.  Where the aquifers came in, they met up against an impervious wall area, and they were diverted elsewhere.  An important find – the briny ground water was cut off from going into the lake project area.

Well, congratulations Gen. Kern!  A geologic fault line diverts the briny ground water contamination away from your project site to “elsewhere.”  Guess what, we live in “elsewhere.”  Now that your ground water contamination problem is settled, how are you going to deal with the surface runoff?  Once again, Gen. Kern on pages 302-303…

So, with this, we developed a scheme that said we would design the lake, and we would isolate the lake from the Martha Oil Field by closing down discharges and the brine source.  Huntington District had come back with a proposal that we buy out the Martha Oil Field from Ashland for $50 million.  I thought that was not a worthwhile expenditure of federal funds.  We really ought to get Ashland to do what the nation had mandated, and that was to clean up the environment.  We needed to get the Commonwealth of Kentucky to act.  Being good responsible citizens, they would obviously want to do the same thing.

So, Huntington District approached the governor’s office and found that there was not great interest at the moment in cleaning it up.  Consequently, we went into a briefing one day for Congressman Perkins, I was going to lay out for him how we were going to proceed because he was badgering Chairman Bevill to get money for the project in that year’s budget to get started…

…In our meetings with EPA, we felt that we could go into the environmental impact process and demonstrate that if Kentucky cleaned up their law so Ashland Oil would stop contaminating, we could move it through EPA and Fish and Wildlife and show we were doing a good thing for the environment…

…That process was what we took to Congressman Perkins…Basically, he threw us out of the office at that point.  He told General John Wall, the Director of Civil Works, who was with us, that he wanted some of those combat generals, not all these environmental generals to talk to him [laughter]…

…Anyway, he basically threw us out of the office because he didn’t want to hear about going to the state to force Ashland Oil into compliance. 

So the Army Corps of Engineers went to the governor’s office to get Ashland to clean up their mess in the Martha Oil Field so the Army could safely build Yatesville Lake.  The governor’s office basically wasn’t interested in upsetting Ashland.  And Congressman Perkins definitely did not want to open that can of worms, so he threw them out of his office.  The only help the Army got was from Mother Nature, providing that geologic fault line to block the flow of contaminated ground water to Yatesville Lake.

The Army assumed that the surface runoff problem was fixed, since by the time the lake was finished most of the wells in the Martha Oil Field had been abandoned.  However their attention was on the brine in the runoff, hence the lake’s nickname Dead Sea II.  What about the continuing runoff from our radioactive sludge pits and other hot spots?  Check out the above video Toxic Soup: Ashland's Radioactive Sludge Pits.

Ashland, clean up your mess!

Martha Reclamation Program: Dirty Socks Under the Bed

After a piece of radioactive pipe from Ashland Oil’s Martha oil field tripped a Geiger counter at a scrap yard in 1988, Ashland knew they had a problem.  Let’s let Tom FitzGerald, Director of the Kentucky Resources Council, tell the story.  From his August 11, 2005 letter to the Kentucky Department for Public Health:

The discovery of elevated levels of radioactivity in the Martha oil field in the late 1980’s led to the development of a “Joint Agreement on Martha Reclamation Program (MRP)” executed between the Cabinet for Human Resources (CHR) and Ashland Exploration (AEI), in which AEI agreed to a program of reclamation under a document captioned “Martha Reclamation program” (August 1, 1993), modified by Technical Support Addendum (October/December 1994) and Technical Consensus Document (January 1995) in which levels of NORM would be lowered through selective removal of contaminated media, to agreed-upon values for radioactivity, with confirmatory sampling by the company and oversight by the Cabinet. The exemption criteria below which no remediation would be required was set at 5 pCi/gm above natural background and averaged over 100 square meters, in the top 15 cm of soil (with 15 pCi below 15 cm).

Whew!  Reading that was about as fun as clearing kudzu.  We think what he meant was Ashland and the state of Kentucky entered into an agreement to clean up the radiation to an agreed standard, with testing performed by Ashland (overseen by the state of Kentucky) to confirm that the agreed standard was met.  Now, back to Mr. FitzGerald…

After execution of the Joint Agreement in February 1995, procedures were agreed upon by CHR and AEI for selective confirmatory surveys of well sites and tank battery sites, for removal of contaminated soil and piping to a local collection and storage site, and for securing letters from CHR approving the remediated sites for “unrestricted release.” The “First Addendum to Joint Agreement on Martha Reclamation Program” executed in September 1995, contained procedures for release of sites, allowing any site with a reading below 20 micro r/hr at 1 meter above ground to be released, and providing for confirmatory surveys of a statistical sampling of the remediated sites. Over a period of several years as reclamation work was being undertaken by OHM under contract with AEI, data was submitted to the state concerning sites that had been “remediated” and letters of concurrence from CHR of the eligibility of many properties for unrestricted release were issued. The soils and piping removed by AEI were stored on AEI property, and to this day, significant quantities of the NORM-contaminated soil remain at a consolidation site and have not been properly disposed of in a permanent disposal site.

In other words, a process was put in place to survey selected sites where radioactive waste was likely to be, and the radioactive pipes, sludge, scale, soils, etc. that exceeded an agreed measurement threshold were removed to a temporary consolidation site on Ashland’s property.  The waste still sits there waiting for permanent disposal (see above video Toxic Soup: Ashland’s Radioactive Sludge Pits for an aerial view of the toxic waste consolidation site).  Once again, Mr. FitzGerald…

…Data developed on the Martha oil field through field surveys conducted by the Cabinet for Human Resources and the Natural Resources and Environmental Protection Cabinet, as well as a consultant for an oil company in the area, indicates the existence of numerous sites where levels of radium-226 has been detected at excessive levels. These areas include apparently dozens of brine/sludge pits in the Martha oil field that were formerly used for separation of oil and produced water (brine), and for disposal of oil-related sludges and clays as well as other land areas which currently or formerly supported tank batteries (oil/water separators) or piping and equipment storage, many of which exhibit levels of radium-226 as much as hundreds of times above the levels deemed unacceptable due to health consequences by the United States Environmental Protection Agency for human exposure.

So, even though we’ve all been through the Martha Reclamation Program for the past 15 years we still have hazardous radioactive hot spots throughout the oil field.  So the clean-up has not been successful.  And we have a temporary radioactive waste dump site that is starting to look permanent.  We have radioactive waste drained out of old storage tanks, dumped into holes and buried. Some of these remediation efforts remind us of when we try to get our teenage kids to clean their rooms; at first things look OK but then we find that all the dirty socks and underwear end up under the bed.

Ashland, clean up this mess!

"Will the real Ashland Oil please stand up?"

There used to be a TV show called To Tell the Truth where three contestants appeared before a panel of judges, all pretending to be the same person.  In the end, the moderator would ask the contestants, "Will the real _____ please stand up?" to reveal the person's true identity.  We can play a similar game with Ashland Oil:

1997 - Ashland signed definitive agreement with Marathon Oil to combine the two companies' refining, marketing and transportation assets. Ashland sold its domestic oil and gas properties for $566 million, and the company's two coal investments merged to form Arch Coal, Inc.



1998 - Marathon Ashland Petroleum LLC began operation Jan. 1. Ashland owned 38 percent of this joint-venture company, the nation's sixth largest refiner. 


1999 - Ashland's headquarters moved to Covington, Ky., as the company observed its 75th anniversary. Ashland formed two new divisions - Ashland Distribution Company and Ashland Specialty Chemical Company - from its largest wholly owned business, Ashland Chemical Company. 


2004 - Ashland and Marathon Oil Corporation signed an agreement to transfer its 38-percent interest in Marathon Ashland Petroleum LLC (MAP) to Marathon for approximately $3.0 billion. 


2005 - Ashland Inc. (NYSE: ASH ) and Marathon Oil Corporation (NYSE: MRO ) on June 30 completed an agreement under which Ashland transferred its 38-percent interest in Marathon Ashland Petroleum LLC ( MAP ) and two other businesses to Marathon. The two other businesses were Ashland's maleic anhydride business and 60 Valvoline Instant Oil Change (VIOC) centers in Michigan and northwest Ohio, which were valued at $94 million. After 81 years in the petroleum refining and marketing industry, Ashland Inc. became a two-sector company with operations in the chemicals and transportation construction industries. 


So, is Ashland or Marathon responsible for the radioactive mess in the Martha Oil Field?  I'm sure the lawyers know who is legally responsible, however, if a good corporate citizen decided to clean up the mess tomorrow, who would it be?  Ashland, Marathon or someone else?  Will the real Ashland Oil please stand up?

History of the Martha Oil Field

We know a little bit about the history of the area and would like to share it with you.  The village of Martha was named after Martha Skaggs, nee Cothron, a Cherokee who married Peter Skaggs in Virginia in 1788.  They moved to the “head of Blaine” in Lawrence County, Kentucky in 1804.  Martha Skaggs died in 1865 in Martha.

The Martha Oil Field was discovered in 1919 and produced roughly 19 million barrels of oil prior to 1955 when a waterflood project was begun by Ashland Oil to extract more oil.  Over 6 million barrels of oil was recovered using water injection between 1955 and 1970.  At this point, Ashland estimated an additional 30 million barrels of oil remained to be recovered by injection of brine and inert gas.  They considered the Martha Oil Field to be an opportunity to test the field-wide application of these enhanced oil recovery techniques.

Unfortunately the oil in the Martha Oil Field lies in Devonian shale, which contains low-level concentrations of radium-226, a radioactive element (naturally occurring radioactive material, N.O.R.M.) with a half-life of 1600 years.  Radium-226 is highly water soluble.  The water, brine and inert gas injections into the Devonian shale concentrated the radium-226 and brought it to the surface where the oil was separated from the brine.  The radioactive brine was dumped into sludge pits and disposed of in Blaine Creek.  As a result, oil wells, pressure wells, tank batteries, sludge pits and disposal pathways were contaminated with concentrated radioactive material.  Also, pipes and tanks that were in prolonged contact with the radioactive material were contaminated and strewn about the oil field.

The radiation contamination was discovered in 1988 when pipes hauled from Ashland Inc. tripped a scrap yard’s radiation detectors.  Ashland contended the radiation was harmless and began removing old pipes and tons of contaminated soil from the area to a designated disposal site.  Area residents claimed their health and property were at risk and filed lawsuits against Ashland Oil.

Ashland Oil Exploration merged with Marathon Oil in 1998 to form Marathon Ashland Petroleum, LLC.  In 2005 Ashland sold its share in Marathon Ashland Petroleum to Marathon Oil to exit the petroleum business.

We can’t imagine that Marathon Oil took on Ashland’s liabilities without proper due diligence, therefore Marathon should move to settle with the local residents and clean up this mess.  Do the right thing, Marathon!