Glacier County hears technical briefing on injection well, tribe says permit in place

Wayne Smith, a consultant geologist, briefed the Glacier County Board of Commissioners on the geology and safeguards around a long-standing injection well serving the Cut Bank field, saying the well is engineered to protect shallow groundwater and that the deep Madison formation tapped by the well is briny, not potable.

Smith told the board he was appointed to the Montana Board of Oil and Gas in the past and has decades of industry experience. He described the Hardwick well’s construction: surface and production casings cemented back to the surface, API‑spec pipe, cement plugs and monitoring in place to isolate deep injections from shallow drinking-water zones. He said the Madison formation in the area is typically about 3,300–3,444 feet deep and the injection pressures used historically ranged roughly 2,400–2,500 psi.

“Madison is not a drinking water,” Smith said. “It’s really prolific, salty, briny water,” and making it potable would require treatment on the scale of desalination. Smith and other presenters said those geologic and engineering features are why the wells were developed as disposal or secondary-recovery injection points and why regulators (state oil and gas, EPA and the BLM) are involved in oversight.

A tribal/operator representative told the board the tribe/company already holds a permit to dispose of frac water and has had it since 2012; activity dropped after larger operators left the area but the tribe is reentering wells and exploring limited disposal tied to renewables. “We have had that permit since 2012,” the representative said, describing the permit history and earlier heavy-haul road improvements that supported truck traffic to the plant.

Commissioners pressed presenters on mapping and on whether the Madison aquifer shown on maps is continuous across counties. Smith cautioned that the Madison formation is discontinuous in places and that geologic faults and pinch‑outs limit simple geographic inference. Commissioners also raised local concerns about tax impacts and truck traffic if activity increases; presenters said the plant sits just off Highway 2 with an existing heavy-haul approach and estimated limited truck counts under a renewables‑oriented proposal.

No formal action was taken on the injection/permitting topic at the meeting. Commissioners scheduled a field site visit to inspect the plant and wells after the meeting for further fact‑finding. The presenters said an EPA process would be required for any expansion to a different permitting class and that they would seek to keep commissioners informed as permit steps proceed.