[DANmode]

Wait, are they sacrificing the whales by putting them in toxic wastewater, in your ridiculous example?

Otherwise, someone’s industrial process is responsible for those samples…

and if the only business in the area that matches the waste is…

[tpmoney]

The point was that “that’s just what someone polluting somewhere else would say” is about as productive of an assertion as any other assertion that they’re involved in some conspiracy. You can’t derive any useful information about whether or not they are actually polluting from the statement.

As far as where those pollutants are coming from, multiple other commenters have noted there is another near by oil and gas processing equipment facility/manufacturer, a highway and multiple farmlands in the same area, all perfectly viable sources of pollution. Especially since as other commenters have pointed out a lot of these values appear to be just slightly above the local background values. And again given the overall lack of communication and the apparent need for manual monitoring, it seems pretty fair to say that you can’t just assume that the measured values are because of this pipe and not any of the other potential sources that are also going to be flowing into this ditch.

[DANmode]

Oil and gas wastewater contains toxic petroleum hydrocarbons and radioactive materials, while lithium wastewater is defined by chemical reagents and strong acids or bases.

There is some overlap (high salinity, boron).