The tracking system that was put in place requires monthly or yearly reports to the state from well operators indicating where their waste was taken, but offers no way for the state to guarantee that the waste actually reached the disposal sites.
The challenges of tracking all of the industry’s drilling waste and disposing of it will not go away soon. At least 50,000 new Marcellus wells are supposed to be drilled in Pennsylvania over the next two decades, up from about 6,400 permitted now.
Wells also create waste that is not captured by recycling, because operators typically recycle only for the first several months after a well begins producing gas.
Though the amount of wastewater decreases over time, the wells can continue to ooze for decades after they have been hydrofracked. There are regulations, however, that govern how gas wells are plugged and abandoned.
“This is important because as the well ages, the fluids that come up from it become more toxic, and the state or companies are even less likely to be tracking it,” said Anthony Ingraffea, a drilling expert and professor of civil and environmental engineering at Cornell.
State regulators predict that the heaviest burdens are still to come.
“The waste that flows back slowly and continuously over the 20- to 30-year life of each gas well could produce 27 tons of salt per year,” Pennsylvania officials wrote in new rules adopted last August about salt levels in drilling wastewater being sent through sewage treatment plants. “Multiply this amount by tens of thousands of Marcellus gas wells,” they said, and the potential pollution effects are “tremendous.”
In an interview on Sunday, John Hanger, who in January stepped down as secretary of Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection, pointed to these rules as some of the strongest in the country and cited other accomplishments during his term, including increasing inspections of drilling industry trucks, more than doubling his department’s natural-gas staff and improving well design requirements.
The natural-gas industry uses a number of methods to recycle drilling waste.
Some drillers have used recycling equipment at the well site or trucked the water to a dedicated recycling facility. The wastewater is filtered, evaporated and then distilled, to be used again at the well. Other companies add fresh water to the wastewater, to dilute the salts and other contaminants, before pumping it back in the ground for more hydrofracking.
Any sludge that settles from these various processes is taken to landfills, which in Pennsylvania are equipped with radiation monitors, or is sent to injection disposal wells.
But drilling experts say that virtually all forms of recycling still result in liquid waste that can be more toxic than it was after the first use.
“The wastewater that comes up from the well will likely increase to some degree in many contaminants such as salts and possibly radium and other radionuclides with each new fracking, but the data is very limited on this issue so not much is known,” said Radisav Vidic, an environmental engineering professor and drilling expert at the University of Pittsburgh. “There needs to be more data on this.”
Industry officials said there was no reason for concern about radioactivity levels in wastewater.
“All of our reports indicate that this industry operates within the same standards set forth and observed by all water consumers in Pennsylvania,” said Matt Pitzarella, a spokesman from Range Resources-Appalachia, a part of the Range Resources natural-gas company.
Some energy companies have found more profitable options for getting rid of their drilling wastewater.
In West Virginia, for example, environmental regulators and highway officials last year announced plans for the state to start paying around five cents per gallon for gas drilling wastewater known as brine, which tends to be extremely salty, to melt ice on roads.
They planned to buy about 1.2 million gallons of the wastewater at more than 120 sites around the state and to buy more as needed.
West Virginia’s water and waste management director, Scott Mandirola, has said that he recognized that some Marcellus waste may have radioactive contaminants and that some of the waste could find its way to the state’s waters.
But he added that it would be highly diluted by rain or snow and that de-icing the roads was important. State officials also said that only wastewater from shallow wells would be used, thereby reducing levels of radioactivity.
Pennsylvania also allows salty brine produced from the wastewater to be spread on roads for dust suppression or de-icing.
More than 155,000 gallons of this wastewater was sent by a drilling company called Ultra Resources to nine towns for dust suppression in 2009, state records show. The water came from two gas wells in Tioga County and contained radium at almost 700 times the levels allowed in drinking water.
“I was told nothing about frack water or any gas-well brines or anything else,” said Deborah Kotulka, the secretary of Richmond Township, in Tioga County, whose name appears on the state record. Her township received 101,640 gallons of the water from wells with high radioactivity, those records show.
As gas producers have tried to find new ways to get rid of their waste, they have sought reassurances from state and federal regulators that the industry’s exemptions from federal laws on hazardous waste were broad enough to protect them.
In late 2009, for example, officials from an industry trade group, the Pennsylvania Oil and Gas Association, wrote to regulators to confirm that drilling waste, regardless of how it was handled, would remain exempt from the federal law governing hazardous materials. The association said it was asking in case companies sought to distill the waste into salts for de-icing roads.
“The query has monumental significance,” Steve Rhoads, then the president of the association, wrote in a September 2009 e-mail to state regulators explaining his members’ concerns about any attempt by federal officials to categorize drilling waste as hazardous material. The correspondence was obtained through open-records requests filed with the state.
If drillers were to lose the exemption from federal law that allowed their waste not to be considered hazardous, they would probably be forced, at great expense, to start more rigorously testing the waste for toxicity.
They might also have to do what most other industries do: ship any sludge or salts that are high in radioactivity to Idaho or Washington State, where there are some of the only landfills in the country permitted to accept such waste.
Instead, federal regulators informed the industry that their exemption remained intact, a decision that association officials quickly passed on to their members. State regulators declined to comment on the exchange because it concerns a federal, not state, exemption. Federal officials said the salts were regulated by the states.
“In short,” Mr. Rhoads wrote his members, the Environmental Protection Agency has determined that the exemption “remains in effect once the waste is generated, regardless of how the waste is treated or managed.”
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