Shale drillers eye mine drainage for fluid

http://www.waterworld.com/index/display/news_display/1422301945.html

Timothy Puko
Pittsburgh Tribune Review
May 22, 2011

A growing energy industry that comes with its own pollution concerns could help clean up one of the  oldest pollution problems in Pennsylvania.

Shale gas drilling uses billions of gallons of water every year to break into rocks one mile underground. Drillers put chemicals such as methanol, benzene and 2-butoxyethanol into that water to help their equipment work and coax gas forth, but that angers environmentalists and landowners who worry about the water spilling or seeping into public drinking water sources.

One solution could be to use water that’s even dirtier.

University of Pittsburgh professor Radisav D. Vidic is studying how drillers could make use of mine drainage water, since thousands of gallons flow untreated into waterways statewide every day. It would keep that toxic drainage out of water supplies and stop drillers from using tanker trucks that burn gasoline and crush roads while hauling water to well sites, Vidic said.

“I was completely blown away by the fact that they were willing to truck water around,” said Vidic, a civil and environmental engineer.

He’s in the middle of a three-year, federally funded research project and is focusing on how to use mine water.

“Not only do you reduce the traffic and opportunities for spilling, but you clean up some of the legacy issues (left by coal),” he said.

Drilling companies are taking notice.

‘Every little bit counts’

Chevron and Samson Investment Co. hold permits to use mine water in Greene and Somerset counties. They’re permitted to use as much as 323,000 gallons a day, according to the state Department of Environmental Protection. Consol Energy Inc. executives said last month that they’re planning to sell mine water for use in shale drilling.

Two other proposals under state review could expand its use in Somerset County and add Indiana County to the list, said Brian Dillemuth, a water pollution biologist at the department’s southwest regional office. Atop the Marcellus shale, a gas-rich rock formation under most of Pennsylvania, interest in the idea is growing, Dillemuth said. Entrepreneurs independent from drilling companies frequently call him about ways to use mine water in drilling, he noted.

“Every little bit counts,” Dillemuth said. “I haven’t been doing this that long, but if these sources meet the requirements that these (drillers) have, then obviously we’d love to exploit them. (The mines) were part of the problem, but now they’re maybe part of the solution for this new industry. The potential is definitely there.”

The state has a decades-old problem of coal mine drainage. It spends $19 million annually on abandoned mine reclamation, according to the DEP. Mines left abandoned, either by scofflaws or bankrupt companies, fill with rain runoff and drain or leach into waterways throughout the state’s coalfields, which underlie about a third of Pennsylvania.

That water often is highly acidic and contains dissolved metals such as iron, aluminum and manganese. Mine drainage is the biggest problem for state waterways, responsible for thousands of miles of streams now uninhabitable for wildlife and unusable for humans, said Paul Ziemkiewicz, director of the West Virginia Water Research Institute in Morgantown.

There is some environmental concern about using that water in shale drilling, because it could spill or leach into drinking water supplies, Dillemuth said. But mine drainage is the bigger, more expensive, long-standing problem ? and it’s getting into water supplies, said Dillemuth, Vidic and others who support the idea.

About 150,000 gallons of untreated mine water seep into the upper Monongahela River and its tributaries every minute, Ziemkiewicz said. That’s why environmental groups, including the Pennsylvania Environmental Council and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, support the idea.

Drillers use more than 4 million gallons of water in every Marcellus shale well. Even if they use mine water in only 100 wells, that’s more than 400 million gallons.

Of the water that drillers pump into a well, only about a fourth to a fifth of it flows back to the surface. Spills happen so infrequently that the risk of spilling thousands of gallons of mine water is outweighed exponentially by the chance to put millions of gallons into a deep rock formation, said Terry Engelder, a Penn State University geosciences professor.

“It makes a lot of sense conceptually,” said Matt Ehrhart, Pennsylvania executive director at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. “We agree completely (that) using mine pool water and recycling frack water ?  the more we can reduce the demand for fresh frack water, the better off we are.”

Not a ‘blanket panacea’

There are reasons to be skeptical, though, Ziemkiewicz said. He suggests the coal industry left too many abandoned mines and too much mine drainage for Vidic’s idea to really help reduce the pollution.

“I think that using mine water where it’s feasible, where it makes chemical sense, it’s a great idea,” Ziemkiewicz said. “I just don’t want people to get the idea it’s the blanket panacea for all of our problems.”

Logistics could be problematic, too. Texas-based Range Resources explored using the abandoned Gladden Mine in South Fayette as a source of water, said Matt Pitzarella, spokesman for the company, which has an office in Cecil. But none of its drill sites are close enough to make it work.

Two other snags are the economics and some long-term legal issues.

Vidic is working to make the process affordable and profitable. He hopes to present a field demonstration by late 2012. The problem is that mine water typically is high in sulfates, which can react with other chemicals underground and essentially clog a well.

Chevron declined to comment for this story, and Consol officials did not respond to requests for details. Samson Investment Co. did not respond to a request for comment.

The industry’s early use of mine water has been limited to purified mine drainage, Vidic and Pitzarella said. Vidic’s goal is to make mine water usable with minimal treatment: the only way it could become a cheap, widely available source for the shale gas industry.

Even if that problem is solved, drillers don’t want to get caught up in the state’s long-standing mine problems, Pitzarella said. For abandoned mines there’s no owner the state can force to pay for water  treatment or environmental damage. Drillers worry that if they tap a pool of mine water, the state might try to make them pay to treat it, even when they no longer need it, Pitzarella said.

“There’s the whole ‘if you touch it, you own it’ thing,” he said. “We’ve studied it; we know it can be done. The problem is that no one wants to use it and then be told later, ‘OK, now you’re responsible for all of this forever.'”

DEP spokeswoman Katy Gresh said department managers are reviewing those legal issues, but she did not provide details. If the DEP does not sort out the issue, the drilling industry likely will build better infrastructure to keep using fresh water sources, including creeks and rivers, Vidic said.

“As long as there’s a slim chance they’ll be held responsible, (drillers are) not going to want to do it,” Vidic said. “They’re just going to run a pipe to the Ohio River, and once they do that, problem solved,  and they’re not going to want to do anything else. The time is now for the state if they’re going to promote this dual solution.”

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