Testimony given on frack water treatment plant
A standing-room-only crowd of 60 people attended a meeting Thursday of the Wyalusing Township supervisors, which was held to hear testimony on an application for a conditional use permit to construct three plants on a 26-acre site in the Browntown section of the township, including a plant to process the waste water from hydraulic fracturing of natural gas wells, a plant to manufacture asphalt for paving, and a plant to manufacture synthetic drilling mud.
The supervisors had their first meeting on the matter on Dec. 1, and they continued to take testimony related to the application at Thursday’s meeting.
The site would be served by the Lehigh Railway line, which runs along the Susquehanna River, but the applicants said there would be no discharge from any of their operations to the river.
Carl Bankert, an engineer with Glenn O. Hawbaker Inc., which would build the asphalt plant, said that for all three operations at the site combined, it is estimated that a total of 163 trucks would come to the site each day.
Ground/Water Treatment & Technology of Rockway, N.J., is proposing a plant for the site that would be able to treat 400,000 gallons per day of waste water from hydraulic fracturing, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.
Bob Kunzel, the executive vice-president for Ground/Water Treatment & Technology, said the treatment of the frack water would take place inside a building using a system of tanks.
Lime would be added to the waste water from hydraulic fracturing to precipitate out calcium, magnesium, barium and strontium as a sludge, Kunzel said.
The sludge would be de-watered before it was taken to the White Pine Landfill in the Wilkes-Barre area, he said.
After the frack water is treated at the plant, it would be returned to gas well sites for further hydraulic fracturing, he said.
The cycle of bringing waste water to the site, reinjecting the treated water into well bores for further hydraulic fracturing, and bringing the flow-back water from hydraulic fracturing to the plant, could be repeated indefinitely, Kunzel said.
There are no current plans to bring waste water from hydraulic fracturing to the site by rail, Kunzel said.
However, the other two operations at the site would use the rail line, the applicants said.
During the first 1 1/4 hours of the meeting, which began at 7 p.m., the supervisors asked questions of the applicants.
As of 8:15 p.m., the supervisors were continuing to ask questions of the applicants.
At the beginning of the meeting, 22 people said they wanted to speak at the meeting, but by 8:15 p.m. none of them had had a chance to speak yet.
At the meeting, Catherine Sherman represented Fluids Management, which is the company that is seeking to construct the facility for manufacturing synthetic drilling mud.
BY JAMES LOEWENSTEIN (STAFF WRITER)
Published: February 11, 2011James Loewenstein can be reached at (570) 265-1633; or e-mail: jloewenstein@thedailyreview.com.
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