Marcellus waste reports muddy

Waste reports submitted by Marcellus Shale drillers for the last six months of 2010 indicate that more of the toxic wastewater that returns from their natural gas wells is being reused or recycled, but incomplete and inconsistent reporting makes it difficult to assess real changes in the waste’s fate.

According to production reports due Feb. 15 and posted last week on the Department of Environmental Protection’s Oil and Gas Electronic Reporting website, Marcellus Shale operators directly reused 6 million barrels of the 10.6 million barrels of waste fluids produced from about 1,500 different wells between July and December.

At least an additional 978,000 barrels were taken to facilities that treat the water and return it to operators for reuse.

The amount reused or recycled is about seven times larger than the 1 million barrels of wastewater Marcellus Shale drillers said they directly reused during the 12 months between July 2009 and June, the first time the drillers’ waste reports were made publicly available on the website.

But the comparison is hazy because not all of the Marcellus Shale operators met the Feb. 15 reporting deadline or included all of their waste during the previous reporting period. Major operators, including East Resources, Southwestern Energy Production Co. and Encana Oil and Gas USA, reported no waste for the most recent six-month period.

And inconsistencies in how companies report their waste make it impossible to determine a complete picture of how its treatment has changed.

“I would take all of it with a grain of salt,” said Matt Kelso, data manager for FracTracker, an online Marcellus Shale data tool developed by the Center for Healthy Environments and Communities at the University of Pittsburgh.

“I wouldn’t say it accurately represents anything,” he added, “but it is the only data we have.”

He emphasized that the information is self-reported by the drillers, who have some discretion in how to categorize their waste. He pointed out one oddity – that more brine was reportedly produced in the last six months of 2010 than the entire year before that – and attributed the increase to better reporting.

The first round of reports was a “disorganized mess,” he wrote in a FracTracker blog post last year. Establishing trends from such a baseline would be difficult, if not useless.

“There may be some adjustments” in how the waste is now being handled, he said, “but they will be difficult to discern because the reporting was so bad before.”

State environmental regulators say that nearly 70 percent of the wastewater produced by Marcellus Shale wells is being reused or recycled. The Marcellus Shale Coalition, an industry group, puts the number higher, saying that on average 90 percent of the water that returns to the surface is recycled.

The advances were compelled in large part by a lack of deep disposal wells in Pennsylvania and state rules, adopted last August, that limit new discharges of the wastewater to streams.

Prior to the development of the new rules, wastewater was primarily treated and disposed of through industrial wastewater plants or municipal sewer authorities that could not remove total dissolved solids, or salts, from the discharge.

Even in the most recent reports, there is still an apparent lack of uniformity in how companies report their waste.

Liquid waste is categorized as either “drilling fluid waste” – fluids, generally in a mud form, created during the drilling process – “fracing fluid waste” – the salt and metals-laden waste fluid that returns for the first 30 days or so after wells are hydraulically fractured to release the gas from the shale – and “brine” – the even saltier waste that returns more gradually over the life of a well.

Most companies reported all three types of waste, but some companies, including Chesapeake Appalachia, reported only “frac fluid” while others, including Talisman Energy USA, reported only drilling fluid and brine.

Two companies, Talisman Energy and Chief Oil and Gas, both reported producing about 280,000 barrels of hydraulic fracturing wastewater during the six-month period, even though Chief had only about a quarter as many gas wells in production as Talisman during that time.

One thing the data make clear is that a lot of waste from Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale wells is being shipped out of state for treatment or disposal.

During the six-month period, more than 490,000 barrels of wastewater were sent to deep disposal wells in Ohio; 30,000 barrels of drilling fluids and brine were treated by Clean Harbors of Baltimore in Maryland; 32,000 barrels of wastewater went to recycling or treatment plants in West Virginia; 2,500 barrels of drilling fluid was treated by Lorco Petroleum Services of Elizabeth, N.J.; and 36,000 tons of drill cuttings, a solid waste, were sent to landfills in Angelica, Painted Post and Waterloo, N.Y.

By Laura legere (Staff Writer)
Published: February 27, 2011
Contact the writer: llegere@timesshamrock.com
http://thetimes-tribune.com/news/marcellus-waste-reports-muddy-1.1111329#axzz1FAVdxBzR