DEP boss: We won’t leave scars
http://standardspeaker.com/news/dep-boss-we-won-t-leave-scars-1.1185041#axzz1UFlEFGtR
By KENT JACKSON (Staff Writer)
Published: August 6, 2011
Speakers at a conference in Hazleton about pollution from abandoned coal mines hope that environmental problems won’t result from Pennsylvania’s latest energy boom – drilling for natural gas in the Marcellus Shale formation.
Michael Krancer, the secretary of Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection, who opened the conference on Friday at Best Western Genetti Inn and Suites, said he will police gas drilling so companies don’t pollute air and water.
“We’re very sensitive to leaving a legacy,” Krancer said, while adding that public sensibilities are different now than a century ago when coal mining left its mark.
“People today won’t tolerate scars on the land” or pollution in the air, he said.
An attorney and former judge on the state Environmental Hearing Board, Krancer said he encourages companies to be good neighbors and said those that cheat on environmental rules ruin the free market and the natural world.
“That is my core belief,” he said.
When asked, however, about taxing gas companies today to remediate the problems created by coal companies of yesteryear, Krancer said that won’t happen.
“Given my boss’ view of taxes,” he said of Gov. Tom Corbett’s stance against taxing gas companies, “it’s a non-starter.”
Krancer further said the gas deposits are personal property and compared a plan to tax them to borrowing the car of the man who raised the question for government use. He did say the legislators show strong support for charging companies fees to offset the impact on communities where drilling occurs.
Krancer approves using water polluted by draining through mines to drill for gas.
“That’s a no-brainer” was his reaction when he first heard of the concept, and he said he hasn’t changed his views. Legal questions, however, have arisen about whether gas companies inherit responsibility for treating water under the doctrine of “You use it, you own it.”
Sandra McSurdy, in one of 15 seminars that followed Krancer’s address, talked about a study of using acid mine drainage in gas drilling that she manages for the U.S. Department of Energy.
The plan might work better in the southwestern part of the state where mine pools overlap gas wells better than they do in the northeast.
Using mine water, she said, reduces the water that drillers will draw from rivers, streams and public drinking supplies. It also could cut down the traffic from trucks carrying water to mines or hauling contaminated water that flowed back from gas wells to Ohio for disposal in deep wells there.
Some gas drillers seeking to avoid legal responsibility for treating mine water refuse to use it.
For drillers that would use mine water, meanwhile, McSurdy described some of the interactions with chemicals in water that flows back from the gas wells.
Sulfate in mine water, for example, is excellent at removing barium and iron, but not strontium, from flowback water, McSurdy said. Adding sodium bicarbonate, meanwhile, helps take out strontium, she said.
Radisav Vidic at the University of Pittsburgh is leading the research and looking at how fast the chemical reactions occur between mine and drilling waters, McSurdy said.
Some samples of the flowback water contain radioactivity from radon below ground, which can be removed by sulfate. The resulting solid would need to be disposed as low-level nuclear waste, McSurdy said.
Mine water also has been used to wash coal, provide a source of steam in coal-burning plants and has been suggested as a water source for the coal-to-diesel plant that Jack Rich of Reading Anthracite wants to build in Schuylkill County, Charles Cravotta III, a hydrogeologist for the U.S. Geological Survey, said.
Cravotta and colleagues did a study that estimated 60 billion to 220 billion gallons might be pooled in mines in the Western Middle Anthracite Fields, which are primarily in the watersheds of the Mahanoy and Shamokin creeks.
Thomas Clark of the Susquehanna River Basin Commission looked at the top 20 sites in the anthracite region, including the Jeddo Tunnel, that send acid mine drainage into the river. Prefacing his remarks by saying he is not an engineer, Clark said 10 treatment plants might be built to handle the flow from 16 of the top sources, plus 20 other discharge points.
In his plan, the Nescopeck Creek, which is fed by the Jeddo Mine Tunnel and accounts for 56 percent of aluminum entering the Susquehanna in the region, would get a separate treatment plant. Other plants would treat water from two or more sites.
Together, the plants would remove 68 percent of iron, 73 percent of manganese, 79 percent of aluminum and 60 percent of acidity flowing into the Susquehanna from the region.
Mine engineer Michael Korb of Hazleton, after reporting on a never-realized plan from the 1950s to send mine drainage from Pennsylvania to Maryland through a 137-mile tunnel, suggested diverting water from mines so it doesn’t become polluted rather than building treatment plants. Treatment plants require constant maintenance and passive plants have been disabled by storms, he said.
Even diversion systems, such as ditches and flumes, require maintenance, said Korb, who pointed out that most of the systems installed in the 1950s in lieu of the giant tunnel stopped being effective after the coal companies went out of business and stopped the upkeep.
kjackson@standardspeaker.com