Pa. allows dumping of tainted waters from gas boom

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11004/1115432-454.stm

Pa. allows dumping of tainted waters from gas boom
Companies insist there’s little risk, but now recycle

Tuesday, January 04, 2011
By David B. Caruso, The Associated Press

Jim Riggio, plant manager for the Beaver Falls Municipal Authority, shows a sample of solid materials removed from the Beaver River during treatment Dec. 15 at his plant.

The natural gas boom gripping parts of the United States has a nasty byproduct: wastewater so salty, and so polluted with metals like barium and strontium, that most states require drillers to get rid of the stuff by injecting it down shafts thousands of feet deep.

But not in Pennsylvania, one of the states at the center of the gas rush. In Pennsylvania, the liquid that gushes from gas wells is only partially treated for substances that could be environmentally harmful, then dumped into rivers and streams from which communities get their drinking water.

In the two years since the frenzy of activity began in the vast underground rock formation known as the Marcellus Shale, Pennsylvania has been the only state letting its waterways serve as the primary disposal place for huge amounts of wastewater produced by a drilling technique called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. State regulators, initially caught flat-footed, tightened the rules this year for any new water treatment plants, but let existing operations continue discharging water into rivers.

At least 3.6 million barrels of the waste were sent to treatment plants that empty into rivers during the 12 months ending June 30, state records show. That’s enough to cover a square mile with more than 8 1/2 inches of brine.

Researchers are still trying to figure out whether Pennsylvania’s river discharges, at their current levels, are dangerous to humans or wildlife. Several studies are under way, some under federal Environmental Protection Agency auspices.

State officials, energy firms and treatment plant operators insist that with the right safeguards in place, the practice poses little or no risk to the environment or the hundreds of thousands of people, especially in Western Pennsylvania, who rely on the rivers for drinking water.

But an Associated Press review found that Pennsylvania’s efforts to minimize, control and track wastewater discharges have sometimes failed.

For example:

• Of roughly 6 million barrels of well liquids produced in a 12-month period The Associated Press examined, the state couldn’t account for the disposal method for 1.28 million barrels, about one-fifth of the total, due to a weakness in its reporting system and incomplete filings by some energy firms.

• Some public water utilities downstream from big gas wastewater treatment plants have struggled to stay under the federal maximum for contaminants known as trihalomethanes, which can cause cancer if swallowed over a long period.

• Regulations that should have kept drilling wastewater out of the important Delaware River Basin, the water supply for 15 million people in four states, were circumvented for many months.

The situation in Pennsylvania is being watched carefully by regulators in other states, some of which have begun allowing some river discharges. New York also sits over the Marcellus Shale, but former Gov. David Paterson slapped a moratorium on high-volume fracking while environmental regulations are drafted.

Industry representatives insist that the wastewater from fracking has not caused serious harm anywhere in Pennsylvania, in part because it is safely diluted in the state’s big rivers. But most of the largest drillers say they are taking action and abolishing river discharges anyway.

All 10 of the state’s biggest drillers say they have either eliminated river discharges in the past few months, or reduced them to a small fraction of what they were a year ago. Together, those firms accounted for 80 percent of the wastewater produced in the state.

The biggest driller, Atlas Resources, which produced nearly 2.3 million barrels of wastewater in the review period, said it now recycles all water from its wells in their first 30 days of operation, when the flowback is heaviest. The rest is still sent to treatment plants, but “our ultimate goal is to have zero surface discharge of any of the water,” spokesman Jeff Kupfer said.

Still, with dozens more energy firms at work in Pennsylvania’s surging gas industry — more than 2,400 wells drilled and work starting on 5,400 more — operators of the largest of the 16 treatment plants they most commonly use say they haven’t lost much business.

Records verifying industry claims of a major dropoff in wastewater discharges to rivers will not be available until midwinter, but John Hanger, secretary of Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection, said he believed that the amount of drilling wastewater being recycled is now about 70 percent — an achievement he credits to tighter state regulation pushing the industry to change its ways.

“The new rules, so far, appear to be working,” he said. “If our rules were not changed, … we would have all of it being dumped in the environment, because it is the lowest cost option,” Mr. Hanger said.

But he cautioned that rivers need to be watched closely for any sign that they have degraded beyond what the new state standards allow. “This requires vigilance,” he said. “Daily vigilance.”

University of Pittsburgh scientist Conrad Volz, who has been studying the environmental effect of the wastewater discharges, said he had student researchers in the field this fall documenting a steady flow of brine-filled tankers arriving at plants on the Monongahela River south of Pittsburgh, and on the Blacklick Creek, 17 miles northwest of Johnstown.

“We’ve been taking pictures of the trucks,” he said. “We know it’s still happening.”

He said researchers are still trying to figure out whether the wastewater discharges, at their current levels, could cause serious environmental harm.

The municipal authority that provides drinking water to Beaver Falls, 27 miles northwest of Pittsburgh, began flunking tests for trihalomethanes regularly last year, about the time a facility 18 miles upstream, Advanced Waste Services, became Pennsylvania’s dominant gas wastewater treatment plant.

Trihalomethanes aren’t found in drilling wastewater, but there can be a link. The waste stream often contains bromide, a salt, which reacts with chlorine disinfectants used by drinking water systems to kill microbes. That interaction creates trihalomethanes.

The EPA says people who drink water with elevated levels of trihalomethanes for many years have an increased risk of getting cancer and could also develop problems of the liver, kidney or central nervous system.

Gas drilling waste isn’t the only substance that can cause elevated trihalomethane levels. Pennsylvania’s multitude of acid-leaching, abandoned coal mines and other industrial sources are also a major factor in the high salt levels that lead to the problem.

Beaver Falls’ treatment plant manager Jim Riggio said he doesn’t know what is causing the problem, but a chemical analysis raised the possibility that it might be linked to the hundreds of thousands of barrels of partially treated gas well brine that now flow past his intakes every year.

“It all goes back to frack water,” he said.

Natural gas drilling has taken off in several U.S. states in recent years because of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, techniques that unlock more methane than ever before from ancient shale sea beds buried deep underground. Fracturing involves injection of millions of gallons of water mixed with chemicals and sand deep into the rock, shattering the shale and releasing the gas trapped inside.

When the gas comes to the surface, some water returns, along with underground brine that exists naturally. It can be several times saltier than sea water and tainted with fracking chemicals, some carcinogenic if swallowed at high enough levels over time.

The water is often laden with barium, found in underground ore deposits and also used by drillers as a bit lubricant. It can cause high blood pressure if someone ingests enough of it over a long period of time.

It also is often tainted with radium, a naturally occurring radioactive substance, and strontium, a mineral abundant in rocks, earth, coal and oil.

The amount of produced water varies from well to well, but in Pennsylvania it has been running about 1 to 2 gallons for every 10 injected into the ground.

In some Pennsylvania locales, there have been fights over whether the drilling process itself has the potential to contaminate nearby drinking water wells.

When firms recycle wastewater, they lightly treat it for particles and other substances, combine it with fresh water and reuse it in a new fracturing job.

Operators of the treatment plants handling the bulk of the waste still being discharged into Pennsylvania rivers say they can remove most toxic pollutants without much trouble, including radium and barium.

“We have been able to do it carefully. We have been able to do it safely,” said Al Lander, president of Tunnelton Liquids, one of the state’s busiest treatment plants. The facility, near Saltsburg, east of Pittsburgh, treats both drilling water and acid draining from abandoned mines.

“In some respects, its better than what’s already in the river,” he said of the water his plant discharges into the Conemaugh. “What we are putting into the river now is far cleaner, and far more eco-friendly than what was running in naturally from acid mine drainage.”

What can’t be removed easily, except at great expense, he said, are dissolved solids and chlorides that make the fluids so salty. Those usually don’t pose a health risk to humans in low levels, said Paul Ziemkiewicz, director of the West Virginia Water Research Institute at West Virginia University in Morgantown, but high levels can foul drinking water’s taste, leave a film on dishes and cause diarrhea.

In 2008, workers at two plants that draw water from the Monongahela River — U.S. Steel Corp. in Clairton and Allegheny Energy — noticed that salt levels had spiked so high that equipment was corroding. State regulators suspected it was related to gas drilling waste being discharged through sewage treatment facilities. But it remains unclear today how much of a role wastewater had in the salt spike. Some research has suggested that abandoned coal mines, which release far more polluted water into state rivers than gas drilling, were predominantly to blame.

Monongahela salt levels have spiked again since 2008, though relatively little drilling wastewater is being discharged into it.

In the Barnett Shale field in Texas and the Haynesville Shale in Louisiana, fracking has also ignited a gas bonanza, but the main disposal method for drilling wastewater there and in other big gas-producing states such as West Virginia, New Mexico and Oklahoma is injection wells. Regulated by EPA, these are shafts drilled as deep as those that produce shale gas.

When Pennsylvania’s gas rush began a few years ago, the state had only a few injection wells in operation. Ohio had more, but trucking wastewater there from Pennsylvania was expensive. River dumping turned out to be the easy answer.

The Environmental Protection Agency requires all polluters to get a permit before they can discharge wastewater into rivers and streams. In theory, the permits limit how dirty the effluent can be when discharged into a river and ensure that the water quality doesn’t degrade.

But Pennsylvania, which administers the EPA permit program within its borders, initially lacked a clear regulatory scheme to deal with the big increases in volume created by the gas boom and wasn’t initially aware that some facilities had begun handling the waste.

Since then, the state has enacted tougher water quality standards. The new rules, adopted last summer, allow existing treatment plants to continue operating with few changes, but will require new facilities to meet strict targets for dissolved solids and chlorides. Essentially, the water they discharge must be no saltier than tap water.

Operators of several of the public water utilities closest to the biggest plants say they are testing for any signs of degradation in the quality of the raw water flowing into their intakes.

Much of the drilling wastewater legally discharged in Pennsylvania eventually flows into the Allegheny or Monongahela rivers and ultimately past Pittsburgh’s drinking-water plants.

Along the way, it passes more than 20 public drinking-water intakes from Emlenton and Clarion, halfway between Pittsburgh and the New York line, to the Tri-County Joint Municipal Authority on the Monongahela in Fredericktown, 20 miles from West Virginia.

Chemists for the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority have been monitoring river water and testing for salt levels and a variety of other contaminants.

At the Buffalo Township Municipal Authority in Freeport, 23 miles northeast of Pittsburgh — which is closer to more gas wastewater treatment facilities than any other municipal water supplier in the state — plant manager Don Amadee said he was “not aware of any issues” with his water quality. But he added that, as a small supplier, the authority doesn’t have much expertise in drilling waste and may not be testing for every contaminant that could be in the effluent.

Area waterworks, he said, have been communicating more about the problem and keeping in touch with chemists downstream at the bigger water suppliers.

Shifting industry practices have, at times, made it hard for the public officials and researchers monitoring the potential environmental impact of the discharges. For a time, many focused attention on the Monongahela River after drilling waste was suspected of contributing to an unusually high load of chlorides and dissolved solids on the waterway in 2008.

But state records show very little drilling waste was discharged to plants on the Monongahela in 2009 or early 2010. They show 55,257 barrels sent to treatment plants in that river’s watershed over the 12-month period The AP analyzed, compared with 1.2 million barrels sent to facilities on the Conemaugh River and a tributary, the Blacklick Creek.