Webinar next Wednesday on Household Water Treatment Systems
The Water Resources Extension Webinar series will continue next week with a presentation on Household Water Treatment Systems on February 23 from noon to 1 PM by Dr. Tom McCarty. Tom is an Extension Educator with Penn State Cooperative Extension in Cumberland County.
Webinar Summary
If you have seen one of those fiberglass “missile” tanks in a basement and wondered “what is that for?” or have been curious about the extra sink spout that supplies “RO” water, please come and join the discussion at noon on February 23rd. The webinar will discuss the need for household water treatment and various approaches to treatment. We’ll discuss disinfection, softening, iron removal, rotten-egg odor (hydrogen sulfide) treatment, corrosion control, chlorine removal, and other devices to provide small amounts of high purity water for drinking and cooking. You won’t be an expert by the end of lunch but the tips we’ll provide will allow you to ask some pretty good questions of the next water treatment salesman. And for sure you will have some insight into whether or not there should be some treatment equipment on your drinking water supply.
How to Partcipate
The live webinar will occur from noon to 1 PM and is accessible at: https://breeze.psu.edu/water1
To participate in the live webinar you will need to have registered and received a “Friend of Penn State” ID and password. To learn more about registration and additional details about the webinar series, go to:
http://extension.psu.edu/water/webinar-series/schedule/registration
Taped versions of each webinar in the series are available to anyone. A link to the presentation video along with a PDF copy of the presentation slides, links to relevant publications, and a copy of the question/answer session are posted at:
http://extension.psu.edu/water/webinar-series/past-webinars
Addional Upcoming Webinars
March 30, 2011 – Management of Nuisance Aquatic Plants and Algae in Ponds and Lakes
April 27, 2011 – Using Rain Barrels and Rain Gardens to Manage Household Stormwater
Budget cuts tap out safe drinking water
In all of the debate on Capitol Hill about cutting budgets, you wouldn’t expect water to get a great deal of attention. But it should.
The Continuing Resolution set to emerge from the House this week makes drastic reductions in support for critical functions of the Environmental Protection Agency – the federal entity charged with protecting water supplies for hundreds of millions of Americans. But slashing the EPA’s budget, without shifting legal and financial responsibility to polluters, will leave America’s fisheries, drinking water supplies, and coastal areas vulnerable. No one else is guarding the door to the henhouse – quite literally, it turns out, when it comes to water pollution.
Industrial animal agriculture operations in the U.S. generate up to one billion tons of manure annually, most of which is applied – untreated – to cropland. As a result, according to the EPA, drinking water sources for an estimated 43 percent of the U.S. population have suffered some level of pathogen contamination associated with livestock operations, and 29 states have identified livestock feeding operations as a source of water pollution. In Congressional testimony, the U.S. Geological Survey identified livestock manure as the single largest source of nitrogen pollution in major rivers across the country, including rivers in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Florida, Arkansas, California and Wisconsin.
As food animal production in the U.S. has shifted from family farms to a concentrated industrial production system, efforts to protect the environment, rural communities and water supplies have not kept pace. These massive operations, housing thousands of hogs or hundreds of thousands of chickens in tight quarters, produce manure and other waste on an equally large scale, but continue to be regulated under a now-antiquated set of rules designed for small family farms. Corporations that own slaughterhouses, packing facilities and livestock often contract with farmers to raise the animals to the point of slaughter and argue that they bear no liability for compliance with Clean Water Act permits during the production period. The companies own the animals; the farmers are stuck with the manure.
Under this system, corporate owners have not been obligated to provide any financial assistance to farmers for the costs of waste treatment and disposal. As a result, local water utilities spend millions monitoring and treating this water pollution, and treasured gems like the Chesapeake Bay suffer from livestock-related pollution, while taxpayers pay the cleanup costs through EPA water programs. These programs are now on the chopping block.
Congressional efforts to find legitimate savings through efficiency and the elimination of waste in government programs are of course laudable. But members of Congress also have a responsibility to ensure that alternatives to government spending are identified so the health and welfare of millions of Americans is not jeopardized.
When it comes to water pollution, the polluters – and not the general public – should be responsible for cleaning up their own waste. It¹s time for industrial animal agriculture to pay its fair share.
By Karen Steuer – 02/15/11
Karen Steuer is Director of Government Relations for the Pew Environment Group.
http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/economy-a-budget/144261-budget-cuts-tap-out-safe-drinking-water
Why don’t we know how many drinking water sources have been harmed by natural gas operations?
How many drinking water sources have been harmed by oil or gas operations? According to a recent report
[ http://thetimes-tribune.com/news/how-many-water-supplies-have-been-impacted-by-gas-drilling-pa-doesn-t-keep-count-1.1063683#axzz1BzibG6Fv ]
from Pennsylvania, no one knows in that state. This alarming article quotes an environmental engineer as estimating that as many as 50 homes in Bradford County, Pennsylvania alone are currently getting replacement water supplies provided by gas companies.
But no one knows the real number, and here’s why: the article explains that companies often will not replace a homeowner’s contaminated water unless the homeowner signs a document promising not to tell anyone about the contamination. Therefore, we don’t really know how many people have contaminated water because many cases have been kept secret.
This makes it impossible for public agencies charged with protecting public health and safety to have adequate data to understand the full health and environmental impacts of oil and gas operations.
According to the article, Pennsylvania is consider a new rule that will require oil and gas companies to notify the state’s Department of Environmental Protection within 24 hours of receiving a complaint about contaminated drinking water. This rule should be in place everywhere in the country.
http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/amall/why_dont_we_know_how_many_drin.html
Amy Mall’s Blog
Posted January 24, 2011
No fracking way
http://www.observertoday.com/page/content.detail/id/554737/No-fracking-way.html?nav=5047
No fracking way
By NICOLE GUGINO
OBSERVER Staff Writer
January 9, 2011
Hydraulic fracturing – also known as hydrofracking or just fracking – may not sound familiar, but this process of extracting natural gas is becoming a household term as controversy emerges.
Hydrofracking is a complicated process of extracting natural gas from rock formations like the Marcellus Shale in the New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio. This process can be vertical or horizontal – both of which may pose a threat to drinking water.
Hydrofracking uses three ingredients to access the gas – water, sand and fracking fluid. Water and sand alone are harmless enough; the fracking fluid is the reason groups are rallying against the drilling process. Fracking fluid is a mixture of 500 or more chemicals used for different purposes in the process that allows the drilling of a well and the fracturing of the rock to occur, releasing gas.
Fracking fluid has been described by different sources as very different things – from a detergent to a carcinogenic concoction.
SPRINGVILLE
Hydrofracking of gas wells has moved from the west to the east and has moved north from Pennsylvania to New York.
A meeting of anti-fracking groups in Springville last month brought a concerned crowd to hear about what may come to the area.
A woman in the audience warned that a gas company had surveyed Sprague Brook Park, north of Springville, for gas drilling.
The main concerns of anti-fracking groups center around a loophole in the Energy Policy Act of 2005 which exempts the gas industry and specifically hydrofracking from about 10 environmental regulatiosn including the Safe Drinking Water Act.
Another concern is contamination of ground water. In many places across the country people sign leases with gas companies. In most cases the companies extract the gas and nothing goes wrong. However, reportedly for some this is not true. If a well is not properly sealed from the water table during drilling, then natural gas and fracking fluid can leak into the ground water residents use in wells for drinking water.
“My husband and I didn’t know what was going on with our water until we watched this documentary on HBO called GasLand. After we watched GasLand he went to check our water to see if it lit on fire and it did,” Natalie Brant of Springville said.
Brant later had her water tested and was told not to drink, bathe or wash dishes or clothes in the water. Brant is frightened for the health of her eight children.
“Gas companies lead you to believe that drinking this is as safe as drinking laundry detergent. Who here thinks that drinking laundry detergent is safe?” she asked.
Another concern is that after a well has been fracked, the water (mixed with fracking fluid) is left over. The gas companies are supposed to have this water treated, but allegedly in the past have not done so. Instead, according to the documentary, gas companies allegedly evaporate the water (and chemicals) into the air or secretly dump it on dirt roads.
GASLAND
GasLand is a documentary on hydrofracking, written and directed by Josh Fox, a Pennsylvania native. This documentary has received notice from many for its disturbing images of water that lights on fire and the health and property damage allegedly caused by hydrofracking across the country.
In the documentary Josh Fox, who lives in the New York City Watershed, begins an investigation into hydrofracking after receiving a letter asking if a gas company could lease his land for gas drilling.
Fox tours the country and hears similar stories in many states of water contamination, heath problems and legally helpless land owners.
He brings the story back to his home where he fears that drilling will effect his childhood home and which has a creek that feeds into a water supply that distributes fresh water to over 15 million people in three states.
PROFESSOR WEIGHS IN
Since the release of the film GasLand, some organizations have tired to debunk the claims made in the documentary and others to affirm them. SUNY Fredonia Professor Gary Lash, an expert on the Marcellus Shale, had a few criticisms of the film himself.
“My problem with that whole thing is that there is no scientific backing to that whole movie and of course it’s a pretty complicated process that they are trying to do, but again the physics behind fracking are pretty inconsistent with cracks coming up the water table,” he explained the cracks made by the fracking in the shale will not work their way back up thousands of feet to the water table.
“But having said that, there is nothing wrong with regulating. Any responsible operator wants oversight because they don’t want to be blamed for something if anything goes wrong.”
He explained concerns with the left over water from fracking. “What they are doing now is these closed loop systems where they’re sending the water through a treatment system on site and then using that water again.”
He also explained that natural gas flowing in creeks is natural and can be found in creeks all over including the Canadaway creek. He explained that the pictures of the dead fish and birds in waterways near Pittsburgh in the film was not caused by natural gas.
“Some of the chemical fingerprints that they have found and which wasn’t addressed in the film, is chemical runoff from (coal) mining.”
“Just about any well that is drilled any more is fracked. You’ve got to break up the rock to release the gas from it. The water tables are generally no more than a couple hundred feet and their targets are at thousands of feet. What they will do is, when they drill, they will case the well, they put multiple layers of metal casing and each layer is separated by cement, so the goal there is to not allow anything that is going down into the well or coming out of the well to interact with the water table,” he explained.
“When they fracture they use water and a very small amount of chemicals, with things like detergent to reduce the surface tension of the water and there is some biocides in there to kill any microbes and some other things and then they pump in sand after that to hold the cracks open and the gas migrates out the cracks.”
Murphy’s law is still applicable to fracking process according to Lash. “There is a chance that anything could go wrong in anything we do,” he admitted.
When asked if residents should worry about their water if they have a gas lease, he said to do your homework.
“The question they would ask (the as company) is ‘what does the operator plan to do to protect the aquifer?’ and make sure they follow all of the state guidelines for casing the well … people entering into a lease have every right to make sure that’s going to be followed.” He recommended baseline testing before and after drilling.
It takes a great amount of pressure and high temperatures to create natural gas. Chautauqua County, according to Lash, is undesirable for fracking. However the Marcellus Shale near Binghamton, Cayuga and Chemung counties is a mile down and thick – perfect for drilling.
Lash originally estimated 1,500 trillion cubic feet of gas in the marcellus Shale, but new research may show that that is a low estimate. “This takes on more meaning when you know that the U.S. uses 19 trillion cubic feet of gas per year,” Lash explained the potential of the shale.
“I’m as much of an environmentalist and liberal politically as anybody but I think this is something that can done responsibly. I think that there is an awful lot of misinformation out there right now and if we look at this scientifically, and it is a scientific and engineering problem, I think with the proper safeguards in place that it can be done responsibly. And if you combine natural gas with wind and solar I think we are moving in the right direction,” he added.
WHAT LANDOWNERS CAN DO
Due to the lack of action at the federal and state level, groups at the meeting in Springville recommended bringing the fight to a more local forum.
Sarah Buckley, of Wales in Niagara County, recommended going to local town boards and recommending water bans to prevent drilling in areas.
“Where I have some hope for protecting ourselves is in the towns … Some towns in New York state and Pennsylvania have passed bans … a small town in Pennsylvania has passed a ban that is a water rights ordinance … they said they would not allow the companies to source the water to frack, they won’t allow the water to be transported in to do the fracking … So, this in a sense prohibits the fracking,” Buckley said.
As a private land-owner Buckley recommended baseline water and foundation tests – which can be costly, just in case gas drilling on a property goes wrong and needs to be litigated. Buckley also recommended baseline tests of roads for towns to protect themselves.
Sarah Buckley can be contacted at 713-7780 or at ssbuckley@gmail.com for information on water testing and town level bans on hydrofracking.
The non-profit organization Western New York Land Conservancy offered help with conservation easements on land to protect land from anything that may harm its quality, like hydrofracking. The group can be contacted by phone at 687-1225 or on the their website www.wnylc.org.
Albert Brown of Frack Action Buffalo also noted that although Josh Fox was offered almost $100,000 to drill on his 19 acres, some who have leased their land in Western New York have sold their mineral rights away for $5 an acre.
Brown cited a Cornell University study that reported the towns drawn in to the fracking scheme with the promise of money in return, did not benefit at all from allowing gas companies to frack in their towns.
“If you look at increased truck traffic, for one fracking job you’re talking over 1,000 trucks and each of the wells on those paths can be fracked up to ten times. So 1,000 times 10 for one well and if there are 10 wells on that path, it’s just astronomical the number of trucks coming in and out,” Brown said.
According to Brown, because old wells are not producing gas like they used to, gas companies can use this new method of fracking to drill deeper, but are not obligated to notify residents if the company owns the mineral rights.
Frack Action Buffalo is trying to reach out to the Southern Tier and can be contacted through Albert Brown by e-mail at beingsamadhi@gmail.com.
There will be a follow-up meeting on hydrofracking in the Concord Town Hall, 86 Franklin Street, on Thursday Jan. 13 at 6 p.m.
IN SUMMARY
As one side argues that hydrofracking is safe and good for jobs and U.S. energy interests, the other side argues that the health and environmental risks are to great to continue.
The film GasLand is clearly lobbying for one side of the issue, however after viewing the documentary, some facts stood out.
The first, federal and state level regulation are lacking. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 exempted hyrdofracking from environmental safety laws and in a recent veto by former Gov. David Paterson. The moratorium to stop vertical and horizontal drilling in New York until it was further investigated was shot down. Instead, Paterson gave an executive order which only bans horizontal fracking and excludes vertical, which has been said to be the more popular of the two in New York state.
The second, expressed by John Hanger, the Secretary of Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection, in his interview with Josh Fox. He said no form of energy is perfect.
Whether it is fossil fuels, solar panels or wind mills, there is always a drawback.
Prof. Gary Lash agreed with this statement. “No, they aren’t. You aren’t going to get anything for free and what we are trying to do is reduce our impact on the environment. Even if you take something like windmills, for example, use light earth elements which are coming from countries that aren’t very friendly with us, and there are finite amounts available, there production is rough on the environment … the same thing with solar panels the rare earth elements that we need for solar panels are what they call ‘endangered elements’ and they are again in countries that aren’t very friendly to the United States … but if (fracking is) regulated and we do it responsibly I think it helps in the long run,” he said.
The Marcellus Shale is said to hold ‘an ocean’ of natural gas. For landowners with gas leases, the best policy appears to be, stay informed and be prepared. Both the anti-fracking groups at the meeting in Springville and Lash said that landowners have the right to ask questions and should do baseline testing, just in case.
Comments on this article may be sent to ngugino@observertoday.com
Pa. official defends rules on gas drilling waste
http://online.wsj.com/article/APf1a0b0069bef43808fc2f7cde2c1a7bb.html
JANUARY 4, 2011
Pa. official defends rules on gas drilling waste
Pennsylvania’s top environmental enforcement official said Tuesday that he is confident that wastewater discharged into rivers and streams by the booming natural gas industry hasn’t degraded the state’s drinking water.
At least 3.6 million barrels of the ultra-salty, chemically tainted wastewater produced by gas drilling operations were discharged into state waterways in the 12-month period that ended June 30, according to records reviewed by The Associated Press. Drinking water for hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvanians is drawn from those rivers and streams.
Those discharges have troubled some environmentalists. Most of the big drilling companies digging thousands of new wells in Pennsylvania have committed to curtailing or ending the practice.
John Hanger, the outgoing secretary of Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection, said he believes the new regulations are adequate to protect water supplies.
“The drinking water at the tap in Pennsylvania is safe. It has not been contaminated by drilling,” he said.
The state set new standards in August governing discharges by any new drilling waste treatment plants, but allowed existing operations to continue putting partially treated wastewater into rivers and streams, as long as the water body’s quality does not fall below federal drinking water standards.
Hanger said state officials have been using a network of sensors operated by his department and water supply companies to monitor for signs that rivers may have sustained a significant drop in water quality.
So far, he said, they haven’t found any.
Many researchers have been particularly concerned with how the high levels of salt and dissolved solids in drilling waste might affect rivers, especially those that have already picked up unhealthy amounts of pollution from other sources, including abandoned coal mines.
If a river’s total load of dissolved solids gets high enough, it can make the water taste bad, leave a film on dishes, corrode equipment and could give people diarrhea. Researchers, some of them working under the auspices of the federal Environmental Protection Agency, are still trying to determine if Pennsylvania’s river discharges, at their current levels, are dangerous to humans or wildlife.
Hanger said no river used for drinking water has exceeded the EPA standard for dissolved solids for an extended period, although there have been some instances of seasonal spikes that can last for a few days.
“We are watching it very closely,” he said.
Pennsylvania is rare among gas-producing states in that it allows the wastewater that flows out of natural gas wells to be disposed of in rivers.
In most states, drillers are required to send the liquid back down deep shafts so it can’t pollute surface water.
Drilling companies use about 2 million gallons of water a day in Pennsylvania to help get at the gas locked in its vast underground Marcellus Shale gas field. During a process called hydraulic fracturing, the water — mixed with sand and chemicals, some of them toxic — is forced into the wells at high pressure, shattering the shale and releasing trapped gas.
There has been a fierce debate over whether the wastewater that returns to the surface is hazardous.
It can contain high levels of some toxins, like barium, strontium and radium, but the treatment plants handling the bulk of Pennsylvania’s gas drilling waste remove most of those substances before discharging the water.
State officials and industry participants say the amount of waste put back into waterways, while significant, is also safely diluted by the massive volumes of water in the rivers, reducing both any residual toxins and the salt to safe levels.
An AP review of state records found that the state couldn’t account for the disposal method for 1.28 million barrels of drilling wastewater, about a fifth of its total, because of incomplete record keeping.
Hanger said the state is working to improve its methods for tracking wastewater, including making recent hires of additional staff.
“There’s always room for improvement,” he said.
It also found that in 2009 and part of 2010, about 44,000 barrels of drilling waste produced by the energy company Cabot Oil & Gas were improperly sent to a treatment facility in Hatfield Township, a Philadelphia suburb, despite regulations intended to keep the liquids out of the watershed. The liquids were then discharged through the town sewage plant into the Neshaminy Creek, which flows through Bucks and Montgomery counties on its way to the Delaware River. Customers in 17 municipalities get treated drinking water from that creek.
Water quality test results reviewed by the AP also showed that some public water utilities downstream from gas wastewater treatment plants have struggled to stay under the federal maximum for contaminants known as trihalomethanes, which can cause cancer if people drink tainted water for many years.
Trihalomethanes can be created during the water treatment process by dissolved solids in drilling waste, but other types of pollution are just as often to blame for the problem.
Hanger said those trihalomethane readings are “of concern,” but he couldn’t say definitively whether there was any link to gas drilling waste.
Faced with opposition to river dumping and tightening state regulations, all of the state’s biggest drillers say they are now recycling a majority of the wastewater produced by their wells in new fracturing jobs, rather than sending it to treatment plants.
Hanger said about 70 percent of the wastewater is now being recycled, which he credits to the tighter state regulations.
Still, with dozens more energy companies drawn to the Marcellus reserves — more than 2,400 wells have been drilled and work has started on 5,400 more — operators of the largest of the state’s 16 most commonly used treatment plants say they haven’t lost much business. In midwinter, records will be available to verify company claims of any major drop-off in river disposal.
Hexavalent Chromium [chromium-6] Discovered in U.S. Tap Water
http://www.worldnewsinsight.com/hexavalent-chromium-chromium-6-discovered-in-u-s-tap-water/2174/
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Hexavalent Chromium [chromium-6] Discovered in U.S. Tap Water
Chromium Chromium, the chemical that was first brought to light when the movie “Erin Brockovich” covered the issues of groundwater contamination in California, has now been discovered in U.S. tap water.
A survey just released, has discovered that hexavalent chromium is present in the tap water supply of 31 cities across the United States. There were a total of 35 cities taking part in the tests.
Hexavalent Chromium is widely believed to be a carcinogen, as a result of laboratory testing on animals.
Currently, there are no legal limits for the quantity of this particular kind of chromium permitted in tap water and there is no legal requirements for utilities to carry out any testing for it. However, there is a legal limit of 100 parts per billion for the total chromium permitted to be present in tap water.
The state of California has set proposed limits of around 0.06 parts per billion.
25 of the 39 cities tested have levels higher than the California proposed safe minimum level. Some of those cities are registering at hundreds of times higher than that limit, according to the survey.
Leann Brown, a spokesperson for the group who carried out the survey, Environmental Working Group, stated “Some types of chromium are necessary and helpful to the body. But chromium-6 is extraordinarily harmful.”
DEP-Cabot settlement gets Rendell’s approval
http://citizensvoice.com/news/drilling/dep-cabot-settlement-gets-rendell-s-approval-1.1078462
DEP-Cabot settlement gets Rendell’s approval
By Robert Swift (Harrisburg Bureau Chief)
Published: December 17, 2010
HARRISBURG – Gov. Ed Rendell gave his personal stamp of approval today to the settlement between the Department of Environmental Protection and Cabot Oil and Gas Corp. to address water contamination problems in Dimock Township.
“It’s a good settlement because they (Cabot) share the fiscal responsibility of making this right,” Rendell said.
Under the settlement, Cabot agrees to pay $4.1 million to residents affected by methane contamination attributed to faulty Cabot natural gas wells. In exchange, DEP has dropped its plan to build a 12.5-mile waterline from Montrose to Dimock Township to restore water supplies to 19 families affected by methane contamination in their water supplies.
Rendell said the settlement is due to the determination of DEP Secretary John Hanger to reach a solution to the township’s water woes.
State regulators will watch Cabot very carefully as the company resumes hydrofracking operations and drilling for natural gas pockets in the area next year as provided under the settlement, Rendell said.
rswift@timesshamrock.com
Dimock residents see “dirty tricks” in Cabot document
http://citizensvoice.com/news/dimock-residents-see-dirty-tricks-in-cabot-document-1.1079002
Dimock residents see “dirty tricks” in Cabot document
By Laura Legere (Staff Writer)
Published: December 18, 2010
Legal releases delivered Thursday by the gas company deemed responsible for methane contamination in Dimock Twp. water wells have some township residents accusing the driller of using “dirty, dirty tricks” to try to free itself of a lawsuit pending in federal court.
Early on Thursday morning, attorneys for Cabot Oil and Gas Corp. delivered documents to 19 Dimock families who will split $4.1 million as part of a settlement announced 14 hours earlier between the Texas-based driller and the state Department of Environmental Protection.
Each family is entitled to a payment worth twice the value of its home as a remedy for methane in the drinking water that DEP linked to faulty Cabot gas wells. Under the agreement worked out between the company and the state, Cabot must put each family’s share of the money in escrow accounts that the residents can access after 30 days at the earliest.
DEP Secretary John Hanger emphasized when announcing the settlement that it carried “no requirement” for the families to drop the federal lawsuit that 11 of them have filed against Cabot alleging broader harm and damages to their health and property.
But the letter Cabot delivered Thursday offered a different deal: the families were asked to release the company from all legal claims against it in exchange for receiving the money.
Cabot spokesman George Stark said the offer was intended only as a way to speed up the payments.
“It is a way in which they can get their payment now, immediately, and we’ve heard from some that they’d like that to be an option,” he said. “The other option is to wait for the escrows to be fully funded, which would be about 30 days, and then they can draw their dollars down from there.”
“They are under no obligation one way or another to sign or not to sign,” he added.
The families’ attorney, Leslie Lewis, said the Cabot document contained no information that identified it as an optional offer to speed up the payments.
“It really doesn’t say that,” she said.
“It was an effort to acquire a waiver for all present and future claims in exchange for this money. They tried to slip something by.”
The families called the letter from Cabot a ploy meant to appeal to the poorest and most vulnerable among them.
“They’re sneaky,” resident Julie Sautner said.
“There may be people that are desperate but nobody is that desperate. We’re going to wait.”
llegere@timesshamrock.com
Residents of Dimock Township receive $4.1 million
Dimock, Pennsylvania Residents to Share $4.1 Million, Receive Gas Mitigation Systems Under DEP-Negotiated Settlement with Cabot Oil and Gas
Additional $500,000 to Reimburse DEP for Investigative Costs; DEP to Drop Montrose Water Line Plan Given Uncertain Prospects
HARRISBURG, Pa., Dec. 15, 2010 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — Residents of Dimock Township, Susquehanna County, who have had their drinking water supplies contaminated by natural gas will each receive a share of $4.1 million that Cabot Oil and Gas Co. will pay under a settlement negotiated by the Department of Environmental Protection and the company.
The settlement, which will enable the affected families to address their individual circumstances as they see fit, also binds Cabot to offer and pay to install whole-house gas mitigation devices in each of the 19 affected homes.
Cabot also will pay DEP $500,000 to offset the state’s expense of investigating the stray gas migration cases that have plagued Dimock residents for nearly two years.
“The 19 families in Dimock who have been living under very difficult conditions for far too long will receive a financial settlement that will allow them to address their own circumstances in their own way,” said DEP Secretary John Hanger, who explained that the amount paid to each family will equal two-times the value of their home, with a minimum payment of $50,000.
“In addition to the significant monetary component of this settlement, there is a requirement that Cabot continue to work with us to ensure that none of their wells allow gas to migrate,” Hanger noted.
DEP began investigating reports of stray gas in Dimock water wells in January 2009. A consent order and agreement signed in November 2009 required Cabot to install whole-house treatment systems in 14 homes, but residents found that action to be unsatisfactory.
The agreement was modified in April 2010 and DEP ordered Cabot to cap three wells believed to be the source of the migrating gas. DEP also suspended its review of Cabot’s pending permit applications for new drilling activities statewide and prohibited the company from drilling any new wells in a nine-square-mile area around Dimock.
In September, DEP announced that Pennsylvania American Water Co. would construct a 5.5-mile water main from its Lake Montrose water treatment plant to supply the affected Dimock residents with a reliable source of quality drinking water. In November, the Pennsylvania Infrastructure Investment Authority, or PENNVEST, approved an $11.8 million grant and loan package for the project, with the commonwealth intending to recover the cost of the project from Cabot.
Given the opposition to the planned water line and the uncertain future the project faces, Hanger said the department would abandon its pursuit of the project.
“Our primary goal at the department has always been to ensure that the wells Cabot drilled in Dimock were safe and that they were not contaminating local private water supplies,” said Hanger. “We’ve made great progress in doing that. Since we initiated our enforcement actions, gas levels in a majority of the contaminated water wells have gone down significantly. This agreement lays the foundation for families to finally put an end to this ordeal.”
Media contact: Michael Smith, 717-787-1323
SOURCE Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/dimock-pennsylvania-residents-to-share-41-million-receive-gas-mitigation-systems-under-dep-negotiated-settlement-with-cabot-oil-and-gas-111961099.html
Study Charts How Underground CO2 Can Leach Metals into Water
http://solveclimatenews.com/news/20101207/study-charts-how-underground-co2-can-leach-metals-water
Study Charts How Underground CO2 Can Leach Metals into Water
Study is the first to observe, for at least a year, the effects of a CO2 leak on groundwater
by Catherine M. Cooney
Dec 7, 2010
It’s not a common for a solution to carbon emissions to also pose a contamination danger for drinking water supplies, but new research indicates that if CO2 stored 
deep underground were to leak in even small amounts, it could cause metals to be released in shallow groundwater aquifers at concentrations that would pose a health risk.
In a study published in Environmental Science & Technology, authors Mark Little and Robert B. Jackson studied samples of sand and rock taken from four freshwater aquifers located around the country that overlie potential carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) sites.
The scientists found that tiny amounts of CO2 drove up levels of metals including manganese, cobalt, nickel, and iron in the water tenfold or more in some places. Some of these metals moved into the water quickly, within one week or two. They also observed potentially dangerous uranium and barium steadily moving into the water over the entire year-long experiment.
“We did the study to try and build a framework to help predict where problems with groundwater might arise if CO2 leaked,” Jackson told SolveClimate News. “The chemistry of the water provides us with an early warning of the potential leaks before the leaks occur, and that by itself if a very useful tool,” Jackson added.
The technology for capturing and storing CO2 emissions from coal plants and industrial facilities is not yet commercially available. Still, the Obama Administration and other governments consider capturing carbon dioxide and sequestering it underground a vital technology that will allow the world to continue using coal as fuel while reducing the impacts of climate change. This new study sheds further light on how fresh water contamination from the technology could potentially occur.
Similar to Ocean Acidification
When the CO2 buried deep underground escapes into groundwater, it forms carbonic acid, a chemical reaction very similar to the process that occurs when the oceans absorb CO2. But the problems created by the carbonic acid in groundwater are quite different from the reactions that occur in the ocean, Little said.
Scientists have already observed that atmospheric CO2 is causing ocean acidification that is harming corals, shellfish, lobsters, and other marine animals at the bottom of the sea. The increased acidity caused by CO2 dissolved in water underground can cause metals to leach out of surrounding sand and rock.
Borrowed from agencies such as the US Geological Survey, the sediment used in the study was from 17 locations within four project sites: Acquia and Virginia Beach in the Virginia and Maryland tidewater region; Mahoment in Illinois; and Ogallala in the southern high plains of Texas. The scientists dried the sediment samples and placed them in bottles, then piped a stream of 99.8% pure CO2 to each bottle for 320 to 344 days.
Jackson and Little used their observations of the leaking CO2 to develop selection criteria, based on the metal contamination seen in the water, to help owners and operators choose CCS sites that are less likely to contaminate nearby freshwater aquifers. They also identified four geochemical markers to help monitor sites and discover when CO2 has leaked and caused metals to move into the groundwater.
Jackson, Nicholas Professor of Global Environmental Change at Duke University’s Center on Global Change (co-author Little was a postdoc fellow at the time of the study), said the research is unique because of its length: it is the first to observe, for at least a year, the effects of a CO2 leak on groundwater.
Scientists have already conducted short-term experiments of two-weeks to one month and found that CO2 in very small amounts can escape along rock faults and old petroleum wells into near-by groundwater and release harmful metals such as arsenic and uranium into the water.
Once CO2 reaches a freshwater aquifer, the quality of the drinking water is site specific, and depends on an array of factors including the size of the leak and the types of bacteria in the water, Little said. “By no means would all sites be susceptible to problems of water quality,” Jackson added.
Other researchers are trying to determine how a very large leak might affect the subsurface environment, while the Department of Energy (DOE) and private investors are beginning studies of potential groundwater contamination in the field, rather than in a lab as Jackson and Little did.
EPA’s Rule
The paper was published just as EPA finished a rule designed to protect potential drinking water sources from contamination following a CO2 leak. Announced on November 22, the rule is written for the owners and operators of potential CCS wells. It’s designed to ensure that the wells are appropriately sited, constructed, tested, monitored, and closed, according to EPA.
Sally Benson, director of the Global Climate and Energy Project at Stanford University, said EPA’s rule should protect groundwater because it will make it difficult to inject CO2 too close to a possible drinking water source. She also said the new study doesn’t present any surprises and is not likely to put an obstacle in the way of those CCS projects in the planning stages.
“Really, it gets down to making sure projects are designed carefully and that the project has monitoring so that one has early warning of any CO2 movements,” Benson added.
But drinking water utilities aren’t convinced that EPA’s rule will protect water sources from metal contamination resulting from the bubbling up of CO2, which is sure to occur in small amounts at least.
Cynthia Lane with the American Water Works Association (AWWA), a nonprofit research and advocacy organization representing researchers and water utilities, said this rule doesn’t include specific site selection criteria. Rather, the rule leaves many of the decisions about site selection and permit approval up to each state.
“It is not as protective as we might like,” said Lane. “We are concerned about the quality of drinking water. There is a definite shift in certain parts of country to use saline or more brackish water for drinking.”
Groundwater protections should be in place for areas in the southwest, such as Las Vegas, where utilities are having a difficult time finding water sources, Lane said. “They are using anything that is wet no matter what the saline content is,” Lane added.
After observing the CO2 percolating through aquifer sand and sediment for a year, Jackson said the study strongly suggests to him that long-term monitoring for CO2 leakage into freshwater aquifers should be part of every CCS project.
The CO2 caused concentrations of manganese, cobalt, nickel, and iron to increase by more than 100 times the original levels (or 2 orders of magnitude), and potentially dangerous uranium and barium increased throughout the entire experiment in some samples. In general, they found that iron and manganese concentrations increased within 100 days. The response of other potentially harmful metals was more varied.
“We don’t want a private homeowner with a well that is not regularly monitored by the local utility to suddenly have elements in their groundwater that they don’t even know about.”
The two researchers are now collecting data on sites that are under consideration by DOE and private consortiums.
“Our next step is to do incubations under a variety of conditions,” said Jackson. “I think we could contribute to a list that indicates why certain sites are better than other sites.”