Pa Fracing Deep Gas Wells Toxic, Hazardous Chemicals Discharged to Surface Waters and Sewage

TOXIC, HAZARDOUS CHEMICALS FROM FRACTURING WASTES USED TO DRILL DEEP GAS WELLS – MARCELLUS SHALE – to POTWs in PENNSYLVANIA, NEW YORK, WEST VIRGINIA, OHIO

PA – “ FRACKING” DEEP GAS WELLS – TOXIC, HAZARDOUS CHEMICALS DISCHARGED TO SEWAGE TREATMENT PLANTS –FROM THERE TO SURFACE WATERS AND SLUDGE -

“Some of the waste water is taken to DEP-approved municipal sewer authorities that dilute it with their regular effluent before discharging it into a river or stream.’

“no one is saying how much arsenic, manganese, cobalt, chromium and lead is in the stuff. Depending on the concentration, it could be a hazardous waste."

"Gas drilling companies currently dispose of their wastewater in Pennsylvania’s municipal sewage plants and in some industrial treatment plants, which then discharge it into rivers and streams. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency warns against [9] this form of treatment, because the plants aren’t equipped to remove TDS or any of the chemicals the water may contain. Of even more concern, TDS can disrupt the plants’ treatment of ordinary sewage, including human waste."

John Hanger, secretary of the state Department of Environmental Protection, said, “Fracking wastewater is one of the most toxic substances on earth.”

Incredibly, the gas drilling industry wants to dispose of frack wastewater by pumping it into rivers and streams, but DEP said no. The industry appealed to the Independent Regulatory Commission and lost 4-1.
Frack wastewater destroys municipal sewage treatment plants and requires special high-hazard treatment facilities, one of which is planned for Somerset County.
Citizens and officials in the region must now be concerned about airborne carcinogens and the safe disposal of liquid effluent or sludge. Discharge into any watercourse is questionable. Sludge must be rendered totally inert.

"-- We should expect our representatives in Congress to sponsor and support the FRAC Act (House Bill 2766 and Senate Bill 1215) that would remove the gas industry exemption from the Safe Drinking Water Act. Government needs to know the chemicals used in fracking so they can be tracked if, and when, they migrate into water tables and wells. The gas industry must be required to protect drinking water.
-- At the state level, Pennsylvania needs a moratorium on deep-well drilling. Six-digit fines and bonds are pocket change to a drilling company. Multimillion, and multibillion, dollar fines are required."

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Our look at GAS DRILLING WASTEWATER

Flowback and Brine Treatment in Pennsylvania

Gas drilling companies will try to convince you that using up to 6-million gallons of water for fracing one gas well doesn't amount to a massive amount of water. Even if they are successful in making that argument with you, the next topic becomes flowback or brine. What do you do with the crap that comes back out of the ground?
The Municipal Authority of McKeesport accepts 80,000 gallons per day, which is then mixed with treated sewage and dumped into the Monongahela River upstream from Pittsburgh. Hawg Hauling is part of Chesapeake Energy.
[ note:

Alert Notifications

PWSID: / Elevated Levels of Bromide in the Monongahela River / Issue Date: 09-17-2010
Elevated Levels of Bromide in the Monongahela River The Monongahela River is our primary source of supply for your drinking water. According to the DEP, the river has experienced elevated levels of bromide for the past two years. Bromide is an element typically found in salt water and rock
Oct. 4, 2009
With Natural Gas Drilling Boom, Pennsylvania Faces an Onslaught of Wastewater
Workers at a steel mill and a power plant were the first to notice something strange about the Monongahela River last summer. The water that U.S. Steel and Allegheny Energy used to power their plants contained so much salty sediment that it was corroding their machinery [2]. Nearby residents saw something odd, too. Dishwashers were malfunctioning, and plates were coming out with spots that couldn’t easily be rinsed off.
Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection soon identified the likely cause [3] and came up with a quick fix. The Monongahela, a drinking water source for 350,000 people, had apparently been contaminated by chemically tainted wastewater from the state’s growing natural gas industry. So the DEP reduced the amount of drilling wastewater that was being discharged into the river and unlocked dams upstream to dilute the contamination.
But questions raised by the incident on the Monongahela haven’t gone away.
In August, contamination levels in the river spiked [4] again, and the DEP still doesn’t know exactly why. And this month the DEP began investigating whether drilling wastewater contributed to the death of 10,000 fish on a 33-mile stretch of Dunkard Creek, which winds through West Virginia and feeds into the Monongahela. A spate of other water contamination problems [5] have also been linked to gas drilling in Pennsylvania, including methane leaks that have affected drinking water in at least seven counties.]
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Somewhere between 30% and 70% of the water used for hydro-fracing a gas well returns to the surface as flowback. In addition to the frac fluids added by the gas drilling companies, this water picks up other contaminants from deep in the Earth (~ 7,000 feet deep) with one of the most notable being salt.

These fluids contain sodium and calcium salts, barium, oil, strontium, iron, numerous heavy metals, soap, radiation and other components. This fluid combination becomes brine wastewater, and tanker trucks hauling it are labeled with a RESIDUAL WASTE placard. Treated brine is also sold for deicing and other applications that utilize calcium chloride, often being applied to roadways.
Brine wastewater is difficult and expensive to treat, one of the same reasons we aren't using much ocean water for agriculture and residential applications. The saltiness of this wastewater creates a high level of TDS (total dissoved solids). Incomplete processing of this brine wastewater, especially when dumped into rivers used for drinking water, creates a high TDS situation that causes drinking water treatment plants problems, like Trihalomehtanes. High TDS water reacts with chlorine when it is processed.
The gas industry estimates the amount of high-TDS wastewater needing disposal in Pennsylvania will increase from 9 million gallons per day in 2009 to 20 million gallons per day by 2011
In other parts of the United States, gas drilling operations dispose of their wastewater deep in the ground, by using deep injection wells. However, the geology around Marcellus Shale doesn't lend itself as well to accepting deep injections, so the wastewater gets dumped back into Pennsylvania watersheds. Early on in Marcellus drilling, many municipal treatment plants were accepting this briny wastewater that weren't equipped to process it. Add that situation to low river levels due to drought and you begin to have real problems.

“Monongahela River, = drinking water at risk . . .

Pesticides harm fish and wildlife . . .

State concerned about waste water from new gas wells

Sunday, December 21, 2008

By Don Hopey, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Keith Srakocic/Associated Press

drilling rig used to bore thousands of feet into the earth to extract natural gas from the Marcellus Shales deep underground is seen on the hill above the pond on John Dunn's farm in Houston, Pa., in October.

Gas well drillers tapping into the deep Marcellus Shales add up to 54 substances, some of them toxic, to the water they use to fracture that rock and release the gas.

And the state Department of Environmental Protection doesn't know what chemicals, metals and possibly radioactive elements are in the waste water that is pushed out of the wells. It is discharged into the state's waterways including the Monongahela River, from which 350,000 people get their drinking water.

"That's the bigger issue. They don't have an analysis of what's in the waste water they're pulling out," said Dr. Conrad Dan Volz, assistant professor in the Graduate School of Public Health at the University of Pittsburgh. "What they're putting into the wells can chemically change and be added to underground, and no one is saying how much arsenic, manganese, cobalt, chromium and lead is in the stuff. Depending on the concentration, it could be a hazardous waste."
Each well drilled into the Marcellus Shales, which lie at least a mile deep beneath parts of Pennsylvania, New York, West Virginia and Ohio, uses up to 4 million gallons of water to fracture the rock and release natural gas. The chemicals are added to the "frac" water that is pumped into the wells under high pressure to reduce friction in the pipe and allow the water to flow more freely into the rock layers.

Among the chemical additives are formaldehyde, a human carcinogen; various acids; a variety of petroleum compounds and several pesticides that are toxic to fish and other aquatic life. Many of the chemicals, depending on their concentrations, can also cause human skin, eye and nose irritations, and damage kidney, heart, liver and lung function.

Much of that frac water -- about 40 percent of the total used -- is pushed back to the surface by the gas released from the shale, and it must be disposed of.

"Yes, we're concerned," said Mark Hartle, chief of aquatic resources for the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission. "And we're more concerned with the recovered fluids from the wells than with the water they use to do the fracing initially. The problem is, we're not sure what they're ending up with so we don't know the constituents of the discharges."

Lou D'Amico, executive director of the Independent Oil & Gas Association of Pennsylvania, said frac water chemical concentrations are low and treatment facilities are removing much of the metals and dissolved solids from the waste water.

"Companies are committed to huge investments to treat the waste water, because without that we're out of business," Mr. D'Amico said. "We're very aware of all the environmental and public concerns, and our mission is to develop the Marcellus shale as an economic benefit to Pennsylvania and in an environmentally sensitive way."

He said drilling and fracing companies are doing a wide-ranging survey of the waste water, also known as "flow-back water," to show it is not a health hazard.

Tom Rathbun, a DEP spokesman, said the department also is doing a chemical analysis of the waste water, a study that should be done by the first of the year.

"We have a general idea but want to know for sure," Mr. Rathbun said. "If it's different, we will make the necessary adjustments.

"I don't think they've been doing enough Marcellus Shales drilling so far to make a difference," Mr. Rathbun said. "But the gas industry needs to come up with a way to deal with this. A couple of companies want to do on-site water treatment, and others are looking at different recycling technologies."

He said there are now only about 20 active Marcellus Shales gas wells. But there has been drilling activity at more than 300 in Pennsylvania, and another 250 have been issued state permits.

The drilling and water discharges have attracted the attention of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

"It is an issue that's been on our radar for a while and currently a matter we're looking into," said Dave McGuigan, associate director of EPA's regional office of permits and enforcement. "The question is what is in [well waste water] and what are the treatment facilities doing with it."

Some of the waste water is taken to DEP-approved municipal sewer authorities that dilute it with their regular effluent before discharging it into a river or stream. Some is trucked to one of the state's six industrial water treatment facilities, where metals, oils and some dissolved solids are removed but where waste salts are a disposal problem exacerbated by the volume of the waste water.

"The salts are the biggest issue right now and the most expensive thing to remove from the highly concentrated brines," said Paul Hart, president of Pennsylvania Brine Treatment Inc., who owns three of the state's six industrial treatment facilities and wants to build six more.

Mr. Hart criticized the DEP for slow action on permit applications for new treatment facilities, for regulating the well water as waste, which limits the ability of drillers and treatment facilities to recycle it, and for failing to determine the composition of the waste water.

"The Marcellus has wide variations in the amount of iron, barium and salt, and we need to know the high and low marks so we can treat it and we're still determining that," he said. "Right now we don't know as much as we'd like to know."

The drilling companies provide the DEP with lists of chemicals they add to the water but not the amounts of specific mixtures, claiming that is proprietary information.

Four of the chemical compounds are complex pesticides that scientific assessments have determined are "very toxic to fish." One, 2.2-Dibromo-3-nitrilopropionamide, retards fetal development in rabbits.

The pesticides are added to the drill water to stop the growth of algae in temporary holding ponds and tanks built next to the drilling pads. Algae and other "biofilms" can foul pumps used to push the water underground and into the shale.

None of those chemicals should be discharged directly into surface water such as the Monongahela River, said Dr. Volz, who is studying the effects of pollutants in the rivers.

"If there's enough biocide to kill algae, by the looks of this bromated compound there's enough to do damage to fish," Dr. Volz said. "Throwing it in the water is just crazy."

He said formaldehyde, which is a human carcinogen, "is always a concern," but any risk is impossible to assess without knowing its concentration.

In addition to the pesticides, the chemicals added to the well "fracing" water include acids to dissolve cement around the pipe casings and open perforations in the pipe for the water to flow through and into the shale formation; friction reducers to make pumping easier; and additives to keep clay from reducing the flow of the released gas.

Different pumping companies use different frac-fluid recipes and formulas and different combinations and amounts of those chemicals.

A report on the chemical additives requested by DEP's Bureau of Oil & Gas Management and prepared for the Independent Oil & Gas Association of Pennsylvania states that care and controls are used to prevent the frac chemicals and chemical water solutions from contaminating surface and ground water near the wells. The report also notes that water in the Marcellus Shales contains high concentrations of dissolved solids, (TDS = total dissolved solids) making it unsuitable as a drinking, agricultural or industrial water supply.

The DEP and public water suppliers have said the high TDS levels are not a health concern. But David Dzombeck, an environmental engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University, said without knowing the chemical composition of the dissolved solids, that's hard to confirm.

Don Hopey can be reached at 412-263-1983.

First published on December 21, 2008 at 12:00 am

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FEBRUARY 22, 2010 PENNSYLVANIA

PA POTW FINED $75,000 FOR GAS WELL FRACKING WATER VIOLATIONS

Pa. DEP fines Jersey Shore, Pa., for sewage violations
Feb. 22 -- The borough of Jersey Shore, Pa., must pay fines $75,000 for operation and discharge violations at its sewage treatment plant in Lycoming County during 2008 and 2009, according to The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.

"The borough had several violations of its gas well wastewater acceptance plan in addition to violations of its DEP discharge permit," said DEP North-central Regional Director Robert Yowell

Between September 2008 and May 2009, the borough’s sewage treatment plant had 13 discharge violations for contaminants including fecal coliform and total suspended solids.

In 2008, DEP approved the borough’s gas well wastewater acceptance plan, but imposed a number of operational requirements, as well as sampling and recordkeeping responsibilities.

The borough exceeded limitations on the amount of gas well wastewater it could accept and accepted wastewater with higher levels of chloride concentrations than it was authorized to treat, DEP said.

The borough was ordered to stop accepting gas well wastewater at its treatment plant and to remove all of the wastewater stored onsite to an approved offsite disposal facility.

Jersey Shore has complied with the provisions of DEP´s order and paid the fine to the state´s Clean Water Fund, which pays for cleanups across the state.