Archive for 'Wastewater'
With the support of anti-drilling group Food & Water Watch, Maryland House of Delegates member Shane Robinson (representing the DC suburb of Montgomery County) has introduced a bill into the Maryland legislature that would ban importing fracking wastewater for treatment in the state.
In the complicated, ongoing story of fracking wastewater treatment in Warren, Ohio, the existing permit that allows the Warren Water Pollution Control Facility (sewage treatment plant) to dispose of treated brine water in the Mahoning River expires today. But because the renewal of the permit is something that has been appealed, according to Ohio EPA [...]
A lawsuit against the City of McKeesport, PA (near Pittsburgh) for treating fracking wastewater has been settled. McKeesport was hauled into federal court last year by two activist anti-drilling organizations—Clean Water Action and Three Rivers Waterkeeper—to force the McKeesport municipal sewage treatment plant to not accept fracking wastewater for treatment at the plant (read the [...]
The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has finally gotten around to assessing a fine for a fracking water spill that happened in March 2011—a spill of 800-1,000 gallons of fracking water that the DEP says was preventable.
John Armbruster, a seismologist from Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, NY is one of the researchers investigating a string of 11 earthquakes near Youngstown, OH, the most recent of which occurred on New Year’s Eve in the afternoon. Armbruster says a local injection well, which injects wastewater from shale gas drilling under high [...]
A 4.0 earthquake in the Youngstown, OH area on Saturday afternoon is thought to be connected to a local injection well. MDN has chronicled previous episodes of earthquakes thought to be connected with injection wells in Arkansas and Texas. Saturday’s earthquake was the 11th in the Youngstown area in recent months, and by far the [...]
New Jersey legislators—at least some of them—don’t want wastewater from Marcellus (and Utica) Shale gas drilling in their state. New legislation is now making its way through the NJ state Assembly:
Looks like two more injection wells are coming to Ohio. These new wells will be built near Mansfield (Richland County), Ohio and are specifically designed to handle 200,000 gallons of fracking wastewater per day from Marcellus and Utica Shale drilling operations.
The future of wastewater treatment plant in Warren (Trumbull County), Ohio that handles fracking wastewater from Marcellus Shale drilling is now in doubt. The state attorney general has ruled that the permit granted to the Patriot Water Treatment plant in Warren was granted illegally.
A new Marcellus wastewater treatment facility is coming to McKean County, PA, and by using a local railroad spur, owners of the new facility hope to service a large area of Pennsylvania and eventually New York, reducing truck traffic. The facility will use methane from a local landfill for power instead of electricity. Low-grade heat [...]
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is signaling their intent to continue overreaching their authority by regulating oil and gas drilling in the U.S., violating states’ constitutional rights to do so themselves. The EPA’s “back door” way of regulating hydraulic fracturing (buying them time while they try to regulate it by the front door with [...]
Under threat of a lawsuit, supervisors in Columbus Township (Warren County, PA) reversed their previous ban on the disposal of fracking fluids in two injection wells in the township (see this previous MDN story about the lawsuit). Injection wells are deep wells used to dispose of fracking fluid from those drillers who do not recycle [...]