PA Senator Reintroducing Bill to Reduce Marcellus Waste Reporting
On Tuesday, PA State Sen. Elder Vogel (Republican from Beaver, PA) circulated a co-sponsor memo that states his intent to re-introduce a bill that will remove some of the hassles drillers now face with the recent adoption of new Marcellus drilling regulations. Specifically, Vogel wants to change the DEP (Dept. of Environmental Protection) regulation requirement that drillers must file paperwork to report the amount and disposition of drilling waste–which would include wastewater and drill cuttings–from monthly to every six months. Every gallon of frack and produced water that comes out of a well, and every square inch of leftover rock and dirt, must be tracked and a report filed. The new Chapter 78a drilling regulations adopted by the DEP requires monthly reports to be filled out–a virtual blizzard of paperwork. Vogel wants to make it more manageable with biennial reports instead…
Read More “PA Senator Reintroducing Bill to Reduce Marcellus Waste Reporting”
January 20th, when Donald Trump is inaugurated and decomposing swamps like the EPA get drained, can’t happen soon enough. However, before that date, the Obamadroids are doing everything they can to get their last digs in. One of them is the rogue, out-of-control Environmental Protection Agency, which will soon be swept clean by Scott Pruitt (delicious justice if ever there were some). We’ve written about the sleazy practice of “sue and settle” in the past–a practice whereby government agencies like the EPA get their friends in the radical environmental movement to sue them, then they quickly settle the case and say “See, we HAVE to do this because the court is making us do it.” Scott Pruitt knows all about that practice and it will stop on Jan. 20. But until then, the EPA continues to engage in it. The latest case they’ve just settled was brought by the odious National Resources Defense Council, Earthworks and a mishmash of other radical groups in May 2016 regarding an attempt to ban injection wells and stop landfills from accepting drill cuttings (see 
Earlier this week so-called researchers at the University of Iowa released a tragically flawed study that purports to say Marcellus Shale drill cuttings (rock and dirt from drilling) are radioactive and if you put them in your landfill, you’ll start to glow in the dark. That’s the upshot from “research” that used just three samples FROM A SINGLE WELL as the basis of the “study.” This is anti-fossil fuel hogwash by a group of grad students who want to launch their careers by making a name for themselves. What they’ve actually done is ended their short careers with shoddy research. The paper is titled “Disequilibrium of Naturally Occurring Radioactive Materials (NORM) in Drill Cuttings from a Horizontal Drilling Operation” and appears in the journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters. Below is a summary of the “research” followed by an analysis by MDN friend and intrepid writer Nicole Jacobs, writing for Energy in Depth. Nicole rips apart this new study and exposes its tragic flaws…
enerGREEN360, a young Ohio company that cleans up material heading to landfills so it can get re-used instead, has a plan to clean drill cuttings from Utica drilling to reuse those cuttings as clean fill on brownfield sites. The company has its sights set on an industrial park south of Cambridge, OH as its first location to dump the treated drill cuttings. Everyone wins in this instance–less material filling up local landfills, fill needed at the industrial park, the cuttings get treated before being used (minimizing any potential exposure risks). The only ones who lose are radical environmentalists, who will try their best to demagogue this plan, painting it as unsafe and harmful to locals who live and work in the area. The only problem for enerGREEN360 is that the Guernsey County Board of Supervisors is unanimously opposed to the plan (see 
Two weeks ago MDN provided an update on the new Antero state-of-the-art frack wastewater treatment plant and landfill being built in West Virginia (see 
Imagine this: a backhoe sinks its bucket into the ground, scoops out some dirt, and the dirt is used to build a road. No big deal. Now imagine this, a very long drill goes down into the earth and digs out dirt. Because the dirt comes from deep down, some of it may be mixed with minerals not found near the surface, so a company processes the deep down dirt to remove any extra minerals, and the dirt is then essentially the same chemical composition as the dirt from near the surface–and it’s used to build a road. The dirt from deep down is called drill cuttings. Environmental Nazis repeat the magical incantation, “It’s been fracked!” and therefore they begin to hyperventilate that “fracked waste” is being used to build a road. Our example illustrates antis’ intellectual dishonesty about what drill cuttings are. When we spotted a story that a private hunting club in Lycoming County (Williamsport area) in PA will build a new road using processed drill cuttings, and the spin job done by the anti-drilling shills at the taxpayer-funded PBS StateImpact Pennsylvania, we had to laugh…
In March MDN reported that 47 dumpsters full of concentrated frack waste from OH, PA and WV was illegally dumped in a Kentucky landfill in Estill County, KY (see 
Seems to us like folks in Kentucky swing more to the liberal side of the isle when it comes to opposing natural gas drilling and pipelines. Just our observation over time. We think they overreact to anything related to fracking and gas drilling. However, in this case, we don’t think they’re overreacting. It appears that 47 dumpsters full of concentrated frack waste from OH, PA and WV was illegally dumped in a Kentucky landfill in Estill County, KY. They were buried between last July and November, near as anyone can tell. And the landfill sits across the road from a school. Normal frack waste has extremely low (usually no) kind of radioactivity. But when drill cuttings are further processed and concentrated, as was the case with this series of loads, the naturally occurring radiation present can become more concentrated. There’s no indication of a problem at the landfill…no indication that it’s leaking radioactivity into the water table, etc. Radiation levels are being monitored and do not show anything above normal background levels. But still, somebody somewhere should have known this was happening. Local residents have a right to be up in arms over not being told…
The Keystone Sanitary Landfill is Pennsylvania’s third busiest landfill–located on the outskirts of Scranton. The Keystone Landfill accepts drill cuttings from Marcellus drilling. Last year Keystone applied for a permit to expand the landfill once again–but instead of outward, they want to expand it upward, making it higher, to gain more capacity. At present about 10% of the incoming waste stream at the landfill is shale waste. The Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) had, as of last summer, delayed granting the expansion request pending more study (see