New Report: Water is a $6.4B Part of the U.S. Shale Industry
How much water is used, and how much is generated that needs to be disposed of (or recycled) in oil and gas drilling–particularly in U.S. shale plays? A new report by Bluefield Research says the U.S. fracking industry consumes over 1 billion barrels of water annually, producing 450-500 million barrels of wastewater for disposal. According to Bluefield, the U.S. shale industry will spend $6.38 billion (!) in 2014 on water management: supply, transport, storage, treatment, and disposal. Water is a big deal in shale drilling. The following article by Bluefield sheds interesting light on the topic. Among the things that caught our interest is the breakdown of which shale plays use the most water (how does the Marcellus and Utica stack up? see the graphic below), and the section at the end which talks about new opportunities for supply chain companies in the water space…
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A disturbing bit of news. Officials in Waynesburg, PA (county seat of Greene County, in the very southwestern tip of PA) say about 4,000 gallons of a “gray, milky substance” flowed through the local sewage treatment plant and that the plant’s flow meters spiked up when it happened. In other words, someone, somewhere dumped something down a manhole and that something got processed by the plant and ultimately discharged into Ten Mile Creek. The disturbing bit is that the plant’s operators, along with the PA Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP), think the substance dumped may have been frack wastewater…
We’ve got some bad blood happening between EQT–a big Marcellus driller headquartered in Pittsburgh, PA–and the PA Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP). The DEP has just filed a lawsuit against EQT to force the company to cough up a new record–$4.53 million in fines–for a leaky wastewater impoundment in Tioga County, PA. The fine comes a week after the anti-drilling PA Attorney General, Kathleen Kane, once again abused her office’s powers by filing criminal charges against EQT (see today’s companion story). The DEP says EQT filed for and received permission to build a freshwater impoundment at that location in 2012, but after the impoudment was built, they decided to change and use it for frack wastewater. Problem is, with a wastewater impoundment you need monitoring wells drilled around the impoundment and extra protections that were lacking because it was supposed to be used for freshwater only. EQT then built a second impoundment next to it for wastewater and did install monitoring wells, figuring those monitoring wells would cover both impoundments. The first impoundment leaked and, according to the DEP, EQT just doesn’t get how serious the problems were/are that resulted, and so they’ve slapped them with their biggest single fine ever. EQT is already fighting back both legally and with their own press release…