Wastewater

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    Will Soil be the New “Water” in the Fight to Stop Marcellus Gas Drilling in NY State?

    MDN finds it necessary to periodically post disclaimers such as the following: We think drilling can be done safely, but we must remain vigilant. The more we know about drilling, the more we are convinced it is a good thing for the economy and the nation’s energy future. We are not anti-science, we’re not blind, we do care about our neighbors and we welcome opposing opinions. No one wants water supplies to be poisoned, and no one wants enjoyment of the great outdoors to be spoiled by drilling activity. And it doesn’t have to be that way if drilling is done right.

    With that said, the other side of the drilling debate seems to stop at nothing to instill irrational fears into the general population under the guise of science. Put the name of a prominent educational institution next to a committee or group, invoke the name of someone with a Ph.D., and viola, instant credibility. And if you dare say, “but the Emperor has no clothes” out loud, you’re shouted down as an industry shill or accused of being greedy at others’ expense. Such loving and caring people those who disagree with us.

    Since “your water will be poisoned” doesn’t seem to be getting sufficient traction these days as a scare tactic, we now find out that soil is “sensitive” (bet you didn’t know that!) to drilling activity:

    Researchers have developed the Cornell Soil Health Test to evaluate soil response to management on different types of land. It’s intended to assess changes due to gas drilling work.

    The construction necessary to extract natural gas from the Marcellus Shale in southern New York could affect the soil around drilling sites and pipeline right-of-ways, says a Cornell soil expert who has helped develop a new soil health test to assess such impacts.

    “Soil is sensitive to heavy construction, and while there are a lot of construction standards and practices, there isn’t really a standardized way to measure construction impacts on soil behavior,” said Robert Schindelbeck, a Cornell extension associate in crop and soil sciences and member of the Cornell Soil Health Team.

    To fill in that information gap, Schindelbeck and his team have developed the Cornell Soil Health Test (CSHT), a set of tests designed to evaluate soil response to management on different types of land.*

    *PhysOrg.com (Apr 1) – New test assesses gas drilling effects on soils

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    Three Upstate Landowners on New York City Public Radio Discuss Drilling in the Marcellus

    An interesting radio segment from WNYC Public Radio. Leonard Lopate conducted an interview with three Upstate landowners. From the program description:

    We’ll look into the controversy over drilling for natural gas in Marcellus shale in Upstate New York, and discuss the challenges landowners face when deciding whether to lease their land to gas companies, the role of landowners coalitions, and how public officials are managing the drilling already occurring in their towns. We’ll speak with Mark Dunau, organic farmer from Delaware County; Jim Bays, Supervisor of the Town of Smyrna, in Chenango County; and Abby Tamber, steering committee member of the Central New York Landowners Coalition.*

    While Mr. Dunau is clearly anti-drilling and Mr. Bays is somewhat anti-drilling, Ms. Tamber does a good job of representing local landowner groups and the concerns of landowners. The questions by the host are pretty good, and as far as public radio goes, this is about as fair and balanced as it gets. Overall, a B+ from MDN. Worth listening to as it does discuss some very important issues for landowners. Embedded player below—give it a listen! The segment is 34 minutes in length.

    *WNYC (Mar 23) – The Lenoard Lopate Show

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    Marcellus Driller Funds Water Monitoring Program in Susquehanna River Basin

    As Marcellus Drilling News previously noted, the Susquehanna River Basin Commission is in the process of placing 30 monitoring devices to track the effects of Marcellus drilling wastewater that enters area waterways. We now learn the program is being funded by the drilling industry itself:

    The commission used a $750,000 grant from natural gas company East Resources Inc. to start the monitoring system. The monitoring stations provide data on factors such as temperature, pH level, depth and clarity. That information is available immediately on the commission’s Web site, and the state Department of Environmental Protection is notified if any problems are found.*

    Kudos to East Resources for contributing a significant sum of money to help alleviate concerns that drilling is harming our waterways.

    *State College Centre Daily Times, via WaterWorld (Mar 19) – System monitors water quality

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    New Marcellus Wastewater Treatment Plant Set to Open in Westmoreland County, PA

    The Pennsylvania State Department of Environmental Protection has issued a permit for a new Marcellus drilling wastewater treatment facility to begin operations in April in western PA.

    Stephen Frobouck, a partner in Reserve Environmental Services Inc., said the treatment facility at the former American Video Glass plant in East Huntingdon, Westmoreland County, is ready for operations to begin in April.

    "We will have the capacity to handle (water from) 500 to 600 wells a year," Frobouck said Friday, declining to say how much the firm paid to prepare the plant for its new use.*

    *Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (Mar 13) – Plant near New Stanton to treat gas wastewater

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    AOP Clearwater Plant in WV a Big Success in Treating Marcellus Shale Wastewater

    AOP Clearwater Plant, Fairmont, WV A lesson for Owego and Tioga County, NY from Marion County, West Virginia where a new wastewater treatment plant is a big success. The AOP Clearwater Plant is located just outside of Fairmont.

    According to AOP Clearwater President Louis Bonasso, they have had no problems getting customers from oil and gas drilling companies in the Marcellus Shale. In fact, the trucks are “lining up” at the facility.

    “We are a distillation-crystallization process, available to the oil and gas producing community in the area for clean-up of flow back and production brine waters,” said Bonasso.

    Which means, the contaminated water is brought in on trucks, put through an extensive cleaning process, and pumped back out–as clean water for the oil and gas companies to reuse.

    “We offer a very rapid unload-reload opportunity for trucking companies. Instead of sitting in line, we unload in about 11 minutes and we can reload in about the same time,” said Bonasso.*

    Beside creating 16 jobs and bringing revenue to the county, there is this positive side benefit:

    Through the cleaning process, salt is removed from the contaminated water and is able to be re-used to treat winter roads.

    “All the salt that we produced since the plant started operations in November was sold in Marion County to independent contractors and the city,” explained Bonasso.*

    *The State Journal (Mar 9) – AOP Clearwater Plant Open in Marion County

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    Patriot Water Decides Not to Build Marcellus Wastewater Treatment Plant in Owego, NY

    Last week, Patriot Water LLC withdrew their application to convert a former car dealership on the edge of the Village of Owego, NY (in Tioga County) into a wastewater treatment plant to deal specifically with wastewater from Marcellus Shale drilling in Pennsylvania, and from New York, when drilling finally begins there.

    Each well drilled in the Marcellus will use approximately 3 million gallons of water during the process of hydro fracturing. Much of that water comes back out of the ground and needs to be treated so it can be re-used in drilling. Some of it will be treated and returned to area waterways, which is no different than the local sewage treatment plant. The fluids entering the environment from any wastewater plant must pass rigid tests to ensure no pollution occurs.

    So the news that Patriot Water was planning to build and operate such a plant was good news for the Southern Tier of New York, bringing jobs and tax revenue to Tioga County. But one problem: The proposed site was very close to residential areas. Yes, it is zoned industrial, but it would mean four trucks an hour, 24 hours a day running down residential streets, and local folks didn’t want it. Can’t blame them.

    But! Could Tioga County not have come back with a counter offer? Another location nearby that is not close to residential areas? Was there any kind of effort made at all? It appears not. And so, on March 3, Patriot Water said “no thanks” to Owego and Tioga County.

    MDN recommends Patriot have a look at nearby Broome County, NY. There’s a couple of industrial parks close to Interstates 81 & 86 (NY Route 17) in the Conklin and Kirkwood areas, and those locations have truck traffic all the time. Perhaps the members of the town planning boards in Broome County will actually show up for meetings (unlike the Tioga County Planning Board, five members of whom abrogated their duties by not showing up for a crucial meeting on the Patriot request). Come on over to Broome, Patriot!

    Owego Pennysaver (Mar 3) – Patriot Water, LLC withdraws application for Taylor Road site

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    Skaneateles High School Airs Both Sides of the Marcellus Drilling Debate

    Kudos to the Skaneateles High School Environmental Club for the public meeting they held on hydraulic fracturing on January 23rd at the High School auditorium. Yes, the members of the club are no doubt anti-drilling and they had several speakers who presented the anti-drilling viewpoint. And yes, they showed the biased anti-drilling “documentary” Split Estate.

    But to their credit, the Environmental Club also balanced it with someone who presented the pro-drilling side of the argument. That person was David Palmerton, a geologist and environmental consultant, and someone who’s actually developed oil and gas wells.

    With regard to the likelihood that chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing will pollute water aquifers, Mr. Palmerton said:

    “I can tell you as a geologist that putting water in 7,000 feet down, which is some 6,500 feet below any possible water supply, is not going to reach that water supply,” Palmerton said. “It’s trapped by the pressure of the rock.”

    A question was also raised about what is done with the “frack fluid” once it is reclaimed.

    Palmerton agreed with [Onondaga Nation General Counsel Joseph] Heath’s earlier point that there were not enough facilities to treat the wastewater.

    “But, once it’s clear that oil and gas development can proceed, companies will come in, will develop those facilities,” he said. “There’s a lot of money that’s out there that’s ready to be invested in those facilities.”*

    Some common sense words. Let’s hope the young members of the Environmental Club were listening. Hats off to them for airing both sides.

    *Skaneateles Press (Mar 8th) – Fracking finds supporters, opponents at SHS

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    New Wastewater Treatment Plant Approved in Central PA

    Narrowsburg, NY – The River Reporter (Feb 25)
    ‘Unauthorized’ wastewater hearing brings flowback feedback

    The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has granted its first permit to a wastewater treatment facility since new, stricter guidelines were recently implemented. From The River Reporter article:

    The DEP has issued its first new permit for treating drilling wastewater to TerrAqua Resource Management LLC of Williamsport, allowing the company to treat and discharge 400,000 gallons per day of gas well drilling wastewater into the West Branch Susquehanna River Watershed.

    According to the DEP, the permit requires TerrAqua to meet the proposed new regulatory standards of 500 parts per million for total dissolved solids (TDS) and 250 parts per million for chlorides and sulfates. TerrAqua has indicated that it will pursue a thermal treatment process capable of reducing TDS levels to less than 500 parts per million at all times.

    The discharge permit also requires TerrAqua to monitor for radioactivity, a large number of metals, including barium, strontium, iron, manganese and aluminum, as well as organics such as toluene, benzene, phenols, ethylene glycol and surfactants.

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    New President of Marcellus Shale Coalition Says Drilling Will Bring 110,000 Jobs to PA in 2010

    Katie Klaber, the new President of the Marcellus Shale Coalition recently appeared on the Clean Skies News network to discuss the environmental issues of natural gas drilling. It’s an informative and short piece (under 10 minutes), and worth watching (embedded below).

    Among the things discussed that MDN found interesting:

    • Ms. Klaber says Marcellus Drilling will bring 110,000 jobs to Pennsylvania in 2010.
    • Some drillers recycle and reuse 100% of fracking water, but the industry average right now is recycling and reusing 60%.
    • Because of the high rate of recycling, a shortage of wastewater treatment facilities is not critical at the moment, but more facilities will be needed in the next few years.
    • Drilling companies already have an MSDS (Materials Safety Data Sheet) at the drilling site for each and every chemical used in the fracking process. That is right now, today. So the hue and cry that drillers are “hiding” the chemicals used in fracking is not true.
    • Ms. Klaber predicts that Pennsylvania will be a net exporter of natural gas by 2014.

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    Engineer Explains Why Hydraulic Fracturing in the Marcellus Shale is Safe

    The Energy Collective (Feb 23)
    Shale Gas and Drinking Water

    In an article posted on The Energy Collective website, Geoff Styles, who has a degree in chemical engineering (U.C. Davis) and worked for Texaco for 22 years, in addition to working for NASA, explores just what hydraulic fracturing is, how it’s done, and why it’s safe, particularly in the Marcellus Shale deposit. It is an extremely well written and enlightening article—please read it!

    Here is a brief extract:

    [F]or the purposes of this discussion let’s take a quick look at one of the shale regions at the heart of this controversy, the Marcellus Shale in the Appalachian region of New York, Pennsylvania and the Virginias. In the course of my research I ran across a handy document on groundwater from Penn State. Aside from surface water (lakes, rivers and streams), it identifies the various aquifers in Pennsylvania by type in Figure 4. The key fact from the perspective of fracking safety is that the deepest of these aquifers lies no more than about 500 ft. below the surface, and typically less than a couple of hundred feet down. By contrast, the Marcellus Shale is found thousands of feet down–in many areas more than a mile below-ground–with a thickness of 250 feet or less. In addition, the gas-bearing layers are sealed in by impermeable rock, or the gas would eventually have migrated somewhere else. In other words, the shale gas reservoirs are isolated by geology and depth from the shallower layers where our underground drinking water is found.

    He covers many other issues, including the relatively SMALL amount of water used to frack a well with horizontal drilling—compared with water used in a “traditional” oil or gas well. And how the aquifer is protected when the drilling begins, before any water and chemicals are pumped into the well.

    Bottom line?

    Thus, whether intentionally or as a result of a basic misunderstanding of how this technology works, we are being presented with a false dichotomy concerning shale gas and fracking. The real choice here isn’t between energy and drinking water, as critics imply, but between tapping an abundant source of lower-emission domestic energy and what looked like a perpetually-increasing reliance on imported natural gas just a few years ago.

    Well said Mr. Styles. Well said.

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    Swamp Angel Energy Guilty of Illegally Dumping 200K Gallons of Brine in PA

    Mother Nature Network (Feb 22)
    Gas drillers plead guilty to felony dumping violations

    Two people from Swamp Angel Energy pled guilty last week to dumping 200,000 gallons of brine in an abandoned oil well in McKean County, Pennsylvania.

    According to the article:

    [P]art-owner Michael Evans, 66, of La Quinta, Calif., and John Morgan, 54, of Sheffield, Penn., admitted dumping 200,000 gallons of brine – salty wastewater that’s created in the drilling process – down an abandoned oil well. The maximum penalty for both Evans and Morgan is three years in prison, a fine of $250,000, or both. Sentencing will be June 24.

    Swamp Angel Energy was (and is currently) drilling in the Allegheny National Forest, located in McKean County. Also according to the article:

    Swamp Angel has 77 active, permitted wells in Pennsylvania, all of them in McKean County.

    Fellow drillers and those in the drilling industry have swiftly and rightly condemned the illegal dumping. The article is anti-drilling with a smug “See, I told you so,” kind of tone, which is to be expected coming from MNN. However, the illegal actions of a few should not be used to paint all drilling companies with the same broad brush.

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    New Marcellus Wastewater Treatment Plant Coming to Elk County, PA

    DuBois Courier-Express/Tri-County (Feb 20)
    Marcellus shale drilling water may be treated at local acid mine treatment site

    Drillers in the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania will soon have a new plant to treat wastewater, called flowback, from drilling activities. The new plant will be located in Brandy Camp (Elk County), PA. From the article:

    The project will be located at the existing Blue Valley acid mine drainage treatment and fish culture station in Brandy Camp, which is operated by the Toby Creek Watershed Association, according to a Friday news release.

    The project, to be known as the Blue Valley Hydrofrac Plant, will be owned and operated by Flowback Wastewater Development Group, which has Frank Nickens as director of operations.

    As for capacity of the plant:

    The first phase will provide for treatment of up to 300,000 gallons per day of hydrofracture flowback and production brine wastewaters. The output will be 1.2 million gallons per day of recycled hydrofracture makeup water or 720,000 gallons per day of treated acid mine drainage water.

    The second phase will add an additional 1.15 million gallons per day of treated acid mine drainage.

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    Chesapeake Withdraws Application to Store Millions of Gallons of Wastewater near Keuka Lake

    Syracuse Post-Standard (Feb 21)
    Plan to truck hydrofracking wastewater to Finger Lakes shelved, for now

    Readers of Marcellus Drilling News know that we advocate for landowners, and that we support safe drilling. But, drilling companies sometimes do themselves no favors and deservedly receive suspicion and condemnation. Case in point: Chesapeake Energy, one of the largest drillers in the U.S., is looking for a place to store millions of gallons of wastewater from their drilling operations in Pennsylvania. They thought they may have found a spot in the Steuben County (New York) town of Pulteney, in an old gas well no longer in use. They wanted to store up to 663 million gallons of wastewater—called “flowback” in the drilling business—in the old gas well, and they filed an application to do so.

    Flowback, which is water combined with sand and unspecified chemicals, is what’s leftover after it’s been pumped into the ground and brought back out again. The problem is, the chemicals used by drilling companies are a closely guarded trade secret—something that gives them an edge over competitors when drilling. So no one knows what, exactly, is in the flowback, nor in what proportions. This makes people uneasy when you want to store millions of gallons of it close to homes with water wells, and close to their vineyards. The old gas well sits next door to an active vineyard.

    It’s also bone-headed of Chesapeake to want to store it in this particular abandoned gas well, as the location is just one mile away from Keuka Lake, one of the Finger Lakes in Central New York. The proposed underground storage by Chesapeake “would not be lined or contained.” If, by some unfortunate event, the stored flowback were to leak into Keuka Lake, the resulting contamination could be catastrophic. It appears to be a risk just not worth taking. Much better for Chesapeake to look for a facility that will treat the flowback and return it to them to be reused for more drilling.

    Chesapeake has withdrawn its application for now. Although not a popular subject with drillers, if drilling companies were to disclose the chemicals used in the drilling process, it would go a long way to silencing the critics that there is no safe way to drill.

    The article from the Syracuse Post-Standard is fair and balanced (more or less) with a video interview of a local landowner who lives across from the abandoned gas well. It’s worth your time to read the article and watch the video interview.

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    Susquehanna River Basin Commission Monitors Waterways for Contamination

    WETM-18 TV (Feb 15)
    Gas Drilling Prompts More Water Quality Monitoring

    Due to concerns over drilling in the Marcellus and discharge of wastewater from drilling operations into area waterways that ultimately find their way to Susquehanna River, the Susquehanna River Basin Commission has placed monitoring devices in the Twin Tiers area of New York (Binghamton and Elmira). So far 10 monitoring devices have been installed, with another 20 to be installed by June.

    Marcellus Drilling News applauds the efforts of the SRBC to ensure local waterways remain contamination-free from drilling activities. Everyone wins when there is vigilance and monitoring.