Wastewater

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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.