Drillers to face tough regs

BY LAURA LEGERE, TIMES SHAMROCK WRITER
Published: July 15, 2009

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At a public meeting last Wednesday I Williamsport for the first facility in the state designed to meet new treatment standards for the toxic water produced by drilling in the Marcellus Shale, an engineer for the proposed plant told a crowd of more than 100 that the treated water it will dump into the Susquehanna River will be cleaner than the water there now.

 For more than three hours, the audience, made up of many people who drink water pulled from sources downstream from the proposed plant, questioned how they will know for sure that the salts, chemicals, and dozens of other "pollutants of concern" lacing the Marcellus Shale water will be gone by the time they use it.
 
One Williamsport resident, wearing a shirt patterned with swimming fish, took the microphone.
 
"Maybe you guys can drink it as it comes out the pipe," he said, "and then we'll be reassured."
 
Much is at stake as proposals emerge to build facilities along the state's rivers to treat the millions of gallons of wastewater produced during natural gas exploration in the Marcellus Shale.
 
To produce gas from the shale, companies break apart the rock more than a mile underground with millions of gallons of water, chemicals and sand. About 40 percent of the water returns to the surface, bringing with it metals, naturally occurring radioactive material and high levels of total dissolved solids (TDS) - salts and organic material - from the shale formation.
 
The state Department of Environmental Protection and the Susquehanna River Basin Commission estimate that about 20 million gallons of Marcellus Shale wastewater per day will need to be treated by 2011, an estimate industry representatives say is too high.
 
According to DEP records, there are currently 18 facilities in the state that can accept drilling wastewater from the shale, but only six of them are industrial treatment facilities specifically designed to take metals and other contaminants out of the water.
 
Now, new plants are seeking permits to try to fill the anticipated gap between treatment needs and available solutions.
 
The facility proposed in Williamsport by TerrAqua Resource Management is one of 11 new plants planned along the North and West branches of the Susquehanna River under review by DEP in Northcentral Pennsylvania.
 
Four more are proposing to treat the wastewater in Northeast Pennsylvania including two new industrial wastewater treatment facilities in Wyoming County.
 
 Although DEP staff cautioned that its list of proposed treatment facilities is incomplete and changing, if all of the approximately 23 potential industrial wastewater facilities are built or modified, the number of specialized treatment plants in the state will nearly quadruple.
 
The challenge facing the industry, regulatory authorities and the communities affected by drilling, is that the flow-back water that returns from the Marcellus Shale is saltier than that pulled from other gas-bearing shales in the United States. It can be between six and 10 times saltier than sea water.
 
In other shale gas regions, including the Barnett Shale in North Texas, most of the wastewater is injected in deep disposal wells without being treated, but the geology necessary for that kind of disposal has not been found in Pennsylvania.
 
Thus far, treatment facilities in the state have relied on dilution in rivers to deal with the salt in the water.
 
But last fall, DEP found that the concentration of salts reached historic highs in the Monongahela River Basin, where at least eight sewage plants were discharging gas wastewater. The TDS levels exceeded water quality standards at all 17 of the drinking water supply intakes from the West Virginia border to Pittsburgh. In some areas downstream from high TDS discharge points, researchers found an abundance of salt-loving organisms in the suddenly brackish water.
 
The agency attributed the problem to abandoned mine drainage, low river flows and, pointedly, the discharges of gas wastewater.
 
"We can't really dispose of large quantities of this salty wastewater in any of the fresh waters of the commonwealth," DEP engineer Thomas Starosta said at the meeting on Wednesday. "We can't get away with that long-term."
 
In April, DEP announced a proposed standard that would restrict treatment plants from discharging gas wastewater that is high in salts.
 
By 2011, if the rules are finalized, the discharges will not be allowed to exceed the Environmental Protection Agency's recommended drinking water standards for total dissolved solids, chlorides and sulfates and will face additional limits on barium and strontium.
 
The final strategy, which all proposed and future facilities will have to comply with, essentially demands that gas drilling wastewater plants turn the waste into distilled water.
 
TerrAqua, for example, said on Wednesday it plans to use a thermal evaporation process to turn the gas wastewater into distilled water and a cake of salts and waste.
 
Starosta characterized the treatment options, such as thermal evaporation, that will enable the plants to meet the 2011 standards as "expensive," "difficult," "problematic" and "the last resort."
 
"Other states have other appropriate disposal options," he said. "We don't have those options available here."
 
But the state's options will also create cost incentives for gas producers to reuse and recycle as much water as possible before discarding it, and some of the potential treatments, though difficult, have been touted as the environmental vanguard in other shale regions trying to reduce waste.
 
Because of the rigor of the new standards, Mr. Starosta said, he expects the numbers of potential future plants to dwindle because most submitted permit applications to DEP before the standard was announced.
 
"Facilities are going to walk away from their permit applications when they realize the department doesn't intend to let them just drop out some metals and discharge the rest into the river," he said.
 
Local permit applicants are not discouraged yet.
 
Janet Brown, who, with her husband, Philip, is applying to build a wastewater treatment plant in Lemon Twp., just south of an area of concentrated drilling in Susquehanna County, said she is not sure yet how the new standards will affect their plans.
 
"We're still waiting for approval and then we'll have to go from there," she said.
 
Environmental advocates and watershed groups think the DEP's strategy could be more aggressive.
 
For many, DEP's short-term plan for wastewater treatment during the period until 2011 is troubling. In the interim, the department developed a strategy to divide the amount of salt a river can assimilate between the number of plants that propose to discharge there.
 
"It doesn't make sense to us that you acknowledge you need stricter standards to make sure we're not harming our rivers and streams, but then you're going to allow them to harm our rivers and streams for a year and a half," said Myron Arnowitt, the state director for Clean Water Action in Pittsburgh.
 
Many citizens and environmentalists at the TerrAqua meeting also expressed a fear that some of the dozens of "pollutants of concern" in Marcellus Shale wastewater, including those like benzene and toluene that pose significant human health hazards, will pass through the treatment process into rivers and, eventually, drinking water.
 
The problem, they say, is that neither the public nor DEP knows exactly what contaminants will be in the wastewater, a fact that Mr. Starosta of DEP acknowledged.
 
"This is not a fully characterized wastewater, so there is still some potential for surprises," he said.
 
But the responsibility for discharging clean water ultimately rests with the treatment plant, he added.
 
"They have to deal with whatever comes down the pipe."
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