A planned disposal well in Plum is likely more than a year away from accepting its first truckload of oil and gas waste fluids, but the project advanced this week when it received a major federal permit.
Despite broad local opposition, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said Delmont-based Penneco Environmental Solutions meets the requirements to safely operate the Sedat #3A well as a commercial injection facility that will entomb waste brines from Marcellus Shale and other drilling operations. It issued the 10-year permit on Wednesday.
The company must still receive a state permit to convert the well from a producing gas well to a waste injection well. It also has to resolve a legal case it filed in Allegheny County Court challenging a provision of Plum’s zoning ordinance that excludes injection wells from the borough.
Plum Mayor Harry Schlegel said borough leaders are considering their options, but he knows other communities have fought expensive legal battles to try to stop disposal wells and lost.
“I do have an issue with us becoming a sewer,” he said.
The permit allows the company to inject 54,000 barrels of oil and gas waste fluids per month at the facility off Old Leechburg Road. Ben Wallace, COO at Penneco Oil and its affiliated companies, said that equates to 14 truckloads a day, or about a truck every 50 minutes during operating hours.
The planned injection site differs slightly from others in Pennsylvania where depleted oil and gas wells are being turned into waste conduits.
Most often, fossil fuel wells are reversed to fill the same rock layer with fluids that had been emptied of gas. The Penneco well will target a different layer, the Murrysville sandstone, about 2,000 feet above the formation where the company extracted gas since 1989.
The company chose the Murrysville sandstone because natural fluids already pool there, showing it is conducive to absorbing more liquid, and because other nearby wells don’t tap that layer, so there is minimal chance for interference, Mr. Wallace said.
The injection zone is about 1,900 feet below the ground surface and is separated from the deepest potential source of drinking water by about 1,400 feet of rock, including a series of tight shale layers that will contain the fluids in the sandstone, the EPA said in response to concerns raised in written comments and at a public hearing that drew about 200 people last summer.
Pressure limits will prevent the injected fluids from creating fractures in the sandstone or any surrounding rock layers, the agency said.
Fluids will also be injected more than a mile and a half above the deep geologic layer known as the crystalline basement, which has been implicated in cases of man-made earthquakes in other states when deeper disposal wells near the basement trigger stressed faults there.
“Candidly, this really is safe,” Mr. Wallace said. “We have a vested interest in making sure that our well functions as it’s intended, because that’s what we sell.”
He said the facility will also help provide stability to the shale gas industry, which must reuse, treat or dispose of the waste fluids that flow out with gas from its wells.
The Sedat well will be Penneco’s first commercial disposal well in Pennsylvania, but the company operates one in West Virginia and has about 900 production wells in the commonwealth.
The company plans to develop more disposal wells, but Mr. Wallace would not say how many or where.
Lauren Fraley, a spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, said state regulators had not received Penneco’s permit application as of Thursday morning. DEP will hold a public hearing on the well once it gets the application, she said.
The U.S. EPA also issued a permit on Wednesday to Seneca Resources Corp. to operate a second private disposal well in Highland Township, Elk County — half a mile from the first one permitted in the township in 2014. The community changed its form of local government in 2016 in an unsuccessful attempt to ban such wells.
Both the Penneco and Seneca permits are appealable to the EPA’s Environmental Appeals Board within 30 days.
Laura Legere: llegere@post-gazette.com.
First Published: March 8, 2018, 10:04 p.m.
