Pa. allows dumping of tainted waters from gas boom
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Jim Riggio, plant manager for the Beaver Falls Municipal Authority, shows a sample of solid materials removed from the Beaver River during treatment Dec. 15 at his plant. -
Cecil Griffith, right, maintenance supervisor for the Beaver Falls (Pa.) Municipal Authority, and Jim Riggio, plant manager, watch the bubbler at one of the intake gates on the Beaver River at the authority's water treatment plant Dec. 15. Their water began flunking tests for trihalomethanes regularly last year, around the time that a facility 18 miles upstream became Pennsylvania's dominant gas wastewater treatment plant.
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The natural gas boom gripping parts of the United States has a nasty byproduct: wastewater so salty, and so polluted with metals like barium and strontium, that most states require drillers to get rid of the stuff by injecting it down shafts thousands of feet deep.
But not in Pennsylvania, one of the states at the center of the gas rush. In Pennsylvania, the liquid that gushes from gas wells is only partially treated for substances that could be environmentally harmful, then dumped into rivers and streams from which communities get their drinking water.
In the two years since the frenzy of activity began in the vast underground rock formation known as the Marcellus Shale, Pennsylvania has been the only state letting its waterways serve as the primary disposal place for huge amounts of wastewater produced by a drilling technique called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. State regulators, initially caught flat-footed, tightened the rules this year for any new water treatment plants, but let existing operations continue discharging water into rivers.
At least 3.6 million barrels of the waste were sent to treatment plants that empty into rivers during the 12 months ending June 30, state records show. That's enough to cover a square mile with more than 8 1/2 inches of brine.
Researchers are still trying to figure out whether Pennsylvania's river discharges, at their current levels, are dangerous to humans or wildlife. Several studies are under way, some under federal Environmental Protection Agency auspices.
State officials, energy firms and treatment plant operators insist that with the right safeguards in place, the practice poses little or no risk to the environment or the hundreds of thousands of people, especially in Western Pennsylvania, who rely on the rivers for drinking water.
But an Associated Press review found that Pennsylvania's efforts to minimize, control and track wastewater discharges have sometimes failed.
For example:
• Of roughly 6 million barrels of well liquids produced in a 12-month period The Associated Press examined, the state couldn't account for the disposal method for 1.28 million barrels, about one-fifth of the total, due to a weakness in its reporting system and incomplete filings by some energy firms.
• Some public water utilities downstream from big gas wastewater treatment plants have struggled to stay under the federal maximum for contaminants known as trihalomethanes, which can cause cancer if swallowed over a long period.
• Regulations that should have kept drilling wastewater out of the important Delaware River Basin, the water supply for 15 million people in four states, were circumvented for many months.
The situation in Pennsylvania is being watched carefully by regulators in other states, some of which have begun allowing some river discharges. New York also sits over the Marcellus Shale, but former Gov. David Paterson slapped a moratorium on high-volume fracking while environmental regulations are drafted.
First Published January 4, 2011 12:00 am
