Drilling wastewater still a problem
NEW YORK — Pennsylvania’s natural gas drillers are still flushing vast quantities of contaminated wastewater into rivers that supply drinking water, despite major progress by the industry over the past year in curtailing the practice.
Under pressure from environmentalists and state officials, energy companies that have been drilling thousands of gas wells in the state’s countryside spent part of 2010 overhauling the way they handle the chemically tainted and sometimes radioactive water that gushes from the ground after a drilling technique known as high-volume hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.
Until the second half of last year, Pennsylvania had been the only state to allow most of this wastewater to be discharged into rivers after only partial treatment. Other states required most or all of the brine to be disposed of by injecting it deep underground.
In recent months, though, the industry has boasted big gains in the amount of well wastewater that is reused, rather than trucked to treatment plants that empty into rivers and streams.
New figures released by Pennsylvania regulators this week confirm many of those claims, showing that for the first time, a majority of well wastewater is now being recycled. But drilling in the vast, gas-rich rock formation known as the Marcellus Shale is growing so explosively that some of those gains are being erased by operators that still send their waste to plants that discharge into rivers.
Of the 10.6 million barrels of wastewater that gushed from the wells in the final six months of 2010, at least 65 percent was recycled, a dramatic increase from previous years, when little or no recycling took place. But the records also show that at least 2.8 million barrels of well wastewater were sent to treatment plants that discharge into rivers and streams.
By comparison, some 3.6 million barrels were sent to treatment plants during the 12-month period that ended on June 30. So even with the recycling effort ramping up tremendously, more tainted wastewater is being dumped into rivers now than was the case a year ago.
A total of 1,386 new gas wells were drilled in the state last year, up from 768 a year earlier. Thousands more well permits have been approved.
Even as it has made changes, the industry has argued that its original practice of sending most wastewater through partial treatment, and then into rivers, posed no danger to the environment or drinking water.
