The Pipeline web-site of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette is defined as “your source for Marcellus shale coverage.”   On June 26^th, the article by Torsten Ove is entitled “State says probation for wastewater dumper too lenient.”   Excerpts from this article are as follows:

The state has asked Greene County judge Farley Toothman to reconsider the probation sentence he imposed on a Robert Allan Shipman earlier this month for illegally dumping millions of gallons of wastewater across six counties, saying it was far too lenient to send a message that willfully polluting the environment is taken seriously in Pennsylvania.

Toothman sentenced Shipman, owner of Allan’s Waste Water Service, to seven years of probation and 1,750 hours of community service. The judge also ordered him to pay $257,316 in restitution, a $100,000 fine and another $25,000 to the attorney general’s office.

But prosecutors said Shipman deserved to go to jail and that the judge made errors in granting him leniency, including considering his charitable works, personal tragedy in his family and the fact that he has sold his company and cannot work in the wastewater business again.  Sentencing guidelines called for 16 months in prison.

In a motion for reconsideration, the Attorney General’s office noted that the judge said the case was a “clarion call” to all those who would pollute the state that such conduct will be punished. Probation does not meet the definition of a “clarion call,” the attorney general’s office said.  ”To the contrary,” wrote Amy Carnicella, a deputy attorney general, “a probationary sentence will have absolutely no deterrent effect and sends a clear message to the business community, including the oil and gas industry, that enforcement of environmental crimes is little more than the cost of doing business.”

Shipman pleaded guilty earlier this year to theft by deception, receiving stolen property, tampering with public records, conspiracy and other counts related to the illegal dumping.  The Attorney General’s office said he and his company orchestrated a scheme to dump gas drilling wastewater and sludge into streams and onto business properties in Allegheny, Fayette, Greene, Lawrence, Washington and Westmoreland counties between 2003 and 2009.

Earth Thirst: Solving the Freshwater Crisis

Scientific American has developed a web-site with a number of important articles dealing with the water crisis here in the United States. New approaches help keep our water supplies safe, but much remains to be done.

One of these articles is entitled “How can we cope with the dirty water from fracking?” The proposed methods include advanced membranes, unusual solvents and new drilling processes involving processing and recycling much of the contaminated water.

Of great concern is the disposal of contaminated water via deep-well injection.  This involves pumping large volumes of water under very high pressures down into the rock strata in various states.  Ohio has been taking incredible volumes of wastewater from Pennsylvania and West Virginia.  Some earthquakes have been caused by these methods.  But, there are other problems with this method.

Scientific American reports the following on deep-well injection:

More than 30 trillion gallons of toxic liquid deep into the earth, using broad expanses of the nation’s geology as an invisible dumping ground. Records from disparate corners of the United States show that wells drilled to bury this waste deep beneath the ground have repeatedly leaked, sending dangerous chemicals and waste gurgling to the surface or, on occasion, seeping into shallow aquifers that store a significant portion of the nation’s drinking water.

In 2010, contaminants from such a well bubbled up in a west Los Angeles dog park. Within the past three years, similar fountains of oil and gas drilling waste have appeared in Oklahoma and Louisiana. In South Florida, 20 of the nation’s most stringently regulated disposal wells failed in the early 1990s, releasing partly treated sewage into aquifers that may one day be needed to supply Miami’s drinking water.

There are more than 680,000 underground waste and injection wells nationwide, more than 150,000 of which shoot industrial fluids thousands of feet below the surface. Scientists and federal regulators acknowledge they do not know how many of the sites are leaking.

Several key experts acknowledged that the idea that injection is safe rests on science that has not kept pace with reality, and on oversight that doesn’t always work. “In 10 to 100 years we are going to find out that most of our groundwater is polluted,” said Mario Salazar, an engineer who worked for 25 years as a technical expert with the EPA’s underground injection program in Washington. “A lot of people are going to get sick, and a lot of people may die.”

“There is no certainty at all in any of this, and whoever tells you the opposite is not telling you the truth,’ said Stefan Finsterle, a leading hydrogeologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who specializes in understanding the properties of rock layers and modeling how fluid flows through them. “You have changed the system with pressure and temperature and fracturing, so you don’t know how it will behave.”

A ProPublica review of well records, case histories and government summaries of more than 220,000 well inspections found that structural failures inside injection wells are routine. From late 2007 to late 2010, one well integrity violation was issued for every six deep injection wells examined — more than 17,000 violations nationally. More than 7,000 wells showed signs that their walls were leaking. Records also show wells are frequently operated in violation of safety regulations and under conditions that greatly increase the risk of fluid leakage and the threat of water contamination.

Vienna Township, Ohio — About 20 residents of Trumbull County and surrounding areas gathered in prayer Saturday at a newly operating fracking wastewater injection well site.

According to event organizers from Ohio Fracktion, the service was designed “to pay respects to those who have died of cancer, who are experiencing neurological damage, who have chronic lesions on their skin, who have lost the ability to have children, and whose water has been poisoned by drilling chemicals or are forced to breathe the toxic airborne byproducts of hydrofracking.”

This gathering was held in solidarity with a global Day of Direct Action Against Extraction, and one of a series of events building momentum for the largest action against fracking in the country’s history, scheduled for June 17th in Columbus.

Reverend Monica Beasley-Martin of Liberty Township delivered a sermon at the well, leading residents in prayer and song. The Reverend spoke to humankind’s Biblical responsibility to act as guardians of the earth, and decried fracking and other forms of extraction: “We are allowing such things as tar sands extraction, off shore drilling, mountain top removal, and hydraulic fracturing, which is becoming increasingly popular locally, to destroy both the earth God created and one another.”

The Vienna township well is one of over 170 injection wells in Ohio receiving toxic fracking wastewater from as far away as Texas. Much of the frack wastewater from West Virginia is trucked to Ohio. Five injection wells in the Youngstown area have been shut down in the wake of a dozen earthquakes that were caused by injection at D&L’s Ohio Works Drive Well, including a 4.0 New Year’s Eve tremor.  The Ohio Division of Natural Resources (ODNR) concluded that injection of fracking waste was the cause of these quakes.

Reverend Beasley-Martin spoke to the earthquakes in her sermon: “The definition of insanity is to continue doing the same things, over and over, and over again, while expecting different results. What have these earthquakes taught the Ohio Department of Natural Resources? Apparently, absolutely nothing, because here we stand, at the site of yet another injection well, that ODNR insanely granted permission to be built.”

Fracking has been linked to cases of water contamination in towns across the country including Dimock, PA and Pavilion, WY, and methane emissions from drilling were the cause of a 2007 home explosion in Bainbridge, OH.  The gas industry is exempted from the Clean Water and Safer Drinking Water Acts and as a result, many of the chemicals used in drilling are unknown.  Yesterday, the Ohio State Senate approved industry-backed legislation that would gag doctors from sharing information about patients’ exposure to hydrofracking chemicals.

Residents who attended the service explained that they were concerned about impending development of fracking and injection wells near their homes and committed to taking action to stop fracking. “We are here because we refuse to be a sacrifice zone,” said John Williams, 55, of McDonald. “Companies like BP and Chesapeake depend on treating Ohio as their personal dump to keep their toxic operations running. It’s time for all of us to stand up and say no to poisoned water, polluted air, and manmade earthquakes.”

UPDATE: The sermon has received excellent local media coverage and is currently the top story on EcoWatch.

For more information see the OhioFracktion web-site and/or the EcoWatch web-site.

“JustBeneaththeSurfaceWV.com” is a web-site of the natural gas industry which has posted a slide presentation entitled Water Management and Marcellus Gas Development, by Paul Ziemkiewicz, PhD, Director, West Virginia Water Research Institute.  This covers the topics of water management including withdrawals, the management of returned frac water, produced water, disposal options and the effects on streams.

It is reported that the amount of Frac return water is ~10 to 20% of the amount injected. After 7 -10 days flow back is greatly reduced and is considered produced water.  Flow-back rates during first 7 –14 days may average 3,000 -5,000 barrels/day, declining rapidly to a few 100 bbl/day. Further decline is gradual, 10 to 20 b/day, after a few months. 

The total dissolved solids level in frac water is usually under 120,000 parts per million.  This sometimes contains  acrylamide copolymer, also known as polyacrylamide which has been reported to contain small concentrations of acrylamide (which is toxic). Sulfate is normally added to precipitate insoluble BaSO4 and SrSO4.  Radium salts can also be rendered insoluble as radium sulfate.

CONCLUSIONS Regarding Returned Frac Fluid:

Chemistry: Generally neutral to alkaline; Primarily sodium, calcium, chloride (about 95% of TDS); Magnesium, strontium and barium in lesser amounts; Volatile/non-volatile organic compounds in varying concentrations

Environmental/health and safety: Primary environmental issue: salinity; Primary human health issue: organics; ‘You don’t want to drink fracing fluid’

Management: Water managers must keep it out of streams and drinking water supplies; Treatment-STPs, Evaporation, deep well injection; Recycling

A wastewater disposal well in the Youngstown area of northeast Ohio almost certainly caused 11 minor earthquakes since last spring, a seismologist investigating the quakes said on January 2^nd.  

Research is continuing on the now-shut injection well at Youngstown and seismic activity, but it might take a year for the wastewater-related rumblings in the earth to dissipate, said John Armbruster of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y. Injection wells have also been suspected in quakes in Astabula in far northeast Ohio, and in Arkansas, Colorado, and Oklahoma, Armbruster said.

The earthquake on Saturday at 4.0 magnitude involves a fault line where enough pressure created seismic activity. Armbruster said Monday he expects more quakes will occur despite the shutdown of the Youngstown well.  “The earthquakes will trickle on as a kind of a cascading process once you’ve caused them to occur,” he said. “This one year of pumping is a pulse that has been pushed into the ground, and it’s going to be spreading out for at least a year.”

The Ohio Governor said 177 deep injection wells have operated without incident in Ohio for decades and the Youngstown well was closed within 24 hours of a study detailing how close this recent quake was to the well. The industry-supported Ohio Oil and Gas Association said the rash of quakes was “a rare and isolated event that should not cast doubt about the effectiveness” of injection wells. Such wells “have been used safely and reliably as a disposal method for wastewater from oil and gas operations in the U.S. since the 1930s,” the association’s executive vice president, Thomas E. Stewart, said in a statement Monday.

Permits allowing hydraulic fracturing in Ohio’s portion of the Marcellus shale and the deeper Utica Shale formations rose from one in 2006 to at least 32 in 2011.

Anadarko, which is drilling extensively on state forest land in Pennsylvania, decided last year to convert all its Marcellus operations into closed-loop systems, eliminating pits and collecting debris in steel containers that are carted to landfills. It also received state permission to dig up the buried cuttings from about a dozen wells it already had drilled. “We want to say we haven’t buried anything here,” said Steve Woelfel, Anadarko’s drilling-operations manager in Appalachia. “It always could be a risk. It could come back to you.”

Anadarko says the closed-loop system is part of a broader “no-spill” strategy aimed at keeping all materials contained during the drilling process. Said Scott Chesebro, Anadarko’s engineering manager for Appalachian operations: “Nothing we bring to the surface touches the ground.”

In some states, operators dispose of drilling debris by plowing it into fields, a practice known as “land-farming.” Other “beneficial uses” include using cuttings on gravel roads or mixing them with asphalt as paving material. Jamie Legenos, a spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, said the state had received no formal requests for “beneficial uses” of drill cuttings.

Natural gas drilling has aroused such ardent opposition (in northeast Pennsylvania) that even disposing of cuttings at approved landfills has raised alarms, forcing landfill operators to assure local officials that all incoming waste is tested for radioactivity and hazardous materials.  See the news article here.

Congresswoman Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) is one of the 32 congressional representatives who comprise the bipartisan Natural Gas Caucus.  Capito and her Caucus colleagues signed a Jan. 5th letter to Department of the Interior Secretary Ken Salazar indicating opposition to regulation of the natural gas industry being considered by the Department of the Interior.  One of the arguments in the letter is that the industry is “properly managed and regulated at the state level”.  An analysis of campaign contributions showed that in total the 32 members of this group of reps received $1,742,572 from the gas industry.  Shelley Moore Capito received $49,900 from the gas industry in campaign contributions.

Pro Publica reports that a week later, 46 House Democrats followed up by signing a letter to Salazar urging him to at least adopt the disclosure requirement (for fracking chemicals used in wells on federal lands)because, as Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-N.Y., said, “communities across America have seen their water contaminated by the chemicals used in the hydraulic fracturing process.”

“The public has a right to know what toxins might be going into the ground near their communities, and what might be leaking into their drinking water,” said the letter, which was sent by the three initial sponsors of now-stalled legislation to regulate fracturing (Frac Act), Hinchey, Rep. Jared Polis, D-Colo., and Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo.

Pro Publica story: Opponents to Fracking Disclosure Take Big Money from Industry