Fracking Wastes Fill WV Landfills Under New Rule

From the Article by Matthew Barakat, Houston Chronicle, December 7, 2013

McLEAN, Va. (AP) — A memo released quietly by regulators earlier this year has carved a major loophole in West Virginia’s rules restricting the amount of waste that can be accepted by the state’s landfills, all with the intent to ease a burgeoning problem caused by the boom in gas drilling, environmentalists say.

The new rule specifies that landfills can accept unlimited amounts of solid waste from horizontal gas drilling, more commonly known as hydraulic fracturing or fracking. The rule carves out an exception to a decades-old state law that limited landfills’ intake to only 10,000 or 30,000 tons a month, depending on their classification.

In the industry, the drilling waste is called “drill cuttings,” a sludgy mix of dirt, water, sand and chemicals dredged up in the drilling process.

While much of the environmental concern over fracking has been focused on groundwater or air pollution, little attention has been paid to solid waste.

But the new rules in West Virginia, announced to landfill owners in a July 26 memo from the state’s Department of Environmental Protection, are further proof of the boom in drilling on the Marcellus Shale, a resource-rich rock formation running under Pennsylvania, Ohio and parts of West Virginia that has become one of the most productive gas drilling fields in the world thanks to fracking technology.

West Virginia passed legislation in 2011 that requires the drill cuttings from fracking operations to be disposed of in a landfill, but the law made no provision for generating extra landfill capacity.

Tom Aluise, spokesman for the Department of Environmental Protection, said the new rules are the best way to accommodate two conflicting laws: one that strictly regulates the intake of solid waste and one that requires massive amounts of waste to be disposed of in landfills.

“This is not a carte blanche, unrestricted ‘exception’ to the tonnage limits,” Aluise said in an email. He noted that the DEP is requiring landfills to build a separate cell for the drill cuttings, or to seek a new permit to upgrade from a Class B to a Class A landfill, which is allowed to accept larger amounts of waste.

Still, environmentalists see the new rule as obliterating the state’s carefully crafted rules on trash intake. And they say it’s being done for an industry that has a dubious environmental record.

Norm Steenstra, a legislative coordinator with West Virginia Citizen Action Group, said fracking waste is a particular concern because of its radioactivity. Studies by the U.S. Geological Survey have shown that Marcellus Shale happens to have higher levels of naturally occurring radioactivity than other shale formations, though there is great dispute as to whether the levels are potentially harmful to humans.

“Radioactivity is the gift that keeps on giving,” Steenstra said.

Issues revolving around fracking affect primarily the northern part of the state, under which the Marcellus shale formation runs. Six landfills in the state currently accept drill cuttings, according to the DEP, concentrated in and around the northern Panhandle.

In Wetzel County, on the border with southwestern Pennsylvania, a landfill once authorized to accept only 9,999 tons of solid waste each month took in more than 40,000 tons in October, according to the county’s Solid Waste Authority. roughly 75 percent of the volume was from drill cutting.

Ryan Inch, director of engineering at the Wetzel landfill and three others owned by J.P. Mascaro and Sons in Audubon, Pa., said he believes the concerns about radiation are a nonissue. In Pennsylvania, where landfills are required to monitor all incoming trash for radiation, he said his landfills have accepted nearly 2,500 truckloads of drill cuttings, and that only one triggered radiation detectors, finding levels just twice the level of background radiation.

He said it’s far more common for the detectors to be set off due to byproducts from nuclear medicine: if a someone blows their nose after receiving a radioactive dye injection as part of a medical test, for instance.

Inch also disputes that the July memo from the state gives landfills any more leeway than they already had. He said West Virginia law has always made an exception for drill cuttings, and they are not defined as “solid waste” under state law, and said the July memo merely clarifies the status quo.

Bill Hughes — chairman of the Wetzel County Solid Waste Authority, which is opposing the landfill’s expansion to accommodate fracking waste — insists drill cuttings are regulated under the solid waste law. He said he is also concerned about radiation and that the state needs to independently investigate whether the drill cuttings pose a public health risk. Unlike Pennsylvania, West Virginia does not require testing waste for radioactivity.

“Landfills have never seen a ton of waste they don’t want to take,” Hughes said. “Our state just sort of trusts the garbage guys.”

Corky Demarco, executive director of the West Virginia Oil and Natural Gas Association, said he believes the complaints about landfills are just a backdoor way of trying to rein in fracking operations.

“They’ve tried water and air, and that hasn’t worked” for environmentalists, Demarco said. “Now they’re going after the drill cuttings.”

Arbitration Possible for Hydrofracking Dispute

Shell Oil Co. has announced plans to develop an ethane cracker making the plastic feedstock ethylene — and possibly downstream polyethylene units — at an undisclosed location in Appalachia, which includes parts of Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio. In a June 6 news release, officials with Houston-based Shell said polyethylene (PE) is “the leading option” for downstream derivative choices. They described PE as “an important raw material for countless everyday items” and added that most of the resulting PE production will be used by Northeastern industries.

Shell Oil President Marvin Odum said, “With this investment, we would use feedstock from Marcellus to locally produce chemicals for the region and create more American jobs. A cracker and derivatives complex “typically takes at least five years to build, from the early definition of the project to being on-stream.”

It’s possible Shell would want to work with international firms that have been eyeing the North American market — such as Saudi Basic Industries Corp. of Saudi Arabia or Brazil’s Braskem SA — to develop new PE sites. Other firms such as Dow Chemical Co. and Westlake Chemical Corp. have announced ethylene expansions to take advantage of the new natural gas, but Shell is the first to place such a project in the Northeast. The Shell project would be the first new ethylene cracker to be built in North America since 2001.

Shell owns or leases the natural gas rights for 700,000 gross acres in the Marcellus. Most of that acreage is in Pennsylvania, which makes it likely the new cracker would be located there. The firm operates an office in Warrendale, Pa., about 30 miles north of Pittsburgh, and employs almost 250 in natural-gas-related businesses across Pennsylvania. In July, Shell acquired East Resources Inc., a Warrendale-based oil and gas supplier.

Among those who follow plastics and chemicals markets, reaction to Shell’s big news was mixed. One observer who was less than thrilled with the announcement was Emily Wurth, water policy director for Food & Water Watch, a non-profit organization in Washington. Wurth’s group and other environmental organizations have questioned the hydraulic fracturing process — know as “fracking” — used to access shale gas because of the possibility of groundwater contamination. “We have a lot of concerns about the new technologies around fracking and the risk it poses,” Wurth said in a phone interview. “There’s a risk to public health and to the environment.”

After an improper casing on one of Chesapeake Energy’s Marcellus wells led to the contamination of private water supplies for 16 families in Bradford County, Pa in 2010, and a tank fire injured three workers in February, Pennsylvania DEP has charged the company with the largest single fine it has ever issued to an oil and gas driller– nearly $1.1 million.  In addition to the fines, the families affected by these incidents are pursuing legal action.  The contamination of the Bradford County wells with methane and the fine imposed are unrelated to the recent  blowout of a Chesapeake well and the stream contamination related to that event in the same county.  This announcement comes only days after Chesapeake Energy declared that it would resume hydraulic fracturing in Pennsylvania, having voluntarily suspending operations for three weeks in response to a blowout in Bradford County.  This incident, along with the recent Duke study linking hydraulic fracturing to groundwater contamination, have caused Congress to create a new panel to evaluate the safety of hydraulic fracturing.  Set up by the US Department of Energy, the panel will present its preliminary recommendations to Congress in 90 days.