Drinking Water Dilemma: Barging Oil and Gas Waste on the Ohio River

From an Article by Robin Blakeman and Sarah Carballo, Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, July 30, 2020

A new threat recently emerged for communities along the Ohio River.

Three barge docks are proposed to be built along the river to transport oil and gas waste from horizontal and vertical fracking operations. The projects, if approved, could result in the first barges carrying briny fracking wastes on the Ohio River.

The terminals would be developed by 4K Industrial Frac Water Supply and Recycling Technologies in Martins Ferry, DeepRock Disposal Solutions about 61 miles downstream at Marietta, and by Fountain Quail Energy Services about 38 miles downstream from Marietta in Meigs County, Ohio.

According to Dr. Randi Pokladnik, a retired research chemist and volunteer with the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition (OVEC), these operations pose a substantial risk for the Ohio River — the primarily tap water source for approximately five million people.

“Citizens have every right to be concerned about yet another threat to their drinking water,” says Dr. Pokladnik. “A quick glance of the Environmental Working Group’s (EWG) data collected from public drinking water suppliers along the Ohio River reveals that all public drinking water sources along the river have pollutants that in many cases exceed the EWG health standards and in some cases exceed federal standards.”

Based on current regulations, it is unclear what agencies would be tasked with responding to potential spills as a result of these new barging operations, and whether or not those agencies would be able to work together successfully to address the environmental and public health hazards associated with these pollutants.

Even worse, many public water treatment facilities are not equipped to filter out the contaminants if this conventional and unconventional oil and gas waste is spilled in the Ohio River. For example, some contaminants, such as radioactive chemicals in water, can only be removed using very specific techniques that are not currently utilized by most public water treatment facilities in our region.

In response to requests and comments from concerned citizens, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has scheduled a virtual public hearing on Friday, August 7, for the DeepRock barge dock near Marietta, Ohio.

To prepare for the public hearing, an online informational session will be hosted on Monday, August 3, by the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition and other partners across the region. For more information about the issue or how to attend the public hearing, check out THIS ARTICLE from OVEC or contact robin@ohvec.org.

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See also: GREEN NEWS, WV Environmental Council, Volume 30 Issue 13 — https://wvecouncil.org/green-volume-30-issue-13/

A rolling stone gathers no moss or frack sand ...

Presentation by Justin Nobel, Science Journalist (Rolling Stone Magazine), West Union, WV, January 22, 2020

On Wednesday, January 22, 2020, Justin Nobel, Science Journalist writing for the Rolling Stone will hold an informational meeting regarding the radioactive risks associated with the oil and gas industry at the Doddridge County Senior Center in West Union, WV.

Justin has spent the past 20 months reporting on the issue of the radioactivity brought to the surface in oil and gas production, and the many different pathways of contamination posed to the industry’s workers, the public, communities, and the environment. Justin’s story is due out in the February issue of Rolling Stone magazine, and he is also writing a book on the topic to be published with Simon & Schuster and tentatively titled: Petroleum-238: Big Oil’s Dangerous Secret and the Grassroots Fight to Stop It.

“I have uncovered never-before-released early reports from the oil and gas industry that highlight the radioactivity problem and its risks to workers and the public, and also been led to a set of recent court cases linking oil and gas worker deaths from cancer to radioactivity on the job. What is scary is that although these workers often worked their jobs for many years, these aren’t necessarily specialized jobs, these documents reveal that everyday oil and gas work such as that of a derrickman, roughneck, or truck driver involve considerable exposure to radioactive materials and can lead to cancer.”

Justin has also spent months gaining access to present-day workers in the Marcellus and Utica, some of them have been stealthily capturing samples of the waste they haul, and have taken great risks to share their information with him. Justin’s reporting, involving hundreds of interviews with scientists, environmentalists, state regulators and industry workers, has also revealed shocking public health risks that our federal and state regulators appear to have ignored.

Radioactivity is present in a number of different types of oil and gas waste, from brine, to sludges and scales generated at the wellhead and in downstream industry equipment such as pipelines, compressor stations, natural gas processing plants, and ethane cracker plants. The disposal of this waste presents dangers at every step from being trucked along Americas highways in unmarked vehicles; handled by workers who are misinformed and left unprotected by its dangers; leaked into waterways; stored in municipal dumps that are not equipped to contain the toxicity; and even used in household commercial products that have been sold at hardware stores and still are spread on local roads.

This is important information, and it is information all should hear — We ask that concerned residents, industry workers and their families, policy makers and anyone else in the community please feel free to attend.

Please join us for this important presentation on Wednesday, January 22, 2020 from 6:00 to 7:30 PM, at the Doddridge County Senior Center, 403 West Main Street, West Union, West Virginia.

Event Organizer: Mirijana Beram, miri_beram@yahoo.com
See also: Doddridge County Watershed Association

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See also: The Hidden Risk in the Fracking Boom – Rolling Stone, 2/2/19 — Are pipeline safety regulations keeping pace with the flood of natural gas?

See also: Fracking Increases Risk of Asthma, Birth Defects and Cancer – Rolling Stone, 3/13/18 — The most authoritative study of its kind reveals how fracking is contaminating the air and water – and imperiling the health of millions of Americans

Flares burn excess natural gas & pollute the air

From an Article by Justin Nobel, Rolling Stone Magazine, March 13, 2018

Photo: Flares burning at fracking industry site on federal land near Counselor, New Mexico, where environmental groups and indigenous people are fighting back against the expansion of the fracking industry.

The most authoritative study of its kind reveals how fracking is contaminating the air and water – and imperiling the health of millions of Americans

“Our examination…uncovered no evidence that fracking can be practiced in a manner that does not threaten human health,” states a blistering 266-page report released today by Concerned Health Professionals of New York and the Nobel Peace Prize-winning group, Physicians for Social Responsibility. Drawing on news investigations, government assessments and more than 1,200 peer-reviewed research articles, the study finds that fracking – shooting chemical-laden fluid into deep rock layers to release oil and gas – is poisoning the air, contaminating the water and imperiling the health of Americans across the country. “Fracking is the worst thing I’ve ever seen,” says Dr. Sandra Steingraber, one of the report’s eight co-authors, a biologist who has worked as a public health advocate on issues like breast cancer and toxic incinerators. “Those of us in the public health sector started to realize years ago that there were potential risks, then the industry rolled out faster than we could do our science.” In recent years, the practice has expanded from rural lands to backyards, farms, and within sight of schools and sources of drinking water. “Now we see those risks have turned into human harms and people are getting sick,” says Steingraber. “And we in this field have a moral imperative to raise the alarm.”

The researchers behind the report, titled “Compendium of Scientific, Medical and Media Findings Demonstrating Risks and Harms of Fracking,” are quick to point out that fracking, or “unconventional oil and gas extraction,” extends far beyond the idea of a single well obediently gurgling up natural gas or oil. Fracking is part of a complicated extraction process with a spider web of infrastructure that extends many miles from the well pad. At virtually every turn, the process contains public health hazards. Residents living near an active site breathe air laced with carcinogens, including benzene and formaldehyde, and research has shown an increased risk of asthma, a decrease in infant health and worrisome effects on the development of a fetus, such as preterm births and birth defects. “Pregnant women have a major risk, not only themselves but they’re carrying a fetus whose cells are multiplying continuously,” says Dr. Lynn Ringenberg, a retired Army colonel and the president-elect of Physicians for Social Responsibility. “If those cells get hit by some toxic chemical from fracking, it may not manifest itself for years.”

Fracking sites have caught fire – others have exploded, as happened last month in Belmont County, Ohio – torching chemicals whose dangerous components local fire chiefs may be surprised to learn are an industry secret. Communities have long feared the fracking process can contaminate underground aquifers with hazardous chemicals and research in Texas and Pennsylvania has now confirmed this to be the case. Fracked gas flows via pipelines, whose leaks and explosions are now well-documented. Piped gas must continuously be re-pressurized at compressor stations which have been documented to emit methane, fine particulate matter, as well as benzene, formaldehyde and other known human carcinogens. Report co-author Dr. Kathleen Nolan, a pediatrician and bioethicist who has examined numerous people sickened by fracking-related contamination, describes the harrowing case of one western Pennsylvania family. “They would see a yellow fog, kind of like a chemical mist coming from the compressor station,” says Nolan. “Their two youngest children, nine and 11, started having tics where their muscles would go into spasms, those spasms would persist even when they were asleep.”

Then there’s the issue of the waste that flows back up a fracked well. Although the industry calls it “brine” or “produced water,” this material contains carcinogenic chemicals, can be flammable and, in much of the country, also contains radioactive elements from deep below the surface. Occasionally, this toxic waste is used to frack new wells. Often, it is hauled by trucks that must weave around narrow local roads to sites called injection wells, where this hazardous slurry is injected deep into the earth, a process that has repeatedly been linked to earthquakes. In 2016, in Barnesville, Ohio a truck spilled approximately 5,000 gallons of fracking wastewater when it crashed beside a stream that leads into one of the village’s main reservoirs.

Last November a truck carrying fracking waste overturned near Coolville, Ohio and emptied fluid into a culvert that connects to a creek. Residents were prepared; they’d been living for years with the menace of injection wells, including what resident Susie Quinn calls a “chemical factory like smell” around their homes. Like many in the region, she spends free time researching risks the industry and her own government have failed to protect her against. More than a week after the frack truck overturned, she visited the site to take samples, but forgot gloves. “About an hour and twenty minutes later all the fingers on my left hand were burning underneath my fingernails,” says Quinn. Tests later revealed the culvert was loaded with barium, as well as strontium, whose isotopes can be radioactive.

In West Virginia and Pennsylvania, radioactive fracking waste is being processed at facilities like Antero Clearwater in Doddridge County, West Virginia, which claims it can produce water clean enough to be discharged back into nearby local waterways. But Antero’s website contains scant details on how this is done, and radioactivity experts, like Dr. Marvin Resnikoff, a nuclear physicist and international consultant on radioactive waste, remain concerned. “The radioactive levels at the Marcellus shale formation are off the charts,” he says, referring to the gas-rich layer that underlies much of West Virginia and Pennsylvania. “What is radioactive underground is still radioactive when it’s brought to the surface,” says Resnikoff. “This is not alchemy where radioactivity disappears.” A tour last February with local residents through heavily-fracked Doddridge County revealed Antero’s facility, located just six miles from Doddridge County High School, was emitting tremendous amounts of steam that drifted away in the wind. “There may be radioactive elements in the steam,” says Resnikoff.

The “Harms of Fracking” report also highlights astonishing risks for an often overlooked group in the public health discussion on fracking: The workers. Fracking has created 1.7 million jobs, says the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the industry has potentially exposed workers on the ground to extremely dangerous conditions. “These are killing jobs,” says report co-author Dr. Sandra Steingraber. “We have actually detected benzene in the urine of workers at levels known to raise the risks of leukemia.” Dr. Pouné Saberi, a Philadelphia-based occupational and environmental medicine physician says workers face a wealth of risks, but their injuries rarely show up in the data, for a variety of reasons. They often work as non-unionized sub-contractors, allowing parent oil and gas companies to avoid reporting injuries, and the oil and gas industry is exempt from certain worker safety rules. Also, doctors and major Pennsylvania health care providers that service the industry, potentially a valuable source of worker data, says Saberi, rarely mention anything negative about fracking. “There is a code of silence that exists,” she says. Plus, workers themselves rarely report injuries or hazards, for fear of losing their jobs.

“If you asked too many questions, you were labeled a tree-hugger and you were gone,” says former fracking waste truck driver Randy Moyer, who describes his stomach-turning experience on a website called Shalefield Stories. “Every day was different,” he writes. “Some days I’d carry mud, but most days I’d haul wastewater from fracked wells…It was an endless parade of trucks on those back roads.” Moyer was never told the contents of the waste he was hauling. At the well-site, waste was kept in a makeshift pit, and when loading his truck Moyer often had to climb in and squeegee out material. To avoid getting their boots wet, “some guys would go in there in their bare feet.” Moyer was given no safety gear, aside from a flame-resistant coat, because, he explains, “If the public sees guys in hazmat suits they’re going to start to ask questions.” As one would anticipate from a human being with direct exposure to radioactive waste, Moyer became quite sick.

“My tongue, lips, and limbs all swelled up,” he writes. “I’ve had three teeth snap off. The first two broke while I was eating garlic bread and spaghetti. I have burning rashes all over my body that jump from place to place.” Moyer has seen over 40 specialists across West Virginia and Pennsylvania. “One told me that I had bed bugs. Another said it must be a food allergy.”

The report, which is in its fifth edition, flips the narrative on an energy rush that is quite literally powering the nation. Fracking has “bolstered our economy and energy security” says Seth Whitehead, a consultant with Energy in Depth, a website affiliated with the Independent Petroleum Association of America. The numbers bear out: Fossil fuels supply the U.S. with a majority of its electricity, and gas has overtaken coal as America’s number one power source. Meanwhile, about 60 percent of the gas produced in America and 48 percent of the oil now comes from unconventional oil and gas deposits. Fracking has helped ease America off foreign fossil fuels. And the boom extends far beyond the well pads.

Ethane, one of many components in fracked gas, serves as the base ingredient for the production of numerous plastics and petrochemicals. On the Gulf Coast, these industries are making big investments in infrastructure to take advantage of America’s newly abundant cheap gas. “With more than $35 billion in planned chemical plant expansions in our area over the next five years, these are the ‘good old days,’” Chad Burke, President of the Economic Alliance Houston Ship Channel Region, posted on the organization’s website. The American Chemistry Council bullishly estimates that over the next decade the plastics industry will generate over 300,000 jobs. “The surge of natural gas production from shale has reversed the fortunes of the U.S. plastics industry,” states a 2015 Council report.

But these glowing numbers rarely take into account the fracking boom’s epic toll on public health, the American landscape and the world’s climate. In fact, against a mounting pile of personal testimony and scientific data, the industry continues to claim it is doing nothing wrong. “The science clearly indicates that, with an emphasis on prevention…energy production can and is being done right, and that hydraulic fracturing is not leading to widespread, systemic effects to drinking water resources,” Stephanie Wissman, an Executive Director with the American Petroleum Institute, stated at a recent meeting of the Delaware River Basin Commission. “It’s sad,” Marcellus Shale Coalition spokesperson Erica Clayton Wright wrote in an email, “that some shoddy so-called ‘studies’ focused on attacking American energy and the tens of thousands of hardworking Pennsylvanians that work across the industry are the subject of fake news stories like these.”

But the science on fracking is getting more difficult to dismiss. “With fracking,” says Steingraber, “we had six peer reviewed articles in 2009 pointing to possible public health risks. By 2011 we had 42. Now there are more than 1200.” Some states are indeed listening to the scientists. New York, Maryland and Vermont have banned fracking, and even Florida’s state legislature is seriously considering a ban. “The chickens are going to come home to roost,” says Ted Auch, an environmental scientist with FracTracker Alliance. He believes that as negative impacts on health and water supplies continue to stack up, the fracking industry will have an increasingly difficult time gaining investors, an issue highlighted in a December article in the Wall Street Journal. “Shale has been a lousy bet for most investors,” the article states, referring to the deposits where fracking typically occurs. Within the past decade, says the Journal article, “energy companies…have spent $280 billion more than they generated from operations on shale investments.”

As a result, many companies have taken extreme measures to politically protect their investments. Last month, Wyoming became the third state, after Iowa and Ohio, to introduce a bill criminalizing protest activities like the ones undertaken at Standing Rock. “It is a war,” says Tina Smusz, a retired emergency medicine and palliative care physician and Virginia-based member of Physicians for Social Responsibility. “And in this war one of your most valuable weapons is science.”

Marcellus Shale under Electron Microscope

Studying the contaminated water that comes up from fracking

Essay by S. Tom Bond, Retired Chemistry Professor and Resident Farmer, Lewis County, WV

Slick water hydraulic fracturing, as most readers know, is using water solutions to break shale rock far below the earth’s surface, so that gas from pores containing oil and gas may be mobilized and brought to the surface.

The pores are very irregular in shape and size, ranging from a micrometer to a few hundreds of micrometers in dimensions, the size of a typical bacterium to the diameter of a human hair.

Pressures used at the surface are typically are up to 10,000 pounds per inch (psi), and at the depth the shale being fractured, more by the weight of the column of fracking liquid, which frequently goes than a mile down. At one mile down, if the fracking solution has the density of water (and it would usually be more) the pressure would be up to 12,280 psi. Over six tons to the square inch!

As the reader knows, temperature goes up as the depth increases, and the temperature is about 180 Fahrenheit at that depth. You don’t get far into chemistry without learning that solubility of substances is different, usually greater, at elevated temperature. Pressure also affects solubility, very much for gases, but usually somewhat less than for temperature. A particularly important pressure effect in drilling involves calcium sulfate, which precipitates out on the way up. Other solubility effects may be involved at these extreme pressures.

So, at this point, you and I have these understandings: the pores are very tiny and irregular, and the solubility of compounds is different at the bottom of the hole. Let’s add one more, it takes about ten barrels of water to produce one barrel of oil or gas energy equivalent to a barrel of oil.

All the solution that goes down the hole, in the order of 4.4 million gallons (105,000 barrels), more or less, since individual wells vary a lot, does not come back up when the pressure is allowed to drop. What does is called “flowback,” and amounts to 20 per cent, again more or less, while the rest stays in the ground. What comes up has the chemicals in it that went down, diminished in quantity by reactions below, plus such chemicals as result from the reaction and what chemicals will dissolve out of the formation quickly.

Flowback occurs for a few days, diminishing to a smaller constant flow. This smaller flow lasts the productive life of the well, some 7 or 8 years, and is called “produced water.” Produced water is more strongly influenced by what dissolves in water underground, and in time includes more water in the formation which has been there for millions of years.

Solutions that come up, flowback and produced water, usually go in the same holding pit, which is lined with one or two layers of 60 mil polyethylene plastic.

What we call fracking sprang from the ground full grown like the fierce warriors which from dragon’s teeth sown by Cadmus in Ancient Greek mythology.

This is very much unlike other large scale chemical industry operations. It did not go through a pilot plant stage and scale up stage, with careful analysis of effluents by chemists. Diverse entrepreneurs tried it with the old mixtures used in vertical fracking, with additives they thought might be helpful. No doubt salesmen from suppliers played a far more important part in drillers choices than engineers.

There is an illustration of the quantity of chemicals used in a typical well in Beaver County, Pennsylvania here. The quantity of chemicals shown is 757 barrels, including 373 barrels of “mystery chemicals,” so called because the identity is not known to the public. The reason given to the public and regulators is that this is “proprietary information.” It would give competitors an advantage if they could use them, too. The reader can take that claim as he/she sees fit.

So, here we are, a decade after fracking appeared to be heading for the big time, wondering what those “mystery chemicals” are. And wondering what else, and how much of it comes up with water from the deep. An important recent contribution to the question of what comes up that originates from the shale formation is an article titled “Scientists seek more data on existing water in shale formations,” located here.

The article is concerned with the composition of the water in the formation (really, what is dissolved in it) before fracking and thus can come to the surface. The reason for studying this “super-salty liquid with elevated levels of heavy metals, radium and other chemicals” is to “lead to safer disposal options and other actions to protect public health and the environment,” according to the article’s author.

Is there such a need? There certainly is. This “brine” has been eagerly sought by some road authorities as a dust suppressant and for a wintertime de-icer. “Brine” is widely understood by many people to be a salt (sodium chloride, ordinary table salt) solution. The fact is that chemists use “brine” for a a large category of compounds, not just one. Salts are the product of reaction between metals and highly non-metallic elements. Some are harmless and some are poisonous. Soluble barium compounds, some times present in these waters, are very poisonous.

The reader hardly needs to be warned about radioactivity. “Acceptable” levels of radiation have declined dramatically from when I first became aware of the “acceptable” concept in the 1950′s while an instructor at the Army Chemical Corps training school. I will predict they will decline further in the future.

An immense class of poisonous compounds is known, both organic and salts, that are called “endocrine disrupters”, but hardly recognized in formal toxicology. The endocrine glands are the ductless glands of the body, such as the pituitary gland, the thymus, the thyroid and parathyroid, the adrenal gland and many others. Their hormones go directly to the blood, in very small amounts, as with various body processes. Frequently they control other glands which produce far larger quantities of hormones.

Due to the small amount of hormone produced by these glands, a very small amount of disrupting toxins is needed to destroy their function, and disrupt body processes. These compounds, because they are present in such small quantities are difficult to analyze and study. Often, the amount required is near the limit of chemical detection.

“So to be able to understand all these things, we really need to understand the natural formation water,” says Madalyn Blondes of the United States Geological Survey, quoted in the article. The change from “flowback” water to “produced” water over time makes determining the composition of the water originally in the formation particularly difficult. Knowledge of composition also improves drilling efficiency by reducing “salting out” (deposition of solids, such as calcium sulfate) in drilling equipment.

Water in the shale formation started out as ancient sea water, which became more concentrated as the water evaporated. Some of what is there today exists in pores of the shale or surrounding formations and other could have been precipitated into the rock, but is re-dissolved by the fracking solution. Taras Bryndzia, a geologist with Shell International Exploration and Production, Inc., says of his research: “This data also showed that some brine could come from an adjacent layer.” Brian Stewart, a geologist at the University of Pittsburgh believes, “Indeed, it would be unlikely for the Marcellus shale layer to be the source for all of the produced water.” They have analyzed drill cuttings from the State of New York. “There’s not enough salt or water in those pores to really explain the super salty water that comes back,” Stewart said.

Stewart acknowledges the possibility of cracks outside the shale layer and even to the level of shallower wells above, but thinks contamination of ground water is from improperly functioning new well with leaks near the surface.

Fracking has been developed largely through trial and error by entrepreneurs. Let us hope more and more science, including solution chemistry and toxicology, can be applied as soon as possible.

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Impoundments Create Public Risks

Environmentalists Call for New Study of Fracking Radiation

From an Article by Andrea Sears, Public News Service PA, December 24, 2015

Radium 226 found in fracking waste has a half-life of 1,600 years. (Delaware Riverkeeper Network)

Bristol, PA – Environmentalists say a state study of radiation in waste from gas drilling is inaccurate and incomplete. The PA Department of Environmental Protection study found little cause for concern about radioactive materials in waste from drilling operations.

But Tracy Carluccio, deputy director of the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, says scientists have known for years, compared with other shale formations, Marcellus shale has high levels of radiation.

“The various scientific reports point out that when the Marcellus shale is fracked, that radioactivity, which is naturally occurring in those deep formations, comes back up to the surface,” says Carluccio.

The Network has published its own report, criticizing the PA-DEP study for inaccurate or incomplete sampling of rock cuttings and waste water, and failing to take action when radiation was detected. A lobbying organization for the gas drilling industry has dismissed the criticisms as “baseless.”

But according to Carluccio, the samples tested by the company hired to do the PA-DEP study may not reflect the true amounts of radiation present in the waste materials. ”For instance, where you have drill cuttings buried at well sites they basically took samples from the surface they did not do push probes,” says Carluccio.

Push probes, she says, would better sample radiation in the drill cuttings themselves and in the surrounding soil.

Carluccio says trucks carrying drilling waste to landfills sometimes set off radiation detectors and though the PA-DEP report said radiation levels in water that accumulates at these sites was too low to pose a health risk, Carluccio points out the amount of waste being buried at those sites continues to grow. “If radium 226 is ending up in the leachate at these landfills, then it’s ending up in our environment and it could even enter our drinking-water sources,” she says.

The Delaware Riverkeeper Network says the PA-DEP study is so flawed that the agency needs to start over and conduct a whole new study.

See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net

Western PA wastewater treatment facility

Public Radio International — Living on Earth: “Fingerprinting Frackwater”

From Steve Curwood, et al., Living on Earth, PRI, July 10, 2015

STEVE CURWOOD: Now, as he [Allegheny Front’s Reid Frazier] was explaining, pinpointing the precise source of groundwater contamination can be tough. Many fracking chemicals are naturally occurring, or are used in other industries. But a study published a few months ago in the Journal of Environmental Science and Technology lays out a new forensic approach to help track down the exact source of fracking water pollution. One of the authors is Robert Jackson, who teaches at Stanford University. He spoke with Living on Earth’s Emmett Fitzgerald.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: So tell me about a little bit about what you’ve done, about your study, and how that’s addressing some of these problems.

ROBERT JACKSON: Well, for a number years now, we’ve been interested in tracing the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing fluids and also elements found naturally deep underground that might contaminate groundwater. That contamination could occur through a well that’s made improperly or poorly, but it can also happen if wastewater leaks out into the environment. And oil and gas operations in United States generate a trillion gallons of wastewater every year. There’s a lot of it.

FITZGERALD: How are you able to determine whether water has fracking fluids present in it.

JACKSON: Well, in this paper we focused on a handful of elements. Boron, lithium, in particular, but also salts, such as chloride, and even bromide. And we’re focusing on these elements because some of them are added into hydraulic fracturing fluids – boron in particular – but all these things are found naturally deep underground. When the company pumps water deep underground to extract the oil and gas, some of that water flows back to the surface. When it does it carries those elements back with them, sometimes in very high concentrations. In the Marcellus [shale region], for instance, the water that comes back out of the well might be 10 times saltier than seawater, and so if that water that is produced out of the oil and gas well leaks onto the surface, then we can use the presence of these elements and their chemical signatures, the isotopes, to identify them.

FITZGERALD: So you call boron and lithium, in particular, tracers. What do you mean by tracers? So this kind of approach allows us to disentangle, to distinguish those kinds of situations. We can separate different waste streams and tag them back to their source.

JACKSON: A tracer is a compound that you can use to tell different sources apart. So when I talk about a tracer I’m thinking about something that might be found in different concentrations in different sources. It might be found in one source but not the other at all, or it might have a different chemical signature like its isotopic composition. So these compounds allow us, even at very low concentrations, to identify the source in the environment. So I’ll give you an example. A few years ago, in the Monongahela River in Ohio and downstream there was this really big controversy about increases in bromine and other salts in the river water potentially impacting people’s drinking water, and there was a lot of discussion about what the source of that was. Was it old coal mines, was it conventional oil and gas wells, or was it the newly hydraulic fracturing wells that were popping up all over the place in the watershed, or at least in the wastewater that was being brought to the watershed?

FITZGERALD: So basically you’re looking at the chemical, the presence, the concentration, the isotopic situation with these different compounds and indirectly you’re able to say well this possibly came through fracking chemicals rather than the way it would occur naturally.

JACKSON: That’s right. These tracers and many others that we’ve developed and many other groups around the world have developed allow us to identify the source of contamination in the environment really well.

FITZGERAL: Professor Jackson, you called this a “forensic approach”…can you explain what you mean?

JACKSON: We want to be able to keep track of wastewater in the environment. We might want to see if a wastewater treatment facility is working properly. We might want to identify the source of a potential spill, if somebody thinks a spill has happened in their neighborhood or in their stream or river, has it actually happened and if it’s happened what caused it? This allows us to go in and identify the sources of contamination in the environment and that’s really important and very useful.

JACKSON: Well, at a crime scene, investigators will go in and apply a forensic approach. They might gather DNA. They might gather blood types. They might gather hair, and they assemble a set of evidence to assess a probable cause, a probable weapon, even sometimes a probable person. So in science we can talk about forensics in the same way, we can gather and apply a suite of chemical analyses and then apply them to a particular situation and try to figure out what caused the problem.

FITZGERALD: You’re fingerprinting fracking wastewater?

JACKSON: We are fingerprinting fracking wastewater. It’s not the same scale of resolution as a DNA identification. It’s not a one in 100 million or one and 1 billion chance. The tools are not that accurate, but they’re pretty accurate.

FITZGERALD: In the end, what do you hope comes out of this research?

JACKSON: All of the research that I do in this area has a single purpose in mind. We want to improve things to make things better so we can provide some tools that companies and regulators can use to keep spills from happening, to track wastewater in the environment better and ultimately to make the entire process safer, then I think that’s a good reason for doing the work. There’s also a basic science component to this we’re learning about what’s found naturally deep underground so when I get a basic science project and a project with strong relevance today, I’m happy about that.

CURWOOD: Robert Jackson is a co-developer of the frackwater forensic fingerprint technique. He teaches at Stanford University, and spoke with Living on Earth’s Emmett Fitzgerald.

>>> Robert Jackson is a Professor of Environmental Earth System Science at Stanford University and co-author on the study “New Tracers Identify Hydraulic Fracturing Fluids and Accidental Releases from Oil and Gas Operations” published in the Journal of Environmental Science & Technology.

Related links:
- Read the original study
- Duke’s press release on “New Tracers Can Identify Fracking Fluids in the Environment”
- Study co-author and Professor Robert Jackson’s Stanford University webpage
- Locate over 1.1 million active oil and gas wells, spills and wastewater injection on FracTracker
- Difficulty making frackwater clean-up profitable, our piece.
- ThinkProgress’ piece on tracking fracking waste
- Inappropriate disposal of solid, radioactive frackwaste contaminates water, our story.

Testing of contaminated sediments

Public Radio International — Living on Earth: “Arsenic & Frackwater Waste”

From Steve Curwood, et al., Living on Earth, PRI, July 10, 2015

STEVE CURWOOD: It’s Living on Earth. I’m Steve Curwood. Earlier this year, the US Geological Service detailed what exactly it found in wastewater left over from fracking natural gas and oil.

Treating and disposing of the huge amounts of noxious wastewater that result from frack wells depends on a proper analysis of the water, and a few months ago, Reid Frazier of the public radio program the Allegheny Front checked in on the scientists hard at work to figure this out.

REID FRAZIER: Denise Akob is a microbiologist for the US Geological Survey. In a USGS lab outside of Washington, DC, she holds up a glass jar filled with water. At the bottom of the jar is what looks like sand.

DENISE AKOB: It’s got this brown color. It’s rocky. The water is still really clear.

FRAZIER: The sediment is from a clean streambed. It’s been inside the bottle for 90 days. Akob holds up a second bottle. This one’s not so clear. Inside of it is sand from a stream in West Virginia that was polluted by a leaking oil and gas wastewater impoundment.

AKOB: You actually can’t even see through the bottle.

FRAZIER: An orange goo coats the sides of the second bottle. The goo is iron oxide–rust. It’s the result of a chemical reaction between microbes in the sediment and contamination in the streambed. The experiment is part of a research project at the USGS to determine the risk posed by fracking wastewater. The oil and gas industry produces billions of gallons of this waste every year. It’s the briny liquid that comes out of a well after it’s been hydraulically fractured with millions of gallons of water. The waste is tainted with chemicals from fracking fluid, and has toxic levels of metals and salts from underground formations.

COZZARELLI: One of the main things we’re trying to do on this project is identify what the important potential pathways to the environment are.

FRAZIER: Isabelle Cozzarelli is a geochemist leading the team of USGS researchers.

COZZARELLI: So there can be accidental spills; there can be leaks or spills at waste disposal facilities.

FRAZIER: In North Dakota, a million gallons spilled from a pipeline break and killed a swath of vegetation along its two-mile path.

Cozzarelli’s team is looking closely at one question – what happens when tiny organisms in the soil come in contact with frackwater. These bugs are like the Earth’s gut bacteria.

COZZARELLI: I guess you could call it the microbial flora, right?

FRAZIER: So they’re studying the everyday behaviors of these microorganisms.

COZZARELLI: And, so they have to do two things, right? They need food and they need to breathe.

FRAZIER: And some bacteria eat crude oil and chemicals found in oil and gas waste. So if some it spills on the ground, it’s like an all you can eat buffet for bacteria. That seems like good news right? The bugs can eat the contamination. But there is a catch. These bugs need to breathe, too. And they need to breathe more when they’re given a large new food source, like a frackwater spill. But underground, there is very little oxygen. Cozzarelli’s group says the bacteria they study evolved to thrive in this inhospitable environment.

COZZARELLI: And if you’re a human, you die, right?  But if you’re a cool microorganism, you can breathe the nitrate or the iron or the sulfate because you’ve adapted to be able to do that.

FRAZIER: That’s right. These bacteria don’t need oxygen to breathe. They can even breathe in metals, like iron. Here’s where the problem starts though. The more food they get from a spill, the more iron they breathe. Iron minerals found in soil are a frequent host for another element – arsenic, a known human carcinogen. When a bacteria breathes that iron in, the arsenic is released, and becomes water-soluble.

COZZARELLI: And you can get more arsenic released into groundwater.

FRAZIER: That’s what it appears happened at an oil spill site in Minnesota. Arsenic levels in the groundwater there are 20 times above the EPA limit for drinking water, though no one is actually drinking that water. So will bacteria help or hurt groundwater quality when frackwater gets on the ground? Cozzarelli says they’re just beginning to answer these questions.

COZZARELLI: I kind of feel like we’re trying to catch up. The industry’s just gone so quick.

FRAZIER: All this science could help in states where frackwater spills occur. In Pennsylvania, oil and gas companies have drilled 8,000 wells in the Marcellus shale. And state records show that spills or leaks of fracking waste are common. The mapping website FracTracker analyzed violations records from the state’s Department of Environmental Protection. It found 53 recorded spills of fracking wastewater in 2014; that’s more than one a week. Many of these are small, only a few gallons, but some are not.

[DIESEL TRUCKS PULLING IN]

FRAZIER: In Washington County, in southwestern Pennsylvania, trucks removed contaminated soil from a hillside that used to house a wastewater pond. The John Day impoundment was ordered closed this year after the company that owns it, Range Resources, discovered high salt levels in the soil beneath its liner. The DEP found Range had leaks at several of its waste ponds in the area. In September, the company agreed to pay a record $4.15 million fine for these discharges.

FRAZIER: Range said in a statement it was disappointed by the violations, but said safety features at its new impoundments would go above and beyond DEP requirements. The DEP’s Scott Perry said the size of the fine reflects how seriously the state is taking the issue.

PERRY: Management of wastewater from oil and gas development is, in my opinion, the most critical environmental issue associated with the activity. Perry said the state is beefing up its rules on impoundments, which could include mandating two liners below each waste pit. That’s welcome news for residents like Janice Dumont. She lives next to one of the leaky impoundments, this one in Cecil Township, just south of Pittsburgh.

At her house, contractors are putting on new siding. The upgrades came courtesy of money Dumont and her husband received from Range Resources for a gas lease on their land. But word of a potential leak at the impoundment nearby has caused her to worry about groundwater.

DUMONT: Range tested it, the DEP tested it, and there was no impact from the fracking pond.

FRAZIER: To see the leaky impoundment, all Dumont needs to take a ride on a cart.

[OUTDOORS WITH WIND BLOWING]

DUMONT:  I got this for my 40th anniversary. It’s called a gator, a John Deere Gator.

[MOTOR STARTS]

FRAZIER: At the top of a steep hill, on the left, she points out the waste pit, which has been taken out of production. It’s cut into a hillside.

DUMONT: That was such beautiful farmland before…I guess it will be again…looks like a strip mine.

FRAZIER: A steep ravine separates her hill from the impoundment. She says a DEP inspector told her the ravine might act as barrier between pollution from the waste pond and her groundwater.

DUMONT: We were just fortunate, I think. We were lucky that we didn’t have any problems, because our well water is so good. I mean it’s delicious, it’s cold, and there’s no water bills.

FRAZIER: Range Resources will keep testing the groundwater, and will remove the impoundment by next year. Dumont says she won’t miss it. I’m Reid Frazier.

CURWOOD: Reid reports for the public radio program, the Allegheny Front.

Related links:
- Learn more about Fracking wastewater spills on the Allegheny Front’s page
- Our story on iron-eating bacteria
- U.S. Geological Survey
- In North Dakota, a million gallons of brine spilled from a wastewater pipeline break earlier this year and killed a swath of vegetation along its 2-mile path.
- Arsenic levels in an aquifer near Bemidji, Minnesota are 20 times above the EPA limit for drinking water, thanks to microorganisms’ chemical reactions.
- In Pennsylvania, oil and gas companies have drilled more than 8,500 wells in the Marcellus shale.
- FracTracker analyzed oil and gas violations records from the DEP and found 214 recorded spills in 2014; 53 were for oil and gas wastewater.
- In September, the Range Resources company agreed to pay a record $4.15 million fine for waste pond discharges.
- Range’s statement concerning the violations and its new impoundments
- The DEP is also attempting to fine The EQT Corporation $4.5 million for leaks at a 6-million gallon wastewater impoundment in northern Pennsylvania.
- EQT is challenging the fine, calling it “exorbitant.”

Thirty Eight (38) Conservation Groups Object to GreenHunter Barge Activities

For Immediate Release: February 18, 2015.  Contact: Teresa Mills, 614-507-5651 tmills@chej.org, or  Robin Blakeman, 304-840-4877 rbrobinjh@gmail.com

Columbus, OH — Citing serious public health and safety concerns, environmental and community groups opposed to barging of fracking waste sent a letter to the U.S. Coast Guard requesting that the agency immediately initiate investigative action related to GreenHunter, LLC to determine the true contents of waste that GreenHunter, LLC may be transporting by barge on inland waterways, including the Ohio River and the Mississippi River, both, sources of drinking water for millions of people.

The letter of February 17, addressed to Captain Richard Timme, also requests the Coast Guard to issue a “cease and desist” order to GreenHunter, LLC to stop transporting any “oilfield wastes” while the Coast Guard makes its determination of what exactly is being shipped by the company. Additionally, the groups’ letter requests the Coast Guard to initiate an “enforcement penalty proceeding” if, indeed, the Coast Guard finds GreenHunter in violation regarding possible shipments of “shale gas extraction wastewater,” or SGEWW.

For the past two years, GreenHunter, LLC has been seeking U.S. Coast Guard permission to transport fracking waste on the Ohio River or other inland waterways.

The group’s letter references a statement by Kirk Trosclair, COO of GreenHunter to the Wheeling Intelligencer (2/6/15), “GreenHunter Water will continue to transport ‘oilfield waste’ until such time as the Coast Guard ultimately decides on the proper definition of ‘shale gas extraction waste water’ and the rules under which such waste water can be transported. Once these rules are finalized, GreenHunter will comply with these rules and regulations.”

The group reads Trosclair’s statement that GreenHunter ‘will continue to transport’ to mean that the company is actively shipping drilling wastes now, with impunity and without legal authority.”

Currently, fracking waste has too many legal exemptions, trade secrets, and euphemisms associated with it making it difficult to ascertain the precise components of the fracking waste. This in itself makes this situation not your typical shipment for transport down the Ohio River. Obviously, the Coast Guard needs to know exactly what substances are being transported on the waterways so that they can protect the public interest.

Dr. Randi Pokladnik says she “is concerned with the ability of local public drinking water systems to remove the numerous aromatic organic, carcinogenic and endocrine disrupting chemicals contained in wastes from shale gas extraction.”

“Just the thought of toxic and potentially radioactive unconventional gas well waste being shipped by barge on the Ohio River sickens me” says Robin Blakeman, organizer with the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition in Huntington, WV. “I, and three generations of my entire immediate family get our tap water from the Huntington, WV intakes. I am appalled that a company like Green Hunter would try to subvert the Coast Guard’s authority and may already be shipping this noxious substance by barge, as well as by truck near the river’s edge. I hope the Coast Guard and the US EPA will do everything in their power to fully investigate Green Hunter’s operations and stop them from any activity which endangers our tap water!”

One only needs to consider the recent events of Charleston and Fayette County, West Virginia and Toledo, Ohio to grasp the enormity of the consequences of losing – even temporarily – a source of drinking water.

# # # – - - Signatories:

Commentary — Two Kinds of Truth for Your Consideration

Truth is elusive with consequences

Written by S. Tom Bond, Retired Chemistry Professor & Resident Farmer, Lewis County, WV

Observers have been amazed with the division of attitudes toward modern high volume, horizontal, hydraulic fracturing which has come into use since the year 2000. It is as though one party says something is yellow and another, looking at the same thing, says it is blue. The obvious answer is, “Who is making money from it and who is paying a price?” That goes for people actually in contact with it, but what about the millions who form opinions in spite of no contact?

I think that is related to two kinds of truth, which I hope to distinguish. What is needed is to sort out a general idea, truth, and how one arrives at “truth.”

As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says, “Truth is one of the central subjects in philosophy. It is also one of the largest.” So I must define truth to begin with: Truth is a belief which serves as a basis for individual action. If you believe something, that is your mental map of what is. Truth is one’s understanding of the real world, the guide for ones action.

Most works on philosophy include several definitions of truth. Almost all of them have one which has to do with verifiability. That means the ability to check, item by item, the contents of the verbal map of reality. Lets call this verifiable truth.

A second kind of guide for action is to respond to authority. If you believe some authority, it is a kind of truth. This may be a King, a religious leader, or simply “the boss,” who in our era (and many others), is whoever controls pay for your labor. This we will call authoritarian truth. Such a believer’s action is determined by a mental map provided by the authority.

What does this have to do with the understanding of the nature of fracking? A lot, really.

Concerning fracking the general public (including officials) must choose between the claims of the banks and the drilling companies on the one hand , and the cries from the injured on the other. The individual who is not directly affected, and cannot see what is going on, must choose what to believe.

Those in the field can see what is happening. People are hurting, and loosing what is theirs. For some who gain even a slight advantage it is easy to ignore another’s pain. That is also a human attribute. It makes possible wars, racism and genocide. It also makes it possible for some to be rich while others are poor. Those who aren’t seriously affected can adopt the authoritarian truth as a psychological defense.

One of the principal characteristics of authoritarian truth is that it is not constrained by verifiability. It offers an explanation, and suggests a course to follow for the believer’s advantage. It causes an expected reward for action. It may, and often does, involve deception about verifiability, however. Left out details don’t exist for the authoritarian believer. It is received truth.

Verifiable truth comes from direct sensory experience of the phenomenon, or from observers judged by the individual to be reliable. Who is reliable? Direct observers who don’t have an advantage by being untruthful and are able to understand what effects them. Simultaneous changes are a strong key to understanding.

If one thinks rural people are willing to lie about what affects them, or are too dumb to understand, or are people whose interests aren’t a significant part of the commonwealth, the economic whole of our state and nation, you might adopt such a view. You might be more willing to adopt a story put out by some authority.

In a situation where people need to act, people who are not where they can observe facts themselves, perhaps by voting or by buying, it becomes a considerable labor to decide what action they should take – in other words who to believe. We humans have a long history of cooperation with each other. Frequently it has been the best path to simply follow some leader, rather than to try to go it alone or join a minority. Most of our past has involved a choice between leaders without reference to verifiability of claims, or perhaps no choice between leaders at all; the choice is simply the degree or enthusiasm with which we follow some designated leader of our group. Consequently, we humans have developed no easy way to distinguish which kind of truth one is following. It is a labor and a learned skill not necessary for survival of the human race.

Because of this bit of human nature, those who can form belief on the basis of our own observation, and the observation of people we trust because we understand them, must aggressively present the story of what is going on to the wider public, who invest, who vote, and who regulate the world we live in.

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing it, doesn’t go away.”

>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Fact to fiction — A twisted tale of how good research became bad information

By Elizabeth Miller, Boulder Weekly, November 20, 2014

The philosophy that University of Colorado research associate E. Michael Thurman applies to scientific research, he says, is: “You can sort the error from the truth if you work hard enough.” This week, that task became far more difficult as Thurman and his research associates came under fire for apparently declaring the fluid used in hydraulic fracturing operations to be harmless.

But it wasn’t true. The researchers never said anything like that, nor did they intend to. Like the children’s game of telephone, as word spread from one mouth to the next, the truth got so mired in errors it was nearly invisible by the end.

So how did a study designed to analyze traceable components of fracking fluid so potential contamination in groundwater could be identified get transformed into a headline that declared fracking fluid safe? The answer is poor communication and bad journalism.

…… the details are in the Article on hydraulic fracturing ……

Dunkard Creek is on Mason-Dixon Line

Greene County creeks leased for drilling by PA-DCNR

From an Article by Emily Petsko, Washington PA Observer-Reporter, April 4, 2014

Two Greene County creeks are doubling as drilling sites for local energy companies, joining the more than 1,400 acres of public waterways across Pennsylvania leased to natural gas companies by the state in the past year. Sections of Ten Mile and Dunkard creeks, both state-owned waterways, were recently leased by the PA Department of Conservation and Natural Resources to three separate companies for horizontal drilling.

According to the state’s Conservation and Natural Resources Act, DCNR is permitted to enter into lease agreements for the extraction of fuel, oil, natural gas or any other mineral deposits on commonwealth-owned lands. DCNR receives the bonus and royalty payments, which are deposited into the Oil and Gas Lease Fund for conservation, recreation and flood control programs.

“Although DCNR does not manage the riverbeds as it does state parks and forests, the agreements are negotiated by DCNR because we have expertise based on our more than 60-year history of gas leasing on state forest land,” said Christina Novak, DCNR press secretary. Novak said drilling activity is “nothing you would notice on the surface” because it occurs deep below the waterway.

DCNR netted nearly $6 million since last year. While most waterway leases were signed during Gov. Tom Corbett’s administration, Novak said one $6 million waterway lease occurred in May 2010 during Gov. Ed Rendell’s term. Eight of nine waterway leases were signed between March 2012 and March 2014.

Most recently, Chevron signed a lease March 12 for 57 acres of Dunkard Creek for $228,000 with DCNR. Two-and-a-half acres of Ten Mile were leased to EQT Production Co., which has a local office in Washington. The company will pay a $10,200 bonus to DCNR.

Underneath another section of Ten Mile, Colorado-based Vantage Energy signed a lease January  31^st for 80 acres at a cost of $321,692. In addition to the bonus payment, all companies are required to pay a 20 percent royalty rate.

Media spokespersons for EQT and Chevron did not respond to calls seeking comment Tuesday. State Rep. Pam Snyder, D-Jefferson, said she was not made aware of the drilling leases for Ten Mile and Dunkard creeks.

NOTE: Greene county is the SW corner county in Pennsylvania bordering WV on its west and south.  Dunkard Creek is about 38 miles in length weaving back and forth across the Mason-Dixon line.  Ten Mile Creek flows thru Waynesburg (center of Greene county) and on east to the Monongahela River.