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.”

Fractured Marcellus Shale

PA Wastewater Treatment Plant May Have Been Dumping Radioactive Fracking Waste

From the Article By Sharon Kelly, DeSmogBlog.com, July 15, 2013

A Pennsylvania industrial wastewater treatment plant has been illegally accepting oil and gas wastewater and polluting the Allegheny river with radioactive waste and other pollutants, according to an environmental group which announced today that it is suing the plant. 

“Waste Treatment Corporation has been illegally discharging oil and gas wastewater since at least 2003, and continues to discharge such wastewater without authorization under the Clean Water Act and the Clean Streams Law,” the notice of intent to sue delivered by Clean Water Action reads.

Many pollutants associated with oil and gas drilling – including chlorides, bromides, strontium and magnesium – were discovered immediately downstream of the plant’s discharge pipe in Warren, PA, state regulators discovered in January of this year. Upstream of the plant, those same contaminants were found at levels 1 percent or less than those downstream, or were not present at all.

State officials also discovered that the sediments immediately downstream from the plant were tainted with high levels of radium-226, radium-228 and uranium. Those particular radioactive elements are known to be found at especially levels in wastewater from Marcellus shale gas drilling and fracking, and state regulators have warned that the radioactive materials would tend to accumulate in river sediment downstream from plants accepting Marcellus waste.

“To us, that says that they are discharging Marcellus Shale wastewater, although no one admits to sending it to them,” said Myron Arnowitt, Pennsylvania State Director for Clean Water Action.

The amount of radioactivity found in the Allegheny riverbed is striking. Sediments just downstream of the Waste Treatment Corporation’s discharge pipe contained over 50 picocuries per gram (pCi/g) of radium-226, state records show. To put that number in rough context, the levels in found in the Allegheny are 10 times those that EPA requires the surface soil at cleaned-up uranium mining sites to achieve.

Most of the radioactive wastes associated with fracking are too weak to cause harm to people unless they are breathed in, drank, or eaten, since the alpha and beta radioactivity they primarily give off is too weak to get past people’s skin. But at the levels discovered by state regulators, the dirt from the Allegheny’s riverbed could potentially be radioactive enough to cause harm to people who are simply near it.

Once-confidential oil and gas industry studies have also pointed to another risk from disposing of radioactive materials from drilling or fracking in waterways – the risk to fish and aquatic life like crustaceans and mollusks. Radium bioaccumulates in fish, meaning that the more a fish ingests contaminated water or soil over its lifetime, the more radium it will contain. If people eat those fish, those radioactive materials consumed along with the fish can do harm to people’s internal organs.

In their January study, state officials did not test fish or other animals like large clams or mussels from the Allegheny to see whether they were carrying radium or other pollutants. But they did study smaller organisms, and concluded that the wastewater being discharged after being processed by Waste Treatment Corporation into the Allegheny was “negatively impacting” aquatic life, specifically bugs, snails and small mollusks in the river. Many pollution-sensitive creatures found upstream of the plant’s discharge pipe were missing downstream from the pipe.

Just last month, DeSmog reported that another industrial wastewater treatment plant was sanctioned by the EPA for illegally discharging untreated Marcellus waste. Environmental regulators also discovered high levels of radium around the discharge pipe at the Pennsylvania Brine Treatment Josephine plant. That plant was fined over $80,000 and the owner agreed to make up to $30 million in upgrades before accepting any more Marcellus shale wastewater.

The Clean Water Action lawsuit also calls attention to a troubling lack of record keeping for the toxic wastewater generated by the shale drilling boom, raising the possibility that more illegal dumping could be uncovered in the future.

“Currently, there are no companies drilling in the Marcellus Shale that report sending wastewater to WTC for disposal,” a Clean Water Action statement says, referring to Waste Treatment Corporation by its initials. “However, the presence of radioactive materials in WTC’s discharge indicates that WTC’s wastewater likely comes, at least in part, from Marcellus Shale wells.”

In 2011, after problems with wastewater disposal made national headlines, many industrial wastewater treatment plants said that they stopped taking Marcellus wastewater and were only taking conventional oil and gas wastewater, Mr. Arnowitt said. But the levels of contaminants — including the ones associated with Marcellus waste — in the discharge at many wastewater plants never changed, he said.

With a track record like this, some Pennsylvanians are skeptical about their state government’s capacity to police the drilling boom. These doubts only deepened when Senate Bill 259 was signed into law by Governor Corbett earlier this month. The bill was originally intended to protect landowners by making royalty payments for people who leased their lands to drillers more transparent.

But a little-noticed provision slipped into that bill as an amendment has sparked an outcry. The amendment would allow drillers to pool together acreage owned by many different people and drill it all together, even if a lease wouldn’t otherwise allow the oil and gas company to do so. This move will especially facilitate Marcellus shale drilling and fracking, which often involves drilling a well horizontally under many properties.

“This pooling language had no place in this bill,” Trevor Walczak , vice president of the Pennsylvania Chapter of the National Association of Royalty Owners told local reporters. ”If you wanted to address pooling, we should have been doing it in a stand alone bill we could debate, not hiding it in here and fast-tracking it through.”

State Representative Rep. Garth Everett, who introduced the language in the bill, told Pennsylvania’s TribLive he had no idea whether someone from the oil and gas industry suggested to him that provision be included. It drew little attention or debate before the bill was enacted.