Specifically, the authors looked at the effluent from the Josephine Brine Treatment Facility in western Pennsylvania and its impact on downstream water quality and sediment. The plant, which only treats oil and gas wastewater, dumps its effluent into Blacklick Creek, a kayaking and whitewater destination. The Effluent From a Plant Designed to Treat Fracking Effluent So how well do these facilities really do? What is their downstream impact? Warner and his colleagues set out to find out. Although they’ve been in use for quite some time to treat water from conventional oil and gas operations, many facilities of this type have been found lacking and some have even incurred fines for failure to meet Clean Water Act or other regulatory standards. (See here, here, here, here and here.)īut there are so-called brine treatment plants that are at least in principle equipped to handle that level of contamination. But you can’t use a standard municipal water treatment plant to treat flowback and produced water as those facilities are just not designed to handle the level of contamination, especially radioactivity, found in these waters. But this method has its own problems - the injection process has the inconvenient habit of causing an earthquake every now and again.Īnother alternative is waste treatment: removing the contaminants and then dumping the“clean” water into a nearby sewer or river. One disposal route is injection into deep wells, and a good deal of flowback and produced water from the Marcellus Shale is transported to Ohio for just such a deep burial. Even so, that leaves a massive amount of toxic wastewater to be disposed of. And methods to reuse more are being developed. In the Marcellus Shale gas country of Pennsylvania, for example, a large percentage of the water, in the vicinity of 70 percent, is currently reused. Ideally, the water would be reused or recycled, eliminating the need for immediate disposal. And so the gas companies have a problem: what to do with the stuff. Fracking wastewater can contain massive amounts of brine (salts), toxic metals, and radioactivity. Once the chemistry of the water coming out of the well resembles the rock formation rather than the fracking fluid, it is known as produced water and can continue to flow as long as a well is in operation. (For more, see “Natural Gas, Hydrofracking and Safety: The Three Faces of Fracking Water.”)Īs a general rule, you would not want to take a shower much less drink flowback or formation water, nor would you want to just pour the stuff into a river or stream (although that has been known to happen, as described here and here). Hydraulic fracturing, as the term implies, involves water - both at the front end with fracking fluid, the water-based chemical cocktail that is injected into the shale, and at the back end where there is flowback water and produced water.įlowback water (which literally “flows back” during the fracking process) is a mixture of fracking fluid and formation water (i.e., water rich in brine from the targeted shale gas-rich rock). Now a paper published this week in the journal Environmental Science and Technology by Nathaniel Warner formerly of Duke University and colleagues focuses on another of those environmental costs: disposal of wastewater. Measurements suggest that, at least in some cases, drilling operations that include fracking have caused contamination of surface and drinking water, and fracking operations, like all natural gas drilling, cause the leakage of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere. Since the fracking rush is way past the start phase, these are probably not non-starters for fracking, but they do represent huge challenges for industry and government who need to make sure they are appropriately addressed. Among the more vexing is the potential for significant environmental costs. ![]() Complications With Frackingīut alas, as with most too-good-to-be-true things, fracking’s got some downsides. What a bonanza: a new and sizable source of natural gas. And, at first blush, a fuel that’s good for the environment: natural gas is the cleanest of the fossil fuels and has already begun displacing coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, in U.S. Combined with horizontal drilling, fracking has allowed us to access huge amounts of heretofore unrecoverable natural gas. fracking) is the technique of injecting water, sand and chemicals at high pressures into shale and other tight rock formations to release the fuel trapped inside. You know that fracking thing? For the uninitiated, hydraulic fracturing (a.k.a. Another crack in the “fracking is safe” story for the industry to address.
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