DEP tightens shale wastewater rules

BY LAURA LEGERE, Times-Shamrock Writer

An effort by environmental regulators to halt the discharge of incompletely treated shale drilling wastewater into state streams will soon carry the weight of law.

The Department of Environmental Protection is asking the state’s shale gas operators to certify by Monday, Aug. 29, that they will not take wastewater to 15 facilities that were grandfathered into state regulations sharply restricting the salty discharges.

“Operators are committing to stop taking wastewater to the listed facilities ever again,” DEP spokeswoman Jamie Legenos said.

The letter is legally enforceable, she said, because false certification is a crime.

The new request goes further than an April 19 call by DEP Secretary Michael Krancer for operators to stop the practice voluntarily – an appeal that was criticized as weak and unenforceable, even though nearly all of the drillers met the May 19 deadline to stop using the grandfathered plants.

Legenos said the certification letter was the fastest way for the department to turn the voluntary request into a legally enforceable one.

Shale drilling wastewater can be many times saltier than seawater and contains metals and radioactivity dissolved from the rock formation about a mile underground. Conventional treatment plants, even those designed to handle industrial wastewaters, cannot remove all of those contaminants.

Surface water sampling in westernPennsylvaniarivers detected elevated levels of bromides, nontoxic salts found in shale drilling wastewater that can turn into harmful compounds called trihalomethanes when combined with chlorine at drinking water treatment facilities.

Even before  Krancer’s request, the majority of Marcellus Shale wastewater generated in the state was either recycled by drillers, taken to out-of-state disposal wells or treated at plants that meet the new discharge standards. But a significant amount of the waste was still taken to plants not designed to treat it, raising concerns about the quality of drinking water drawn downstream of the discharge points.

Since May, drillers have increasingly relied on reuse and deep disposal wells inOhiofor their wastewater.

Kathryn Klaber, president of the Marcellus Shale Coalition, an industry group, supported the certification.

“Our industry embraced DEP’s decision in April and believes this is the natural and right direction for the commonwealth and our environment,” she said.

Myron Arnowitt,Pennsylvaniastate director for Clean Water Action, an environmental group, said he is glad the state is looking to make the commitment legally binding, but he questioned whether the state’s method goes far enough or is strong enough to protect rivers and drinking water users.

He said it is “a little bit strange” that DEP elected to target the generators of the wastewater rather than restricting or regulating the plants that take it.

“It seems to us that the most straightforward and, in our opinion, legal way to do this is to ensure that the plants that are taking in the wastewater either have the proper treatment technology or they don’t take it,” he said.

By using certification to enforce the discharge rules, department officials “are not really utilizing the environmental laws that protect our rivers,” he said. “We’re not clear what the effect of this, especially long term, is going to be.”

Ordering the companies to stop delivering the wastewater or restricting the plants that take it might also have eliminated a question that remains with the certification letters, he said: “I don’t think there’s any certainty that everybody is going to sign these.”

Legenos said if operators choose not to sign the certification, “the department will make an assessment after the deadline on how best to proceed.”