Katie Muth knew it would be a long shot. This January, the Pennsylvania state senator reintroduced three pieces of legislation aimed at closing loopholes in the laws governing how the oil and gas industry disposes of its solid and liquid waste.
In Pennsylvania’s Republican-controlled Senate, Muth said any legislation hampering business as usual for oil and gas companies would garner little to no bipartisan support. Still, there is utility in getting “a lot of legislators on the record voting down clean water,” she said.
“The exemptions don’t remove the harm” that waste from the oil and gas industry inflicts on Pennsylvanians, Muth said. “It just saves corporations money where Pennsylvanians have to suffer.”
Residents in Pennsylvania and across the country have expressed concerns about oil and gas waste disposal landfills, holding ponds and storage wells being located in their communities, and researchers and journalists have uncovered instances in which drinking water and freshwater species have been poisoned by produced water.
The third bill, SB29, also in the Environmental Resources and Energy Committee, would go beyond closing loopholes by introducing regulations that require landfills to test the toxicity of residual oil and gas waste and any runoff, or leachate, it creates. Once dumped in landfills, oil and gas waste can mix with rainwater to generate highly toxic leachate that can contaminate the surrounding environment as runoff or run through storm sewers to wastewater treatment plants, where it is disposed of in local waterways. SB29 would also prevent landfills from accepting any waste that is radioactive.
“These are loopholes that allow one specific industry to do business in a dirty, horrible way,” said Muth, speaking over the phone ahead of the new legislative assembly in Pennsylvania, which began Aug. 30.
A representative from Marcellus Shale Coalition, which represents drillers in Pennsylvania, pushed back on the characterization of the industry’s waste-disposal standards as benefiting from a loophole.
“Pennsylvania and the federal government have strict regulations regarding the handling, treatment and disposal of waste that are based on the characteristics, not the industry that generates it,” the coalition’s President, David Callahan, said in a statement. “While we abide by the same regulations as all waste generators, the oil and gas industry has some of the most robust tracking and disposal standards of any Pennsylvania industry, as all waste generated must be sampled, analyzed and approved by environmental regulators, and every individual waste truck undergoes screening prior to landfill disposal.
“Our members are committed to safe, responsible operations and continue to drive waste and water management innovations, including developing water recycling practices more than a decade ago that have become standard procedure today.”
For Gillian Graber, executive director and founder of Protect PT, an organization focused on educating Pennsylvanians living in the state’s southwestern counties on the impacts of fossil fuel drilling, this kind of legislation is desperately needed.
“Produce water is super problematic,” Graber said, referring to the salty, chemical-laced liquid that bubbles back to the surface of a fracked well, because it is highly toxic and difficult to dispose of safely.
During the first week or two after a well is fracked for natural gas in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus shale, water known as flowback is allowed to drain from the well slowly so that sand, used as a “proppant” to hold the rock apart while the methane escapes, doesn’t come up with it. Gas can’t escape while water fills the well.
This flowback contains the initial chemical additives, or fracking fluids, plus chemicals and minerals it absorbed while coursing through the Marcellus. As the well starts producing gas, the water that comes from deep underground is called produced water. Because it has had more time to dissolve elements of the shale and percolate in the Marcellus, it contains a higher concentration of chemicals, along with numerous hazardous compounds, which can include bromide, arsenic, strontium, mercury, barium, radioactive isotopes such as radium 226 and 228, and organic compounds, particularly benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylenes.
Only about 5 to 10 percent of the millions of gallons of water used to frack a well initially comes back to the surface. The Marcellus is a dry formation that absorbs much of the fracking fluid.
The produced water and gas are collected and separated at the drill pad. Liquid is usually stored in onsite tanks until it’s reused or trucked somewhere…
Read More: New Pennsylvania Legislation Aims to Classify ‘Produced Water’ From Fracking as