By any other name

Among the documents distributed at the latest Upper Delaware Council meeting was a press release announcing that New York State has adopted a Hazardous Waste Facility Siting Plan. Reading the plan online ( dec.ny.gov/docs/materials_minerals_pdf/hwspfinal.pdf ), we discovered that one main purpose of the plan is “to assure the availability of facilities for the management of hazardous waste.”

The plan concluded that there is plenty of capacity, both in and out of state, to handle New York State’s hazardous waste for the indefinite future. It seems odd, however, that it had come to this conclusion without apparently giving any consideration to the potential impact of fracking flowback wastewater.

The explanation proves fairly simple: fracking flowback water is currently classified by New York as “non-hazardous industrial waste.” In this, the New York Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) follows the lead of the U.S. EPA, which concluded in its latest biennial review of hazardous waste disposal that the country has sufficient facilities to handle hazardous waste through 2034—without giving any consideration to the huge planned expansion in unconventional shale drilling across the nation.

Unfortunately, it’s not at all clear at this point that “non-hazardous” is an accurate description of flowback water. In most of the states where hydro-fracking has been used before now, such water has been disposed of by being injected deep underground. The geology of our own area is apparently not compatible with this solution. Currently, in Pennsylvania, the flowback is mostly being disposed of in municipal facilities that have no options more sophisticated than dilution; as the gross volumes of contaminated water and hence contaminants increase, it’s hard to predict what the cumulative impact will be. When you add the fact that the initial EPA study relied on industry data in its analysis of fracking-related fluids, rather than doing its own tests, it seems clear that nobody really knows whether flowback water should be considered hazardous or not.

In fact, it’s due to holes like these in our knowledge that the EPA will be engaging on a new study of the impact of hydrofracking on the environment over the next couple of years. Fortunately, questions about the disposal of flowback water are among those listed for consideration in the EPA scoping document. We hope that these questions are among those chosen to be addressed, and that, among other things, a better determination of “hazard” might be made, especially in light of the vast scale of the wastewater that will need to be disposed of.

That scale is alarming—and could therefore add up to a lot of toxicity over time. For instance, it is estimated that in Pennsylvania, an average of 19 million gallons of wastewater per day will be produced next year. At eight pounds a gallon, that’s 152 million pounds per day. Multiply that by 365, and you get a total of 554 million pounds, or 27 million tons, of wastewater every year. Compare that to the total amount of hazardous waste managed by the entire state of Pennsylvania from every source in 2007, according to the EPA: 527,150 tons. In New York, it was 1,194,363 tons. In other words, the amount of frack flowback to be managed, even this early in the drilling boom, amounts to something like 50 times the entire tonnage of hazardous waste from all sources currently being managed by Pennsylvania and 25 times that managed by New York.

We think it’s clear that plans need to be made both by individual states, and by the nation, to accommodate this huge new source of environmental toxins—and long before 2034.

The issue so far has not been totally ignored. Pennsylvania’s new regulations regarding Total Dissolved Solids (TDS) were developed largely in reaction to the expected influx of fracking wastewater from natural gas drilling, and will become effective next year. The problem is, there is still a shortage of facilities capable of performing the required treatment—just the kind of facilities-availability problem that the New York study doesn’t address because of the way the substance in question is classified. And the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation’s draft SGEIS does recognize flowback as a matter of concern—but without coming up with any proposals as to how to deal with it.

We are still a long way from finding comprehensive and workable solutions for the problem of what to do with those millions of tons of flowback water, given the oversight and budget problems the regulatory agencies on both sides of the river face and the shortage of qualified treatment facilities. But one thing is clear: permits should not be issued for drilling that creates this type of effluvium unless they specify a qualified and environmentally adequate disposal destination for it. Whether you call it “hazardous” or merely “industrial,” the potential cumulative toxicity of this river of waste cannot be ignored.

Also in this issue:

• Bullying is alive and well in Eldred

(Not a scientific poll)

Last week's results:

What type of energy provides the most independence to the U.S. and individual citizens?

Wind and solar: 63.64%

Fossil fuels: 29.09%

Other: 17.27%

Dr. Punnybone

The Naked Eye