HARRISBURG – The Pennsylvania Capital Star is reporting… A long-anticipated health study commissioned by Pennsylvania environmental officials examined the practice of spreading wastewater from conventional gas – and oil drilling on thousands of miles of rural dirt roads in the state. Researchers concluded that the practice doesn’t control dust effectively and poses dangers to the environment and human health. The state Department of Environmental Protection has not yet acted based on those findings but said that the study’s impact will be “immediate, large and intense.”
Photo courtesy PA Environmental Digest
“While we must be willing to accept the trade-offs between the benefits of dust suppression and the drawback of environmental impacts, this research has found that oil and wastewaters only provide drawbacks,” said William Burgos, a professor of environmental engineering at Penn State University and one of the lead authors of the study. After a legal challenge to the practice in 2018 arising from environmental and health concerns, DEP temporarily banned most spreading of wastewater from conventional oil and gas drilling on the approximately 25,000 miles of dirt and gravel roads in the state. Spreading has never been allowed with wastewater from wells employing hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as fracking.
But for more than a half-century, spreading salty wastewater from conventional oil and gas wells was a cheap way for the industry to get rid of a byproduct, while reducing municipal costs for dust control in summer and road de-icing in winter. Twenty-one of the state’s 67 counties allowed wastewater to be spread on rural roads before the temporary ban. Nationally, 12 states have permitted the practice. According to DEP records, approximately 240 million gallons of drilling wastewater were spread on Pennsylvania roads from 1991–2017. Industry officials have long maintained the spreading did not have any adverse consequences.
For the independent study commissioned by DEP, Penn State researchers conducted a series of laboratory experiments to test dust generation and suppression. They also measured the chemical makeup of wastewater and explored its runoff effects. The wastewater samples came from conventional drilling operations obtained in confidence from western Pennsylvania oil service companies.
The results showed that wastewater was essentially no more effective than rainwater in controlling dust because its high sodium content does not allow road dust to bond to the material. In fact, the study noted, “sodium can destabilize gravel roads and increase long-term road maintenance costs.”
The investigation also revealed health and environmental concerns. Elevated levels of contaminants could pollute nearby water sources, the study concluded. In addition to increasing the salinity of fresh water, the water in some simulations contained heavy metals — such as barium, strontium, lithium, iron and manganese — at levels exceeding human health standards. Some tests also found radioactive radium, a carcinogen, though often in low concentrations.
