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New standards approved for salts in gas drilling wastewater - but it's still OK to discharge carcinogens!
Photo | Isaiah Thompson
New standards approved for salts in gas drilling wastewater but it's still OK to discharge carcinogens!
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| Photo | Isaiah Thompson |
Lots of Marcellus Shale news lately. (Click on that link for our "Marcellus Shale" tag you can feed directly to it if this stuff interests you).
Yesterday, the Pennsylvania Independent Regulatory Review Commission approved new regulations aimed at protecting Pennsylvania surface waters from potential impacts of drilling in the Marcellus Shale. The regulations can still be challenged by the House or Senate environmental resources committees, but given Governor Rendell's support of these measures, it seems unlikely.
Probably most significant is a limit on Total Dissolved Solids (TDS) salty chlorides and sulfides in discharged fracking water.
Lest the gentle reader think a stream's "saltiness," isn't a big deal, check out the contamination and massive fish kill that resulted from elevated TDS levels in Dunkard Creek in western Pennsylvania.
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| Kathryn Klaber |
Interestingly, Marcellus Shale Coalition executive director Kathryn Klaber issued a statement yesterday saying rather inexplicably that the standards would "not provide any additional environmental benefit."
Hmm.
While environmental watchdog groups like Penn Environment and Clean Water Action praise the new rules, they point out that these regulations don't cover other toxic discharges like carcinogens benzene and arsenic.
"This rule is about setting a discharge standard, but we don't have that for chemicals," Myron Arnowitt, PA State Director for Clean Water Action, told me over the phone. "There are contaminants being discharged in Marcellus Shale wastewater that there need to be more standards for."
Erika Staaf, Clean Water Advocate for Penn Environment, agreed, pointing me to a report authored by the Environmental Working Group's Dusty Horwitt, who reports that gas companies may be regularly injecting "toxic petroleum distillates" which contain benzene into wells:
Companies that drill for natural gas and oil are skirting federal law and injecting toxic petroleum distillates into thousands of wells, threatening drinking water supplies from Pennsylvania to Wyoming. Federal and state regulators, meanwhile, largely look the other way.
These distillates include kerosene, mineral spirits and a number of other petroleum products that often contain high levels of benzene, a known human carcinogen that is toxic in water at minuscule levels. Drillers inject these substances into rock under extremely high pressure in a process called hydraulic fracturing that energy companies use to extract natural gas and oil from underground formations.
Ready for the really scary quote?
In a worst case scenario, the petroleum distillates used in a single well could contain enough benzene to contaminate more than 100 billion gallons of drinking water to unsafe levels, according to drilling company disclosures in New York State and published studies. ... That is more than 10 times as much water as the state of New York uses in a single day.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Gary Ransome, Philly News Now. Philly News Now said: New standards approved for salts in gas drilling wastewater but its still ok to discharge carcinogens!: Isaiah... http://bit.ly/dtfL3X [...]
In more immediately important news for Philadelphia, the IRRC also approved new streamside buffers rules. Since there is no drilling or dumping in our watershed yet, we're not yet threatened. However, streamside buffers in our watershed EV & HQ streams will gradually improve water quality throughout the watershed over time. Which is great news. For once we got a rule that will make things better, not just slow the bleeding.
If this is true it is already too late considering it takes 1 million gallons of fresh water to drill each well. 5,000 wells in NEPA. You do the math. Once this water is used we never ge it back.
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=k6urJsX3KX4
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