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Page added on December 17, 2014
No Easy Answers When Disposing of Oil and Gas Wastewater
We all want easy answers. And often times the harder the question, the easier we want the answer to be.
Increased natural gas use, for example, can help decrease U.S. greenhouse gas emissions as it has a lower carbon content compared to coal or oil. Natural gas also can help transition our energy mix to more renewable energy sources. This is because properly designed, gas-fired generation can respond quickly to pick up the slack if the wind suddenly dies or clouds unexpectedly roll in. But, these benefits mean nothing if the communities where gas is produced suffer air and water pollution, or if methane – a powerful global warming pollutant that is the primary ingredient in natural gas – is allowed to leak into the atmosphere unchecked.
We all should be worried about global warming and the role that sloppy oil and gas production and distribution practices contribute to the problem. But communities where oil and gas development is taking place are also worried about how oil and gas drilling is impacting their water supplies. This is a key issue and one aspect of the groundwater contamination concerns, rightfully gaining attention in these communities, is how and where toxic wastewater is disposed of that is produced along with oil and gas. But here, too, the answers don’t come easy.
The basic regulatory framework
More than 25 percent of the country’s approximately 700,000 injection wells handle produced water from oil and gas operations. The quantities are huge – at least 2 billion gallons per day. And this fluid is not harmless. Produced water from oil and gas operations is usually much saltier than sea water (it will kill plants and can ruin soil) and is often laced with heavy metals and radionuclides that are naturally present in the formation being drilled. In addition, this produced water can contain hundreds of toxic chemicals – anti-freeze to name just one example. The current standard practice for addressing this potential environmental hazard is through injection of the water into geologic formations suited to permanent disposal.
The 1974 Safe Drinking Water Act gave the EPA oversight of underground wells injected with chemical-laden fluids for disposal and other purposes. In most cases, EPA delegates the authority to state agencies, but in some states, such as Pennsylvania, EPA regulates the wells itself.
EPA’s Underground Injection Control (UIC) program generally has received high marks. In fact, many environmental advocates believe it is important to expand the program to include hydraulic fracturing of oil and gas wells, which was largely excluded from UIC regulation by the “Halliburton loophole” passed by Congress in 2005.
Challenges with existing methods
For all its high marks, the UIC program also has its problems. For starters, it is uncertain whether all states are following EPA’s definition of “Underground Source of Drinking Water”– the water that is supposed to be protected.
Leaks sometimes occur from storage tanks at UIC wells.
Other challenges include: inadequate investigations in some jurisdictions of the surrounding disposal area to make sure no unplugged wells or natural faults allow wastewater to migrate into water supplies; not always assuring that pressures during injection are held low enough to avoid breaks in caprock that protect aquifers; failing to make sure that injection is always limited to permitted intervals; and responding to the increasing number of small and medium size earthquakes that are linked to injections.
Underfunding of regulatory programs compounds the problem, making it harder to provide the public with assurance that their water quality is protected from oil and gas development.
Wastewater Recycling: Buyer Beware
Recycling oil and gas wastewater for reuse in hydraulic fracturing operations is on the rise. The challenge, however, is that recycling requires storage and transport, and almost always requires some sort of treatment. How new residual waste streams are dealt with that carry far more toxic and concentrated substances than the water treated is a major environmental concern as companies jump on the recycling trend.Growing interest in the Appalachian Basin to treat oil and gas wastewater and discharge it into surface streams has heightened attention on these matters. Right now, these discharges are subject to EPA’s National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES), but as EPA recently noted in its Preliminary 2014 Effluent Guidelines Program Plan, “current regulations may not provide adequate controls for oil and gas extraction wastewaters.”
Recycling wastewater does reduce the need for freshwater and reduce the volumes that need to be disposed, but it can make disposal much more challenging – particularly when we don’t know enough about the treatment process and resulting waste products.
Diligent oversight needed
Permanent storage using underground injection wells remains by far the most common disposal method. At this point, it also appears to be the least risky, not to be confused with “unrisky”.
But there are things that can be done right now to help us begin to minimize these risks, such as updating requirements for the installation and maintenance of pits and tanks, assessing risks posed by new forms of transport and adopting appropriate risk controls, and doubling down on efforts to identify and remediate leaks and spills.
Bottom-line: none of this is simple. And questions about management of this produced water from drilling operations further demonstrates why we need to stay vigilant in better understanding the environmental impacts of oil and gas development. Having worked most of my career on these issues, it is clear to me that incremental but near-constant improvements are essential to minimize risks and protect communities.
15 Comments on "No Easy Answers When Disposing of Oil and Gas Wastewater"
GregT on Wed, 17th Dec 2014 8:22 pm
“Increased natural gas use, for example, can help decrease U.S. greenhouse gas emissions as it has a lower carbon content compared to coal or oil.”
Since CO2 accumulates in the environment, natural gas use is part of the problem, not the solution. Substituting oil and coal with NG will only prolong the inevitable. The more we burn, the worse the problem becomes. The time to stop burning fossil fuels is not now, it was forty years ago. The Earth already has enough catching up to do. The next forty years are sure to be uncomfortable enough, without adding more ‘fuel to the fire’.
eugene on Wed, 17th Dec 2014 9:18 pm
My read is we’re in a “done deal” situation but just keep believing there’s an answer just over the hill. I spent some time dealing with addicts who walked in the door desiring a simple solution to a very complex problem. That’s where I see almost all of us. As my neighbor says “I don’t want to give up my stuff”. I read endless comments saying “if we just do this”. As my second wife always said “pay no attention to what people say, watch what they do”. At this point, we’re doing nothing just a lot of wishful talk.
Plantagenet on Wed, 17th Dec 2014 9:59 pm
Actually there is an easy answer. Just use water free fracking methods and there is no none zero nada zip waste water
Apneaman on Wed, 17th Dec 2014 10:59 pm
Folks need water.
NASA: California Needs 11 Trillion Gallons of Water to End Epic Drought
http://ecowatch.com/2014/12/17/nasa-california-drought/
Norm on Thu, 18th Dec 2014 12:26 am
Cheese Louise, set it on fire. Dump the rest into the ocean. Keep it simple.
Kenjamkov on Thu, 18th Dec 2014 1:31 am
There is no “transition”, coal and oil will be used as much as possible until they cannot physically get it anymore. The only “transition” will occur in tandem with coal and oil, not instead of. Natural gas is just a way to try to keep bau going as long as possible.
Davy on Thu, 18th Dec 2014 5:30 am
There are no easy answers especially now when answers are few because of limits of growth with diminishing returns with a human population in carrying capacity overshoot within a degraded ecosystem. Easy answer to begin with are few due to the laws of thermodynamics. Life is no free lunch.
Yet, there are positive occurrences that species stumble upon and quickly colonize. It is the nature of life to spread forth and multiply. Humans had Agriculture and then FF driven industrialization. Basically this has cycled into a roughly a 12,000 year Anthropocene epoch with the hyper human growth in the last 200 years or so. We are done folks on those time scales. We are on the descent on the larger times scale. There are still corns that believe in exceptionalism of humans through knowledge, technology, market substitution, and complexity. This is delusional thinking per the resource evidence and systematic cycle evidence.
We know ecosystems cycle. It is apparent depletion is occurring. Innovation and new inventions are way down. Complexity and growth have stalled. For you and I and the time value of human interest this is not important except academically. We joes are concerned with 3-5-10 years. It is this time frame we find many of our questions on this PO board. The big picture is important and should tell us we are in a macro descent. Yet, in the short term has this descent begun per our locals and our personal experiences. My feelings are we graduated from the bumpy plateau and into the bumpy descent in the last year. This transition is subtle and slight but monumental in the direction of movement. My thinking is the position of oil economic value depletion and the financial system diminishing returns to debt were the turning point.
Oil and debt are critical because they effect growth. Growth is vital to problem solving and maintenance of complexity. When we can’t solve problems and complexity drops we lose our fight with entropic decay. We cannot support a population bumping carrying capacity. Social fabric tears. These conditions converge, create feedbacks, and eventually random descent. This descent is economic abandonment, complexity loss, and energy intensity degradation. The million dollar question is how quickly and powerful will this descent progress.
Species ability to mitigate, adapt, and adjust are directly influenced by this condition of degree and duration of descent. There are no easy answer, no free lunch, and no end to entropic decay. The best we can do at this point is acknowledge we have lost and we must adapt and adjust to a fall from the grace of prosperity.
The act of denial only makes the process more difficult. A crisis now is our only answer and it may not be survivable. Just as radical surgery is needed to save one’s life but success is not assured. That is where we are at. The human race needs to man-up and face our consequences now before nature pulls the plug and there is no hope.
Makati1 on Thu, 18th Dec 2014 5:44 am
We are Wylie Coyote standing in midair…
Dredd on Thu, 18th Dec 2014 7:36 am
The easy answer is that by default socities down through time commit suicide.
The great historian Arnold Toynbee wrote the book on it: “In other words, a society does not ever die ‘from natural causes’, but always dies from suicide or murder — and nearly always from the former, as this chapter has shown.” –A Study of History, by Arnold J. Toynbee
Plus, civilization has yet to discover the nature of the planet it is on (You Are Here).
Kenz300 on Thu, 18th Dec 2014 8:41 am
Gas, oil coal and nuclear power plants all need huge amounts of water to generate electricity and add huge environmental costs………..
Wind and solar power plants require no water to produce electricity and are safe and clean…………
One more reason to speed up the transition to safer, cleaner and cheaper alternative energy sources.
Apneaman on Thu, 18th Dec 2014 9:54 am
Wind and solar need massive inputs of fossil fuels. From highly destructive mining of toxic rare earths, to high energy manufacturing to installation, maintenance and decommission and disposal. Add up ALL the energy and environmental costs throughout the entire life cycle.
Green Illusions
“Green Illusions delivers a backstage tour of solar, wind, hydrogen, biofuels, clean coal, and electric cars. It asks: is clean tech part of the solution to growth and productivism, or part of the problem?”
http://www.greenillusions.org/
ghung on Thu, 18th Dec 2014 10:28 am
Apneaman: “Add up ALL the energy and environmental costs throughout the entire life cycle. “
….then compare this to so-called conventionals that require massive on-going inputs. I’m not sure why folks are so determined to make the ‘perfect the enemy of the good’. Twenty years after their installation, my first PV system has required ZERO inputs; none, all-the-while performing flawlessly. Including one battery set replacement (old batteries recycled about 50 miles from here), I’m still convinced I made the much better choice.
It’s telling that you guys never mention the massive initial and ongoing inputs required to provide gridweenies their high energy conventionally-powered lifestyles. Once one factors in the costs (all of them) and ongoing waste of building and maintaining your power grid, methinks the comparison isn’t even close. Then again, I’m not a binary absolutist thinker. At least I know where my energy comes from, post install. It’s about making choices, none of which are perfect.
Apneaman on Thu, 18th Dec 2014 11:23 am
Who is this “you guys” you are referring to?
drwater on Thu, 18th Dec 2014 11:23 am
Good article. It also depends on site specific conditions. Sometimes there are good and easy answers and sometimes there are no acceptable answers.
Kenz300 on Fri, 19th Dec 2014 9:26 am
When adding in the environmental costs of fossil fuels they are very expensive……