Louis Bonasso is president of Appalachian Oil Purchasers (AOP). The company just opened a plant specifically designed to treat water used
in the gas drilling process.
“It’s a distillation, crystallization process. To give you
a nonscientific explanation of that, we basically boil the water three or four
times, extracting the steam and the water content from the solids and the
solids that are left behind are predominately salt, and we hope that that salt
is going to be useful as road salt,” Bonasso said.
At the new AOP Clearwater plant in Fairmont, tanker trucks pull up to a nearly automated station. The truck driver swipes a card in a machine
that looks like an automated gas pump. They hook up a hose to the back of the
truck and the salty water produced from Marcellus gas drilling is pumped out. The
truck can then be reloaded with treated water, which drillers can use to drill
more gas wells.
If any treated water is left over, AOP can discharge into
the Monongahela River just across the road from the plant. Heavy metals
separated from the water are trucked to a landfill near Bridgeport.
Bonasso’s company also operates a number of underground
injection sites where untreated gas drilling water is disposed, but he saw an opportunity
and a need for this new plant as Marcellus gas drilling increased in recent
years.
“Recycling oil and gas fluids is something new, so we have
taken old technology and kind of formulated it to fit our needs or the needs of
the producer, and we’ll see if it works over a period of time,” Bonasso said.
The plant can treat around 210,000 gallons of water daily,
and with just four clients the plant is already close to its treatment capacity
on some days.
Bonasso says it will take a combination of disposal and
treatment methods to deal with the volume of water created from Marcellus
drilling and he sees the water recycling plant as just one option.
Wheeling resident and former biology professor Bruce Edinger
says the AOP treatment method is encouraging but even with this treatment
option, the problem of how to treat so much brine water from Marcellus drilling
is not going away.
The effects of untreated water were felt last year when brine
water released into the Monongahela
River left thousands of Pennsylvania residents without drinking water and corroded industrial
facilities that pull water from the river.
Edinger says state regulations that monitor water usage in
the Marcellus drilling process---from cradle to grave---are lacking.
“We’ve known in the past when you don’t have regulations
the disposal problem does become informal and you have toxic waste dumps,”
Edinger said. “It’s a problem we need to
face, and it’s a case where better regulation could help minimize the impacts.”
The WV DEP is considering requiring drillers to submit more information to the agency about where they’re pulling water from and how they
plan to dispose of it.
Recently, the DEP warned public wastewater treatment plants
from accepting the water produced from Marcellus wells. Clarksburg wastewater treatment plant superintendent William Goodwin
says the plant was accepting the water earlier this year.
“We
were far from being the answer to the amount of water generated from the
Marcellus well drilling or from the industry. It was just a little niche that
we saw an opportunity that we could provide a place for them to take some of
their water and generate some revenue so that we could keep the rates down for
the citizens,” Goodwin said.
But this summer the West Virginia Department of
Environmental Protection sent Goodwin a letter that warned of possible new regulations
and that the Marcellus drilling water may contain radioactive material released
when the Marcellus shale formation is disturbed. After that, Goodwin stopped taking it.
The DEP says most drillers in the state inject the water
into old underground gas wells that are no longer producing. There are 70 of
these permitted wells in the state.
Louis Bonasso with AOP Clearwater hopes his plant addresses
some of the gas industry’s water issues. He says the plant could double its
operation to treat around 420,000 gallons a day if the marketplace demands it.
With nearly 1,000 Marcellus well permits issued in West Virginia in the last three years, it's clear the amount of water needing
treatment will only increase. Each deep Marcellus well typically uses several
million gallons of water to fracture the shale and release natural gas.