There’s a boom underway in Appalachia. Drillers are digging deeper to access natural gas in Marcellus Shale. This shale layer can be as much as 1.5 miles below the earth’s surface. This new gas drilling practice uses more water to fracture the shale and release the natural gas, and the method is already raising concerns about its affects on water.
Earlier this fall Pennsylvania environmental officials noticed water quality problems in the Monongahela River.
“So we started sampling and sending more teams out to collect biological data, water chemistry data,” said Rick Spear, biological supervisor for the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.
“When we did that we noticed that we had levels of total dissolved solids and sulfates that were above our drinking water standards in Pennsylvania.”
Officials determined the salty water resulted from the Marcellus Shale drilling. Drillers were taking the water to sewage treatment plants, but these plants aren’t equipped to handle this kind of water.
“We reduced the load that the sewage treatment plants could take of the fracing water, so we reduced that down to 1%,” said Spear. “We informed the public that we were getting close to above our drinking water standards. If they noticed that their water was tasting salty, to start drinking bottled water.”
West Virginia got involved in Pennsylvania’s problem when the Army Corps of Engineers released water from Stonewall and Tygart lakes, trying to dilute the new pollutants downstream. It didn’t really work,
but it called attention to a problem that West Virginia could experience in the future too.
Pat Campbell is assistant director of West Virginia’s Department of Environmental Protection Division of Water and Waste Management. He says only one treatment plant in the state is taking water from drillers right now. Most of it is pumped underground.
“Typically, they’re in areas where there’s already oil and gas production,” Campbell said. “They pull the gas or oil out of the field and they’ll use the same field to store the spent brine, so they put it back into a formation that will accept the waste.”
The Marcellus drilling requires more water, and this raises another concern: where is all of that water coming from? Campbell says drillers aren’t required to get a permit to take from the state’s waterways.
“The Water Resources Protection Act passed a couple years ago, and it primarily did a couple of things. One, it claimed the waters for the state of West Virginia, it claimed the ownership, and two it required
registration of withdrawals, but it did not give any authority to permit the withdrawals in West Virginia,” said Campbell.
Water withdrawals above a certain amount have to be recorded, but this can be after the fact.
“There has been talk that we need to look at that a little closer, particularly as it is associated with some of the issues around the Marcellus development, because of the water withdrawal concerns,” said James Martin, head of the West Virginia DEP Office of Oil and Gas. “So that is something we are looking into further, but there is no particular requirement for that at this point.”
Martin says his department’s issued more than 3,000 permits so far this year. In the last couple of months, the department started tracking which formation the gas well permits are targeting. Within that time, 89 Marcellus well permits were issued.
Aside from the permitting process, enforcement is also being looked at. Martin says there are more than 50,000 active wells in the state and only 14 inspectors.
“We are looking into trying to hire a few additional inspectors. In fact, we’re engaged in that process now, so hopefully soon we’ll have more people on the ground making sure that we’re taking care of things out there,” Martin said.
Meanwhile Pennsylvania is looking at increasing its permit fees in order to hire more inspectors.