Water contamination news: USA

EPA Adds the Riverside Industrial Park in Newark, New Jersey to the Superfund List seven acre site along the Passaic River contaminated with PCBs and volatile organic compounds.

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Elias Rodriguez, (212) 637-3664, rodriguez.elias@epa.gov

(New York, N.Y. – May 21, 2013) The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has added the Riverside Industrial Park in Newark, New Jersey to the Superfund National Priorities List of the country’s most hazardous waste sites. After a 2009 spill of oily material from the industrial park into the Passaic River, the EPA discovered that chemicals, including benzene, mercury, chromium and arsenic, were improperly stored at the site. The agency took emergency actions to prevent further release of these chemicals into the river. Further investigation showed that soil, ground water and tanks at the Riverside Industrial Park are contaminated with volatile organic compounds and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs).

Benzene, mercury, chromium and arsenic are all highly toxic and can cause serious damage to people’s health and the environment. Many volatile organic compounds are known to cause cancer in animals and can cause cancer in people. Polychlorinated biphenyls are chemicals that persist in the environment and can affect the immune, reproductive, nervous and endocrine systems and are potentially cancer-causing.

EPA proposed the site to the Superfund list in September 2012 and encouraged the public to comment during a 60-day public comment period. After considering public comments and receiving the support of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection for listing the site, the EPA is putting it on the Superfund list.

“The EPA has kept people out of immediate danger from this contaminated industrial park and can now develop long-term plans to protect the community,” said Judith A. Enck, EPA Regional Administrator. “By adding the site to the Superfund list, the EPA can do the extensive investigation needed to determine the best ways to clean up the contamination and protect public health.”

Since the early 1900s, the Riverside Industrial Park, at 29 Riverside Avenue in Newark, has been used by many businesses, including a paint manufacturer, a packaging company and a chemical warehouse. The site covers approximately seven acres and contains a variety of industrial buildings, some of which are vacant. In 2009, at the request of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, the EPA responded to an oil spill on the Passaic River that was eventually traced to the Riverside Avenue site. The state and the city of Newark requested the EPA’s help in assessing the contamination at the site and performing emergency actions to identify and stop the source of the spill.

The EPA plugged discharge pipes from several buildings and two tanks that were identified as the source of the contamination. In its initial assessment of the site, the EPA also found ten abandoned 12,000 to 15,000 gallon underground storage tanks containing hazardous waste, approximately one hundred 3,000 to 10,000 gallon aboveground storage tanks, two tanks containing oily waste, as well as dozens of 55-gallon drums and smaller containers. These containers held a variety of hazardous industrial waste and solvents. Two underground tanks and most of the other containers were removed by the EPA in 2012.

The EPA periodically proposes sites to the Superfund list and, after responding to public comments, designates them as final Superfund sites. The Superfund final designation makes them eligible for funds to conduct long-term cleanups. The Superfund program operates on the principle that polluters should pay for the cleanups, rather than passing the costs to taxpayers. After sites are placed on the Superfund list of the most contaminated waste sites, the EPA searches for parties responsible for the contamination and holds them accountable for the costs of investigations and cleanups. The search for the parties responsible for the contamination at the Riverside Industrial Park site is ongoing.

EPA proposes to add Makah Reservation Warmhouse Beach dump to federal Superfund cleanup list.

Suzanne Skadowski, EPA Public Affairs, 206-553-6689, skadowski.suzanne@epa.gov

(May 21, 2013 – Seattle) The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is proposing to add the Warmhouse Beach dump, on the Makah Reservation, in Neah Bay, Washington, to the Superfund National Priorities List. The proposed cleanup listing includes a public comment period from May 23 through July 23, 2013.

“Adding the Warmhouse Beach dump to EPA’s Superfund cleanup list will help protect the Makah Tribe’s treaty resources and the environment along the Strait of Juan de Fuca,” said Rick Albright, Director of EPA’s Region 10 Office of Environmental Cleanup in Seattle. “The Makah Tribe welcomes EPA’s efforts to assist in the Tribe’s longstanding effort to clean up the Warmhouse Beach dump, our highest environmental priority,” said Timothy J. Greene, Chairman of the Makah Tribal Council. “We look forward to working collaboratively with EPA to finally addressing the serious environmental and health risks that the dump poses to our treaty resources and culturally significant areas.”

The Warmhouse Beach dump was a 7-acre municipal and hazardous waste dump used in the 1970s-1980s by the Makah Air Force Station and by tribal and non-tribal members until the dump was closed in 2012. Contaminants found at the Warmhouse Beach dump and in nearby creeks include polyaromatic hydrocarbons or PAHs, polybrominated diphenyl ethers or PBDEs, perchlorate, metals, pesticides, polychlorinated biphenyls or PCBs, and dioxins. Mussels at the beaches also contain elevated concentrations of lead. The Makah Tribe referred the Warmhouse Beach dump to EPA for Superfund cleanup based on concerns about harmful substances leaching from the dump to surface waters and the tribe’s traditionally significant shellfishing beaches.

Warmhouse Beach is an important natural and cultural resource for the Makah and they have used it as a traditional summer fishing camp and for subsistence harvest of sea urchins, mussels, and steamer clams. Warmhouse Beach is also used for camping, surfing, and other recreational activities. EPA’s Superfund program investigates and cleans up complex and uncontrolled or abandoned hazardous waste sites to protect people’s health and the environment, with the ultimate goal of returning them to communities for productive use. Information on the Warmhouse Beach dump: http://yosemite.epa.gov/R10/cleanup.nsf/sites/warmhouse

EPA Adds the Matlack, Inc. Site in Woolwich Township, New Jersey to the Superfund List.

(New York, N.Y. – May 21, 2013) The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has added the Matlack, Inc. site in Woolwich Township, New Jersey to the Superfund National Priorities List of the country’s most hazardous waste sites. The site is a former truck terminal at which operations included truck maintenance and truck, trailer and tanker washing. As a result of past industrial activities, the soil and ground water are contaminated with volatile organic compounds and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). Many volatile organic compounds are known to cause cancer in animals and can cause cancer in people. PCBs are chemicals that persist in the environment and can affect the immune, reproductive, nervous and endocrine systems and are potentially cancer-causing. Contamination from this site is impacting the Grand Sprute Run stream and nearby wetlands that have been identified among New Jersey’s most significant natural areas.

EPA proposed to add the site to the Superfund list in September 2012 and encouraged the public to comment during a 60-day public comment period. After considering public comments and receiving the support of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection to list the site, the EPA is putting it on the Superfund list.

“Placing the Matlack site on the Superfund list is an important step in protecting people’s health and allowing EPA to take action to clean up the site,” said Judith A. Enck, EPA Regional Administrator. “By adding the site to the Superfund list, the EPA can do the extensive investigation needed to determine the best ways to address the contamination and protect public health.”

Located on Route 322 in Woolwich, New Jersey the site operated as a truck terminal from 1962 to 2001. Previous activities at the 70-acre facility included the cleanup of trucks and tankers used for transporting a variety of materials including flammable and corrosive liquids. The polluted cleaning solution was disposed of in an unlined lagoon behind the terminal building from 1962 until 1976 when Matlack Inc. began transporting the wastewater away from the site for disposal.

World Water Day 2013 in 15 seconds

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Phys.org
Innovative policies and new technologies that reduce water waste are helping countries across the Middle East and North Africa deal with chronic water shortages.

Those advances spring from the simple idea that preventing water loss is effectively the same as giving parched countries new sources of water. This view gained widespread credibility in the wake of an IDRC-supported research program designed to assess how the so-called “water demand management” approach could ease the region’s water crisis.

“The idea of using water more efficiently is now on the top of the policy agenda in the Middle East,” says former IDRC program officer Lamia El-Fattal. “Our work provided the intellectual backbone that made it possible for people to move with confidence in that direction.”

Scaled-down approach

Earlier, governments had seen big, costly projects such as dams, canals, and salt-water desalination plants as the solution to water scarcity. By the mid-1990s, the megaproject approach was widely viewed as a poor response to a water crisis worsened by population growth and climate change. However, the “demand management” alternative to developing new supplies of water—for example, reducing the amount of water used, wasted, or even needed—remained unproven.

Enter WaDImena. Between 2004 and 2009, the IDRC-supported program brought together researchers, policymakers, farmers, and community groups to share successes and assess new ideas.

The research was wide-ranging. For example, WaDImena contributors refined the treatment of wastewater to ensure that “greywater”—non-sewage waste—could safely be used for certain types of agriculture. They also examined how watering crops at night (to minimize evaporation) and using technologies such as drip-irrigation could reduce agricultural water demand.

Efficiency plus equity

Many of WaDImena’s inquiries focused on the dual concerns of enhancing efficiency and distributing water more equitably. A delegation of Syrians to Tunisia, for instance, considered how to replicate the successes of that country’s water users associations. These groups empower small farmers to enforce their own methods of fairer and less wasteful water distribution. They are based on the idea that “the best way to manage water is to give power to the people who are using it,” says El-Fattal.

Researchers also pondered how fees for water delivery could provide incentives to save water without penalizing the poor. Cultural taboos against charging for water had meant that “the paradox of this region was that water was very scarce but also cheap,” explains IDRC program officer and former WaDImena project manager Hammou Laamrani.

The solution since adopted in several countries is to have meters on wells that allow some water to be drawn for free, ensuring fair access for poor farmers. At the same time, distribution fees are imposed for greater use, providing an incentive to conserve water.

Influencing policy

New ideas have led to policy changes at many levels. In Jordan, for example, building codes have been changed to require waste-water recycling to be incorporated into new construction.

In Morocco, government subsidies for efficient drip-irrigation technologies are also used as a lever to encourage farmers to grow value-added crops that make better use of scarce water.

Water demand management, concludes El-Fattal, “has gone from an idea to practical solutions that people are committed to.”

Provided by International Development Research Centre (IDRC)

“Smart solutions to a worsening water crisis.” April 11th, 2013. http://phys.org/news/2013-04-smart-solutions-worsening-crisis.html

World water day everyday

10 ways you can make a difference and help save the water.

1. Sign the WATER BILL OF RIGHTS, a statement of principles affirming that all Americans have the right to safe, clean drinking water at replenishable levels.
2. Fix leaks. You’ll conserve hundreds of gallons of water a year and save on your utility bill as well.
3. Say ‘No’ to bottled water. It takes three times the water you’re drinking just to create the bottle. Plus, you’ll save money.
4. Change your garden practices. More plants die from overwatering than underwatering. If you live in a dry community, try native plants instead of water-guzzling grass.
5. Eat less meat, especially beef. It takes 1,800 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef, more than three times that of chicken or pork.
6. Choose products with the EPA’s WaterSense label, which indicates that a product is water efficient and is contributing to overall water conservation.
7. You’ve got a trash can. Use it. Don’t throw your garbage in the toilet, which can in some cases use up to four gallons of water per flush.
8. Only wash full loads. In both your laundry machine and dishwasher, try to limit yourself to full loads only.
9. Turn off lights when you’re not using them. A single 60-watt light bulb uses up to five liters of water for every hour it stays on.
10. Understand the “hidden water” cost of what you do every day.Use National Geographic’s Water Calculator to test your true water footprint.

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Water contamination news

Amid debate – Falls Water Board used lobbyist to explore fracking in Albany.

By Justin Sondel / Niagara Gazette / February 11, 2013

Niagara Gazette — The Niagara Falls Water Board hired a professional lobbyist in Albany to help it explore the possibility of treating wastewater from natural gas drilling sites while the debate was playing out in the public.

The water board’s lobbyist deal with Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s office, the New York State Legislature and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation on natural gas drilling and water treatment matters, according to reports filed with the New York State Joint Commission on Public Ethics, a state entity that oversees lobbying activities.

The board hired e3communications, a buffalo lobbying and public relations firm, from January 2011 to April of 2012, when the board voted to discontinue its relationship with the company, according to the documents.

The process of high-volume hydraulic fracturing, commonly referred to as fracking, creates thousands of gallons of waste water at each well. That water — which contains chemicals, traces of radioactive material and other toxins picked up from deep below the earth’s surface — needs to be treated before being returned to the water table.

And so New York state’s decision on whether to allow fracking in the gas-rich Marcellus shale — an underground rock formation that runs across southern New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia and West — could present an opportunity for the water board.

Even if Niagara Falls City Council members voted unanimously in March to ban hydrofracking-related activities, including “fracking” waste, within city limits.

Water board officials announced last year that they were considering the possibility of treating wastewater created during the drilling process at the Falls water treatment facility as a way to generate additional revenue for the water board and to cut costs for ratepayers in the city.

Paul Drof, the executive director of the utility, said the board’s decision to work with a lobbyist was not an indication that the board supports fracking, but rather an effort to explore and better understand the issues surrounding the controversial process.

“We’re neither for nor against fracking, but if it happens we wanted to investigate what does mean to the waste industry as a whole,” Drof said.

If the practice of hydraulic fracturing or the treatment of the wastewater were to be allowed in New York state the utility would need to know whether the facility was capable of treating the fluids and what would need to be done — and at what cost — to be able to safely handle the waste, Drof said.

“Until we know what the treatment goals are, we can’t really predict that right now,” he added.

The utility treats about half the amount of water that it did when running at capacity, is dealing with constant infrastructure repairs and upgrade needs and has to cope with rising legacy costs from retired workers’ pensions, water board officials maintain. This year the utility will reach the end of a 20-year agreement with Occidental Chemical that brought the utility $64.5 million over that period. With the key revenue source drying up, the board will have to make up a $1.3 million gap in the budget.

Drof said the utility needs to explore any possible revenue sources to try to offset the many fiscal challenges it is facing.

Drof said he understands the public’s hesitation in accepting fracking waste, especially considering the community’s history of environmental issues. But, he noted, the utility would be subject to stringent regulations and monitoring from the DEC and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency should it ever get into the frack water treatment business.

“We just can’t unilaterally decide to accept something,” he said.

And the plant already accepts a variety of chemical waste products for treatment, he added.

Wastewater from hydrofracking would be subject to the same scrutiny from government agencies as other waste already being hauled to the facility.

“It’s no different than what we’ve been doing from when we were part of the city until now,” Drof said. “We do take in hauled waste.”

Fracking has been a touchy issue for the Cuomo administration with environmental advocates demanding that the practice be banned, while industry insiders and land owners hoping to sell to the companies are urging the state to allow the practice under strict regulations.

A series of recently released polls from the Sienna Research Institute and Quinnipac University suggest public opinion on the fracking ban is narrowly split.

The DEC and New York State Department of Health have been studying the impact of gas drilling for more than four years in an effort to determine whether the practice will be allowed in New York as Cuomo tries to placate constituents and interests on both sides of the issue

Environmental advocates say that even if the ban is lifted, the DEC cannot ensure that hydrofracking wastewater treated in the Falls, which would be discharged into the river after it is processed, would be safe.

Anne Rabe, a campaign coordinator for the Center for Health, Environment and Justice, said that even if the treatment plant is able to clean the majority of toxins out of the fracking fluid, it cannot get them all. And the trace amounts of radium that are infused into the water deep underground cannot be extracted, she said.

“Over time, that’s going to reduce the efficacy of the treatment plant,” Rabe said. “Wastewater treatment facilities are not built to deal with the treatment of a mixture of chemicals and radioactive materials.”

Sandra Steingraber, a distinguished scholar in residence with Ithaca College’s Department of Environmental Studies and Sciences, sits on the advisory committee for the anti-fracking coalition New Yorkers Against Fracking.

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Global water news

New tech said to clean up fracking water.

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A new water desalination technology may prove a savior for the oil and natural gas industries confronting growing concerns about the wastewater that flows to the surface in the months and years after a well is fracked.

In fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, operations 3 million to 5 million gallons of water are injected deep underground, along with sand and a chemical cocktail, to fracture shale rock and extract the embedded natural gas.

Some of that water returns to the surface immediately after the fracturing. The rest comes back over the course of months and years, which a recent study indicates could overwhelm the wastewater treatment infrastructure in the Marcellus Shale formation, which stretches from New York to Virginia.

The new desalination technology is not aimed at the large volumes of water that flow back just after a frack, but could work unattended by a human for months as it treats the really salty water to drinking-water quality, according to engineers working on the system.

The technique “is very much like an engineered version of what nature does in the rain cycle where seawater vaporizes, forms clouds in the atmosphere which condense and come down as rain,” John Lienhard, a mechanical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told NBC News.

“But what we’ve got is clearly a system that’s been designed to optimize performance and to minimize the amount of energy that is required to do the vaporization.”

The system is a variation of the standard desalination process where salty water is vaporized and then condenses on a cold surface. The salt is separated out in the vaporization.

Lienhard and colleagues use what’s called a carrier gas process where water is sprayed onto warm air to vaporize it. This warm moist air, which carries pure water vapor, is bubbled through cool water where the vapor condenses.

While other researchers have developed so-called humidification dehumidification desalination systems, Lienhard and colleagues maintain that theirs is more energy efficient and comes with the advantages of having simple hardware, low maintenance, and is optimized to process between 1,200 and 2,400 liters a day.

That makes the technology well-suited for desalination in rural coastal villages in developing countries, which the researchers said was the inspiration for their research.

“And it turns out that those are very similar to the requirements that you have in dealing with water that is coming up in the oil and gas wells,” Lienhard said.

Hundreds of natural gas wells are distributed across landscapes such as the Marcellus Shale, the Bakken formation in North Dakota and the Permian Basin of West Texas.

Lienhard said he envisions the desalination plants at each individual well pad, processing hundreds to a few thousand liters of produced water per day at a cost of about “a couple of dollars per cubic meter.”

The team has filed for patents on the technology and launched a company to commercialize it.

“We hope to have a pilot plant running at a natural gas site within 12 months,” Lienhard said. “If the pilot works, then we could immediately scale it up.”

John Roach is a contributing writer for NBC News. To learn more about him, visit his website.

Wastewater from fracking could be too much to handle, study says.

The practice of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, produces a relatively small amount of wastewater, given all the gas the technique recovers, according to a new analysis of operations in Pennsylvania. Nevertheless, the number of fracking operations has grown so rapidly that the wastewater being produced threatens to overwhelm the region’s capacity to properly treat it.

In fracking operations, 3 million to 5 million gallons of water are injected deep underground, along with sand and a chemical cocktail, to fracture shale rock and extract the embedded natural gas. Some of that water returns to the surface immediately after the fracturing. The rest comes back over the course of months and years. The result is that each well brings up hundreds of thousands to millions of gallons of wastewater.

Pennsylvania has invested very little in the infrastructure needed to deal with wastewater, even though the region was where the U.S. oil and gas industry got its start more than 150 years ago, Brian Lutz, a biogeochemist at Kent State University, told NBC News.

What’s more, the geology of the region limits the ability to dispose of the massive quantities of wastewater generated during fracking operations by injecting it deep underground, as is done in other regions of the country.

“That’s critical,” Lutz said, “because that means we’re generating large wastewater streams in a new geography of the country where we don’t necessarily have a pre-existing capacity and, perhaps, we don’t have the necessary physical capacity to handle these wastes that we have in other regions.”

Conventional vs. fracking

He and colleagues analyzed data from 2,189 active Marcellus Shale wells in Pennsylvania, and compared gas production and wastewater volumes to conventional well data. They found that shale gas wells typically produced 10 times the amount of wastewater as conventional wells, but they also produced about 30 times more natural gas.

Lutz noted that the study is the first to put shale gas production into the perspective of conventional production in order to benchmark the amount of wastewater being produced per unit of gas recovered from shale gas wells.

The findings make the point that “as we expand domestic natural gas production, even if the expansion were driven by conventional production, our wastewater challenge would be no less and perhaps much worse,” Lutz said.

Despite the greater efficiency in getting the gas out with fracking, however, the region has seen 570 percent growth in the amount of wastewater generated since 2004, due to the boom in natural gas production.

In 2011, the last year data were analyzed, more than 830 million gallons of wastewater were generated in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale formation, Lutz and colleagues report in their study, which was published Wednesday in the journal Water Resources Research.

Natural-gas boom

Natural-gas boom
Over the past decade, the Marcellus Shale, which stretches from New York to Virginia, has gone from producing 2 percent of the nation’s natural gas output to about 10 percent. And the rush may have only just begun. Hydraulic fracturing was pioneered by the U.S. Department of Energy and its industry partners, and is largely responsible for a boom in natural gas production that some forecasts indicate will help make the country energy independent by 2035.

But independence comes at a price. As the fracking boom has accelerated, so too have concerns about the wastewater it generates and groundwater contamination from the chemicals injected into the wells.

Surprisingly, Lutz and colleagues note, only about a third of the wastewater from the Marcellus Shale wells was classified as flowback — the wastewater that comes back to the surface within a few days of a frack. The rest is brine, water that is generated in the wells over a much longer time.

“What surprised us about this, and what’s certain, is that waste was definitely being documented as being generated at the well and taken to treatment facilities two, three, four years out after the well began producing and substantial quantities of waste,” Lutz said.

Much of the controversy surrounding fracking has focused on the chemicals in the flowback, many of which are unknown to outside researchers because the drilling companies consider them proprietary. But the brine often contains a much higher pollution load than the flowback, Lutz noted. What’s more, the finding suggests that truck traffic on back roads will have to continue long after the few weeks required for the initial fracturing operation, in order to haul the wastewater off to treatment zones.

Water issues overblown?
John Krohn is a spokesman for Energy in Depth, a gas industry trade group. He said the study highlights the water efficiencies that have come with the technological advancements used to access oil and gas in shale rock formations.

Those findings, coupled with increasing water recycling rates in the natural gas industry show that wastewater issues surrounding hydraulic fracturing “are at the very least overblown and discredited, potentially, by this study,” he told NBC News.

Krohn noted that wastewater recycling rates in Pennsylvania were 70 percent in 2012, and some companies have reported rates of 100 percent. Recycling for the industry means using one of many technologies to clean the flowback and brine sufficiently to be used for subsequent fracturing operations.

“In a lot of areas, natural gas producers are able to use this fracturing fluid in excess of 20 to 25 times,” he said. “And so what that does is it lessens the water footprint of the entire industry.”

Lutz acknowledges that the industry has made strides in wastewater recycling, but he’s concerned about a future when new wells aren’t being drilled rapidly enough to handle the recycled waste.

“As soon as your well population starts to stabilize or decline, then you are left with a large volume of wastewater, and there currently is no method than can recycle that water for an alternative use — municipal or agricultural or something like that,” he said.

Krohn said he doubted that such a slowdown in well drilling would occur. If it does, other options such as injection wells will offer viable alternatives, he said.

Given the unlikelihood of a slowdown, Lutz hopes the wastewater issue stays in the discussion.

“Wastewater from the Marcellus Shale is really a central challenge to future development,” he said. “It is not an ancillary problem that is perhaps going to solve itself, but something that really needs to lead the discussion, at least from the environmental side of things, as we think about future development.”

John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News

John Roach is a contributing writer for NBC News. From climate change and mass extinctions to human evolution and deep space, his writing explores life on Earth and its place in the universe. He was a staff writer at the Environmental News Network for several years and has contributed to National Geographic News for more than a decade. To learn more about him, visit his website.

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Water education news: Fracking

Hydraulic fracturing produces less wastewater per unit of gas – but more overall.

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Source: Duke University /January 22, 2013 / oilandgasonline.com

Note: Lutz and Doyle conducted their analysis with no external funding /Aurana Lewis, who graduated in 2012 with a master of environmental management degree from Duke’s Nicholas School, co-authored the paper.

Hydraulically fractured natural gas wells are producing less wastewater per unit of gas recovered than conventional wells would. But the scale of fracking operations in the Marcellus shale region is so vast that the wastewater it produces threatens to overwhelm the region’s wastewater disposal capacity, according to new analysis by researchers at Duke and Kent State universities.

Hydraulically fractured natural gas wells in the Marcellus shale region of Pennsylvania produce only about 35 percent as much wastewater per unit of gas recovered as conventional wells, according to the analysis, which appears in the journal Water Resources Research.

“We found that on average, shale gas wells produced about 10 times the amount of wastewater as conventional wells, but they also produced about 30 times more natural gas,” said Brian Lutz, assistant professor of biogeochemistry at Kent State, who led the analysis while he was a postdoctoral research associate at Duke. “That surprised us, given the popular perception that hydraulic fracturing creates disproportionate amounts of wastewater.”

However, the study shows the total amount of wastewater from natural gas production in the region has increased by about 570 percent since 2004 as a result of increased shale gas production there.

“It’s a double-edged sword,” Lutz said. “On one hand, shale gas production generates less wastewater per unit. On the other hand, because of the massive size of the Marcellus resource, the overall volume of water that now has to be transported and treated is immense. It threatens to overwhelm the region’s wastewater-disposal infrastructure capacity.”

“This is the reality of increasing domestic natural gas production,” said Martin Doyle, professor of river science at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment. “There are significant tradeoffs and environmental impacts whether you rely on conventional gas or shale gas.”

The researchers analyzed gas production and wastewater generation for 2,189 gas wells in Pennsylvania, using publicly available data reported by industry to the state’s Department of Environmental Protection, in compliance with state law.

In hydraulic fracturing, large volumes of water, sand and chemicals are injected deep underground into gas wells at high pressure to crack open shale rock and extract its embedded natural gas. As the pace of shale gas production grows, so too have concerns about groundwater contamination and what to do with all the wastewater.

Another surprise that emerged, Doyle said, was that well operators classified only about a third of the wastewater from Marcellus wells as flowback from hydraulic fracturing; most of it was classified as brine.

“A lot of attention, to date, has focused on chemicals in the flowback that comes out of a well following hydraulic fracturing,” he said. “However, the amount of brine produced – which contains high levels of salts and other natural pollutants from shale rock – has received less attention even though it is no less important.”

Brine can be generated by wells over much longer periods of time than flowback, he noted, and studies have shown that some of the pollutants in brine can be as difficult to treat as many of the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing fluids.

“We need to come up with technological and logistical solutions to address these concerns, including better ways to recycle and treat the waste on site or move it to places where it can be safely disposed,” Doyle said. “Both of these are in fact developing rapidly.”

“Opponents have targeted hydraulic fracturing as posing heightened risks, but many of the same environmental challenges presented by shale gas production would exist if we were expanding conventional gas production,” Lutz added. “We have to accept the reality that any effort to substantially boost domestic energy production will present environmental costs.”

The Marcellus shale formation stretches from New York to Virginia and accounts for about 10 percent of all natural gas produced in the United States today. Much of the current production is in Pennsylvania. Prior to technological advances in horizontal well drilling and hydraulic fracturing that made the shale gas accessible, the region accounted for only about 2 percent of the nation’s output.

Lutz and Doyle conducted their analysis with no external funding.

Aurana Lewis, who graduated in 2012 with a master of environmental management degree from Duke’s Nicholas School, co-authored the paper.

SOURCE: Duke University

Really? – Shale Gas Fracking uses a lot of water? – Really!

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Contaminated water news: Great Lakes

The Grand Calumet’s road to recovery

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Water news

MMSD ordered to provide ‘green infrastructure’ for storm water.

DNR wastewater permit will cut storm-water flows to sewers.

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Water crisis: China

Report ties top clothing retailers to severe water pollution.

By staff reporter Cui Zheng / Caixin Online / 04.11.2012 11:01

Nearly 50 major clothing retailers were linked to supply chains that dump toxic waste into China’s dwindling water resources, a new study by five environmental organizations finds.

(Beijing) – Arguably the epicenter of the world’s textile industry, China is now grappling with the effects of disastrous wastewater management. Now a recent study by a group of five environmental organizations says the willful avoidance of major clothing retailers continues to persist, adding to the many hurdles of pollution control in the country.

Companies including Marks & Spencer, Esprit, Calvin Klein, Giorgio Armani and Carrefour were cited as lacking a policy on downstream pollution management.

The report released April 9 by five NGOs, including Friends of Nature and the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, sought to identify the pollution policies of 48 clothing retailers. Citing egregious environmental violations spreading across Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Shandong, Guangdong and Fujian provinces by roughly 6,000 suppliers, the report states that some of the world’s largest clothing companies ignore the wastewater policies of suppliers.

The water-intensive production process of clothing makes the textiles industry the third largest emitter of untreated wastewater at 2.45 billion tons per year among 39 industries, according to the report. The same report states textile dye wastewater accounted for 80 percent of water pollution while effluent from fiber treatment accounted for 12 percent.

In 2008, a textile company in Shantou, Guangdong Province, emitted wastewater without treatment and was fined 100,000 yuan.

However, the report did not limit it’s scrutiny to clothing retailers. The president of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, Ma Jun, said the largest barrier in wastewater management continues to be poor regulatory enforcement. The largest wastewater lawsuit occurred just last year, when three companies in Foshan, Guangdong Province, received a 5 million yuan fine for dumping toxic wastewater into waterways.

“With the nominal cost of water pollution still so low, companies don’t have any incentive to upgrade manufacturing technology,” Ma said.

New: STEM water science resource material.

Contaminated drinking water

EPA still investigating if fracking can contaminate drinking water.

Posted: Sunday, December 23, 2012

The EPA says they’re conducting 18 research projects into hydraulic fracturing— where water, sand and chemicals are blasted into the earth to release natural gas. And they’re looking at several aspects of fracking, from gathering water for the process to treating the wastewater that comes back up to the surface after drilling is complete.

While EPA officials have declined to comment further beyond their published update, environmental advocacy groups are watching their progress closely.

Dusty Horwitt is a senior counsel with Environmental Working Group, a research organization based in DC. He says the EPA’s research project needs to be broad because it is difficult to prove the exact source of water contamination.

Horwitt: “There are so many different points in the process that could potentially cause pollution, geology and hydrology is going to be different in different parts of the country. We don’t know in many cases exactly what chemicals the industry is using in its fracking process so that adds a level of difficulty to the research.”

Horwitt says there are few scientific studies of hydraulic fracturing that involve actual testing of water quality before and after drilling, so that should be a key part of the EPA’s efforts.

The EPA plans to release a final draft of the study for public comment in late 2014.

Study of the potential impacts of hydraulic fracturing on drinking water resources: Progress report (PDF) (278 pp, 9.9MB)

Read the press release and executive summary (PDF) (4 pp, 138K)

At the request of Congress, EPA is conducting a study to better understand any potential impacts of hydraulic fracturing on drinking water and ground water. The scope of the research includes the full lifespan of water in hydraulic fracturing.

What is the Hydraulic Fracturing Water Cycle?

A first progress report is planned for late 2012. A final draft report is expected to be released for public comment and peer review in 2014.

How EPA is doing the research

• Plan to Study the Potential Impacts of Hydraulic Fracturing on Drinking Water Resources
• Approach to the Science
• Quality Assurance & Integrity
• Peer Review
• Transparency

Learn More About How EPA is doing the research

How you can get involved

• Participate in Meetings
• Technical Stakeholder Outreach
• Coordination with federal, state and tribal government agencies
• Peer Review

Learn More About How you can get involved

 

New: STEM water science resource material.

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Water contamination

U.S. and Mississippi announce clean water act agreement with the city of Jackson.

Stacy Kika / kika.stacy@epa.gov / 202-564-0906 /202-564-4355
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: November 21, 2012

WASHINGTON – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Department of Justice, and the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) announced today a comprehensive Clean Water Act settlement with the city of Jackson, Miss. Jackson has agreed to make improvements to its sewer systems to eliminate unauthorized overflows of untreated raw sewage and unauthorized bypasses of treatment at the Savanna Street Wastewater Treatment Plant (WWTP), the city’s largest wastewater treatment facility. When wastewater systems overflow, they can release untreated sewage and other pollutants into local waterways, threatening water quality and contributing to beach closures and disease outbreaks.

“EPA is working with cities to protect the nation’s waters from raw sewage overflows that can have significant impacts on people’s health and the environment,” said Cynthia Giles, assistant administrator for the EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance. “Today’s settlement will lead to improvements in the management of wastewater overflows, which will reduce water pollution and benefit the Jackson community for years to come.”

“This agreement will bring lasting benefits to the people of Jackson by reducing the threats to public health posed by untreated sewage overflows,” said Ignacia S. Moreno, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division. “The settlement will bring the city into compliance with the nation’s Clean Water Act, requiring significant upgrades to the existing sewer system. Under the settlement, assistance will be provided to residents to repair sewer connections in lower-income areas that have suffered historically from overflows of untreated sewage”

The consent decree requires Jackson to implement specific programs designed to ensure proper management, operation and maintenance of its sewer systems. In order to address the problem of wet weather overflows of raw sewage from the sewer lines, Jackson will develop and implement a comprehensive sewer system assessment and rehabilitation program. The city will also develop and implement a comprehensive performance evaluation and composite correction program to reduce the bypasses of treatment at the Savanna Street WWTP.

The consent decree also requires Jackson to develop and implement numerous sewer system capacity, management, operations and maintenance programs, including a pump station operation and preventive maintenance program, a WWTP operation and maintenance program and a water quality monitoring program.

In addition to the control requirements, the consent decree requires Jackson to pay a civil penalty of $437,916. As part of the settlement, Jackson has also agreed to implement a supplemental environmental project valued at $875,000 that will provide additional environmental benefits to the local community. The project involves reducing the flow of water from entering the sewer system by eliminating illicit stormwater connections and repairing defective private lateral sewer lines from the low-income residential properties.

Keeping raw sewage and contaminated stormwater out of the waters of the United States is one of the EPA’s national enforcement initiatives for 2011 to 2013. The initiative focuses on reducing sewer overflows, which can present a significant threat to human health and the environment. These reductions are accomplished by obtaining cities’ commitments to implement timely, affordable solutions to these problems, including the increased use of green infrastructure and other innovative approaches.

The United States has reached similar agreements in the past with numerous municipal entities across the country including Mobile and Jefferson County (Birmingham), Ala.; Atlanta and Dekalb County, Ga.; Memphis, Knoxville and Nashville, Tenn.; Miami-Dade County, Fla.; New Orleans, La.; Hamilton County (Cincinnati), Oh.; Northern Kentucky Sanitation District #1 and Louisville MSD, Ky.

The proposed consent decree with Jackson is subject to a 30-day public comment period and final court approval before becoming effective.

More about the settlement:

More information on EPA’s national enforcement initiative:

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