PA Outlawed Using Fracking Waste As Road Deicer 7 Years Ago; Oil Companies Spreading It Anyway

[hatrack]

Siri Lawson and her husband live on a stamp of wooded, hilly land in Warren County, Pennsylvania, nestled in the state’s rural northwest corner. During the summer heat, cars traveling on the county’s dirt roads cast plumes of dust in their wake. Winter’s chill can cause a hazardous film of ice to spawn on paved roads. To protect motorists from both slippery ice and vision-impairing dust, communities across Pennsylvania coat these roads with large, cheap volumes of de-icing and dust-suppressing fluids. In Lawson’s case, her township had been using oil and gas wastewater as a dust suppressant, believing the material was effective. But researchers have found it is no better at controlling dust than rainwater. It can also contain toxic chemicals and have radioactive concentrations several hundred times the acceptable federal limit in drinking water. Given the risks it poses to human health and the environment, Pennsylvania lawmakers and the state’s environmental agency disallowed this practice more than seven years ago.

But oil and gas companies have continued to spread their wastewater practically unchecked across the state, thanks to a loophole in state regulations. A Grist review of records from 2019 to 2023 found that oil and gas producers submitted more than 3,000 reports of wastewater dumping to the state Department of Environmental Protection, or DEP. In total, they reported spraying nearly 2.4 million gallons of wastewater on Pennsylvania roads. This number is likely a vast undercount: About 86 percent of Pennsylvania’s smaller oil and gas drillers did not report how they disposed of their waste in 2023.

Wastewater dumping is an open secret on Pennsylvania roads. At a legislative hearing this spring, state senators Katie Muth and Carolyn Comitta, both Democrats, said they witnessed companies spreading wastewater last fall during a tour of new fracking wells. Lawson, who has become a public face of opposition to wastewater dumping, experiences sinus pains and believes her symptoms are connected to living near roads coated with wastewater. Sometimes the pain has been so intense she’s had to leave her home “to get different air.” She’s submitted multiple complaints to DEP over the years, but she says it has done little to drag the agency off the sidelines.

EDIT

Lawmakers first banned the use of wastewater from fracking wells as a dust suppressant in 2016. Two years later, the DEP issued a moratorium on the use of wastewater from traditional drilling methods as well. But conventional oil and gas companies have found a loophole that allows them to skirt these rules with impunity. The DEP requires permits for wastewater disposal, but the agency grants an exception if the wastewater can be reused for a “beneficial” purpose. Any waste that is no more injurious to the environment and human health than a commercial alternative may be classified as a “coproduct,” a designation that receives less DEP oversight. Under Pennsylvania law, companies can grant their wastewater coproduct status by conducting in-house analyses to determine whether their waste is harmful to human health or the environment. These tests do not have to include a radiation analysis, even though studies have shown radium from oil and gas wastewater — which often contains 300 to 560 times the acceptable levels of radioactive substances in drinking water — has made its way into roadside vegetation, fresh water, and up the food chain. A company is only required to submit its justification for using the coproduct status if asked by the DEP to do so.

EDIT

https://grist.org/regulation/roadspreading-pennsylvania-fracking-waste/

[Probatim]

1. You can see this happening in the Pittsburgh area - drive down the parkway when the roads are open

and you'll see streaks along the highway that run for miles. It's obvious they open a cap on the tanker and it splashes out as they drive down the highway.

[gab13by13]

2. Pa. has quite a bit of radium and other minerals in the ground,

when they decay they form radon gas. My daughter lives outside of Pittsburgh where there are concentrations of radium, she installed a radon gas detector in her basement.

Then came fracking:

Residues from the oil and gas industry often contain radium and its daughters. The sulfate scale from an oil well can be very radium rich. The water inside an oil field is often very rich in strontium, barium and radium. Some frackers were sending their frac water to sewage treatment plants who didn't even test for radiation.

This shit causes cancer and they spread it on our roads where it readily washes into streams.

They like to call it brine water which sounds better than calling it radioactive water.

[Diamond_Dog]

3. Very good informative article.

I like that Grist site.

It is unconscionable to me how anyone would think spraying roads with fracking waste, a toxic stew of chemicals and radiation, would ever be a good idea. Surely it gets washed off into streams and meadows and ponds. Someone must know someone who knows someone, etc.

[CrispyQ]

4. Unfuckingbelievable. What good are these loophole regulations & who writes them?

Looks to me like company officials had a heavy hand. The company gets to run their own analysis on their wastewater to determine if it's harmful. And look, they only have to report to the agency if asked to!

So much corruption.

[Clouds Passing]

5. The rich are destroying our home.