WASHINGTON - The Obama administration is moving to block one option for oil and gas companies trying to get rid of the millions of gallons of briny, metal-laden wastewater that can flow out of each hydraulically fractured well.
The Environmental Protection Agency wants to ban companies from sending drilling wastewater to municipal treatment facilities, which are often ill equipped to remove the naturally occurring radium, bromide and other toxins carried with the fluid out of the ground. When salty bromide mixes with chlorine at treatment plants, it can produce trihalomethanes linked to bladder cancer and miscarriages.
Pennsylvania officials concerned about that toxic combination - and facing pressure from the EPA - blocked oil and gas companies from delivering wastewater to the state's treatment facilities in 2011, but federal regulations still allow the practice.
Public health advocates hailed the EPA's "zero-discharge" proposal as a vital step to protecting drinking water nationwide in comments filed with the federal government last week. And while no known municipal facilities currently accept drilling wastewater, that could change as pressure and limitations mount on other disposal methods, said Rachel Richardson, director of Environment America's "Stop Drilling" program.
"Putting this rule in place is essential to mitigate future harms," Richardson said. "Fracking wastewater is a big problem for which there is simply no adequate solution. ... It's crazy that highly toxic, radioactive wastewater can still be treated at the same place as dirty bath water, then released into the rivers and lakes we drink from."
But oil industry officials fear the focus on wastewater is just a back door attack on drilling.
Even conventional oil and gas wells can deliver wastewater to the surface - primarily fluids that flow along with the fossil fuels out of the underground formation.
But the industry's water disposal needs have skyrocketed with the surge in hydraulic fracturing, a process that involves pumping millions of gallons of water along with sand and chemicals underground to open the pores of dense rock formations and unlock the oil and gas trapped inside. Some of that fracturing fluid can surge back to the surface along with water from the formation itself. Over time, the initial surge of returning fracturing fluid declines and water already underground can flow alongside oil and gas from the reservoir itself.
Oil and gas producers traditionally have dealt the wastewater by trucking it to municipal facilities or centralized treatment facilities that specialize in wastewater from fracturing; injecting it into deep storage wells; or recycling the fluids. But municipal wastewater treatment facilities are already blocked off in Pennsylvania, the only state where drillers used them for disposal. Underground injection is drawing scrutiny because of its possible link to earthquakes. And not all wastewater can be recycled.
The EPA also is considering going beyond its proposed limitation on municipal wastewater treatment facilities as it weighs standards for sending oil and gas wastewater to centralized treatment facilities.
John Noel, the national oil and gas campaigns coordinator for Clean Water Action, said oil companies are going to look at the cheapest and most readily available disposal option "as the screws tighten on other disposal options."
Oil industry trade groups argue that the EPA is unfairly closing off the municipal treatment plant option by exaggerating the convenience and availability of wastewater injection and recycling. And some industry leaders worry the EPA's move is just the first of many to come, as environmentalists opposed to oil and gas development focus criticism on wastewater disposal.
"This clearly adversarial atmosphere on fossil energy will continue to threaten the ability to site and use disposal technologies, no matter how historically beneficial their record may be," said the Independent Petroleum Association of America and more than two dozen regional trade groups in comments filed with the government.
The EPA is set to re-examine and refine its proposal, in response to at least 19,000 public comments that were filed by a deadline earlier this month.
Industry trade groups said the EPA's proposal can't be considered in isolation. Other water management options, and the possibility that some may be foreclosed, should have been part of the agency's analysis, the American Petroleum Institute said.
The API said underground injection wells are not necessarily available nationwide and "are a viable option only where geologic characteristics favor necessary or optimal rates of injection. And access to these disposal wells may become restricted in ways largely outside of EPA's control."
For example, North Carolina recently prohibited disposing of oil and gas drilling waste in injection wells, and other states worried about quakes may take similar action.
There also is little capacity to inject drilling wastewater underground in Pennsylvania, where gas companies are targeting the Marcellus Shale formation. The geology of that area has made it cost prohibitive in some cases to drill deep injection wells, the Domestic Energy Producers Alliance noted. Centralized treatment facilities have been one solution for Pennsylvania producers.
In Pennsylvania, drillers said the EPA will follow up its proposed zero-discharge rule for municipal treatment plants with another rule blocking them from sending fluids to centralized facilities.
"If that is foreclosed, then we're facing a loss of production because the water can't be managed," said Lee Fuller, IPAA's executive vice president.
Fuller sees critics targeting wastewater disposal and hydraulic fracturing as a way to limit the underlying drilling and energy production. "Clearly their objective is to close the options," Fuller said. "This is not ... a battle over fracturing, it's a war over fossil energy."
If attacks on the hydraulic fracturing process aren't working, "then you start proliferating the issue to anything else you can find - water supply, wastewater management, air emissions," Fuller added. "Whatever's out there, you try to go after it. And that's the battle we're fighting."
Noel countered that there is "no coordinated effort to shut down oil and gas development via wastewater disposal."
Instead, he said, the EPA's proposal is evidence of federal officials trying to catch up with drilling practices and disposal practices that evolved quicker than environmental regulations.
He said some of the ways oil companies are disposing of their waste "is so egregious and causing so many blatant problems it's hard not to ask questions. Now you're just seeing,10 years after the fracturing boom kicked off, federal environmental protections catching up."