I respond to Dispatch Reporter Spencer Hunt’s excellent Jan. 14 story “Barges of brine on Ohio River?” I can think of a few problems that arise from lacing millions of gallons of water with toxic chemicals and shooting it thousands of feet under the earth.
But one problem that’s hard to ignore is that nearly half of that cocktail bubbles back up to the surface, bringing back with it corrosive salts and radiation from metals deep underground.
Fracking produces waste that, like the refuse from nuclear power plants that has plagued us for decades, is so nasty that there is no good way to get rid of it.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency long has recommended that oil and gas waste be disposed of in pre-existing wells deep underground. But that’s not a solution that should comfort Ohio, which is home to many of the Marcellus region’s disposal wells.
When these best practices were developed, no one saw the shale boom coming, and no one knew that Ohio would become a regional dumping ground for fracking waste.
The fracking debate certainly draws differing viewpoints, but there should be wide agreement that we ought to ban the most reckless disposal methods, such as leaving waste in open pits or spraying it on county roads as a de-icer, and we should restore our nation’s decades-old hazardous-waste law so that it covers oil and gas. That’s the first step.
Next, this waste dilemma should really make our leaders stop and think twice about whether this whole fracking business is a good idea at all.
State policy advocate