By All Means, PA - Spread Gas Drilling Wastewater On Roads - It's Just Salt, Radium, Benzene And (Trade Secrets)!!
A gas industry advisory council to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection opened its meeting earlier this month by discussing the possibility of legalizing the spreading of toxic wastewater from conventional gas drilling on roads as a dust and snow treatment, despite studies showing the practice is potentially harmful to human health and the environment. The Pennsylvania Grade Crude Development Advisory Council’s agenda included consideration of two recent studies from Penn State University, the second published in July, that concluded such roadway treatments were ineffective and potentially unsafe.
Spraying roads with “produced water,” highly saline wastewater containing proprietary drilling chemicals as well as benzene, arsenic and radium 226 and 228, both radioactive isotopes, has been outlawed in Pennsylvania since 2016, but only for fluid that comes from unconventional, or fracked, gas wells. The DEP issued a moratorium on spraying produced water from conventional wells onto roadways in Pennsylvania in 2018 after the practice was challenged before the state’s Environmental Hearing Board.
Despite the recent studies, advisory council members remain unconvinced that spreading produced water from conventional wells on roadways would be harmful. The meeting opened with a discussion about the feasibility of submitting a rule-making petition to the DEP to legalize the spreading of produced water from conventional wells on roads as a dust suppressant.
EDIT
Produced water spread on roads “washes off the road, and doesn’t suppress dust,” said Bill Burgos, a professor of environmental engineering at Penn State and a co-author of the studies discussed at the advisory council meeting. “It’s a terrible idea.” Burgos and a team of scientists at Penn State began publishing studies on produced water in the late 2010s, and, after years of studying the chemical makeup of the material, Burgos was shocked to discover the term “road spreading” in one of his data files. “Surely this stuff isn’t spread on roads,” he remembered thinking. “There’s plenty of examples of seeing stressed vegetation in the gullies by the road because there’s so much salt” in the produced water, he continued. “Health issues are often slow to develop—you don’t see them right away.”
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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/27102023/should-toxic-wastewater-from-gas-drilling-be-spread-on-pennsylvania-roads/
= new reply since forum marked as read
It’s all ‘natural’ stuff made by man, diluted with water sprayed on roadways where it’s filtered through the asphalt or concrete then filtered even more soaking into the ground under the road till it hits the aquifer where its stored for years before getting pumped out and ran through a purification plant.
What’s the problem? We’ll adapt to that water.
