Clarksburg Stops Treating Gas Well Drilling Brine

The State Journal
22 October 2009
By Pam Kasey

The Clarksburg Sanitation Board, which oversees the last municipal wastewater treatment plant in the state that was open to accepting gas well drilling brine, has decided to discontinue the practice.

The plant's effluent already is almost as salty as the state Department of Environmental Protection will allow, according to treatment plant Superintendent Bill Goodwin.

"The DEP was going to give me a daily max of 730 parts per million Total Dissolved Solids (TDS) with a monthly average of 500," Goodwin said. "We're so close already that we have no room for that."

The state doesn't have a water quality standard for TDS: salts that often are introduced to waterways through coal mining and oil and gas operations and that, at high concentrations, can foul drinking water supplies and impair the function of industrial equipment.

But the DEP began considering the problem in earnest in fall 2008 for two reasons.

One involved problems with drinking water and industrial equipment in Pennsylvania during a temporary period of high TDS in the Monongahela River -- due in part to low precipitation and in part to discharges upriver in West Virginia.

The other was the fact that several of the state's municipal wastewater treatment plants -- Clarksburg and Weston high in the Monongahela drainage and Wheeling on the Ohio River -- had begun to see gas well drilling brine as a waste stream that could augment their revenues.

In the end, it's been a short-lived attempt to generate those revenues.

Weston received a modified permit, according to plant Operator Ed Hubbs, but never took any brine.

Wheeling received a modified permit but found ultimately that the brine interfered with settling and ultraviolet disinfection. The plant stopped taking brine last month, according to Wheeling Public Works Director Russell Jebbia.

But the Clarksburg treatment plant, which began a trial program for up to 50,000 gallons per day of brine from Energy Contractors LLC of Bridgeport just as TDS problems arose further down the Monongahela River in September 2008, received particular attention from DEP.

In July 2009, the DEP presented its requirements for a modified permit.

"They gave me a list of 42 different parameters that we'd have to analyze for, and radioactive material," Goodwin said. "Obviously they wanted to be prohibitive of plants taking it."

The CSB asked Energy Contractors to provide detailed laboratory analysis before bringing more water, which Goodwin said the company has not done.

And Goodwin began testing TDS in the plant's effluent without the brine.

Since August, he has found the effluent to be so close already to the level DEP proposed for the plant for TDS that there's no room for Energy Contractors' brine.

He doesn't know why.

"It may be that it's not unusual," he said. "It's not something we've tested for before."

He recommended to his board on Oct. 14 that CSB give it up.

Income of $200,000 to $300,000 a year from the brine operation could have covered a significant part of the CSB's budget, Goodwin has said in the past.

He expects that a rate increase will be needed in the not-too-distant future.

"It would have been nice for the residents to keep the rates down, but obviously our primary concern is water pollution control, and we don't want to do something that negatively impacts the stream."

Energy Contractors did not return a call in time for this story.

Statewide, no one knows how much brine is being generated. DEP does not require producers to report the disposition of brine.

But given that a single Marcellus well may generate on the order of 3 million gallons during just its initial completion phase, and given that Lee Avary of the West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey lists 330 permits issued for possible Marcellus wells in the first seven months of this year, the reality is that the municipal programs provided a very limited outlet for the brine.

The DEP has said that much of the brine is injected underground under permit.

Some is known to be hauled out of state for treatment and underground injection.

And AOP Clearwater of Frazeysburg, Ohio, expects to open a 210,000-gallon-per-day brine recycling facility in Fairmont later this month. At least some of that capacity already is under contract, although the company has said it has room to triple its operation if demand justifies it.