Pa., W.Va. Address Salt Problems Differently

The State Journal
8 January 2010
By Pam Kasey
pkasey@statejournal.com

MORGANTOWN — As West Virginia legislators strategize about controlling salt levels in West Virginia streams, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection is taking a very different approach to the same problem.

The difference reflects the two states’ contrasting situations with regard to brine from natural gas wells in the Marcellus Shale.

But it’s all in the details. Depending on how the rules are written and applied, either approach — or neither — ultimately may prove adequate to protect water quality.

Why Regulate Salts?

The region’s streams long have assimilated salty water from legacy mine drainage and, more recently, from coal bed methane extraction.

Brine from these processes contributed to the death last fall of as many as 22,000 fish and all of the mussels on Dunkard Creek at the West Virginia-Pennsylvania line.

But there’s much more brine to come. Far larger and saltier volumes result when producers blast water laced with sand and chemicals into the Marcellus Shale formation to break the rock and release trapped natural gas.

Several million gallons of this hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” fluid returns to the surface at each well — but briny with salt from the ancient seabed.

The fish kill on Dunkard Creek and the increasing understanding that other streams across the region are high in total dissolved solids and risk sharing its fate, along with the expected increase in Marcellus activity, have raised interest in controlling the flow of salts from all sources.

In West Virginia, much of the frack flowback is injected underground under state permit, according to the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection’s Office of Oil and Gas.

“There’s a good bit of that water that’s being reused,” said James Martin, chief of WVDEP’s Office of Oil and Gas. “But for ultimate disposal purposes, volumetrically, most of that’s likely to be UIC (underground injection control permit).”

Martin’s office estimates that about 1,060 permits were issued in West Virginia for Marcellus wells through November and that about 500 of those wells had been drilled and completed.

In Pennsylvania, by contrast, most frack flowback is released to surface waters — currently by facilities that don’t undertake the expensive process of removing the salts but that rely, rather, on dilution.

That resulted in several episodes of high TDS in the Monongahela River in Pennsylvania in 2008 and 2009, creating taste and odor problems in drinking water and a range of problems for industrial water users.

With thousands of Marcellus wells now permitted in Pennsylvania, PADEP has received applications for brine discharges that would overwhelm the state’s waters.

“The commonwealth could need up to 20 million gallons per day in new treatment capacity, which equates to about 7,500 to 12,500 tons per day of salt,” reads a presentation prepared by John Hines, deputy secretary for water management at PADEP. “That mass cannot be disposed of via dilution by streams.”

A Brief Clean Water Act Primer

Two Clean Water Act tools are relevant.

One is standards: Regulators can apply in-stream water quality standards or end-of-discharge-pipe effluent standards.

The other is uses: Regulators can set in-stream water quality standards for various uses, which can affect the way the standards are applied. For example, a standard aimed at protecting the public water supply might be applied only within a given distance of a drinking water intake, while a standard protecting aquatic life would apply everywhere within a stream.

The application of these two tools largely determines whether pollution discharge permit limits will be relatively loose or relatively strict.

West Virginia’s Approach

The approach West Virginia legislators are taking — one that did not pass in 2009 but is planned for a second try in 2010 following the Dunkard Creek kill — is to set an in-stream water quality standard.

As currently conceived, that standard would be no more than 500 milligrams per liter for salts, which are a component of TDS.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recommends a standard of 250 milligrams per liter.

An in-stream standard protects water quality at a given level, while enabling industrial customers to take advantage of dilution — allowing for the possibility of looser discharge limits where streams can assimilate more salts.

However, the draft legislation so far leaves it to WVDEP to determine the use or uses that would be protected — and the use is critical, according to Margaret Janes, a senior policy analyst who works extensively with applications of the Clean Water Act at the Appalachian Center for the Economy and the Environment in Lewisburg.

“We need an aquatic life standard,” Janes said.

“We have these early warning signals that are being ignored, having to do with insects,” — bottom-dwelling bugs that serve as fundamental indicators of stream health. “DEP ignored the early warning signals on Dunkard Creek,” she said, “and look what happened.”

Pennsylvania’s Approach

By contrast, PADEP is considering setting the same standard of 500 milligrams per liter, but at the end of the discharge pipe. There is no allowance for how much the receiving stream might dilute the discharge and, therefore, the treatment may be more expensive.

However, the proposed rule leaves many industrial water users subject only to the state’s existing in-stream standard: those that were permitted before April as well as new industrial water users with effluent under 2,000 milligrams per liter and 100,000 pounds per day of TDS.

For most of the state’s waters, the existing in-stream standard of 500 milligrams per liter is for the use of the public water supply and, according to PADEP spokeswoman Helen Humphreys, applies only near a drinking water intake.

“For it to be really meaningful, Pennsylvania will have to have an aquatic life criterion,” Janes said — a standard enforced at every point on all streams that would apply to all users.

PADEP wrote in an April interim permitting strategy for TDS that it “has begun development of in-stream numeric criteria … designed to protect the aquatic life use.”

According to Humphreys, no such rule has yet been issued.

Effect on Industrial Water Users

Each state’s path may represent the best solution for industrial water users, given the current situations.

Discharge permitting that relies on an in-stream water quality standard, such as the one West Virginia legislators plan to propose, generally grants the greatest part existing assimilative capacity to the first discharger into a given stream and less to each successive discharger. The process makes sense if few dischargers are expected statewide, which so far is the case in West Virginia.

But where multiple industrial users are expected to discharge in the same watershed, as in Pennsylvania, that approach gives an unfair advantage to the early permittees that receive looser discharge limits.

In that case, an end-of-pipe standard levels the playing field for dischargers.

The success in protecting water quality depends in both cases on how the standards are written.

West Virginia legislators are mindful of the effect regulation might have on the coal, oil and gas industries.

“Somehow we need to have clean water and have jobs and economies that are dependent on these (industries),” said Delegate Barbara Evans Fleischauer, D-Monongalia, lead sponsor of last year’s bill.

“But when it comes down to 22,000 dead fish, is it staring us in the face?”

Fleischauer said she expects other action on the subject as well.

“In addition to statutory action, there is regulatory action in the works.”