Mil­lions of gal­lons of briny, toxic, waste­wa­ter from shale gas drill­ing and frack­ing op­er­a­tions could soon be loaded onto barges and pushed down the Al­le­gheny, Mo­non­ga­hela and Ohio riv­ers.

A loose net­work of river tank ter­mi­nal and barge com­pa­nies has floated plans to be­gin ship­ping waste­wa­ter con­tain­ing pe­tro­leum con­den­sates, can­cer-caus­ing chem­i­cals and ra­dio­ac­tive ma­terial, be­tween as many as seven river ter­mi­nal sites spread out over hun­dreds of miles of the re­gion’s ma­jor wa­ter­ways.

The barg­ing of waste­wa­ter on riv­ers has been dis­cussed for at least a dozen years, but like a tow on a sand­bar, the in­dus­try ini­tia­tive has been re­peat­edly side­lined due to per­mit­ting is­sues, en­vi­ron­men­tal con­cerns and the risk of con­tam­i­na­tion of pub­lic wa­ter sup­plies that draw from the riv­ers.

Although shale gas well drill­ing and frack­ing have been in a trough due to low nat­u­ral gas prices, in­ter­est in barg­ing waste­wa­ter has re­kin­dled in re­cent years as trans­port and dis­posal of the mixed liq­uid wastes have be­come cost­lier for the drill­ing in­dus­try.

Don Hopey

Pittsburgh and PWSA raise concerns over proposed Plum shale gas well

In meet­ings, let­ters and emails with reg­u­la­tors, barge com­pa­nies and ter­mi­nal own­ers have pressed reg­u­la­tory agen­cies to is­sue au­tho­ri­za­tions, ap­prov­als and per­mits. And drill­ing in­dus­try pub­li­ca­tions are tout­ing the pub­lic safety and eco­nomic ben­e­fits of mov­ing waste­wa­ter by tanker barge.

Last month, in the first pub­li­cized ac­knowl­edge­ment that the idea of waste­wa­ter barg­ing is start­ing to move again, Belle Ver­non-based Gutt­man Realty Co. re­ceived a grant of al­most $500,000 from the Penn­syl­va­nia Depart­ment of Com­mu­nity and Eco­nomic Devel­op­ment’s Com­mon­wealth Financ­ing Au­thor­ity to ret­ro­fit the ex­ist­ing tank and barge load­ing ter­mi­nal along the Mo­non­ga­hela River in Speers, Wash­ing­ton County, 43.5 river miles above Pitts­burgh’s Point.

The changes would al­low the Speers ter­mi­nal to ac­cept tanker truck­loads of waste­wa­ter, also known by the shale gas in­dus­try term “pro­duced wa­ter,” ac­cord­ing to an April news re­lease tout­ing the grant from State Rep. Bud Cook, R-Belle Ver­non.

“The fa­cil­ity will be mod­i­fied,” the re­lease stated, “to ac­cept waste wa­ter from the nat­u­ral gas in­dus­try by truck to be stored in ex­ist­ing tanks and ul­ti­mately trans­ported by barge to the treat­ment fa­cil­ity in Ohio.”

Using barges to trans­port waste­wa­ter also will re­duce truck traf­fic, die­sel ex­haust, truck-auto col­li­sions and road dam­age, the re­lease stated.

But mul­ti­ple en­vi­ron­men­tal or­ga­ni­za­tions from the tri-state area have strong con­cerns and many ques­tions about those plans, say­ing river waste­wa­ter trans­port is poorly reg­u­lated and in­creases risks of chem­i­cal and ra­dio­ac­tive spills, and those spills can con­tam­i­nate wa­ter­ways that are drink­ing wa­ter sources for mil­lions of peo­ple, and, in­creas­ingly, rec­re­ational ven­ues.

They say drill­ing and frack­ing waste­wa­ter con­tains salty brines, drill­ing and frack­ing chem­i­cals and nat­u­rally oc­cur­ring ra­dio­ac­tive ma­terial flushed from shale for­ma­tions thou­sands of feet un­der­ground. Ra­dium-226 and ra­dium-228, both found in brine waste, are known car­cin­o­gens and can cause bone, liver and breast can­cer in high con­cen­tra­tions, ac­cord­ing to the U.S. Centers for Dis­ease Con­trol and Preven­tion. The waste­wa­ter can also con­tain other ra­dio­ac­tive com­po­nents, in­clud­ing Po­tas­sium 40, Tho­rium 232, and Ura­nium 238.

Don Hopey

New streams in Pennsylvania to be tagged as High Quality for extra protections

“Our Three Rivers are go­ing to be­come the grand speed­way of frack­ing waste,” said Gil­lian Graber, ex­ec­u­tive di­rec­tor of Pro­tect PT, a lo­cal Penn­syl­va­nia en­vi­ron­men­tal or­ga­ni­za­tion. “All three of our ma­jor wa­ter­ways could be im­pacted by a spill or re­lease of flu­ids. Spills are scary, but the build-up of small re­leases is also a ma­jor con­cern.”

Sarah Mar­tik, cam­paign di­rec­tor at the Center for Coal­field Justice, said in an email state­ment that barges are un­re­li­able and the frack­ing waste­wa­ter is “ex­tremely haz­ard­ous.”

“It is ir­re­spon­si­ble to turn the Mon Val­ley into a fun­nel for re­gional frack­ing waste, just as it’s ir­re­spon­si­ble to barge the waste down the river,” Ms. Mar­tik said. “How many tons of coal are sit­ting at the bot­tom of the river from barges that have sunk in the past?”

The Mo­non­ga­hela River alone serves as the main source of wa­ter sup­ply for some 850,000 res­i­dents in the Pitts­burgh met­ro­pol­i­tan re­gion. And most of the drink­ing wa­ter for the city of Pitts­burgh comes from the Al­le­gheny River.

Other sites

In ad­di­tion to the ter­mi­nal at Speers, four other barge load­ing sites were iden­ti­fied in doc­u­ments pro­vided by the U.S. Coast Guard in re­sponse to a Free­dom of In­for­ma­tion Act re­quest by the Fresh Water Ac­count­abil­ity Proj­ect, an Ohio en­vi­ron­men­tal or­ga­ni­za­tion that fo­cuses on wa­ter pro­tec­tion and shared them with the Pitts­burgh Post-Ga­zette.

Those load­ing ter­mi­nals in­clude an­other on the Mo­non­ga­hela River at Star City, near Mor­gan­town, W.Va., 98.7 miles up­river from Pitts­burgh; and two on the Ohio River, at Bel­laire and Han­ni­bal, Ohio, 93.5 miles and 123.1 miles down­river from Pitts­burgh.

A fifth waste­wa­ter load­ing fa­cil­ity op­tion is iden­ti­fied as the Nicho­las En­ter­prises Inc. ter­mi­nal in Free­port, Arm­strong County, 29.6 miles up the Al­le­gheny River from Pitts­burgh, and 20 miles from the Pitts­burgh Water and Sewer Au­thor­ity’s wa­ter in­take pipes at Aspin­wall.

Ac­cord­ing to a No­vem­ber 2019 U.S. Coast Guard cargo au­tho­ri­za­tion form, the plan at the time was to barge waste­wa­ter to un­load­ing ter­mi­nals owned by En­link Mid­stream at Bells Run near Port­land, Ohio, and DeepRock Dis­posal So­lu­tions, LLC, in Ma­ri­etta, Ohio, lo­cated 160 and 173 river miles, re­spec­tively, from Pitts­burgh.

Hous­ton-head­quar­tered DeepRock, a busi­ness part­ner with Comtech In­dus­tries, owner of the Bel­laire ter­mi­nal, op­er­ates 12 deep dis­posal wells at five sites near the un­load­ing ter­mi­nals in Ohio and can ac­cept up to 50,000 bar­rels or 2.1 mil­lion gal­lons of waste­wa­ter a day.

A Dec. 22 ar­ti­cle on Comtech’s web­page states that DeepRock had re­ceived more than 30 per­mits and au­tho­ri­za­tions, is in “con­ver­sa­tion” with river ter­mi­nals on all three riv­ers, and is ex­pected to be­gin re­ceiv­ing waste­wa­ter and un­load­ing barges at its Ma­ri­etta ter­mi­nal dur­ing the first quar­ter of this year.

A day later, a head­line in Mar­cel­lus Drilling News, an in­dus­try web­site, stated, “Barg­ing Fracked Waste­wa­ter on Ohio River Ap­proved! Starts in 1Q21,” re­fer­ring to the first quar­ter of 2021.

But barg­ing waste­wa­ter has not started yet, and Dean Grose, chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer at Comtech, did not re­spond to re­quests for in­for­ma­tion about how that time­line has changed, what has caused the de­lay, or Comtech’s or DeepRock’s cur­rent plans for waste­wa­ter barg­ing.

Tay­lor Gren­ert, Comtech mar­ket­ing co­or­di­na­tor, cited non­spe­cific per­mit­ting is­sues when asked about the de­lay, but added that ter­mi­nal fa­cil­i­ties are “ready to go.”

One pos­si­ble snag may be due to the Penn­syl­va­nia Depart­ment of En­vi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion, which has had spo­radic in­ter­ac­tions with Gutt­man Realty, part of the mul­ti­bil­lion-dol­lar Gutt­man Group, dat­ing back more than a de­cade about us­ing its river ter­mi­nals to ship waste­wa­ter.

Most re­cently, on a June 2020 con­fer­ence call with reg­u­la­tors from the DEP’s South­west Re­gion of­fice, Gutt­man rep­re­sen­ta­tives raised the pos­si­bil­ity of us­ing the Speers bulk liq­uid stor­age ter­mi­nal to re­ceive, store, pro­cess, and trans­fer nat­u­ral gas pro­duced wa­ter to barges for out-of-state dis­posal.

But Lau­ren Fai­ley, a DEP spokes­woman, said in an email re­sponse to ques­tions that the com­pany hasn’t ap­plied for a re­sid­ual waste trans­fer fa­cil­ity per­mit, which would be re­quired for such a fa­cil­ity. She also said the DEP doesn’t reg­u­late what is trans­ported on the riv­ers.

James Lee, a spokes­man for the Ohio En­vi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency, said the state doesn’t re­quire a per­mit to trans­fer re­sid­ual waste like Penn­syl­va­nia.

“While the fa­cil­ity may have ex­ist­ing per­mits or need ad­di­tional per­mits from DEP for var­i­ous ac­tiv­i­ties, the act of ship­ping waste­wa­ter by barge from un­con­ven­tional gas de­vel­op­ment in and of it­self is not some­thing that re­quires a DEP per­mit,” Ms. Fra­ley said.

Another snag is that Gutt­man, which didn’t re­spond to many in­ter­view re­quests dur­ing the past two weeks, sold its ter­mi­nals in Star City and Belle Ver­non, both on the Mo­non­ga­hela, to Ze­nith Energy Ter­mi­nals PA Hold­ings LLC in Jan­u­ary.

A wa­ter ob­struc­tion and en­croach­ment per­mit was trans­ferred to Ze­nith in April 2021. New per­mits would be re­quired if Ze­nith chooses to mod­ify the ter­mi­nal fa­cil­i­ties, Ms. Fra­ley said, but DEP has not had dis­cus­sions or re­ceived any ap­pli­ca­tion.

Jay Rey­nolds, Ze­nith’s chief com­mer­cial of­fi­cer, said none of the com­pany’s ter­mi­nals han­dle drill­ing waste­wa­ter, there are no plans to do so and it’s “not a busi­ness we are pur­su­ing.”

Ca­sey Smith, a spokes­woman for the state Penn­syl­va­nia Depart­ment of Com­mu­nity and Eco­nomic Devel­op­ment, said the de­part­ment was told by Gutt­man that it would take six to eight months to get the DEP re­sid­ual waste trans­fer per­mit, and must have all per­mit ap­prov­als be­fore funds are dis­bursed.

“Should the com­pany fail to ob­tain a per­mit from the DEP, they would be un­able to draw down any funds and the grant would be liq­ui­dated,” Ms. Smith said.

Send­ing waste to Ohio

Dis­posal of drill­ing and frack­ing waste­wa­ter from the Mar­cel­lus and Utica shale gas fields in Penn­syl­va­nia, Ohio and West Vir­ginia is now done via tanker truck, rail­road and pipe­line, which trans­port waste­wa­ter to deep in­jec­tion dis­posal wells or dis­til­la­tion fa­cil­i­ties.

Ben Hun­kler, an or­ga­nizer with Con­cerned Ohio River Res­i­dents, said Ohio has be­come “the de facto dump­ing ground for frack­ing waste­wa­ter pro­duced in the Ohio River Val­ley, thanks to the state’s loose in­jec­tion reg­u­la­tion.”

Mr. Hun­kler said Ohio Depart­ment of Nat­u­ral Re­sources records show that nearly half of the 38 mil­lion bar­rels of toxic waste in­jected into Ohio’s 226 dis­posal wells in 2017 was ex­ported from West Vir­ginia and Penn­syl­va­nia.

“Barg­ing waste­wa­ter along the Ohio River,” he said, “could sub­ject even more Ohio com­mu­ni­ties to the nox­ious air emis­sions and ground­wa­ter con­tam­i­na­tion com­mon near waste in­jec­tion wells.”

Ac­cord­ing to the Coast Guard doc­u­ments, the waste­wa­ter, in­clud­ing small amounts of oil and liq­uid gas con­den­sate, would be trans­ported on the riv­ers in dou­ble-hulled steel tank barges ca­pa­ble of car­ry­ing flam­ma­ble, com­bus­ti­ble and haz­ard­ous cargo, and owned by Lou­i­si­ana-based Set­toon Tow­ing, which had and has U.S. Coast Guard ap­proval to barge oil and gas in­dus­try waste­wa­ter through Gulf Coast in­land wa­ter­ways for the last 30 years.

Randy Mar­tin-Nez, ex­ec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent of Set­toon Tow­ing, said the com­pany has re­ceived au­tho­ri­za­tion from the Coast Guard to ex­pand its op­er­a­tion into the Ap­pa­la­chian Ba­sin’s riv­ers, but that move has been de­layed by the eco­nomic down­turn in the drill­ing in­dus­try, op­po­si­tion from “lib­er­als and tree hug­gers,” and what he termed the Biden ad­min­is­tra­tion’s anti-frack­ing pol­i­cies.

He said one tanker barge can hold 25,000 bar­rels, or 1 mil­lion gal­lons, of pro­duced wa­ter — the equiv­a­lent of 80 tanker trucks.

“To be scared of pro­duced wa­ter is crazy. It’s not dan­ger­ous stuff,” Mr. Mar­tin-Nez said in a phone in­ter­view. “We have the boats and barges au­tho­rized to do this, and we’re wait­ing for DeepRock and Gutt­man to fin­ish their ter­mi­nal up­grades so they can re­ceive tanker trucks.”

Although the Coast Guard has au­tho­rized Set­toon to barge waste­wa­ter in the Ap­pa­la­chian Ba­sin, it clas­si­fies drill­ing and frack­ing waste­wa­ter more re­stric­tively than Mr. Mar­tin-Nez.

In let­ters to Set­toon dated Oct. 31, 2018, and Nov. 12, 2019, the Coast Guard noted that its as­sess­ment of the pro­posed pro­duced wa­ter cargo’s chem­i­cal prop­er­ties found it con­tained ben­zene, a known hu­man car­cin­o­gen.

And a Coast Guard di­rec­tive ti­tled “Pro­duced Water Clas­si­fi­ca­tion” from July 2020 noted that a 2013 pol­icy al­low­ing the trans­port of shale gas ex­trac­tion waste by barge, re­quested by the in­dus­try, was with­drawn that same year “pri­mar­ily due to sig­nifi­cant en­vi­ron­men­tal con­cerns with trans­port­ing a po­ten­tially ra­dio­ac­tive prod­uct.” The doc­u­ment also states that be­cause the chem­i­cal com­po­si­tion and ra­dio­ac­tiv­ity lev­els of the waste­wa­ter from dif­fer­ent wells var­ies con­sid­er­ably, reg­u­lar test­ing will be re­quired.

Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Daniel Velez said if waste­wa­ter is barged on the riv­ers, it will be car­ried by a “red-flagged barge” be­cause its cargo is con­sid­ered “a haz­ard­ous ma­terial while in the barges and be­ing trans­ported.” Be­cause the waste­wa­ter is a mix­ture of ma­teri­als it is also clas­si­fied as a “nox­ious liq­uid,” he stated.

Yuri Gorby, of the FreshWater Ac­count­abil­ity Proj­ect, said al­low­ing the barg­ing of waste­wa­ter would be a fail­ure of reg­u­la­tory over­sight.

“This waste is cur­rently only reg­u­lated as a haz­ard­ous ma­terial when it’s on the barge,” Mr. Gorby said. “When it comes into Ohio and West Vir­ginia to be pro­cessed or sent to dis­posal wells, it is not clas­si­fied as a haz­ard­ous waste. People in our re­gion will pay the price in the form of un­nec­es­sary ex­po­sures to ra­dio­ac­tive ma­teri­als.”

Drink­ing wa­ter con­cerns

The Charle­roi Munic­i­pal Au­thor­ity’s wa­ter in­take is just a half-mile down the Mo­non­ga­hela River from the Speers Ter­mi­nal. And at least a half-dozen pub­lic and pri­vate wa­ter in­takes are also down river, in­clud­ing three op­er­ated by the Penn­syl­va­nia Amer­i­can Water Co., which pro­vides ap­prox­i­mately 583,000 peo­ple in Al­le­gheny, Wash­ing­ton and Fay­ette coun­ties with drink­ing wa­ter sourced from the Mon River.

“Barge traf­fic presents a po­ten­tial risk to drink­ing wa­ter sources due to the po­ten­tial for spills,” Penn­syl­va­nia Amer­i­can stated in a re­lease by spokes­woman Heather DuBose. “This is why Penn­syl­va­nia Amer­i­can Water has in­vested in tech­nol­ogy that con­tin­u­ously mon­i­tors our sources of sup­ply and pro­vides early de­tec­tion of con­tam­i­na­tion events.”

The re­gion’s big­gest wa­ter com­pany also said it de­pends on the Penn­syl­va­nia Depart­ment of En­vi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion and the Coast Guard “to take en­vi­ron­men­tal and drink­ing wa­ter pro­tec­tions into con­sid­er­ation in their per­mit­ting pro­cesses.”

Over on the Al­le­gheny River, Dean Mar­lin, di­rec­tor of busi­ness de­vel­op­ment for But­ler-based Nicho­las En­ter­prises Inc., which owns the 17-tank bulk ter­mi­nal at Free­port, said the com­pany was ac­tive in pur­su­ing the waste­wa­ter barg­ing in the past and would like to be again.

“We were in­ter­ested and we would be in­ter­ested, but it was al­ways blocked for one rea­son or an­other and we’ve not ac­tively par­tic­i­pated re­cently,” Mr. Mar­lin said. “If it did hap­pen it would be great, but it would re­quire a lot of in­vest­ment and per­mit­ting work.”

The Nicho­las ter­mi­nal is lo­cated im­me­di­ately up­river from the river wa­ter in­take pipes of the Munic­i­pal Au­thor­ity of Buf­falo Town­ship, which serves 8,000 peo­ple in But­ler and Arm­strong coun­ties, in­clud­ing Free­port.

Free­port Mayor James Swartz said us­ing the Nicho­las ter­mi­nal to load barges with waste­wa­ter in­creases risk to the pub­lic wa­ter sup­ply.

“It’s def­i­nitely a con­cern with the ... plant as close as it is,” Mr. Swartz said. “A spill would cre­ate a ca­tastro­phe for cus­tom­ers.”

Leatra Harper, who filed the FOIA re­quest for the Fresh Water Ac­count­abil­ity Proj­ect, said barg­ing a “witches’ brew of waste­wa­ter” ig­nores very real pub­lic health and safety risks.

“It opens a Pan­dora’s box of waste ma­terial on wa­ter­ways that are our pub­lic drink­ing wa­ter sources,” Ms. Harper said. “And its sole pur­pose is to keep the drill­ing and frack­ing com­pa­nies afloat.”

Don Hopey: dhopey@post-ga­zette.com

First Published: May 31, 2021, 9:30 a.m.