NORWICH – The municipal water treatment plant in the Village of Sherburne has accepted an undisclosed amount of waste water from local natural gas drilling operations since the spring, and the City of Norwich accepted 20,000 gallons for the first time last week.
Public works directors at much smaller capacity plants in the villages of Greene, Oxford and Bainbridge said they had not been approached.
“I guess they’re coming, though, right?” said Bainbridge DPW superintendent Jeff Webb.
With 10 wells in Chenango County currently targeting the Marcellus Shale, and the possibility of 100s more to come in the future – based on fast-paced land leasing activity here and the New York Department of Environmental Conservation’s website - Webb’s concern is warranted. Each well drilled into the Marcellus requires hydro-fracing, a process that utilizes between 50,000 to 1 million gallons of water per well.
Where gas companies obtain the water needed for drilling, and where they later dispose of it, are hot button issues for environmentalists and regulators today. The Susquehanna and Delaware Rivers, they fear, could be threatened by the large quantities of water needed to tap into the profitable layer of Marcellus Shale found under much of Central New York. And, they say, an unknown mixture of chemicals and solvents needed to crack the shale might later contaminate drinking water downstate.
The questions have prompted Governor David Paterson to call on the DEC for more drilling oversight, a process that has slowed the permitting process in the Marcellus.
Contractors for Nornew, Inc., a natural gas company with offices at the Eaton Center in Norwich, have been actively drilling mostly horizontal wells in both Madison and Chenango counties.
Company spokesman Dennis Holbrook said Nornew’s water usage is required to follow Susquehanna Delaware River Basin regulations that limit drilling activities to under 600,000 gallons of water per month. While he didn’t say what water sources Nornew is tapping, the company drills six or seven wells per month, using about 560,000 gallons of water or 80,000 gallons per well. (A typical swimming pool holds 20,000 to 25,000 gallons of water.)
Highly pressurized air and well as water is forced down the well shaft, Holbrook said.
“We’ve been drilling with air, using minimal water. Some formations don’t require fracing,” he said yesterday. Drillers have been targeting the Herkimer, Oneida and Oriskany rock deposits in Smyrna, Otselic, Plymouth, Preston, Smithville, Oxford and Coventry.
Not only is the Bainbridge’s water treatment facility under construction, its maximum capacity is only 300,000 gallons per day. In comparison, the county seat’s sewage plant is capable of processing about 16 million gallons per day.
Norwich Public Works Superintendent Carl Ivarson said the city’s plant, with an average flow is 1.5 million gallons per day, wouldn’t be able to handle even an additional 60,000 gallons of commercial waste water per day.
“It would be a shock load to the plant,” he said. “Things get pretty complicated down here when you start adding things. We have to be really careful to the bug life ... they become acclimated to a certain capacity of flow.”
Both Ivarson and Sherburne’s DPW Superintendent Thomas G. Turner said they have turned haulers of drilling waste water, called brine, away.
“When this gets into fracing in the Marcellus, that’s dependent on what’s in the waste water when it comes in. We have every right to turn them away if they don’t meet our criteria,” Turner said.
“This is all experimental to us, but I guess it’s something that’s going to happen big time around us. We are giving it a shot. To see what it’s going to do to our treatment process.”
The Sherburne septage plant is capable of processing 426,000 million gallons a day of outside sewage. DPW Superintendent Thomas G. Turner said he did not know the amounts but he had been permitted drilling fluid from one approved hauler that was thoroughly inspected in accordance to Ph and color.
“One commercial hauler has been bringing in drilling and other non-hazardous waste together, so I don’t know how much of it is just from the drilling,” he said.
Turner said while taking in commercial sewage increases revenues at the plant, it raises operational expenses. “Whenever you have increased amounts of waste, you have increased pumping costs, sludge hauling and additional expenses,” he said.
The municipal water treatment plant in Greene has the capacity for taking in 500,000 gallons per day, but averages 250,000 currently. While capacity figures were unavailable for the Oxford plant, Mayor Terry Stark said it had excess capacity. He also said a driller asked for and received permission last week to use the village’s boat launch in order to take water out of the Chenango River.
“We have no say if they can take water out of the river,” he said. “That’s up to the DEC and the Susquehanna Delaware River Basin authorities.”