NORWICH – In an ongoing effort to educate themselves about the natural gas industry, a multi-county organization monitoring drilling and preparing for future developments in Central New York heard from an invited groundwater expert recently.
Russell Urban-Meade, senior hydrogeologist with The Chazen Companies of Poughkeepsie, provided his engineering and environmental perspective on groundwater, its migration characteristics and whether the controversial hydraulic fracturing method of releasing natural gas from deep shales might also contaminate ground and surface water with dangerous chemicals and radioactive elements.
About 40 concerned citizens and municipal government officials attended last month’s Chenango, Otsego, Delaware, Madison Regional Natural Gas Collaborative meeting at the County Office Building in Norwich.
Though not an expert on natural gas drilling, Urban-Meade took the approach that it is unlikely that the high water volume horizontal fracturing technology will be stopped everywhere in the country. Currently, it is ongoing in several states, including in adjacent Pennsylvania, but not in New York. Energy companies and lease holders have been waiting on the sidelines here while the state’s environmental conservation agency revises its permitting regulations for the enhanced technology.
Urban-Meade backed up his optimism with assurances that scientists and engineers have the capability of measuring the exact levels of the potentially dangerous carcinogens being brought back up to the surface with fracturing fluids. They can be measured before being processed through municipal water treatment plants and a second time before being released into rivers and streams.
Not all well wastewater is processed. Some states permit injection wells for storing the fluids, while others, particularily in western states, allow it to evaporate onsite from collection pools. Many energy companies have begun recycling it for repeated fracturing.
“It’s a domestic energy source, so let’s approach this cautiously and be prepared to upgrade, reevaluate and change our practices to do better,” Urban-Meade said. “Somebody has an idea of what an acceptable dose (of heavy metals and fracturing chemicals in wastewater) is. I’m a firm believer that with good data, we live in an era that can figure out what to do.”
Rapid dilution and source identification issues make managing fluids at the surface of wells challenging at best, he said. But, as an expert in the development of water allocation resources for municipalities, Urban-Meade said just as petroleum brownfields at gas stations are being successfully remediated and stations constructed to more environmentally-cautious specifications, so, too, can natural gas production and well sites. Governments should develop groundwater management ordinances to help regulate and mitigate the risk, he advised.
His presentation came just days before an explosive article in The New York Times revealed that wastewater from 42 wells in Pennsylvania exceeded the federal drinking-water limit for radium; four exceeded the limit for uranium, 128 wells exceeded the limit for gross alpha – a type of radiation; and 41 exceeded the limit for benzene.
Several wastewater treatment plants in western Pennsylvania have been accepting wastewater from natural gas wells for several years. The Times reported that in 2009 and 2010, public sewage treatment plants directly upstream from some of the water intake facilities accepted wastewater that contained radioactivity levels as high as 2,122 times the drinking-water standard.
The Marcellus Shale Coalition, an advocacy organization for natural gas drillers, responded immediately after the Times story ran, agreeing that valid questions about water monitoring were raised. However, the Coalition said the article “lacks context, offers misleading comparisons and in some cases puts forth information that is not supported by the facts.”
And later, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection announced results from its own tests, reporting that radioactivity of river water downstream of Marcellus water treatment plants showed levels at or below the normal naturally occurring background levels of radioactivity.
Chenango County’s economic development consultant for the natural gas industry also agreed that more extensive testing needs to be done on well wastewater before and after it’s processed at plants.
“I’ve never been one to minimize these issues,” said Steven Palmatier. However, the county’s consulant added that he also thought the Times’ numbers describing various contaminants “were all over the place.”
Groundwater quality varies by rock formation, proximity to grade and by season, and often does not meet drinking water standards, Urban-Meade said. And there are different standards of potability in different countries, states and municipalities.
“It becomes political. The health department sets the bar as close to pure as it can,” he said.
Whether the fracturing fluid mix of potentially toxic chemicals and heavy metals from the subsurface can make their way up many thousands of feet into the fresh water aquifer is not something Urban-Meade said he could definitively answer. But to do so, the fluids, like all groundwater, would have to have gradient and porosity, he said.