Paper trail for Pa. shale waste leads to ex-IBM site in NY Official dismisses DEP record of cuttings shipped upstate

A delivery arrives in the village of Endicott, NY last summer
Photo: NY Friends of Clean Air and Water

ENDICOTT, NY -- An issue over what – exactly -- is arriving in tanker trucks for disposal at a manufacturing plant in Endicott, New York is a recent and vivid example of the fear and uncertainty over the endpoint of waste produced by the shale gas industry, and the lack of regulatory wherewithal to track it.

It’s a matter of record with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation that the tanker trucks in question are importing more than 80,000 gallons of waste a day to the plant in the heart of the village. That sum includes 30,000 gallons of leachate from the Seneca Meadow’s landfill, and 50,000 gallons from the Broome County landfill. But there is much that is not on the record, and I will get to that in a moment. First, some background.

Leachate is the soluable and suspended matter that percolates through landfills with (in this area) 30 inches of rain each year, plus whatever moisture is in the landfill itself. This drainage includes essentially anything that goes into the landfill that can be flushed out with water. Put another way, Leachate consists of landfill dregs.

Municipal sewage treatment plants are generally not equipped to handle landfill leachate, so it’s shipped to commercial plants designed to treat industrial waste. The sprawling manufacturing campus in Endicott, in the middle of a heavily populated retail and residential area of the village, was once home to IBM Corp’s micro electronic division .The industrial park, now owned by Huron Real Estate, includes a plant that has been treating waste produced from onsite operations for decades.

The most recent imports are a new source of income for the current operators, i3 Electronics. They began arriving conspicuously last year from Seneca Meadows landfill in 18-wheel tanker trucks rolling through the village. At that time, the business was owned by EIT, which eventually fell to bankruptcy. Along with the tanker trucks came suspicion and fear that former and current operators of the business are trying to offset steady manufacturing losses and job declines over the years with revenue from waste imports.

The suspicion is not without justification. As far as state regulators are concerned, the plant is processing this new source of landfill waste, without a permit, as part of a pilot study. But no time frame has been allocated, and no public comment period or public notification has been declared. According to Mary Jane Peachey, a regulator with the state Department of Environmental Conservation, the DEC has not monitored the input or output of the plant in at least five years.

And here is another critical piece of background: The i3 Electronics site and the surrounding residential and retail district is a Class 2 state Super Fund site, meaning existing pollution there poses a “significant threat to public health or the environment.” Since 1979, IBM Corp. has been pumping toxic solvents from the ground that have seeped from the micro-electronics plant into the community, affecting more than 470 homes. There have been multiple spills since.

It is no surprise that Endicott residents are generally concerned about becoming a waste destination, and specifically concerned about waste from shale gas development, which have been banned in New York pending a health review.

Much of the controversy over fracking waste involves the chemical solution that goes into shale gas wells to stimulate production, and the liquid mix of brine, chemicals and metals that comes out. But liquid waste – called flowback – is just one part of a broader metric. Shale gas development also involves a viscous solution called drilling mud, and solid waste, including drill cuttings tinged with varying degrees of metals, solvents, and naturally occurring radio active material (NORM) from deep in the ground. It’s a matter for record that drilling cuttings from the Marcellus Shale tend to be radioactive, and the New York State Department of Health has advised officials from the DEC to devise a testing protocol to ensure hot drilling waste is handled and disposed of properly .

Drill cuttings, like flowback, are also exempt from federal hazardous waste handling laws, and they often end up in landfills, like Seneca Meadows.

And that’s how shale gas dregs can end up Endicott, or countless other places where landfill leachate is treated. The shipping of leachate to private plants is not, in itself, sinister, or even especially newsworthy. It’s the exemptions, loopholes, and lack of disclosure about its contents that makes it a problem and rightly invites the attention of activists and media watchdogs.

According to records filed with the state Department of Environmental Protection, the Seneca Lake Meadows landfill was the final destination for Marcellus Shale drill cuttings from 196 wells drilled in Pennsylvania during 2010 and 2011. After tracking this bit of information down on their own, some Endicott residents and area activists wanted to know if this potentially radio active drilling waste stream ended in Endicott via the importation of Seneca Meadows leachaete. If so, were state regulators aware of it?

And that brings us to the part of the story where the record gets muddy.

A citizens group called the Western Broome Environmental Stakeholders Coalition met with the DEC’s Peachey in February to get to the heart of the matter. (A video of the meeting, filmed by activist Bill Huston, is available here.) Early in the meeting, the question came up as to whether the Seneca Meadows leachate arriving in Endicott was tested for radioactivity – a simple question that apparently invited a very confusing answer.

Peachey said that step is unnecessary, unless agency personal “are aware” that the waste comes from a suspected radioactive source. “When we are aware that someone is taking a waste stream that would have those elements we would require them to do appropriate sampling and monitoring for that,” she explained.

When a resident pointed out that Seneca Meadows takes Marcellus drill cuttings, Peachey challenged the source of that information. “If they were taking fracking waste now I think we would know it,” she said. When told that the information came directly from the Pennsylvania DEP database, Peachy replied: “I would question that ... I would like to substantiate that more with what’s currently going on there.”

DEP records show that Peachey is technically correct. Seneca Meadows is not currently taking waste from shale gas wells. But she failed to tell the group – in a meeting that was purportedly intended to inform the public and set the record straight – that the Pennsylvania record also shows the landfill did accept cuttings from nearly 200 wells over a two-year period. In bureaucratic form, Peachey fixated on timing and semantics while ignoring the essence of the matter.

While Peachey’s response could be explained as an attempt to disarm a source of PR headaches for the agency, it did nothing to address the issue at hand: drill cuttings in the Seneca Meadows landfill and their influence on the leachate. And it circumvented the original question – is the leachate from that landfill being checked for radioactivity as it rolls into Endicott?

The answer (as eventually revealed – sort of) is no, and perhaps there is a good reason that it is not. (Addressing a later question from the audience, Peachey explained that it is up to landfill operators to check for radio-activity.) But Peachey’s failure to acknowledge, much less explain, the record of shipments of cuttings from Pennsylvania gas wells to Seneca Meadows does not inspire trust. The error of omission could be a misguided attempt for damage control. Or it might be evidence that the department is out of the loop in what she pointed out was a “transaction between one private company to another private company.”

Another possibility, no more reassuring, is that the Pennsylvania records are untrustworthy. Before gaining access to the DEP website, visitors must agree to this disclaimer that notes that the data is self-reported, unchecked, unverified, and possibly incomplete:

DEP makes no claims, promises or guarantees regarding the accuracy, completeness or timeliness of the operators’ data that DEP is required to post. DEP expressly disclaims any liability for errors or omissions related to the production data contained within these reports. No warranty of any kind is given by DEP with respect to the production data contained within these reports posted on its website.

All of this uncertainty points to an overarching problem: the industry’s exemption from federal laws that mandate a clear tracking and specific kind of handling of hazardous waste. States are left with that job, and more often than not, state officials – citing a lack of resources -- defer to the industry to get the job done.

The issue of where the waste goes, which I have written about in several posts, is especially pressing these days, as tens of thousands of shale gas wells come on line in Pennsylvania and Ohio, and tens of thousands more elsewhere in the country.In the absence of federal hazardous waste laws and lack of regional planning, placing the waste becomes a process of default as various states consider legislation to ban it. (New Jersey legislators are crafting a second attempt at a ban after the first was vetoed by Gov. Chris Christie, and the issue is also being considered in New York and Connecticut.) Hence, rather than guided by a master plan, the waste is following the path of least social and political resistance. Much of what comes from the Marcellus, as far as we can tell from industry’s self policing records, goes to injection wells in Ohio, and various landfills and private treatment plants in Pennsylvania and New York.

In addition to Seneca Meadows, DEP records show that New York destinations for waste from the Marcellus Shale include Hyland in Angelica, the Hakes Landfill in Painted Post, the Chemung Landfill near Elmira, Seneca Meadows Landfill in Waterloo and the Allied/BFI Waste Systems landfill in Niagara Falls.

Communities like Niagara Falls (and notably Love Canal) tied to a history of toxic waste disposal are especially sensitive to the possibility of a future tied to more of the same. Even though the Buffalo area does not sit over a viable shale reserve, I have found during book signings there that community members are keenly attuned to the issues of shale gas development and, specifically, the lack of assurances about its waste stream.

Endicott is also one of those places. People in the village are angry that they were not notified about waste imports to the i3 Electronics plant. Matters were made worse last year when a corroded tank holding the contents of a Seneca Meadows shipment failed and at least 6,000 gallons of leachate spilled out, much if it soaking into the ground. Residents were not informed of the shipments or the spill. They were left piecing together information until a year later, when John Okesson, Peachey’s colleague at the DEC, explained details at the February meeting after sustained community pressure for the agency to account for it.

Rick White, a community member and labor advocate, summed up feelings at the end of the meeting. He referred to decades of spills, a pattern of secrecy, and a resulting legacy of environmental problems that, in his words, “stack up.” He continued:

This whole community is very sensitive to the idea that if there is additional toxic fluid, whether it is fracking waste or landfill waste or whatever it might be, and it’s coming into the village of Endicott for whatever the reason, whether it’s to make money or to enrich somebody’s pockets or it its simply to do a good service to the community, the negatives outweigh the positives. And this is why we are asking these questions.

His comments were met with applause from the 50 or so people in attendance.

Radioactive wildcard flags fracking disposal policy... Testing plans reflect Pa.’s take-it-as-it-comes approach

Don’t worry. Fracking fluids from the Marcellus Shale are safe. We’re checking on that part about it being radioactive…

This, paraphrased, is the message the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection issued in a statement late last week. And it captures the kind of regulatory dilemma-turned-PR-migraine that state agencies throughout the country face as they play a game of catch-up overseeing the burgeoning shale gas industry.

Radioactivity is one of many questions about constituents of the waste stream from high volume hydraulic fracturing (aka fracking), a technique for fracturing bedrock with a pressurized chemical solution that has made the shale gas revolution possible. Fracking waste, called flowback, contains brine, heavy metals, and unknown chemical constituents that are both introduced into well bores by operators to stimulate production and regurgitated with methane flowing from ancient reserves. Because flowback and other drilling waste is exempt from hazardous waste laws, it’s routinely handled through conventional disposal methods, where it ends up in rivers via treatment plants, dumped in landfills, buried in pits, or injected underground. The industry claims to be treating and recycling an undetermined amount of the fluids, and although that sounds good, it’s hard to know exactly what it means because recycling is voluntary and self-defined by the industry.

Reports about radioactive production waste from the Marcellus Shale – a primary pay-zone underlying much of the northeast -- have been circulating for years, but in the absence of public oversight and testing protocols, they are hard to gauge. A report by the USGS in 2011 found that high radium levels correspond with saltiness and total dissolved solids (TDS), all of which are characteristic properties of waste from Devonian shales, including the Marcellus and Utica formations underlying parts of New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Maryland. TDS is a measure of concentration of salts and other impurities dissolved in water. They are not visible to the naked eye, and they are flags for water problems apart from radioactivity.

With the onset of the Pennsylvania shale gas boom from 2008 through 2010, TDS levels spiked in major Pennsylvania watersheds, corresponding with the disposal of drilling waste to municipal wastewater plants unequipped to treat it. After TDS in the Monongahela River hit crises levels, the Pennsylvania DEP drafted new rules, under Chapter 95 of Pennsylvania’s Clean Streams Laws, to discourage the disposal of drilling waste at treatment plants by setting TDS ceilings for incoming shipments. But many plants ended up grandfathered into the old standard, and the industry found other ways around the new rule, and the problem persisted. After repeated calls for the industry to voluntarily stop taking drilling waste to municipal plants, TDS levels have recently dropped in the Mon River. But they remain high in the Alleghany. Meanwhile, standards the Corbett administration is moving to relax standards. The Pennsylvania DEP is proposing to drop Chapter 93 Water Quality Standards for the discharge of molybdenum, sulfates, chlorides, and 1-4 dioxane, in response to industry complaints that restricting the discharge of these pollutants would hurt business.

In response to concerns over radioactivity, the DEP has tested water downstream of some wastewater treatment plants, and found levels to be at or below background. Update Feb. 6: A reader has pointed out that the Pittsburgh Water & Sewer Authority also tracks levels of radiation in rivers, and has not found excessive readings at intakes to its treatment plant on the Allegheny River near Aspinwall.

Naturally occurring radioactive material (NORM) comes from many elements buried in the earth. People who live in homes with basements in the northeast are familiar with radon, which sometimes presents an exposure risk requiring mitigation systems to divert gas emitted from radioactive bedrock under the foundations. A critical factor in determining risks from radioactive fracking waste is its half-life, which measures its potency over time. There are other variables, and they tend to vary from site to site, making it difficult to uniformly characterize risks. But there is a common factor. According to the USGS report, co-authored by Mark Engle:

Produced water salinities from reservoirs in rocks of Cambrian-Devonion age in the Appalachian Basin commonly exceed 100,000 mg/L, and far exceed the salinities of many other oil- and gas-producing regions in the United States, including basins in California, the Great Plains, and Colorado Plateau. In many basins, radium activity is correlated with salinity, and particularly among samples from lithologically homogeneous reservoirs, salinity may be used as an indicator of radium activity.

In other words, where there is TDS (specifically salts), there is greater potential for radium, and Marcellus waste is highly saline.

The Pennsylvania DEP responded to these concerns last week, by announcing a plan to sample and analyze the naturally occurring radioactivity levels in flowback waters, treatment solids and drill cuttings, as well as associated matters such as the transportation, storage and disposal of drilling wastes “at dozens of sites.” Details and timing of the plan were not yet public as they are pending peer review.

Why this and why now? The study was announced after reports that fracking waste trucked to conventional landfills periodically began tripping radiation alarms.
To their credit, DEP officials are trying to stay on top of the issues. The plan would go well beyond a few data points down stream from water treatment disposal sites and include points in the industry’s poorly defined waste delivery system. Yet, the wording from one DEP overview the plan represents a kind of agency-speak that appears to try very hard to tell us a lot without telling us anything.

“Current industry practices are such that data do not indicate the public or workers face any health risk from exposure to radiation ... The data will assist in
determining the need with respect to any issues as they exist during extraction,
transportation, treatment and disposal.”

Whether or not this explanation intends to obfuscate, it’s guaranteed to raise suspicion among skeptics, especially phrases like “Current industry practices are such that data do not indicate...”

Third party reports instill little confidence:

“At present, there is no concerted effort that our Radiation Protection Program is aware of concerns measuring radium concentrations or activities in brine,” DEP spokesman John Poister was quoted in TheTimesOnLine last week . “We did some surveys years ago, but nothing’s been done that routinely measures radium production during fracking operations.”

Kevin Sunday, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania DEP, has not responded to my own calls and emails this week seeking clarification.

Concerns over hot fracking waste are not new, and they are not limited to Pennsylvania. While reporting for Gannett, I uncovered a 2008 memo from the New York State Department of Health to the Department of Environmental Conservation warning of the dangers of radio-active flowback. The memo, unreleased to the public, referenced an analysis of wastewater samples by state health officials found levels of radium-226, and related alpha and beta radiation up to 10,000 times higher than drinking water standards. Based on that finding, the Health Department urged the DEC to design a testing protocol to ensure hot drilling waste is handled and disposed of properly. "The issues raised are not trivial but are also not insurmountable," the memo concluded. "Many can be addressed using common engineering controls and industry best practices."

That is reassuring, to a degree. But what are “best practices,” exactly, and how effective are they if they are optional? For now, they are left to the discretion of operators who assure us that all is being handled properly, and to private waste plant operators who echo these reassurances. Last week I wrote about
Reserved Environmental Services, a Pennsylvania company that processes fracking waste, as chronicled by documentarian Kirsi Jansa. Plant operator Andy Kicinski tells viewers that the salty water contains no detectable levels of radiation, and the radiation in sludge is below the 140 micro-rems-per-hour that is the limit for sanitary landfills. So where is the waste coming from that is periodically tripping screening alarms at landfills, and who is checking?

Clarification and definitive answers have been hard to come by, partly because the HVHF industry is still new compared to other energy industries. Ultimately, it must be tried in the field like other emerging technologies– where kinks are naturally ironed out -- for its impacts to be fully understood. It’s success or failure hopefully will not simply be a function of conventional economics, but tied to measures put in place to protect people from dangers – not just the sensational kinds of dangers like blow-outs – but chronic and cumulative dangers of waste disposal that are often easy to brush aside or shift from place to place in the short term rush to get energy on line. As long as there are no mechanisms in place to prevent the industry from passing the cost associated with these risks onto the public, it is bound to happen at least in some instances.

Federal and state policy makers are still trying to assess these risks without appearing to be a killjoy about the fledgling industry’s promises of cheap abundant energy. During his election bid, President Obama characterized shale gas development as “a priority” and a key to energy independence. Meanwhile, in the absence of any overarching federal policy (unlike the nuclear industry) managing shale gas development and the problem of waste disposal has been left to the states, and the states are responding or not responding each in their own fashion. That sometimes includes (in the case of Pennsylvania) sending waste to other states (such as Ohio).

In coming weeks, New York State is expected to unveil an environmental review – four and a half years in the making – that should answer questions about how well the regulators have prepared to oversee the fracking waste stream (and other questions). It’s called the Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement (SGEIS). Previous drafts have fallen well short of offering any kind of comprehensive plan to manage issues on the Devonian-sized scale of shale gas production in the northeast. In the absence of federal waste handling laws, and in the absence of funding for state regulatory staff to match increases in drilling beyond any historical measure, we can hope that the final version of the SGEIS will more comprehensively address what’s in the flowback, where it goes, and who makes sure it gets there. It would be good if the agency positioned itself to head off problems rather than chasing them from behind.