Shale drillers tout recycling as option for wastewater

The level of salty compounds in the Monongahela River south of Pittsburgh spiked above acceptable limits in late 2008 - not a health risk, according to federal and state regulators, but drinking water drawn from the river tasted like mud.

Environmentalists blamed the contamination on Marcellus Shale gas-drilling discharges. Natural-gas drillers pointed to other sources in the historically stressed river: pollutants from coal mines and other industrial discharges.

Which source was to blame didn't really matter. What mattered was that the Monongahela's elevated levels of total dissolved solids - salty compounds known as TDS that can't be removed by conventional treatment - set off alarms, a clarion that Pennsylvania's streams would be unable to assimilate the huge volumes of wastewater expected with the coming Marcellus Shale boom, then in its infancy.

Regulators have been hard-pressed to keep tabs on the vast wastewater volumes ever since, as development of the Marcellus Shale has expanded across the state.

"It was a warning signal, and we treated it that way," said John Hanger, then-secretary of the state Department of Environmental Protection. DEP ordered Monongahela River sewage-treatment plants to reduce the volumes of drilling wastewater they accepted by more than 90 percent, a reduction that remains in place today.

State regulators also began to rewrite wastewater rules, resulting in strict new discharge standards that went into effect this year, over the industry's objections.

Those actions began to close the door on the relatively cheap option of discharging inadequately treated wastewater, forcing the gas industry to develop the practice it now touts as the solution to Pennsylvania's problem: recycling.

"There just wasn't enough treatment capacity," said Tony Gaudlip, director of strategic planning and development for Range Resources Corp., the Texas company that pioneered Marcellus development.

Drillers say they can recycle contaminated wastewater by mixing it with the fresh water used in new drilling operations. The blended water is pumped into wells during hydraulic fracturing or "fracking," a process that involves pumping millions of gallons of water, sand and chemicals under high pressure deep into the earth to shatter the shale to release gas molecules.