The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is proposing to ban publicly owned wastewater treatment facilities from taking untreated waste fluids from the unconventional oil and gas industry in a move that would guarantee the end of a disposal practice that the industry and states have already abandoned, Laura Legere reports today in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
"In a notice Tuesday, federal regulators said they are taking comments on their plan to forbid publicly owned treatment works from accepting and discharging the wastewater, which often contains high concentrations of salt and lesser amounts of chemicals, metals and naturally occurring radioactive materials that are potentially harmful to human health and the environment. Public sewage treatment plants are not designed to remove those pollutants, which can flow through to streams untreated or interfere with the plant’s normal treatment processes.
"The rule would apply to wastewater that comes from production, field exploration, drilling, well completion or well treatment during unconventional oil and gas extraction, which generally uses the combined technologies of fracking and horizontal drilling to pull hydrocarbons from tight geologic formations, like the Marcellus and Utica shales."
