Is "Recycling Waste Fluids" Just Another Name for Disposal?

pumping water from Susquehanna at Ulster, PA

Three weeks ago I posted a brief review on how Range Resources is re-using flowback and frack waste fluids in their drilling process. The idea sounds great: re-use, recycle and reduce the need for pumping millions of gallons of water from our streams and rivers.

But while industry engineers rave about the technology, some people living near recycling operations aren’t so ecstatic. Since that post, I heard from one woman living in the Barnett Shale play who described a local recycling facility.

Fountain Quail, a partner in the Williamsport Eureka facility (which is the one Range currently uses to clarify their frack fluids) operates a similar facility located in the midst of drilling sites just north of the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

“It stinks,” said the Texas resident. She described the odor as an offensive mix of diesel and chemicals that smells like stagnant water. The idea of using well-site recycling might work in isolated, rural areas she said, but the odors are evident from as far away as 1,000 feet.

“You wouldn’t want to live nearby,” she said. Already many people have raised concerns about the cumulative impact of emissions from compressors and other facilities; we should add recycling facilities to that list.

Then there is the question of whether diluting and reusing flowback to drill wells is a legitimate use for drilling waste fluids. “Why isn’t re-injecting flowback fluids into a well regulated under UIC?” asks Dr. Anthony Ingraffea, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Cornell University.

UIC refers to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Underground Injection Control program which regulates disposal of oil and gas drilling wastes in deep disposal wells.

“Congress established the UIC program to protect drinking water,” Ingraffea emphasized in a recent phone conversation. Under the UIC program, drilling wastes are injected into class II disposal wells. EPA regulates these class II wells, limiting the pressure and volume of waste fluid injected into disposal wells.

More importantly, EPA requires the company to demonstrate that injected wastes will not come into contact with any groundwater. That means the company has to identify all abandoned wells in the area and make sure they are plugged properly – otherwise injected waste fluids may find a pathway to contaminate drinking water.

So here’s the conundrum, says Ingraffea: while the EPA strictly regulates how fluids are injected into a deep disposal well, no one is regulating how those same fluids are being reused in drilling.

“This is what happens when technology outpaces regulations,” says Ingraffea. “It’s the same process with a different name.”

Add recycling to the long list of things EPA needs to look at in their new hydro-fracking study.

What to do With Flowback? Just Pump it Back Downhole.

photo of Range Resources impoundment, courtesy SRBC

It takes anywhere from 3 to 5 million gallons of water to frack a Marcellus well, water that companies are pumping from local rivers or purchasing from municipalities. But, says Dave Yoxtheimer at Penn State University, drillers are looking into alternatives: treated wastewater, cooling water from power plants, and abandoned mine drainage. They’re also exploring ways to reuse their flowback and waste fluids.

A number of companies have engineered recycling technologies, including Aqua Pure and GE. But, says Tony Gaudlip, water operations manager for Range Resources, recycling flowback may be as simple as pumping it back down the hole. In an October 21 webinar Gaudlip said that Range Resources has been recycling 100 percent of their flowback for the past year. Reusing the water has resulted in a savings of $200,000 per well, about 5 percent of the total drilling cost.

We’re not talking a lot of flowback – only 10 percent of what’s injected comes back out. Still, the company’s engineers needed to consider a few things before pumping wastefluid back down the hole: pumping pressure – horizontal wells require about 80 to 100 barrels of water per minute to fracture the rock; and the chemicals they used. Fracturing Marcellus requires different chemicals than shale wells in other parts of the country.

“Initially we took the flowback and the brine, mixed it all together and pumped it downhole,” Gaudlip said. They watched the dials and gauges, looked at bacterial growth and scaling, and analyzed fluid stability. “We saw some increase in friction, but that was manageable,” Gaudlip said. What they didn’t see was scaling. Nor did they see an elevation of the total dissolved solids (TDS) levels. Conventional wisdom expected those levels to climb higher with each reuse.

What this meant for Range Resources was that they could reuse their fluids with minimum – or no – treatment. So for the past year they’ve been diluting the flowback in a new mix that’s three-quarters fresh water combined with one-quarter reused waste fluids.

Where do they store this flowback until they need it? In pits. Gaudlip admitted that Range Resources has had some issues with bacterial growth on the surface, which he attributed to the levels of polyacrilamides and solids in the flowback. So now, they truck their

flowback fluids to Eureka Resources, in Williamsport. After raising the pH, adding flocking agent to settle the solids and tossing in chlorine to control bacteria, the “clarified” waste fluid is hauled back to the well pad where it is stored until it’s reused in fracking.

The idea behind reusing drilling waste fluid was two-fold: to reduce the amount of water withdrawn from the rivers and streams, and to reduce the amount of truck traffic hauling both fresh and wastewater on the road. Gaudlip admits that trucking the flowback 35 miles to the treatment facility is not an ideal situation. Not for Range and not for the local residents.

Long term plans call for Range Resources to incorporate mobile water treatment units at their drilling sites. But that’s still a few months off, says Matt Pitzarella, Range Resource Public Affairs Director for the Marcellus region. The company’s ultimate goal, he said, is to maintain zero liquid discharge in Pennsylvania’s surface waters.

You can hear Gaudlip’s webinar presentation here. The longer article that was published in Broader View Weekly last week should be available here sometime next week.