Bromide: A Concern in Drilling Wastewater
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
13 March 2011
By Don Hopey
Public water suppliers in Pittsburgh and elsewhere in the region are
concerned about higher levels of bromide in rivers and streams as
natural gas drilling increases.
Ballooning bromide concentrations in the region's rivers, occurring as
Marcellus Shale wastewater discharges increase, is a much bigger worry
than the risk of high radiation levels, public water suppliers say.
Unlike radiation, which so far has shown up at scary levels only in
Marcellus Shale hydraulic fracturing wastewater sampling done at
wellheads, the spike in salty bromides in Western Pennsylvania's rivers
and creeks has already put some public water suppliers into violation
of federal safe drinking water standards.
Others, like the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority, haven't exceeded
those limits but have been pushed up against them.
Some have had to change the way they treat water.
Bromide is a salty substance commonly found in seawater. It was once
used in sedatives and headache remedies like Bromo-Seltzer until it was
withdrawn because of concerns about toxicity. When it shows up at
elevated levels in freshwater, it is due to human activities. The
problem isn't so much the bromide in the river but what happens when
that river water is treated to become drinking water.
Bromide facilitates formation of brominated trihalomethanes, also known
as THMs, when it is exposed to disinfectant processes in water
treatment plants. THMs are volatile organic liquid compounds.
Studies show a link between ingestion of and exposure to THMs and
several types of cancer and birth defects.
"Our biggest concerns are about bromide, which has become a problem
over the last six months or so," said Stanley States, water quality
manager with the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority, which draws
water from the Allegheny River for its 400,000 customers.
"Trihalomethanes are strictly regulated because of the health risks.
We've seen levels that are threatening the standards."
The federal safe drinking water standard for THMs is 80 micrograms per
cubic liter, and removing them from finished drinking water is
difficult. Keeping bromide levels in raw water sources low is a much
easier way to address the problem.
Mr. States said the elevated bromide levels in the river could be
coming from municipal sewage treatment plants and brine treatment
plants handling Marcellus Shale drilling and hydrofracking wastewater
or from discharges by coal-fired power plants water discharges. He said
four municipal sewage facilities and four brine treatment plants are
handling and discharging Marcellus Shale wastewater upriver from
Pittsburgh's drinking water intake pipe in Aspinwall.
"Something's changed and it could possibly be related to the treating
of Marcellus Shale drilling wastewater," Mr. States said.
"There will be a lot more Marcellus Shale wells operating in the region
before there are a whole lot less and our concern is in providing safe
drinking water. We're not anti-Marcellus Shale. We're anti-bromide."
Problem through the region
Pittsburgh is not alone. The Wilkinsburg-Penn Joint Water Authority
issued a notice to its customers in January informing them of the
bromide problem and said it was necessary to change its water treatment
methods to stay in compliance with state and federal drinking water
standards.
"Due to the sudden increase in bromide concentration in the Allegheny
River, all water suppliers are beginning to have a problem controlling
this trihalomethane formation," the authority wrote on its Web page.
"All water purveyors on the Allegheny River System are working together
to try and find out the source of the elevated bromide levels."
Mr. States said a study is under way on the Allegheny River and its
tributaries to identify sources of bromide in the river.
The Department of Environmental Protection is participating in that
river sampling study and another in the Monongahela River watershed.
Katy Gresh, a DEP spokeswoman, said the department plans to order the
industrial brine plants, sewage treatment facilities and coal-powered
power plants on the rivers to conduct sampling at their discharge pipes.
"We will get and review those results," Ms. Gresh said. "If we can
control the largest contributors, that will help solve the problem."
Jeanne VanBriesen, a Carnegie Mellon University professor of civil and
environmental engineering, said testing there showed an unusual spike
in bromide levels in July and August. Although they've tapered a bit
since then, they remain higher than normal, said Ms. VanBriesen, who
has been studying water quality in the Monongahela River since fall
2009.
She said the two biggest sources of bromide in the watershed are
Marcellus wastewater from sewage treatment facilities and wastewater
from new smokestack scrubbers at coal-fired power plants. The plants
cannot remove the bromide in wastewater.
Bromide levels vary in discharges from both sources, but bromide is
generally found at higher concentrations in Marcellus wastewater.
"It's difficult to make a definitive statement about where it's all
coming from, but we do know it's going into our drinking water
treatment plants and affecting the treatment of our water," Ms.
VanBriesen said. "The most logical way to fix that is to reduce the
amount of bromide in the rivers and creeks."
Millions of gallons
Marcellus Shale drilling and hydraulic fracturing operations use an
average of 4 million gallons of water to drill and "frack" each well.
The drilling industry says it recycles approximately 70 percent of the
wastewater from its well fracking operations, but millions of gallons
are still funneled through 11 sewage treatment facilities and five
brine treatment plants, then discharged into the state's rivers and
streams.
Together, the eight facilities on the Allegheny and its tributaries are
allowed to discharge an average of 1.5 million gallons of Marcellus
drilling wastewater and hydraulic fracturing fluid a day, according to
state Department of Environmental Protection records. Marcellus
discharges from three treatment facilities on the Monongahela River
total 185,000 gallons a day. Another 650,000 gallons a day flow into
the Ohio and its tributaries.
Drilling companies and the Marcellus Shale Coalition, an advocacy and
lobbying organization representing most of the companies doing shale
gas drilling in Pennsylvania, said the industry isn't to blame for
higher bromide levels.
"When you look at the amount of Marcellus Shale wastewater that is
being discharged it's low" compared to the river flows, said Matt
Pitzarella, a spokesman for Range Resources. "So those [bromide]
increases are not an impact of Marcellus Shale."
Range Resources recycled 90 percent of its wastewater last year and has
set a goal of 100 percent for 2011.
"We certainly see this as a non-Marcellus issue," said Steve Forde, a
shale coalition spokesman, who cited a 2010 U.S. Geological Survey
study that noted higher bromide levels nationwide, especially in urban
areas. "Road salt use has been identified as one of the culprits for
that."
Ms. VanBriesen said that's not likely because road salt contains more
chloride and little bromide, and her water testing didn't find a
corresponding spike in chloride levels. Plus the bromide spike in the
rivers first occurred in the summer.
"So to implicate road salt, well, I wouldn't buy that," she said. "The
bromide spike happened in July and August when you wouldn't be applying
road salt. So that wasn't a factor."
Changing treatment process
Whatever the origin of the bromide spike, Jerry Schulte, manager of
source water protection for the Ohio River Valley Water Sanitation
Commission, said bromide is "absolutely an issue" for water treatment
plants.
"We've identified bromide as a compound of concern," Mr. Schulte said,
adding that ORSANCO's triennial review of pollution control standards
in April will focus on developing a new, first-time standard for
bromide in the watershed.
Discharges of bromides and bromide levels in rivers or streams are not
now regulated by ORSANCO or by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
The Josephine brine treatment facility, also known as Franklin Brine,
on Blacklick Creek in the Allegheny's watershed, discharges an average
of 120,000 gallons a day of Marcellus wastewater that, at peak levels,
contains high concentrations of bromide, chlorides and total dissolved
solids, according to sampling done by the University of Pittsburgh's
Center for Healthy Environments and Communities.
"There's pretty high bromide going into the creek. Certainly it is a
public health threat," said Conrad Dan Volz, director of the Center for
Healthy Environments and Communities. "And to remove brominated THMs,
that's going to break the bank for public water systems."
Water treatment plants can get around the bromide problem by changing
their treatment methods -- substituting chloramines for the chlorides
they normally use in the disinfection process. That's what the
Wilkinsburg-Penn water authority did.
The chloramines produce different, less toxic, treatment byproducts,
but those can produce other problems, including causing lead and copper
to leach out of old water pipelines and into drinking water as happened
in Washington, D.C., when it made such a switch in 2000.
Ms. VanBriesen said water utilities making such a change can add
phosphate to their finished water to prevent lead from leaching out of
the pipes.
Another way to avoid THMs, she said, is to change the way water
utilities mix, aerate and store their finished water, and a number of
suppliers are considering that.
One water treatment facility that has had problems with keeping THM
concentrations in finished water below the 80 parts per billion federal
standard is Beaver Falls, in Beaver County, which was required to
notify its 50,000 customers in 22 municipalities of the problem for the
first three quarters of 2010.
The authority changed its treatment methods, from chlorine to
chloramines, which don't form THMs, at a cost of approximately $15,000
last year. That allowed the water supplier to meet the standard for the
last three months of the year, said Jim Riggio, general manager of the
water system.
Although testing done by the state DEP hasn't been able to pinpoint a
cause of the higher bromide levels in the Beaver River, Mr. Riggio said
they coincided with upriver discharges of treated Marcellus Shale
fracking wastewater.
"We went from non-detectable levels of bromide to increased levels a
couple of years ago," Mr. Riggio said. "When I see the whole frack
water thing taking off and the same time we start to have problems,
well, until you can tell me different, that's what I assume it is. And
it seems like a lot of the water suppliers on the Beaver and Mon rivers
had similar problems to what we did."
Don Hopey: dhopey@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1983.