Fracking Waste Fills WV Landfills Under New Rule
Register-Herald
7 December 2013
Associated Press
McLEAN, Va. — A memo released quietly by regulators earlier this
year has carved a major loophole in West Virginia’s rules
restricting the amount of waste that can be accepted by the
state’s landfills, all with the intent to ease a burgeoning
problem caused by the boom in gas drilling, environmentalists say.
The new rule specifies that landfills can accept unlimited amounts
of solid waste from horizontal gas drilling, more commonly known
as hydraulic fracturing or fracking. The rule carves out an
exception to a decades-old state law that limited landfills’
intake to only 10,000 or 30,000 tons a month, depending on their
classification.
In the industry, the drilling waste is called “drill cuttings,” a
sludgy mix of dirt, water, sand and chemicals dredged up in the
drilling process.
While much of the environmental concern over fracking has been
focused on groundwater or air pollution, little attention has been
paid to solid waste.
But the new rules in West Virginia, announced to landfill owners
in a July 26 memo from the state’s Department of Environmental
Protection, are further proof of the boom in drilling on the
Marcellus Shale, a resource-rich rock formation running under
Pennsylvania, Ohio and parts of West Virginia that has become one
of the most productive gas drilling fields in the world thanks to
fracking technology.
West Virginia passed legislation in 2011 that requires the drill
cuttings from fracking operations to be disposed of in a landfill,
but the law made no provision for generating extra landfill
capacity.
Tom Aluise, spokesman for the Department of Environmental
Protection, said the new rules are the best way to accommodate two
conflicting laws: one that strictly regulates the intake of solid
waste and one that requires massive amounts of waste to be
disposed of in landfills.
“This is not a carte blanche, unrestricted ‘exception’ to the
tonnage limits,” Aluise said in an email. He noted that the DEP is
requiring landfills to build a separate cell for the drill
cuttings, or to seek a new permit to upgrade from a Class B to a
Class A landfill, which is allowed to accept larger amounts of
waste.
Still, environmentalists see the new rule as obliterating the
state’s carefully crafted rules on trash intake. And they say it’s
being done for an industry that has a dubious environmental
record.
Norm Steenstra, a legislative coordinator with West Virginia
Citizen Action Group, said fracking waste is a particular concern
because of its radioactivity. Studies by the U.S. Geological
Survey have shown that Marcellus Shale happens to have higher
levels of naturally occurring radioactivity than other shale
formations, though there is great dispute as to whether the levels
are potentially harmful to humans.
“Radioactivity is the gift that keeps on giving,” Steenstra said.
Issues revolving around fracking affect primarily the northern
part of the state, under which the Marcellus shale formation runs.
Six landfills in the state currently accept drill cuttings,
according to the DEP, concentrated in and around the northern
Panhandle.
In Wetzel County, on the border with southwestern Pennsylvania, a
landfill once authorized to accept only 9,999 tons of solid waste
each month took in more than 40,000 tons in October, according to
the county’s Solid Waste Authority. roughly 75 percent of the
volume was from drill cutting.
Ryan Inch, director of engineering at the Wetzel landfill and
three others owned by J.P. Mascaro and Sons in Audubon, Pa., said
he believes the concerns about radiation are a nonissue. In
Pennsylvania, where landfills are required to monitor all incoming
trash for radiation, he said his landfills have accepted nearly
2,500 truckloads of drill cuttings, and that only one triggered
radiation detectors, finding levels just twice the level of
background radiation.
He said it’s far more common for the detectors to be set off due
to byproducts from nuclear medicine: if a someone blows their nose
after receiving a radioactive dye injection as part of a medical
test, for instance.
Inch also disputes that the July memo from the state gives
landfills any more leeway than they already had. He said West
Virginia law has always made an exception for drill cuttings, and
they are not defined as “solid waste” under state law, and said
the July memo merely clarifies the status quo.
Bill Hughes — chairman of the Wetzel County Solid Waste Authority,
which is opposing the landfill’s expansion to accommodate fracking
waste — insists drill cuttings are regulated under the solid waste
law. He said he is also concerned about radiation and that the
state needs to independently investigate whether the drill
cuttings pose a public health risk. Unlike Pennsylvania, West
Virginia does not require testing waste for radioactivity.
“Landfills have never seen a ton of waste they don’t want to
take,” Hughes said. “Our state just sort of trusts the garbage
guys.”
Corky Demarco, executive director of the West Virginia Oil and
Natural Gas Association, said he believes the complaints about
landfills are just a backdoor way of trying to rein in fracking
operations.
“They’ve tried water and air, and that hasn’t worked” for
environmentalists, Demarco said. “Now they’re going after the
drill cuttings.”