Tracking Fracking Water Goes High-Tech
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
10 May 2011
By Bill Toland
Water, as much as natural gas, is the lifeblood of the Marcellus Shale
play. Drillers need millions of gallons of water to flush the gas out
of its hiding spot, deep below ground. Water is hauled by truck,
imported by pipeline, collected on-site by retention impoundments and
spirited away to a treatment or disposal facility once the fracking
fluid has been spent.
Not only do drillers need a lot of water, they also need a very
specific amount of water -- per week, per day, even per hour.
Increasingly, by computers, using a complex network of software, GPS
devices and electronic manifests. The more transport and trucking
companies that adopt such real-time tracking technologies, the less
chance of a rogue hauler taking wastewater where he's not supposed to
or dumping it in a river.
That's what's alleged to have happened between 2003 and 2009. In March,
Robert A. Shipman was arraigned on charges related to illegal dumping
by his company, Allan's Waste Water Services Inc. of Greene County, and
related companies. In all, Mr. Shipman and his company face 175
criminal charges, as recommended by a grand jury.
If drilling companies contracted with only those haulers who use GPS
tracking technology, that might not have happened, said Brian J. Bagby.
"Water is obviously a huge issue," both practically and politically,
said Mr. Bagby, executive vice president of development and marketing
for H20 Resources. It's a practical issue, in that extracting natural
gas from the below-ground rock formations requires millions of gallons
of water; and a political one, because politicians and
environmentalists worry about the damage that drilling may do to
streams and water supplies.
H20 Resources, based in Cranberry, sells its Water TRAC tracking system
to drilling and hauling companies.
A single driller might subcontract its water delivery and wastewater
hauling work to four, five, even a half-dozen hauling companies. Each
of those trucking crews might be operating several trucks, and each of
those drivers might make several trips a day. And each trip requires
haulers to sign in, sign out, submit a bill-of-lading, read a meter and
otherwise track their own whereabouts.
Companies must also report how much water they are withdrawing from a
creek by pipeline -- especially in sensitive areas such as the Delaware
and Chesapeake basins -- or how much fracking waste they are delivering
to a disposal facility.
"Paperwork is error-prone. It's slow ... it's an administrative mess,"
Mr. Bagby said. "We can do it in an hour -- paperwork that used to take
40 hours."
The main selling point of Water TRAC (and its sister technology, Frac
TRAC) is that it cuts down on paperwork by using GPS trackers and other
forms of wireless communication to monitor water usage, according to
Mr. Bagby. For example, if a driller in the Marcellus Shale is limited
to 1 million gallons of water withdrawal a day from a given waterway,
the Water TRAC software and hardware would alert the driller if it was
nearing its usage cap for the day. The sensor system also tracks data
from pipelines, pits and work tanks.
Mr. Bagby and his partners began billing for Water TRAC services in
April 2010, and collected less than $500,000 in sales last year. They
have less than a half-dozen clients.
One of those clients is Citrus Energy, a Colorado oil and gas driller
that is now active in the regional Marcellus Shale play, producing
natural gas in Wyoming County at a few wells a month. The company uses
more than 6 million gallons of water a month.
"It's a huge operation to do the water movement that we do," said Randy
Holt, engineering and operations manager at Citrus' Appalachian
division. Tracking water flow and usage from river to pipeline to well
to truck "is a huge manpower-type need for all of us companies out
here. Some of these companies aren't quite staffed for this type of
need."
So they subcontract to companies that do have the manpower and the
expertise. In some cases, that means partnering with a company like H20
Resources, which will then outfit the hauling trucks with equipment and
install hardware at other points along the line. In other cases, the
larger pipeline and trucking companies already have invested in their
own tracking suites.
"A lot of these companies began making these investments years ago,"
said Matt Pitzarella, spokesman for Range Resources, one of the largest
drillers in the state. Major environmental services and hauling
companies, such as EAP Industries of Atlasburg, Washington County, have
already outfitted all of their trucks with GPS trackers.
One of the largest regional waste disposal firms, handling both liquid
and solid well site waste (and other wastes), is MAX Environmental
Technologies of Pittsburgh. CEO Bill Spencer said he remembered when,
back in the 1980s, it wasn't unusual to learn that drivers were dumping
waste illegally. In fact, he recalls being part of a "spy" operation in
which subcontractor truckers were followed to see where they were
dumping waste.
"It was relatively common," he said. "They just weren't regulating."
Today, he said, it's different, thanks to improved tracking on the part
of haulers and processors, as well as improved regulatory oversight --
the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976 gave the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency broad discretion in how water and waste
was handled in an industrial setting, and that act was amended and
strengthened several times in the 1980s.
Mr. Spencer's company, which owns the landfills and the liquid waste
processing plants, relies on subcontracted trucking firms to do its
hauling. Any time one of the trucks leaves a well site or arrives at
one of MAX's disposal facilities, electronic manifests are filled out
in triplicate, and electronically, with e-records sent to the
transporter, the water treatment plant receiving the waste and the
Department of Environmental Protection.
"It's effective paperwork," he said. "It tracks waste, cradle to grave."
Bill Toland: btoland@post-gazette.com or 412-263-2625.