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Monday, February 14, 2011

Ohio cities push limits for fracking wastewater

Cities in Ohio are looking to cash in on the wastewater created by natural gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale. But state environmental officials say the process of cleaning the water could pollute Ohio's rivers and streams. "East Liverpool, Steubenville and Warren want to take the millions of gallons of salty, toxic wastewater that such wells produce and run it through their sewage-treatment plants," Spencer Hunt of The Columbus Dispatch reports. "However, Ohio Environmental Protection Agency officials say they want strict limits on the amount of brine the cities want to dump in the Mahoning and Ohio rivers."

In December, Ohio EPA "gave Warren officials permission to dump no more than 100,000 gallons of treated brine each day into the Mahoning along with as much as 16 million gallons of treated sewage," Hunt writes. Thomas Angelo, who is director of Warren's water-pollution-control center, told Hunt the Mahoning could handle as much as 600,000 gallons a day and that volume could boost city revenue from an estimated $150,000 a year to at least $900,000. "Discharging 100,000 (gallons per day), it's the proverbial drop in the bucket," Angelo said. "There is more salt coming off the roads into waters of the state than what is coming off the Marcellus shale."

Marcellus shale drilling uses hydraulic fracturing, during which millions of gallons of water, sand and chemicals are injected into wells to break the shale and release gas. "About 15 percent of the water shot down the well comes back up, tainted with salt and hazardous metals that can include barium, cadmium and chromium," Hunt writes. "After the initial surge of  'flow back' water, wells continue to produce brine that contains even higher concentrations of salt, metals and minerals." Warren has filed a legal challenge to Ohio EPA's limit, and the agency will consider requests from Steubenville and East Liverpool in the coming weeks. (Read more)

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