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West
Virginia allows the disposal of liquid pit wastes by landspraying
them over nonproductive land. The criteria that operators
must use is set forth in the General
Water Pollution Control Permit. The permit reached its
current form back in 1988 and we believe it is long overdue
for a complete revision.
The
liquid waste in the pit that is landsprayed is a mixture of
water, chemical additives used in drilling and fracturing
(West Virginia allows the landspraying of fracturing chemicals
and flowback), and substances brought up from underground
during drilling. Pages in this section of the website offer
a background into what the additives used for drilling are,
types of contaminants found in pits, the state's 1980s rationale
when it set up the permit, and an examination of the 2008
landspraying debacle at Fernow Experimental Forest in West
Virginia.
A
page about drilling additives with lots of links.
A
table
showing a selection of contaminants found in various kinds
of waste in Pennsylvania.
Transcription
from the 1985 Fact Sheet which gives the state's rationale
and program for managing pit waste by landspraying.
We
have an Excel file
with a SAR calculator, a chloride load calculator and a spreadsheet
showing some of the contaminants found in 5 drill waste pits
in West Virginia in the 1980s. The spreadsheet is from Table
C of the 1985 Fact Sheet prepared by the state.
Testing
usually shows that chloride is the chemical that has the highest
concentration in pit waste. We have a page
about chloride that describes its environmental effects.
What
Happened at Fernow
We created a group of posts on our Sootypaws blog in spring
2009 about the landspraying event at the Fernow Experimental
Forest where landspraying in 2008 killed undergrowth and small
trees. The posts dealt with a number of issues and are presented
here in revised form.
We
believe the events at Fernow point to the shortcomings of
the current waste management plan in West Virginia. There
is no consideration of chloride load (or other type of salinity
load), no consideration of sodium load (as expressed by SAR
or other means), no mechanism to halt the landspraying process
when things go bad, and letting operators do their own testing
just makes things worse.
Our
description of what happened at Fernow and what we believe
was the cause are on these pages: Fernow
Experimental Forest, The
Discharge Monitoring Report, Chloride
Load, SAR, Liming
the Pit, A Short History
of Fracturing and Fracturing
Chemicals, What Happened
at Fernow, and, finally, Recommendations
and Sources.
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