Wastewater disposal
may overwhelm available injection wells:
Though hydraulically fractured natural gas wells in the Marcellus
shale region produce only about 35 percent as much wastewater, per unit
of gas recovered, as conventional wells, according to the new analysis,
the volume of toxic fracking wastewater from Pennsylvania is growing and
threatening to overwhelm existing injection wells in Ohio and other states.
“It’s a double-edged sword. On one hand, shale gas production
generates less wastewater per unit. On the other hand, because of the
massive size of the Marcellus resource, the overall volume of water that
now has to be transported and treated is immense. It threatens to
overwhelm the region’s wastewater-disposal infrastructure capacity,”
said Brian D. Lutz, assistant professor of biogeochemistry at Kent State
who led the analysis when he was a postdoctoral research associate at
Duke.
“This is the reality of increasing domestic natural gas production,”
said Martin W. Doyle, professor of river science at Duke’s Nicholas
School of the Environment. “There are significant tradeoffs and
environmental impacts whether you rely on conventional gas or shale
gas.”
Lutz and Doyle published their analysis this week in the peer-reviewed journal Water Resources Research.
They analyzed gas production and wastewater generation for 2,189 gas
wells in Pennsylvania, using publicly available data reported by
industry to the state’s Department of Environmental Protection in
compliance with state law..
“We found that on average, shale gas wells produced about ten times
the amount of wastewater as conventional wells, but they also produced
about 30 times more natural gas,” Lutz said. “That surprised us, given
the popular perception that hydraulic fracturing creates
disproportionate amounts of wastewater.”
I am surprised by the claim that fracking wells produce less wastewater per unit of gas than conventional wells, but these guys are the ones who looked at the data.
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