One thing people don’t realize – lab tests aren’t exactly definitive. ExxonMobil uses a cheap testing procedure (approved by the RRC) that reads “no detect” if there is any sort of matrix interference. (other things in the mix) We are going to experiment and thru trial and error find the best testing to find the chemicals common in ExxonMObil and Chevron’s legacy oilfields. We can run whats called a Mass Spec test. They are very expensive – $1000 but pick up everything. Then, we will back track and find which of the cheaper / readily available tests work. I’m going to teach everyone how to find and identify their oilfield contamination.

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Southern Tier farms, businesses and residents have a big stake in pending federal water quality regulations being developed to protect the Chesapeake Bay, 400 miles downstream on the Susquehanna River.

On Tuesday, they will have a chance to meet directly with officials from the federal Environmental Protection Agency to learn more about how the regulations are being developed, and their stake in the issue. The public meeting is scheduled from 2 to 4 p.m. at the Broome County Public Library, 185 Court St., Binghamton.

The meeting is part of the process to develop new standards, called a “pollution diet” by EPA officials, for the Chesapeake Bay watershed.

“We see this as the beginning of at least a one-year dialogue with the public,” said Bob Koroncai, a regulator with the EPA who covers Chesapeake Bay issues. “Anybody who eats food, flushes a toilet, uses fertilizer or drives a car is contributing to the problem.”

Although specific regulations are still being worked out, they involve capping states' contributions to pollution flowing to the bay. The goal is to impose the pollution diet to reduce nitrogen, phosphorus, and sediment degrading water quality in the bay and upstream.

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The mining practice called fracking is coming under new scrutiny by the EPA.

A just-passed Interior Department spending bill includes a provision that encourages the agency to study whether fracking is polluting groundwater. Fracking – short for hydraulic fracturing – has made it easier for companies to drill for natural gas in energy-rich states like Colorado.

A similar study during the Bush Administration concluded there was no threat to groundwater. But that was widely criticized by environmentalists and some members of Congress who said the government's analysis was based primarily on input from Halliburton and other energy companies.

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DEP offices in Meadville, Wilkes-Barre, Williamsport and Pittsburgh have received “many dozens” of applications for National Pollution Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permits to build plants to treat waste water produced in the Marcellus Shale to “clean it” before it is returned to the environment.

One of those applications belongs to Somerset Regional Water Resources, based in Tunkhannock, which has proposed a plant along the Chemung River in Athens Township. Somerset plans to build a treatment plant on a lot in the Valley Industrial Park.

Hydrofracturing is a process used to extract natural gas from previously impermeable shale. Also known as Hydraulic fracturing the process utilizes millions of gallons of water, sand, and chemicals injected at high pressure into horizontally drilled wells, some as far as 10,000 feet below the surface.
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Gas drilling companies will try to convince you that using up to 6-million gallons of water for fracing one gas well doesn’t amount to a massive amount of water. Even if they are successful in making that argument with you, the next topic becomes flowback or brine. What do you do with the crap that comes back out of the ground?

Somewhere between 30% and 70% of the water used for hydro-fracing a gas well returns to the surface as flowback. In addition to the frac fluids added by the gas drilling companies, this water picks up other contaminants from deep in the Earth (~ 7,000 feet deep) with one of the most notable being salt.

These fluids contain sodium and calcium salts, barium, oil, strontium, iron, numerous heavy metals, soap, radiation and other components. This fluid combination becomes brine wastewater, and tanker trucks hauling it are labeled with a RESIDUAL WASTE placard. Treated brine is also sold for deicing and other applications that utilize calcium chloride, often being applied to roadways.
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A federal judge has overturned water quality rules that were meant to protect southeastern Montana cropland from natural gas drilling but were assailed by Wyoming as a threat to energy production.

The rules covered the Tongue and Powder rivers, which flow north from the rich gas fields of northeastern Wyoming into primarily agricultural land in Montana.

Drafted by Montana and approved by the Environmental Protection Agency, the rules limited how much salty water – a byproduct of drilling – could enter the rivers. State officials said the EPA had not yet begun to enforce the rules, in part because of a pending lawsuit.
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Clean Water Action accused the state’s Department of Environmental Protection of illegally entering an agreement with Shallenberger Construction Inc, a water infrastructure contractor, to build the plant at Masontown in southwest Pennsylvania.

The plant would dump 500,000 gallons (1.9 million litres) of gas drilling waste water a day into the Monongahela River, violating federal clean-water standards, the group said.

The DEP has failed to control many of the chemicals that are used in hydraulic fracturing, a technique widely used to extract gas from deep deposits beneath Pennsylvania and parts of surrounding states, it added.

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A salt-loving alga that killed tens of millions of fish in Texas has struck for the first time in an Appalachian stream that flows along the border of Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Prymnesium parvum or “golden algae” caused the sudden death of thousands of fish, mussels, and salamanders in early September along some 30 miles of Dunkard Creek. University and government scientists fear the disaster could presage further kills in the region. Streams at risk due to high concentrations of total dissolved solids (TDS) include portions of the northern branch of the Potomac River and 20 other streams in West Virginia, according to state scientists. Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and Kentucky also have many vulnerable rivers and streams, according to U.S. EPA scientists.

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Environmentalists have challenged the proposed construction of a plant that would process waste water from natural gas drilling in Pennsylvania’s booming Marcellus Shale field, an activist group said on Tuesday.

Clean Water Action, a nonprofit, said the plant would discharge drilling waste into the Monongahela River in southwest Pennsylvania without testing for most of the toxic chemicals that form part of the fluid.

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