Don't Just Throw Away That Fracking Wastewater

states more than hydraulic fracturing or fracking. It produces a lot of wastewater, and states aren't quite sure where they should put it all. That's where Nicole Saunders comes in. She's an energy attorney with the Environmental Defense Fund and she's focused on making sure companies and states dispose of this water right. I spoke with her outside of the eCos conference, but first I wanted to make sure I

understood what fracking really is. I think I understand what fracking is, but it's you're taking water, shooting it way way way underground. It really high pressures. You break the rock open that the you know that's deep underground, that releases gas. The gas comes up, you collect that gas and then sell it and make a lot of money. That's that's fracking, sure, Really at a really high level,

I think that's the basic understanding the water. There's also propens like sand propens propens to prop open fracture, and you'll use some chemicals in that in that operation, so you're not just sending water down, you're sending water into other stuff. But essentially that's what you're doing. You're breaking open the rock down there, releasing the gas. What you're working on is kind of what happens to that water afterward, right, Yeah, that's right. So a lot of the work that I

do revolves around what's called produced water. So produced water is the waste water essentially that comes back after a well is completed, and it's common not only for wells that are hydraulically fractured, but also for more conventional oil and gas produced wells. Oil and gas operations can produce a very small amount of water over their life, or some of them can produce something like ten barrels of water for every barrel of oil that they produce, so it can be a lot of volume and what do

you do with that water? So traditionally, the oil and gas industry has taken their produced water and disposed of it in underground injection control wells or disposal wells, so just sending it back down, essentially sending it back down, so either using it to enhance some kind of oil recovery, which is a traditional method, or just disposing it and

in a very deep disposal well. And that I understand has caused a few problems in some limited circumstances in certain parts of the country where disposal wells were constructed in a certain place and in a certain way, they have been tied to some induce seismicity or earthquake. So a place like Oklahoma is a really great example of an area where you're seeing larger volumes and larger pressures and that is led in some instances to those earthquakes.

That's not good. Nobody wants sort of man made earthquakes. But it sounds like one of the things that you're working on or you're looking into, is instead of just shooting the water back down underground, using it for something.

Is what's that all about. More than ninety maybe ninety five percent of the produced water from these operations is disposed underground, but there are parts of the country that are facing a number of different drivers or stressors, where both regulators and industry are beginning to think about what if we did something different with this produced water? Where

is that? So that's in places like Oklahoma where there's some concern about seismicity, It's in places in the western part of the country where there's a big concern about drought and the availability of water resources, and in other parts of the country where the traditional mechanisms for disposal are very complex or costly for industry. So it can cost a lot in some parts of the country to have a disposal well or to truck at a very

long distance to get to a disposal well. So there's this broader thinking about what if we could convert this waste into a potential resource from a water perspective, And what I work on a lot is we don't want to leap blindly into that or look before we leap, for example, because there's quite a bit that we don't know about produce water and a lot of concerns about what the short and long term health and environmental risks would be of that change in practice. Now, when you

say resource, what are we talking about? Here? Are we saying taking fracking waste whine and turning it into drinking water, or would it just be water that would water my plants, or would it be water that would do other stuff? Or this? Are we able to filter out what's in this water enough that we could actually drink it? Oh? I don't think we're even close to being there, not by any shot. But there's a couple of different ways

that we're thinking about the reuse of this water. The first and one that I would say we support is industry beginning to look and they have been for a while and thinking can we use water that's not fresh water to hydraulically fracture our drill our wells? So can we do something so that we're using less local freshwater, having a lesser impact on the local water resources, and use this waste stream to produce our wells, So recycling

the produced water inside the oil field. So that would essentially be shooting the water underground, breaking up the rock and releasing the oil or gas. The water comes back up, they collect it, and then it goes right back underground to do the same thing. So it's like just a loop, like a snake eating his tail. Yeah. I haven't heard it that way, but surey similar to that, and you guys are in favor of that, Yeah, I think we would be in favor of for that with a caveat that,

let's not spill and leak it. The second is broad, so there are bigger questions about using produce water for crop irrigation or some other type of municipal irrigation. Also looking at other industrial uses where other industries use water, could they instead use some form of produce water or treated produce water. What do you guys think of that? We definitely need to be thinking a lot more about what exactly is in this water. It's not just about

the chemicals that are used in operations. Even more so, it's about what's been down there for a really long time, deep underground, and what kind of interactions maybe have happened, and when it comes up in a wastewater what are the risks to soil, to human health populations, to ecosystems, to water plants, to all of that. What do we know? And the answer is that we don't know a lot.

So we should note here that after I spoke with Nicole, I heard back from Reed Porter, a spokesman at the American petroleum Institude, who said in an email that his industry runs all of its waste management plans passeday regulators before they drill. Okay, Now back to Nicole. What makes it really interesting is the fact that produce water is

different from state to state. So we've been talking about as though it's an it, and really it's a very variable waste stream, and what happens from state to state is going to be extremely different because the water that they're dealing with, and the practices that they're dealing with, and the particular drivers and pressures they're dealing with is very different. So what you see right now our states, as well as the federal government EPA thinking about it

in a number of different ways. So you have places like Oklahoma, where we heard at the Environmental Council of States meeting this morning, thinking about if we were to discharge or permit discharge in the future, what are those research questions? We think we're pretty far out from that. Let's get together and start deciding what should we be thinking about. So I think that's really great, and you

see other states like Colorado and North Dakota. We're also though on this panel this morning, thinking about road application of produce water and seeing that as a practice that has happened for some time and starting to take a step back and say, maybe we should think about this in a new way. So you're seeing states learn as well through this process, and so that's good. I mean road application, like putting it on the roads instead of salt when it's snowy. Yeah, so either as ice or

dust suppression happens in some parts of the country. And you heard this morning from this panel that we're taking there's those states are taking a step back and saying what do we need to know about this water and how can we do this better. The last thing I wanted to ask you is just a more much more broad question, which is you know about fracking in general.

You know, we've seen that it can impact local communities water supplies in a big way, but we've also seen that it doesn't necessarily have to do You think it can be done safely and that there are ways to do it that mitigate the impacts on on the environmental impacts on communities, or do you think that ultimately there's no real safe way to do hydraulic fracturing or fracking as it's more commonly known I think that the key

part of this is not necessarily is it safe. As more of are are in this time where production of oil and gas remains part of our society, part of our economy, we need to be thinking about whether or not we are pushing the limits of making sure that we are reducing as many feasible risks as we possibly can. Everything from methane emissions that DF works on quite a bit, and all of these little detailed components of how the waste is managed, where is it going, what does the

water impact look like. So there are a lot, a lot of questions to go into that question of safe. And I think, you know, the best answer I can give you is that everything that we physically can do to do to reduce the impacts on local communities and the environment and people at large, we need to be doing. And there's a lot of advancements that need to take place to watch that happen and you know, hopefully eventually

transition into other sources of energy. So it sounds like you're saying it's you know, it's not the question of whether it's safe or not safe. The question is this is happening. This is a big part of the economy. Let's make it safe for I think that's right. I think it would be very difficult to say safe, check box checked. I think we always need to be looking for ways that we can continuously improve and continuously make it better, not only industry itself, but also you know,

regulators are constantly tweaking. You can see constantly thinking about how do we push, how do we control the right things, how are we tackling new issues? This produce water is a great example of a new issue that we weren't really talking about five years ago. Even this time last year, the discussion wasn't as heavy as it is today. And so this is a new risk and a new issue that we need to be very, very very careful about. And we just need to be smart and do better

research and manage those risks better. Okay, and we're back in the gondola. That was Nicole Saunders of the Environmental Defense Fund. Check back later this week from Work Podcasts from Vermont. This episode of Parts Rebellion was produced by myself, hen Jessica Coombs, and Rachel Daegel. Our editor is Marisa Horn. Music for this episode is a message by Jasari with used under a creative Commons attribution and share like license. More information can be found at better with music dot com