Natural Gas Drilling and Recyling Wastewater

Ian Urbina, New York Times, March 1, 2011

in a move hailed by industry as a major turning point, drilling companies are reusing and recycling the wastewater generated during the process of drilling for natural gas.

While wastewater reuse reduces freshwater demand, it does not fully eliminate environmental and health risks. Some methods can leave behind salts or sludge impacted with radioactive material and other contaminants.

In Pennsylvania, where the number of drilling permits for gas wells has jumped markedly in the last several years, in part because the state sits on a large underground gas formation known as the Marcellus Shale, such waste remains exempt from federal and state oversight, even when turned into salts and spread on roads. 

More than 90 percent of well operators in Pennsylvania use hydrofracturing to get wells to produce, which uses large volumes of water.  In the year and a half that ended in December 2010, well operators reported recycling at least 320 million gallons. Another 260 million gallons of wastewater were sent to plants that discharge their treated waste into rivers, out of a total of more than 680 million gallons of wastewater produced.

In addition to the potential ancillary impacts of salts, radionuclides, and other contaminants, there is currently no reliable tracking system of the wastewater's disposition. 

Given that at least 50,000 new Marcellus wells are projected to be drilled in Pennsylvania over the next two decades, up from about 6,400 permitted now, the long-term environmental impacts and benefits of the drilling and disposal methods warrant further investigation.

Read more in the NYTimes (here and here).

GRA 19th Annual Conference and Meeting

The Groundwater Resources Association of California is hosting its 19th Annual Conference and Meeting on September 15-16, 2010, at the Hyatt Regency at the San Francisco Airport in Burlingame, California.

This year's Annual Meeting will explore many topics, but will focus on Water Recycling, Conservation, and Water Use Efficiency.

Water recycling, conservation, and water use efficiency are key tools to help California deal with several crises, including:

• A collapsing Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta ecosystem,
• A continuously growing population, and
• Effects of climate change on future water resources.

In addition, California has goals to reduce per capita water use by 20 percent conservation by 2020, and increase recycled water use by two million acre-feet per year by 2030.

Specific topics that will be discussed at the conference:

• SWRCB recycled water policy
• Effects of recycled water irrigation on groundwater
• Intrinsic tracer study for seawater intrusion barrier using recycled water
• Conservation and Water Use Efficiency
• Estimating rates and distribution of residential irrigation
• Regional conservation planning in the San Francisco Bay Area
• Conservation, energy, and air quality

Click here for the registration form.

Waste Exchange Programs

"One person's trash is another person's treasure."

Did you know that there are a multitude of alternatives to the disposal of materials or wastes, which help conserve energy, resources, and landfill space?

Service providers directly connect one-time or regular generators of traditional or even difficult-to-recycle materials with parties that can use those materials.  Instead of paying for hauling and disposal, the generator gets revenue and the recipient gets a resource they need, typically at a lower cost or even for free.  A handful of the many opportunities for direct recycling, reuse, and repurposing are listed below.

• The mission of Califorma Materials Exchange (CalMAX) is to build reuse markets for materials from businesses, organizations, industry, schools, and individuals, and to find markets for nonhazardous materials that may otherwise be discarded.  And, CalMAX is free.

• Pensylvania Material Trader is a free online service established in 2004 by the Pennsylvania Small Business Development Centers' Environmental Management Assistance Program. This service is intended to help businesses find users for materials they have traditionally discarded.

• NY WasteMatch is a free service, created and funded by the NYC Department of Sanitation, which facilitates the exchange of used and surplus goods and equipment from organizations that no longer need them to other entities that do.

• Acting as an information clearinghouse, directory, and marketing facilitator for reusable industrial materials, the Illinois Industrial Material Exchange Service (IMES) deals with waste by-products, off-spec items, hazardous and nonhazardous materials, overstock, and damaged or unwanted materials.

• The Industrial Materials Exchange (IMEX) matches up business industrial waste generators with waste users in the Pacific Northwest.

• RecycleMatch is an online market for transforming commercial waste into value.  RecycleMatch charges a percentage fee for each match that it makes based on the cost savings and revenue produced from each material match.

• Biomass Trader is a free network of regional marketplaces (currently Florida, New York, and Pennsylvania) for buyers and sellers, as well as givers and takers, of biomass and biomass-derived products.

• The British Columbia Electronics Materials Exchange (BC-EMEX) is a program from the Electronics Product Stewardship Association of B.C., Canada, that promotes the exchange (or sale) of electronic items priced from $0 to $99.

• For more directly useable materials (for example, unused construction materials), Freecycle might be worth checking out.  The Freecycle Network™ is a non-profit movement of people who are giving (& getting) stuff for free, made up of 4,873 groups with 6,877,000 members across the globe. Membership is free.

Rewards for Recycling

New York-based RecycleBank tracks how much you recycle, and awards points that you can redeem for rewards such as groceries. The result: RecycleBank has more than doubled recycling rates in every community that has deployed its program.

According to RecycleBank Co-Founder and CEO, Ron Gonen, "Our goal at RecycleBank is to progress societies' view of the product lifecycle from linear to cyclical. Since the discarding of product in a linear lifecycle destroys value, then the reuse and recycling of that product should create value."

As part of its contract with cities, RecycleBank gives every home a special container with a chip embedded in it. When a recycling truck picks up the container, the weight is electronically recorded and translates into RecycleBank points (1 lb of recycled materials = 2.5 RecycleBank Points). Participants can use the points at retailers such as Target.com and Whole Foods.

When cities and universities asked for a solution to help increase recycling among campuses and apartments (where a household-based curbside program wasn't possible), RecycleBank developed and now offers Kiosk recycling.

In Wilmington, Delaware, for example, RecycleBank has diverted 33 percent of the city's waste into recycling, saving it $1.5 million a year. RecycleBank gets a portion of the city's savings, and citizens get paid to recycle.  Phoenix, Arizona, is the newest city to partner with RecycleBank.  The first phase of the program begins with 110,000 households in southwest Phoenix, which is set to begin on November 30.