NOTICE — Mil­lions of gal­lons of briny, toxic, waste­wa­ter from shale gas drill­ing and frack­ing op­er­a­tions could soon be loaded onto barges and pushed down the Al­le­gheny, Mo­non­ga­hela and Ohio riv­ers.

A loose net­work of river tank ter­mi­nal and barge com­pa­nies has floated plans to be­gin ship­ping waste­wa­ter con­tain­ing pe­tro­leum con­den­sates, can­cer-caus­ing chem­i­cals and ra­dio­ac­tive ma­terial, be­tween as many as seven river ter­mi­nal sites spread out over hun­dreds of miles of the re­gion’s ma­jor wa­ter­ways.

The barg­ing of waste­wa­ter on riv­ers has been dis­cussed for at least a dozen years, but like a tow on a sand­bar, the in­dus­try ini­tia­tive has been re­peat­edly side­lined due to per­mit­ting is­sues, en­vi­ron­men­tal con­cerns and the risk of con­tam­i­na­tion of pub­lic wa­ter sup­plies that draw from the riv­ers.

Although shale gas well drill­ing and frack­ing have been in a trough due to low nat­u­ral gas prices, in­ter­est in barg­ing waste­wa­ter has re­kin­dled in re­cent years as trans­port and dis­posal of the mixed liq­uid wastes have be­come cost­lier for the drill­ing in­dus­try.

In meet­ings, let­ters and emails with reg­u­la­tors, barge com­pa­nies and ter­mi­nal own­ers have pressed reg­u­la­tory agen­cies to is­sue au­tho­ri­za­tions, ap­prov­als and per­mits. And drill­ing in­dus­try pub­li­ca­tions are tout­ing the pub­lic safety and eco­nomic ben­e­fits of mov­ing waste­wa­ter by tanker barge.

Last month, in the first pub­li­cized ac­knowl­edge­ment that the idea of waste­wa­ter barg­ing is start­ing to move again, Belle Ver­non-based Gutt­man Realty Co. re­ceived a grant of al­most $500,000 from the Penn­syl­va­nia Depart­ment of Com­mu­nity and Eco­nomic Devel­op­ment’s Com­mon­wealth Financ­ing Au­thor­ity to ret­ro­fit the ex­ist­ing tank and barge load­ing ter­mi­nal along the Mo­non­ga­hela River in Speers, Wash­ing­ton County, 43.5 river miles above Pitts­burgh’s Point.

The changes would al­low the Speers ter­mi­nal to ac­cept tanker truck­loads of waste­wa­ter, also known by the shale gas in­dus­try term “pro­duced wa­ter,” ac­cord­ing to an April news re­lease tout­ing the grant from State Rep. Bud Cook, R-Belle Ver­non.

“The fa­cil­ity will be mod­i­fied,” the re­lease stated, “to ac­cept waste wa­ter from the nat­u­ral gas in­dus­try by truck to be stored in ex­ist­ing tanks and ul­ti­mately trans­ported by barge to the treat­ment fa­cil­ity in Ohio.” Using barges to trans­port waste­wa­ter also will re­duce truck traf­fic, die­sel ex­haust, truck-auto col­li­sions and road dam­age, the re­lease stated.

But mul­ti­ple en­vi­ron­men­tal or­ga­ni­za­tions from the tri-state area have strong con­cerns and many ques­tions about those plans, say­ing river waste­wa­ter trans­port is poorly reg­u­lated and in­creases risks of chem­i­cal and ra­dio­ac­tive spills, and those spills can con­tam­i­nate wa­ter­ways that are drink­ing wa­ter sources for mil­lions of peo­ple, and, in­creas­ingly, rec­re­ational ven­ues.

They say drill­ing and frack­ing waste­wa­ter con­tains salty brines, drill­ing and frack­ing chem­i­cals and nat­u­rally oc­cur­ring ra­dio­ac­tive ma­terial flushed from shale for­ma­tions thou­sands of feet un­der­ground. Ra­dium-226 and ra­dium-228, both found in brine waste, are known car­cin­o­gens and can cause bone, liver and breast can­cer in high con­cen­tra­tions, ac­cord­ing to the U.S. Centers for Dis­ease Con­trol and Preven­tion. The waste­wa­ter can also con­tain other ra­dio­ac­tive com­po­nents, in­clud­ing Po­tas­sium 40, Tho­rium 232, and Ura­nium 238.

“Our Three Rivers are go­ing to be­come the grand speed­way of frack­ing waste,” said Gil­lian Graber, ex­ec­u­tive di­rec­tor of Pro­tect PT, a lo­cal Penn­syl­va­nia en­vi­ron­men­tal or­ga­ni­za­tion. “All three of our ma­jor wa­ter­ways could be im­pacted by a spill or re­lease of flu­ids. Spills are scary, but the build-up of small re­leases is also a ma­jor con­cern.”

Sarah Mar­tik, cam­paign di­rec­tor at the Center for Coal­field Justice, said in an email state­ment that barges are un­re­li­able and the frack­ing waste­wa­ter is “ex­tremely haz­ard­ous. It is ir­re­spon­si­ble to turn the Mon Val­ley into a fun­nel for re­gional frack­ing waste, just as it’s ir­re­spon­si­ble to barge the waste down the river,” Ms. Mar­tik said. “How many tons of coal are sit­ting at the bot­tom of the river from barges that have sunk in the past?”

The Mo­non­ga­hela River alone serves as the main source of wa­ter sup­ply for some 850,000 res­i­dents in the Pitts­burgh met­ro­pol­i­tan re­gion. And most of the drink­ing wa­ter for the city of Pitts­burgh comes from the Al­le­gheny River.

Other sites part of overall plan

In ad­di­tion to the ter­mi­nal at Speers, four other barge load­ing sites were iden­ti­fied in doc­u­ments pro­vided by the U.S. Coast Guard in re­sponse to a Free­dom of In­for­ma­tion Act re­quest by the Fresh Water Ac­count­abil­ity Proj­ect, an Ohio en­vi­ron­men­tal or­ga­ni­za­tion that fo­cuses on wa­ter pro­tec­tion and shared them with the Pitts­burgh Post-Ga­zette.

Those load­ing ter­mi­nals in­clude an­other on the Mo­non­ga­hela River at Star City, near Mor­gan­town, W.Va., 98.7 miles up­river from Pitts­burgh; and two on the Ohio River, at Bel­laire and Han­ni­bal, Ohio, 93.5 miles and 123.1 miles down­river from Pitts­burgh.

A fifth waste­wa­ter load­ing fa­cil­ity op­tion is iden­ti­fied as the Nicho­las En­ter­prises Inc. ter­mi­nal in Free­port, Arm­strong County, 29.6 miles up the Al­le­gheny River from Pitts­burgh, and 20 miles from the Pitts­burgh Water and Sewer Au­thor­ity’s wa­ter in­take pipes at Aspin­wall.

Ac­cord­ing to a No­vem­ber 2019 U.S. Coast Guard cargo au­tho­ri­za­tion form, the plan at the time was to barge waste­wa­ter to un­load­ing ter­mi­nals owned by En­link Mid­stream at Bells Run near Port­land, Ohio, and DeepRock Dis­posal So­lu­tions, LLC, in Ma­ri­etta, Ohio, lo­cated 160 and 173 river miles, re­spec­tively, from Pitts­burgh.

Hous­ton-head­quar­tered DeepRock, a busi­ness part­ner with Comtech In­dus­tries, owner of the Bel­laire ter­mi­nal, op­er­ates 12 deep dis­posal wells at five sites near the un­load­ing ter­mi­nals in Ohio and can ac­cept up to 50,000 bar­rels or 2.1 mil­lion gal­lons of waste­wa­ter a day.

A Dec. 22 ar­ti­cle on Comtech’s web­page states that DeepRock had re­ceived more than 30 per­mits and au­tho­ri­za­tions, is in “con­ver­sa­tion” with river ter­mi­nals on all three riv­ers, and is ex­pected to be­gin re­ceiv­ing waste­wa­ter and un­load­ing barges at its Ma­ri­etta ter­mi­nal dur­ing the first quar­ter of this year. A day later, a head­line in Mar­cel­lus Drilling News, an in­dus­try web­site, stated, “Barg­ing Fracked Waste­wa­ter on Ohio River Ap­proved! Starts in 1Q21,” re­fer­ring to the first quar­ter of 2021.

But barg­ing waste­wa­ter has not started yet, and Dean Grose, chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer at Comtech, did not re­spond to re­quests for in­for­ma­tion about how that time­line has changed, what has caused the de­lay, or Comtech’s or DeepRock’s cur­rent plans for waste­wa­ter barg­ing.

Tay­lor Gren­ert, Comtech mar­ket­ing co­or­di­na­tor, cited non­spe­cific per­mit­ting is­sues when asked about the de­lay, but added that ter­mi­nal fa­cil­i­ties are “ready to go.”

One pos­si­ble snag may be due to the Penn­syl­va­nia Depart­ment of En­vi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion, which has had spo­radic in­ter­ac­tions with Gutt­man Realty, part of the mul­ti­bil­lion-dol­lar Gutt­man Group, dat­ing back more than a de­cade about us­ing its river ter­mi­nals to ship waste­wa­ter.

Most re­cently, on a June 2020 con­fer­ence call with reg­u­la­tors from the DEP’s South­west Re­gion of­fice, Gutt­man rep­re­sen­ta­tives raised the pos­si­bil­ity of us­ing the Speers bulk liq­uid stor­age ter­mi­nal to re­ceive, store, pro­cess, and trans­fer nat­u­ral gas pro­duced wa­ter to barges for out-of-state dis­posal.

But Lau­ren Fai­ley, a DEP spokes­woman, said in an email re­sponse to ques­tions that the com­pany hasn’t ap­plied for a re­sid­ual waste trans­fer fa­cil­ity per­mit, which would be re­quired for such a fa­cil­ity. She also said the DEP doesn’t reg­u­late what is trans­ported on the riv­ers.

James Lee, a spokes­man for the Ohio En­vi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency, said the state doesn’t re­quire a per­mit to trans­fer re­sid­ual waste like Penn­syl­va­nia. “While the fa­cil­ity may have ex­ist­ing per­mits or need ad­di­tional per­mits from DEP for var­i­ous ac­tiv­i­ties, the act of ship­ping waste­wa­ter by barge from un­con­ven­tional gas de­vel­op­ment in and of it­self is not some­thing that re­quires a DEP per­mit,” Ms. Fra­ley said.

Another snag is that Gutt­man, which didn’t re­spond to many in­ter­view re­quests dur­ing the past two weeks, sold its ter­mi­nals in Star City and Belle Ver­non, both on the Mo­non­ga­hela, to Ze­nith Energy Ter­mi­nals PA Hold­ings LLC in Jan­u­ary.

A wa­ter ob­struc­tion and en­croach­ment per­mit was trans­ferred to Ze­nith in April 2021. New per­mits would be re­quired if Ze­nith chooses to mod­ify the ter­mi­nal fa­cil­i­ties, Ms. Fra­ley said, but DEP has not had dis­cus­sions or re­ceived any ap­pli­ca­tion.

Jay Rey­nolds, Ze­nith’s chief com­mer­cial of­fi­cer, said none of the com­pany’s ter­mi­nals han­dle drill­ing waste­wa­ter, there are no plans to do so and it’s “not a busi­ness we are pur­su­ing.”

Ca­sey Smith, a spokes­woman for the state Penn­syl­va­nia Depart­ment of Com­mu­nity and Eco­nomic Devel­op­ment, said the de­part­ment was told by Gutt­man that it would take six to eight months to get the DEP re­sid­ual waste trans­fer per­mit, and must have all per­mit ap­prov­als be­fore funds are dis­bursed.

“Should the com­pany fail to ob­tain a per­mit from the DEP, they would be un­able to draw down any funds and the grant would be liq­ui­dated,” Ms. Smith said.