Fracture Waste

In West Virginia, under the current General Permit, wastes from fracturing a well can be land applied. This waste comes in two forms — unused fracturing chemicals dumped into the pit and fracture flowback discharged from the well into the pit.

According to the General Permit unused fracture chemicals cannot be dumped into a pit but it’s hard to tell if the operators’ crews know this. The state’s Discharge Monitoring Report (DMR) shows the decision tree for determining under which pit category pit waste falls and indicates that chemicals and flowback can be in a pit:

Only category 1 pits do not have fracture flowback or chemicals. Of the small number of DMRs we’ve examined, all have been for category 2 or 4 pits.

The EPA’s exemption of oil and gas wastes does allow the land application of drill waste, flowback, and even chemicals, but the exemption does not allow the addition of unused chemicals to production waste that is covered by the exemption (drill waste and flowback) if the chemicals exhibit certain hazardous characteristics and if the pit waste then assumes those characteristics. These hazardous characteristics are reactivity, corrosivity, ignitability and toxicity. Or, if the chemicals are listed in 40CFR261, subpart D, then the waste is no longer exempt.

Almost nothing is known about the chemicals used for fracturing in West Virginia. The Office of Oil and Gas website publishes an incomplete list of chemicals. The list is incomplete in that it does not show all the chemicals used in a typical fracture job (the biocide is missing, for instance), nor does it show the proprietary chemicals which manufacturers won’t disclose. For the Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDSs) I’ve seen, these proprietary, unnamed chemicals, can form 10% to 60% of a product.

Proprietary chemicals may be innocuous or they may be toxic. They may be those listed in 40CFR261, which makes disposal costly because the waste is no longer exempt.

These unknown proprietary chemicals must be assumed to fall in a worst case scenario — are hazardous in one way (by their characteristic) or another (are listed).

The Office of Oil and Gas has allowed this waste to be land applied without knowing what makes up this waste — the products or chemicals used. But even if the Office had full disclosure from the operators, it would not be getting full disclosure from the manufacturers.

It’s our belief that fracture flowback should not be land applied and that fracture chemicals should not be dumped into drill waste pits. Unused fracture chemicals should be disposed of otherwise and properly.

The MSDS evidence is, as I mentioned above, sparse. Three products known to have been used in West Virginia create particular concern. These Halliburton products (though Halliburton is not the only company making fracturing and drilling products) are: BC-140 (a cross linker); BE-3S Bactericide; and SP Breaker (a post-fracture gel breaker). Clicking on the product names will produce the applicable MSDS Adobe Acrobat document. We have a page on our website that explains the purpose of some of these chemicals.

These products weren’t used in exceptionally large quantities. Their hazards are noted on the MSDS sheets (sections 2, 3, 5, 7, 10, 11, 12 and 15) and include ecological, human health, storage and regulatory issues. Only the SP Breaker exhibits a hazardous characteristic (two in the MSDS version when the product was used — ignitability and reactivity). Waste should, if exposed to this product, according to the EPA exemption, be tested to determine if it is still exempt.

A quick addendum: The Office of Oil and Gas has just decided that fracture flowback from Marcellus wells cannot be land applied.

August 17, 2010