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Ohio Research Confirms Health, Environmental Hazards In Conventional Oil & Gas Drilling Wastewater Dumped On Roads, Just Like In PA

The Buckeye Environmental Network and Ohio Brine Task Force held a webinar on Hidden Dangers Of Oil and Gas Wastewater on March 28 that outlined research done in that state on the health and environmental hazards of conventional and unconventional oil and gas drilling wastewater.

The presentations on health and environmental hazards confirmed research done over the last several years by Penn State University and others on the hazards related to conventional oil and gas wastewater in Pennsylvania.

Ohio Oil/Gas Wastewater Research

Dr. Julie Weatherington-Rice, a certified Professional Geologist and Soil Scientist, said research confirmed as early as the 1980s the oil and gas wastewater spread on roads in Ohio contained harmful chemicals like benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene.

In the 1990s, research found heavy metals like arsenic and lead in oil and gas wastewater spread on roads.

In 2017, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources tried to ban road spreading of oil and gas wastewater based on concerns about levels of radioactivity found by the agency, but was blocked by the Ohio legislature.

In 2019, more research found PFAS and PFOA ‘forever chemicals’ in the drilling wastewater.

“Now, oil and gas is a byproduct. For every barrel of oil you get, you get seven to 10 barrels of production brine, so we have to figure out what to do with this stuff,” said Dr. Weatherington-Rice. “And what we started doing about a hundred years ago is we started putting it on the roads.”

“In the 1990s, Mel Palmer, who was an ag engineer at OSU [Ohio State University] and also the extension person to the Ohio Department of Health for water and wastewater, lived on a county road, a township road, in Licking County, a little gravel road, and he and his neighbor came down with a rare form of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma that they were able to ascertain was caused by an environmental contaminant.

“Mel's son-in-law was working for the James Cancer Hospital here in Columbus at OSU, and they were able to figure out that it was possibly a heavy metals trigger.

“So, Mel being the consummate engineer and scientist and health person that he was, proceeded to test everything to see if he could find out where the metals were that he had been exposed to.

“He tested his well, he tested the street, he tested his garden. He tested everywhere.

“Where he found it was in the dust next to his gravel road that had been sprayed with brine for years for dust control and ice control.

“And he and his neighbor were the two people that were out mowing their lawns on their tractors, getting covered with dust, and so they had been inhaling this and being exposed.

“He died before he was able to publish, but he made sure that everybody that was involved with oil and gas at that point knew about it so that we knew that we had to keep pushing to stop the spreading.”

“So, once we spread it, where does it go? Well, it comes off and it goes into the water, and it can go into the surface water or it can go into groundwater, or it can go into the soils and leach onto the clay minerals.

“And once it's in the soils and the dust at the side of the road, it then either leeches on into water or it stays attached to the clay minerals and it becomes dust.

“So, that's basically how we learned it was radioactive, how we learned it was hazardous, how we learned it was toxic and what happens with it,” said Dr. Weatherington-Rice.

How Radioactive Radium Is Spread

Former Fire Battalion Chief Silverio Caggiano gave a presentation on how the health and environmental impacts of oil and gas wastewater are spread throughout communities and into homes, in particular, contamination from radioactive radium.

“The danger we have is that with the spreading of this radioactive contaminated brine, it has radium-226, radium-228.

“You have the ability to inhale this stuff, and a lot of these people that are spreading it don't know what it is, and they're actually ingesting it because they're not wearing proper PPE [Personal Protection Equipment].

“I guarantee you, the gentleman who is on that truck spreading the brine does not have the proper PPE to do the job. So there is the exposure to the people that put it in there.”

“So when we started doing this, because it's an oil and gas product, it's not required to have a safety data sheet that you see there.

“Now, safety data sheets, to those of us in the hazmat world, are the end all, be all. That tells us what you've got, how much of it you've got, what the dangers are, and we can research this and we can pretty much come up with a way of taking care of the problem.

“Because it's an oil and gas waste, nobody's required to carry these safety data sheets. They're not even required to tell you.

“And in fact, AquaSalina [a deicer made from oil and gas wastewater] was being sold out of Lowe's until Lowe's found out how radioactive and hot it is, and they removed it from their shelves.”

[In a later Q/A session, one participant said West Virginia adopted a law requiring the disclosure of all chemicals on drilling wastewater that was intended for road spreading. They said the oil and gas industry there no longer makes its wastewater available for spreading once its chemical contents were known.]

“So it's a double hazard. Not only are you dealing with the radiums, the 226s, 228s, not only are you dealing with the potential of ingestion and inhalation of this stuff, but you're also dealing with the fact that this is coming home to you.

“Just try to picture, if you will, a person who bought a gallon of this stuff and spread it on his sidewalk and his road, driveway, and then took his pooch out and did his business, and it tracked around and then jumped on the kids when it came in and licked its paws and ingested some of the stuff off of it, and you kind of get a picture of how this starts to radiate out and it starts to get into your life.

“And where the dog walks, the kids play on the carpet and they're ingesting it. Kids put everything in their mouth. You can see where the danger of this product being allowed to exist comes in.

“The other thing is, as we're driving through the streets, the salt's getting on your cars. It's getting on the fire trucks. You come back to the station, one of the first things we always did when we got back from a fire was we cleaned the trucks.

“So now it's in the water, it's sitting on the apparatus floor that you got to squeegee down.

“Or you take your car to, let's say a car wash during the winter. Got to get the salt off. It's too cold in your garage. What most people don't understand is most car washes recycle their own water.”

“So if somebody happened to have driven through a pool of this radiated de-icing stuff, you necessarily didn't have to have driven through this, it's now on your car.

“And as you walk by and you brush your car or you brush the salt that's on the car that may have come from the brine, you again carry it into your home, and, oh, you got the white spot on your pants, so you throw your pants in the washing machine, and you throw the kids' pants in and your wife's pants in and you wash all these pants.

“You're basically spreading this radium all over the place.

“And radium, as I said, attaches to the bones, but it's also bioaccumulative. So a little bit over a long period of time, once it gets in your body, it doesn't go anywhere. It stays there and attaches itself to the bones, your bones.

“So it's not like getting a sunburn. It can go away and you don't sit out in the sun. Once it's in there, it's in there forever. It's not going anywhere.

“And the more you go through it, the more bioaccumulative it is. And that's important too, because those people that are spreading it, again, you're not wearing proper PPE, they don't have probably any idea what it is.

“And the head space that you see there at the top of the yellow tanks, when they open those, or the blue tanks, when they open those up, they're getting a good whiff of radon, which itself is cancerous. It's a cancer-causing gas.

“So somebody somewhere who thought this was a great idea did not think this all through because this is potentially a huge problem, and you don't even have to be around where the problems are to be exposed to it.

“You could get it from washing your car at a car wash. You can get it through driving through the road.

“If you happen to have your window open because it's a semi nice sunny day and you get the mist up into your car or you get the mist into the filters of your car, you could be exposing yourself and your family for an extended period of time. So the dangers of it outweigh the benefits,” said former Fire Chief Caggiano.

Click Here to watch the March 28 webinar.

Penn State Research

Research done in Pennsylvania over the last several years by Penn State University and others found significant hazards in conventional oil and gas wastewater.

A study released in May 2022 by Penn State University found conventional drilling wastewater spread on roads in Pennsylvania contains concentrations of barium, strontium, lithium, iron, manganese that exceed human-health based criteria and levels of radioactive radium that exceed industrial discharge standards. Read more here.

In fact, 25 out of the 31 chemicals and pollutants found in the wastewater exceeded, and in many instances far exceeded, established health or environmental standards, including radioactive radium. Read more here.

[Note: Penn State did not test for PFAS and PFOA ‘forever chemicals” like researchers in Ohio, although other researchers have found PFAS have been used at natural gas drilling sites in Pennsylvania. Read more here.]

The same Penn State study also found conventional oil and gas wastewater was no more effective than water in suppressing dust on roads. Read more here.

In 2021, conventional oil and gas operators reported disposing of 977,671 gallons of their wastewater by road dumping. Read more here.

Operators reported road dumping a total of 3,259,405 gallons of their wastewater from 2018 through 2021.

However, DEP and the public don't really know how much liquid and solid waste 61,655 conventional oil and gas wells generated in 2022 (over 57 percent) and where it was disposed, treated or recycled. Read more here.

Major public landowners like the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources and the Allegheny National Forest and experts like the Penn State Center for Dirt and Gravel Road Studies all have policies opposing the disposal of this harmful waste on roads or believe other, safer alternatives exist.

PA DEP banned the road spreading of unconventional shale gas wastewater in regulations adopted in 2016.

DEP reiterated again on March 22 that road spreading of conventional oil and gas wastewater is illegal because it does not meet state Residual Waste regulations, but a co-product determination process could allow it. Read more here.

However, reports from oil and gas areas say road spreading is continuing unabated.

In 2022, it was reported by conventional oil and gas industry representatives the PA Office of Attorney General was investigating its road spreading practices. Read more here.

[Note: There’s no question solid and liquid waste from oil and gas operations is radioactive. In 2021, for example, the unconventional shale gas industry sent nearly 236,000 cubic feet of their waste that was radioactive to low-level radioactive waste facilities for disposal, according to DEP. Read more here.]

DEP Draft Regulations

PA DEP will shortly be releasing a draft update to its conventional oil and gas regulations dealing with waste disposal, treatment and recycling, however, a previous draft did not include any provision for banning the practice of road spreading conventional wastewater despite the findings of the most recent Penn State study.

The draft of the regulations are expected to go to the PA Grade Crude Development Advisory Council, an industry-dominated advisory committee, in the near future for review.

Related Articles - Road Dumping Impacts:

-- New Penn State Study Finds Runoff From Conventional Oil & Gas Wastewater Dumped On Unpaved Roads Contains Pollutants That Exceed Human-Health, Environmental Standards [PaEN]

-- Preliminary Results From New Penn State Study Find Increased Cancer, Health Risks From Road Dumping Conventional Drilling Wastewater, Especially For Children [PaEN]

-- New Pitt-Duquesne Study Shows Higher Exposures To Radiation In Road Dumping Of Drilling Wastewater When Appropriate Exposure Scenarios Are Used [PaEN]

-- New Penn State Study Shows Road Dumping Oil & Gas Drilling Wastewater Has Little Dust Suppression Benefit, Contains Pollutants Harmful To Human Health, Agriculture, Aquatic Life [PaEN]

-- DEP: Potential For Environmental Impacts From Spills Or Leaks Of Radioactive Oil & Gas Waste Materials Is Real; Health Dept. Not Aware Of All Chemicals In Oil & Gas Wastewater Making Risk Assessment Difficult [PaEN]

-- Penn State Study Recommends Only Using Nontoxic Products Or Highly Treated Drilling Wastewater To Remove Radium, Oil, Metals Before Road Spreading [PaEN]

-- Penn State: Potential Health Impacts Of Oil and Gas Wastewater On Roads [PaEN]

-- Penn State Study: Using Oil & Gas Well Brine As Dust Suppressant Less Than Ideal [PaEN]

-- A First-Hand Account Of How Repeated, Unlimited Road Dumping Of Oil & Gas Drilling Wastewater Is Tearing Apart Dirt Roads And Creating Multiple Environmental Hazards [PaEN]

-- The Science Says: Spreading Conventional Drilling Wastewater On Dirt & Gravel Roads Can Harm Aquatic Life, Poses Health Risks To Humans - And It Damages The Roads [PaEN]

-- Penn State Center For Dirt & Gravel Road Studies: Road Dumping Of Oil & Gas Wastewater To Control Dust Is Environmentally Unsound Practice [PaEN]