Recycling fracking water is not without risks

So you heard your natural-gas driller was recycling its wastewater. Sounds like a great idea. One company is so giddy at the thought, in fact, it's ignoring common sense and the laws of physics:

“Water recycling is a win-win,” one drilling company, Range Resources, says on its Web site. “It reduces fresh water demand and eliminates the need to dispose of the water.”

No, eventually the water does need to be disposed of by someone, somewhere. Perhaps Range Resources' Webmeister should check with one or two of the company's engineers before making stupid proclamations like that.

Still, reusing the wastewater can only help reduce the operation's impact on the environment, right?

But drilling experts say that virtually all forms of recycling still result in liquid waste that can be more toxic than it was after the first use.

“The wastewater that comes up from the well will likely increase to some degree in many contaminants such as salts and possibly radium and other radionuclides with each new fracking, but the data is very limited on this issue so not much is known,” said Radisav Vidic, an environmental engineering professor and drilling expert at the University of Pittsburgh. “There needs to be more data on this.”

As Homer Simpson would say, "D'oh!"

Unfortunately the natural gas drillers have been extraordinarily successful at keeping government regulations and monitoring off their back.

In late 2009, for example, officials from an industry trade group, the Pennsylvania Oil and Gas Association, wrote to regulators to confirm that drilling waste, regardless of how it was handled, would remain exempt from the federal law governing hazardous materials. The association said it was asking in case companies sought to distill the waste into salts for de-icing roads.

... [F]ederal regulators informed the industry that their exemption remained intact, a decision that association officials quickly passed on to their members. State regulators declined to comment on the exchange because it concerns a federal, not state, exemption. Federal officials said the salts were regulated by the states.

Drilling waste being exempted from hazardous-waste legislation ... that's crazy enough. Then we have the risible image of state and federal regulators pointing at one another in a game of hot-potato. No, wait, "risible" is not the right word: there is nothing in the least funny about this situation. We're back to "crazy."

UPDATE: What happens to the fracking water when the driller finally wants to dispose of it? I wrote an entry about that. The bottom line: nobody is interested in regulating disposal, either.