"Spreading fracking wastewater on roads is banned. Oil and gas companies do it anyway."
"Siri Lawson and her husband live on a stamp of wooded, hilly land in Warren County, Pennsylvania, nestled in the state’s rural northwest corner. During the summer heat, cars traveling on the county’s dirt roads cast plumes of dust in their wake. Winter’s chill can cause a hazardous film of ice to spawn on paved roads. To protect motorists from both slippery ice and vision-impairing dust, communities across Pennsylvania coat these roads with large, cheap volumes of de-icing and dust-suppressing fluids. In Lawson’s case, her township had been using oil and gas wastewater as a dust suppressant, believing the material was effective.
But researchers have found it is no better at controlling dust than rainwater. It can also contain toxic chemicals and have radioactive concentrations several hundred times the acceptable federal limit in drinking water. Given the risks it poses to human health and the environment, Pennsylvania lawmakers and the state’s environmental agency disallowed this practice more than seven years ago.
But oil and gas companies have continued to spread their wastewater practically unchecked across the state, thanks to a loophole in state regulations. A Grist review of records from 2019 to 2023 found that oil and gas producers submitted more than 3,000 reports of wastewater dumping to the state Department of Environmental Protection, or DEP. In total, they reported spraying nearly 2.4 million gallons of wastewater on Pennsylvania roads. This number is likely a vast undercount: About 86 percent of Pennsylvania’s smaller oil and gas drillers did not report how they disposed of their waste in 2023."
Jake Bolster reports for Grist July 24, 2024.
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