After quakes, Ohio plans tough gas-drilling rules

JULIE CARR SMYTH

Asso­ci­ated Press

COLUMBUS — A dozen earth­quakes in north­east­ern Ohio were almost cer­tainly induced by injec­tion of gas-drilling waste­water into the earth, state reg­u­la­tors said Fri­day as they announced a series of tough new rules for drillers.

Among the new reg­u­la­tions: Well oper­a­tors must sub­mit more com­pre­hen­sive geo­log­i­cal data when request­ing a drill site, and the chem­i­cal makeup of all drilling waste­water must be tracked electronically.

Both could mean extra costs for gas drillers look­ing for new wells and ways to get rid of waste­water — much of which is trucked into Ohio from Penn­syl­va­nia, the region’s top gas-producing state.

The state Depart­ment of Nat­ural Resources announced the tough new brine injec­tion reg­u­la­tions because of the report’s find­ings on the well in Youngstown, which it said were based on “a num­ber of coin­ci­den­tal circumstances.”

For one, inves­ti­ga­tors said, the well began oper­a­tions just three months ahead of the first quake.

They also noted that the seis­mic activ­ity, which began in March 2011 and ended at the end of the year, was clus­tered around the well bore, and reported that a fault has since been iden­ti­fied in the rock layer where water was being injected.

“Our evi­dence strongly sug­gests that the injec­tion fluid lubri­cated a pre­vi­ously unmapped fault and con­tributed to seis­mic activ­ity,” said Nat­ural Resources spokesman Carlo LoParo. “It was an unfor­tu­nate sit­u­a­tion, and the oper­a­tor drilled the well to spec­i­fi­ca­tions and oper­ated within all per­mit­ted levels.”

The report said: “Geol­o­gists believe it is very dif­fi­cult for all con­di­tions to be met to induce seis­mic events. In fact, all the evi­dence indi­cates that prop­erly located … injec­tion wells will not cause earthquakes.”

The Youngstown well’s oper­a­tor, D&L Energy Inc., noted as much Fri­day in a state­ment react­ing to the state report and the new reg­u­la­tions. D&L pointed out that the state did not actu­ally test the well dur­ing its inves­ti­ga­tion, rely­ing instead of geo­logic and seis­mic data.

D&L said there is “no rea­son to rush and accept bad or incom­plete sci­ence” until the company’s own stud­ies, com­mis­sioned from two sep­a­rate con­sul­tants, can be reviewed. The com­pany also noted the well is no longer tak­ing waste­water because a self-imposed mora­to­rium that Gov. John Kasich extended to 5 miles around it.

North­east­ern Ohio and large parts of adja­cent states sit atop the Utica and Mar­cel­lus Shale geo­log­i­cal for­ma­tions, which con­tain vast reserves of nat­ural gas that energy com­pa­nies are rush­ing to drill using a process known as hydraulic frac­tur­ing, or fracking.

That process involves free­ing the gas by inject­ing huge amounts of chemical-laced water into the earth at high pres­sure, but the water that comes back up needs to be dis­posed of.

Munic­i­pal water treat­ment plants aren’t designed to remove some of the con­t­a­m­i­nants found in the waste­water, includ­ing radioac­tive ele­ments. Deep injec­tion is con­sid­ered one of the safest meth­ods for dis­posal, though earth­quakes — most very small but some, like in Youngstown, large enough to be felt — have been linked to such methods.

Penn­syl­va­nia and other drilling states could see nearly imme­di­ate impacts from the Ohio rules.

Penn­syl­va­nia has lim­ited the deep injec­tion of waste­water because its geol­ogy pre­cludes it. Six of its deep injec­tion wells accept frack­ing fluid. Ohio has 177 such wells.

Drillers in Penn­syl­va­nia sent almost 1.5 mil­lion bar­rels of waste to injec­tion wells in Ohio dur­ing the sec­ond half of 2011, said Kevin Sun­day, a spokesman for the Penn­syl­va­nia Depart­ment of Envi­ron­men­tal Protection.

But with Ohio now plan­ning to require elec­tronic mon­i­tor­ing of waste­water, and that tech­nol­ogy not widely avail­able yet, Penn­syl­va­nia and other states seek­ing to send waste­water to Ohio may need a Plan B in the interim.

Among the new reg­u­la­tions in Ohio:

• Future injec­tion into Pre­cam­brian rock will be banned, and exist­ing wells pen­e­trat­ing the for­ma­tion will be plugged.

• State-of-the-art pres­sure and vol­ume mon­i­tor­ing will be required, includ­ing auto­matic shut-off systems.

• Elec­tronic track­ing sys­tems will be required that iden­tify the makeup of all drilling waste­water flu­ids enter­ing the state.

The state’s report val­i­dates con­cerns among envi­ron­men­tal­ists that Ohio is mov­ing too fast, said Jed Thorp, man­ager of the Ohio chap­ter of the Sierra Club.

“This proves that we need to have data and research and reg­u­la­tions in place before these activ­i­ties begin. The prob­lem here is that they let every­body go over there and start punch­ing holes in the ground before there was data and ade­quate research,” he said. “So now we’re in a posi­tion of hav­ing to cre­ate reg­u­la­tions after the fact. That’s really a back­ward way to do it.”

The Sierra Club, the Ohio Envi­ron­men­tal Coun­cil and other mem­bers of a coali­tion watch­ing the boon in oil and gas drilling activ­ity planned to send a let­ter to the state Fri­day ask­ing for a pub­lic forum on the report, Thorp said.

The U.S. Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency gave Ohio reg­u­la­tory author­ity over its deep well injec­tion pro­gram in 1983, deem­ing that its state reg­u­la­tions met or exceeded fed­eral stan­dards. The new reg­u­la­tions would be added to those exist­ing rules.

Posted by AP News on Mar 10 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.