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Friday 26 December 2014

A Cautionary Tale

In 2007 the Nova Scotia government leased land in the Kennetcook, Hants County area to Triangle Petroleum of Denver to drill five exploratory shale gas wells.  Of these five wells, three were eventually fracked for exploration rather than production purposes.  

Ten million liters of fracking wastewater was produced from these initial test wells and is contained in two ponds in Kennetcook, left behind by Triangle and their associates.  

Accurate figures on the exact number of liters of remaining wastewater are hard to come by;  freezing and thawing alters levels in the ponds, dilution of the effluent causes spillage, illegal dumping is suspected and approximately seven million liters of supposedly treated wastewater was dumped into the sewage treatment facility in Windsor, N.S.
  
To complicate matters further, N.S. has ten million liters of wastewater in holding ponds in Debert that was accepted from Corridor Resources in N.B.  Nova Scotia has since passed legislation that prohibits all municipalities from accepting fracking waste from N.B.  

At present Atlantic Industrial Services (AIS) in Debert N.S. is actively seeking willing towns and cities, in either province, that will take and dispose of any or all of the remaining 30 million liters of flowback still sitting in open holding ponds in Debert and Kennetcook.  

Aside from the toxic chemicals found in the original fracking fluid, produced water contains heavy metals, volatile organiccompounds (VOC's) and radioactive materials.

Barbara Harris, author of "Out of Control:  Nova Scotia's Experience with Fracking for Natural Gas" explains:  "Fracking waste water is not normal sewage, nor is it highly salty wastewater, sewage treatment plants  such as the Windsor plant are not set up to remove either the chemicals, heavy metals or radioactive materials commonly found in fracking wastewater.  After treatment at the Windsor treatment facility water flows into Le Breau Creek which empties into the the Avon River and then into the Minas Basin."

All of this occurred because three exploratory wells were hastily drilled by a company that didn't have the technological expertise to maintain some level of control over events that caused serious environmental harm.  The government displayed a lack of regulatory oversight over an industry that was too pervasive to care about the health and safety of local residents. 

The same can be said for the industry's handling of wastewater anywhere in North America.  There are few, if any, active treatment plants with a technology specializing in the decontamination of produced  water.  And it certainly would not be feasible to truck
hundreds of millions of liters of fracking wastes throughout the U.S. and Canada to dispose of this highly toxic substance.

What industry has chosen to do in many U.S states, to avoid the expense and "nuisance" of water treatment, is to inject the  contaminated water back into the earth using older non-productive wells.  Evidence indicates, however, that wells used to bury 
wastewater threaten aquifers and increases the possibility of seismic activity.

In 2012 Exxon Mobil commented on water treatment as follows:  "More precise experiments and analyses are needed for a reliable evaluation.  The same is true of the treatment of radioactive polluted reservoir water.  We currently regard the treatment of waste water as possible, but not viable for economic reasons.  Hence the preference for deep well injection."*  With regard to this issue, nothing has changed since 2012.

The only interpretation we can take from all this, is that the industry that has been fracking for the last fifteen years, is allowed by governments in heavily fracked areas, to continue this practice without the knowledge or the means to effectively treat the hazardous waste they produce.

So, what might happen if N.B. establishes a fully fledged shale gas industry in the province?  If we were to see 50, 100 or 500 wells drilled over time, where would the hundreds of thousands of liters of produced wastewater go?

No one from government has so much as mentioned how such toxic waste would be disposed of.  There is no way to treat it and no place to put it.  When TAAHF asked MLA Bernie Le Blanc who would be responsible for flowback, he told us that it would not be
government's responsibility, industry would decide how to dispose of its own fracking wastes.  

If that is the case then industry would have an insurmountable problem to solve, because to date no cities, towns or counties in the Maritimes have been willing to entertain the possibility of accepting this waste.  More often than we know this type of scenario leads to the illegal dumping of poisonous effluents into lakes and rivers, out of sight and with no one the wiser.  

More and more the issue of rejecting shale gas development has a strong municipal connection.  Any residents in N.B. who have concerns about these issues  should check with their local government and see where they stand.                                                                                   
Shale gas, even on its own terms, is not even remotely sustainable, but when you add to that issues of climate change, air and water pollution, overuse of the finite resource of freshwater, danger to human health, infrastructure damage due to trucking and the conundrum of wastewater disposal, then we as citizens need to resolve that we will not allow the shale gas industry access to our cities, towns and rural communities.

* Rosenwinkel, Karl Heinz,  State of the Art and Progressive Approaches to Flowback Disposal, 2012.

Donna Mclellan for the Tantramar Alliance Against Hydro-Fracking

18 December 2014

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