Image: Wikipedia

The amount of wastewater fracking whips up is pretty outrageous. And you might be drinking it. Typically, fracking makes headlines most for two reasons: For flooding the market with natural gas, and for possibly flooding our watershed with toxic chemicals in the process. There are other rumblings, of course; the allegedly fracking-induced earthquakes, the dramatic methane flaring, the Wild Westish boomtowns in North Dakota, and so forth.

But some of the largest and most significant impacts of hydraulic fracturing still get little attention. Like this one: The act of fracking generates an estimate 280 billion gallons of toxic waste water every year. That’s the top allegation of Environmental America’s latest report, Fracking by the Numbers. 

Here are some more fun facts from the report:

Some 82,000 wells have been drilled since 2005, and each run through about 2-9 million gallons of water. All told, fracking has allegedly sucked down 250 billion gallons of water since then. 

That water, which is mixed with sand and a still-mostly-secret and likely-already-toxic cocktail of chemicals, is blasted down deep into the earth to clear the way to the fossil fuels. Along the way, it mingles with bromide and radium, two even more toxic elements that render the water into dangerous waste when it returns to the surface as “flowback.” There is, according to the report, 280 billion gallons of the stuff whipped up every year. That’s enough to cover Washington DC in 22 feet of sludge, as The Guardian points out.

The report claims that “fracking operators have no safe, sustainable way of dealing with this toxic waste. The approaches that drilling companies have devised for dealing with wastewater can pollute waterways through several avenues.”

Basically, the giant waste pits that companies have built to store the toxic flowback can and have failed, discharge of the fluid into rivers can contaminate drinking water, and deep disposal wells, one of the most common destinations for frack waste, “can fail over time.”

Furthermore, the report claims that “fracking wastewater discharged at treatment plants can cause a different problem for drinking water: when bromide in the wastewater mixes with chlorine (often used at drinking water treatment plants), it produces trihalomethanes, chemicals that cause 
cancer and increase the risk of reproductive or developmental health problems.”

There are parallels with nuclear power here—disposing of the rapidly proliferating waste is soon going to turn into a major headache for frackers, and nobody’s going to want to deal with it. But until we streamline the disposal process, sick regulators on the issue, and make sure flowback is safely disposed of, the risk that we’ll all be drinking a little frackwater from time to time will persist.