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Environmentalists Are Furious with the Coast Guard's New Plan for Fracking Waste

"Let's just float it down the river," says the Coast Guard.
The regular procession of barges up and down the Mississippi River may soon have new cargo: fracking wastewater. Via USDA/Flickr

As America’s hydraulic fracturing boom continues unabated, the catalog of environmental gripes about fracking has mounted with each methane flare and toxic waste spill. Now environmental groups have another beef to add to the list, courtesy of the US Coast Guard. The maritime law enforcement agency wants to allow barges to transport fracking wastewater to disposal sites via US waterways, a proposal that the industry claims is cheaper and safer than shipping via truck.

Unsurprisingly, anti-fracking activists are horrified by the idea, arguing that an accident could spill thousands of gallons of toxic fracking by-products directly into the water supply.

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“This is just the latest outrage from fracking companies,” Courtney Abrams, a spokesperson for Environment America, said in a statement. “Think about it: Filling barges with thousands of barrels of toxic wastewater and sending them down a river that provides the drinking water for millions of people? You can see why people are concerned.”

The disagreement underscores a major flashpoint in the feud over shale gas drilling: How to dispose of the billions of gallons of chemical-laden wastewater produced by hydraulic fracturing. During fracking, millions of gallons of water are mixed with sand and chemicals and then blasted deep into the earth to release pockets of natural gas and other fossil fuels. Along the way, it picks up other toxic elements, including bromide and radium, and returns to the surface as “flowback.” All told, hydraulic fracturing wells produce an estimated 280 billion gallons of wastewater each year, according to a recent report from Environment America. And all that waste has to go somewhere.

In most places, wastewater is pumped back into the ground into waste and injection wells. But in Pennsylvania, which sits atop the productive Marcellus Shale, the underground geology makes injection wells as less feasible means of disposal, which means the waste must be transported elsewhere. The Coast Guard’s proposal aims to solve this problem by allowing shipping companies to move waste from the Marcellus region to disposal sites and storage centers in Ohio, Texas and Louisiana, primarily transporting the toxic cargo along the Monongahela, Ohio, and Mississippi rivers.

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According to the Coast Guard report, there are a few major advantages to shipping fracking waste via barge. One barge can carry equivalent amount of waste as 100 trucks, thus offering drilling companies a cheaper, and theoretically, more environmentally-friendly alternative for transporting dangerous fracking by-products, while also relieving stress on local land infrastructure.

Barge transport is also comparatively safe, averaging about a third fewer spills than truck transportation, according to a US Department of Transportation report. And shipping industry groups point out that toxic materials, including radioactive waste and by-products from oil drilling, are already moved by barge. "We expect that shale gas wastewater can be transported just as safely," Jennifer Carpenter, a spokesperson for the trade group American Waterways Operators, told the Associated Press.

But environmental groups argue that an accidental spill, even if less likely, would have far more disastrous consequences on water than on land, sending the fracking waste directly into Ohio and Mississippi rivers, which supply water to millions of Americans. To make matters worse, activists say that a fracking waste spill would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to clean up, thanks in part to the notorious “Halliburton loophole” that exempts drilling companies from having to disclose the chemical cocktails used in hydraulic fracturing.

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The Coast Guard’s proposal would require shippers to test the chemicals in each shipment, but still allows companies to withhold “proprietary chemicals” from the public. Without knowing what chemicals have been spilled, developing a mitigation strategy is difficult. "Nobody has figured out what the safe thing is to do if fracking water gets in our drinking water," Tom Hoffman, Western Pennsylvania director of the environmental group Clean Water Action, told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

But the most alarming aspect of the Coast Guard’s proposal is that the policy is “categorically excluded” from environmental analysis.

“This policy letter will not have any of the following: significant cumulative impacts on the human environment; substantial controversy or substantial change to existing environmental conditions,” the report reads.

It’s a peculiar kind of logic: Basically, the Coast Guard is declaring that because the transportation of fracking waste won’t have a significant impact on the environment, the policy is exempt from the very studies that would actually determine the environmental risk. That's despite the fact, documented scientifically and anecdotally, that fracking is flooding the watershed with noxious chemicals.

The AP reports that the Coast Guard is currently sifting through public comments on the policy, and that it could make changes based on that review. But given the government’s track record on fracking regulations, the outlook does not look good.