NJ Lawmakers Want to Keep Pennsylvania's Frack Water From Crossing State Lines

• Susan Phillips
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  Susan Phillips tells stories about the consequences of political decisions on people's every day lives. She has worked as a reporter for WHYY since 2004. Susan's coverage of the 2008 Presidential election resulted in a story on the front page of the New York Times. In 2010 she traveled to Haiti to cover the earthquake. That same year she produced an award-winning series on Pennsylvania's natural gas rush called "The Shale Game." She received a 2013 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Journalism Award for her work covering natural gas drilling in Pennsylvania. She has also won several Edward R. Murrow awards for her work with StateImpact. In 2013/14 she spent a year at MIT as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow. She has also been a Metcalf Fellow, an MBL Logan Science Journalism Fellow and reported from Marrakech on the 2016 climate talks as an International Reporting Project Fellow. A graduate of Columbia School of Journalism, she earned her Bachelor's degree in International Relations from George Washington University.

A New Jersey Assembly committee approved a bill that would ban the state’s sewage treatment plants from accepting natural gas drilling wastewater. The lawmakers worry the frack water from Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale drilling boom could end up in the Garden State. Earlier this year, Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection asked the state’s municipal treatment facilities to stop treating the wastewater, which they had been discharging into rivers and streams. Frack water contains high levels of salts and some radioactive materials that municipal sewage treatment facilities are not able to treat.
A few private treatment facilities in Pennsylvania do treat the waste water, using either reverse osmosis or thermal distillation. Those facilities have permits to discharge the bulk of the water back into the waterways. But a portion of the water contains highly concentrated contaminants and gets sent down deep injection wells. Many of the drillers in Pennsylvania are using the treated wastewater to frack other wells. Others are sending their waste water to deep well injection sites in Ohio, where it is sent down deep into the earth.

Drilling wastewater could also come from New York state, which currently has a drilling moratorium until new regulations are implemented. Environmentalists are worried that when New York’s drill rigs begin to operate, the drillers will look to New Jersey as a place to dispose of their waste water. The Assembly Environment and Solid Waste Committee approved the bill. But it’s unlikely to go to a full vote before the end of this session.
Groups like the New Jersey Sierra Club praised the move. But some say the bill could stifle the development of private water treatment facilities, which are equipped to handle the water.

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