Susquehanna River Basin Commission Weighs Issuing More Water Permits To Drillers

Scott Detrow

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Scott Detrow is a congressional correspondent for NPR. He also co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.

Detrow joined NPR in 2015 to cover the presidential election. He focused on the Republican side of the 2016 race, spending time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, and also reported on the election's technology and data angles.

Detrow worked as a statehouse reporter for member stations WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KQED in San Francisco, California. He has also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

August 24, 2012 | 4:05 PM

Scott Detrow / StateImpact Pennsylvania

A Bradford County driller stores water that will be used during hydraulic fracturing operations.

Pennsylvania Public Radio’s Mary Wilson takes a look at public comments about water withdrawal permits the Susquehanna River Basin Commission recently issued to natural gas drillers:

Public hearings at the Susquehanna River Basin Commission aren’t two-way affairs. So commissioners were silent as one man voiced his concern at the latest meeting that the natural gas industry’s water withdrawals would deplete streams and endanger wildlife. They might have pointed out a common misperception underlying the man’s testimony.
Andrew Dehoff manages project review at the commission and says the bigger issue isn’t how much water drillers are taking, but where they want to get it.
“When we receive a request to, for a withdrawal of water from a smaller, more sensitive stream, we really have to look at it very closely and put some restrictive conditions on if it can be approved at all,” said Dehoff. He added drillers often want to withdraw water close to where they’re fracking, and the SRBC prefers water to be pulled from less pristine streams or larger water sources.

While hydraulic fracturing gets the most public attention, natural gas drillers within the Susquehanna River Basin actually withdraw about 11 percent of what power plants use each day. The drilling industry uses about 10.4 million gallons of water a day, according to SRBC data. Dauphin County’s Three Mile Island, on the other hand, takes out 19.2 million gallons on its own.
Manufacturing uses about 8 million gallons of river basin water each day, and water supply companies withdraw about 9 million.