Pennsylvania's DEP Offers Acid Mine Drainage Water to Drillers

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.

January 9, 2013 | 1:16 PM

courtesy of the Western Pennsylvania Coalition for Abandoned Mine Reclamation

A coal waste heap rises above the landscape in southwestern Pennsylvania.

The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection is encouraging the use of acid mine drainage for fracking operations. The DEP published a “white paper” today, detailing how the agency intends to review proposals from oil and gas drillers. Using AMD for oil and gas drilling operations was a recommendation by Governor Corbett’s Marcellus Shale Advisory Commission.
DEP says more than 300 million gallons of polluted water from decades of coal mining operations, flows into the state’s rivers and streams every day.
Former DEP Secretary David Hess has told StateImpact that more than 184,000 acres of abandoned mine lands exist across the state, resulting in “4,000 miles of biologically dead rivers and streams due to mine pollution.”
Because fracking a well requires on average, four million gallons of water a day, some say using the state’s polluted coal mine drainage waste to frack would help clean up a continuous environmental cost of coal.
Pennsylvania’s environmental problems with coal mining began more than 150 years ago, and communities in northeastern and southwestern parts of the state still live with that legacy. Federal funds to help clean up the coal industry’s damage started flowing to the states in the 1970s under the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977. The idea was simple: make the current coal industry pay for the mistakes of past coal companies.
But states like Pennsylvania had lots of abandoned coal mines and still have far to go to revive the state’s rivers and streams. In the 1950s and 1960s, coal companies walked away, leaving behind a mess. Some abandoned mines would catch on fire, or fill up with water that would overflow, and end up contaminating streams and rivers. Also left behind were mountains of coal waste, which when exposed to air or water, turned into acid, further polluting groundwater.