How Much Water Do Drillers Need? The Inquirer Looks At Withdrawal Regulation

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 22, 2011 | 12:33 PM

Throughout the summer, we’ve monitored the Susquehanna River Basin Commission’s moratorium on water withdrawals along the river and its tributaries.
The restrictions were put in place due to low water levels. At their peak, natural gas drillers were banned from withdrawing water at more than 40 points. That number has since dwindled to less than ten locations.
Yesterday, the Philadelphia Inquirer took a close look at how much water the average gas driller takes from rivers and streams, and the logistics of the SRBC’s regulatory role.

The business of withdrawing water is more complicated than simply inserting a hose into the river and pumping. The SRBC requires drillers to document and meter the withdrawals, and to pay for them.
Chesapeake Energy Corp., the state’s largest driller and among the most active here in Bradford County, operates a withdrawal point on the Susquehanna River in Wysox that is unaffected by SRBC’s dry-weather “passby” flow restrictions.
Chesapeake’s pump station, drawing water from an intake buried on the riverbed, fills five towering 21,000-gallon tanks nearby, while a parade of trucks waits to fill up at four adjacent computer-controlled stations. It takes about 10 minutes to fill a 3,360-gallon tanker truck. Tractor-trailer tankers, which hold 4,620 gallons, take a little longer.
When the metered withdrawals reach the site’s daily limit of about one million gallons – that’s enough to fill more than 200 trucks – the system automatically shuts down until midnight.
The SRBC estimates that the industry, based on projected drilling, will need about 30 million gallons a day.
By comparison, suppliers of public water in the basin consume 325 million gallons a day, and power plants require 190 million gallons a day for coolant. A single nuclear reactor proposed in Luzerne County would require 30 million gallons of water a day.