Fracking Fluid May Be Headed To Niagara Falls

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.

October 21, 2011 | 1:30 PM

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Barrels (more likely, truckloads) of fracking fluid may be on its way to Niagara Falls soon. From the Associated Press:

NIAGARA FALLS, N.Y. — The city that put Love Canal and Superfund in the environmental lexicon may get back into the business of dealing with toxic waste — this time willingly. It is considering whether to truck in and treat wastewater left over from natural gas drilling.
The economically struggling city in western New York could use the revenue, and the Niagara Falls Water Board says its specialized wastewater treatment plant can handle more business since the decline of the chemical industry it was designed for.
With New York considering allowing natural gas production in its part of the lucrative Marcellus Shale, the water board is examining whether it would make economic sense to become a destination for the byproduct wastewater of the drilling process, called hydraulic fracturing, said Richard Roll, the public benefit corporation’s director of technical and regulatory services.
“Since we do have a unique kind of wastewater treatment plant that’s very much under-loaded, we’re looking into the possibility that, with the addition of other treatment processes, maybe our plant would be much more amenable to accepting this waste than your typical municipal biological plant,” he said.

Fluid from Bradford, Tioga and Susquehanna Counties could end up at the Niagara Falls facility. Right now, the bulk of fracking waste ends up in Ohio deep injection wells.