Governor-Elect Shapiro, Prioritize Banning Road Spreading of Drilling Waste

“Pennfield has obtained a Co-Product status instead of Waste with our brine. What this means is you don’t have to report spreading and it can be spread all year round. I know this is hard to believe because D.E.P. doesn’t make anything easy, but it’s true…,” the company told townships that were potential customers.

Titusville Oil & Gas Associates’ president wrote, “I do not currently supply any oil and gas produced water to these entities or any other entities for the purpose of treating dirt and gravel roads in Forest County and have not done so since the Department of Environmental Protection - Bureau of Waste Management (BWM) issued letters to multiple operators in the business of spreading produced water on dirt roads that their co-product determinations were largely inadequate.” The company reported spreading 1004.01 barrels of produced water in Forest County in 2021.

Tachoir Resources, a company that entered 278 records of road spreading a total of nearly 600 barrels of drilling waste in 2021 says it subcontracted the hauling to another company, Anderson Energy Services. Anderson also reported road spreading of waste, 240 barrels of it, for the first time since 2017, told regulators in August, “Per our conversation we have not been disposing brine for spreading for well over a year and are not in the future.” Additionally, that same company routinely lists the same amount of waste spread for each of its entries in a county. It might explain why their client did the same. How much of its own waste and its client’s it actually spread is unknown.

These are among the discoveries the Better Path Coalition made in our latest review of records we obtained from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection’s Bureau of Waste Management in response to a Right-to-Know request.

The records round out our collection of documents pertaining to the use of a loophole conventional drillers found in BWM’s Coproduct Determination program to "legally" continue the practice of spreading toxic, radioactive waste on unpaved roads in Pennsylvania after the Office of Oil & Gas Management put a moratorium on the practice. Collectively, the documents reveal that not one conventional driller reporting road spreading of waste from 2018 to the present submitted a Coproduct Determination report that met the regulatory requirements of the program.

Road spreading of unconventional drilling wastewater was banned in 2016. Since then, studies have confirmed that conventional drilling wastewater is harmful to human health and the environment and that it's no better than rainwater at suppressing dust. Meanwhile, conventional drillers have done everything they can to circumvent the 2018 moratorium.

It's past time for an outright ban on road spreading of ALL drilling waste. Governor-Elect Shapiro must make it a priority to bring an end to this dangerous practice.