With Gas Boom, Pennsylvania Fears New Toxic Legacy NPRHide caption. Hydraulic fracturing lets drillers tap previously inaccessible natural gas reservoirs. Workers at Chesapeake Energy are seen on the job near Towanda, Pa. Previous. Next. David GilkeyNPR. A successful fracking operation requires a battalion of drilling rigs, miles of pipe and millions of gallons of water in order to bore through the earth. Previous. Next. David GilkeyNPR. Workers stand outside the pump room where water is separated from drilling mud at one of Chesapeake Energys water treatment facilities. Previous. Next. David GilkeyNPR. The thick muddy liquid called flowback a mix of water, toxic chemicals and minerals is a byproduct of fracking in the Marcellus Shale. Previous. Next. David GilkeyNPR. A Chesapeake Energy worker stands next to the control panel that monitors the fracking process. Previous. Next. David GilkeyNPR. Rory Sweeney of Chesapeake Energy looks over an active drilling site. Millions of gallons of fluid help crack open fractures in shale, releasing trapped gas. Previous. Next. David GilkeyNPR. Watch Gasland Online Facebook HackingIndustry has ruined a lot of Pennsylvanias water. Coal mining companies hammered the state, leaving behind acidic water that turned thousands of miles of. Test your knowledge with amazing and interesting facts, trivia, quizzes, and brain teaser games on MentalFloss. Chesapeake Energy Senior Director Brian Grove says the industry should have warned people about the messy impact of fracking. Previous. Next. David GilkeyNPR. A worker at Eureka Resources, a recycling plant, holds a container of purified water right and wastewater from a gas well left. Previous. Next. David GilkeyNPR. A worker crosses over a water holding and skimming tank. In 2. 00. 8, Eureka modified its technology to clean up the peculiar mix of gunk in frack water. Previous. Next. David GilkeyNPR. The largest domestic natural gas drilling boom in history has swept across the United States. The Halliburtondeveloped drilling technology of fracking. Ways to watch HBO. HBO is home to the most talked about programs on television from groundbreaking series, films, documentaries and sports to the biggest. Plant owner Dan Ertel says new regulations over the disposal of polluted water have brought more drillers to his water treatment facility. Previous. Next. David GilkeyNPR. Currently, drillers in Pennsylvania reuse about 9. Previous. Next. David GilkeyNPR. Trucking is one of the most expensive parts of fracking and companies are looking to replace some transport routes with pipelines. Previous. Next. David GilkeyNPR. In Pennsylvania, theres an industrial revolution going on. Battalions of drilling rigs are boring into the earth to extract natural gas from an underground layer of shale called the Marcellus formation. Rocks on the shore of the Lackawanna River in Duryea, Pa., are discolored by iron oxide and sulfur compounds pollutants left behind by past coal mining in the state. David GilkeyNPR. David GilkeyNPR. Rocks on the shore of the Lackawanna River in Duryea, Pa., are discolored by iron oxide and sulfur compounds pollutants left behind by past coal mining in the state. David GilkeyNPR. And as the wells multiply all along the western end of the state, people worry they may be facing another toxic legacy. The first one came from coal mining. All over the state, you can see bright orange rivers and streams. The aquatic life was killed by acidic runoff from abandoned mines. Are we really going to let this happen to Pennsylvania again asks David Yoxtheimer, a hydrologist at Penn State who grew up here. Are we going to make sure that we have enough money and that these companies feet are held to the fire to make sure that once their operations are done, they put everything back together, tidy it up, and make it look like nothing happened there in the first placeProgress isnt always pretty. In the natural gas boom, a lot of the ugliness has to do with water. An Unexpected Nuisance. Watch Red Planet Online Hollywoodreporter. Drillers need billions of gallons of water. Its their dynamite They use it to split rock. And they need trucks to move that water. Everywhere you drive in Pennsylvanias gas country, youre stuck behind a truck. You get mud all over your car. One stoplight towns have traffic jams at noon. Dan Lopata, whos in charge of water for Chesapeake Energy, says trucks are a pain for everybody. Explore key components of the natural gas production process and the questions scientists are asking. The transportation of all the fluids is probably our biggest expense, and thats our highest exposure to the local community, says Lopata. Thats what they see driving up and down the road are the trucks. I asked Lopata if those trucks annoy local people. I would say yes to that question, he replied. I visited a Chesapeake Energy well site in the northeast part of the state it was half the size of a football field. Machinery and workers were everywhere, all surrounded by forest. Deer in the woods, and John Deere on the pad. To get the natural gas out of the Marcellus layer of shale, engineers drill about a mile deep, then out horizontally through the shale layer. Explosive charges create cracks in the shale. Engineers then mix water with sand and chemicals. Big pumps drive this slurry down into the shale. The fluid is so highly pressurized that it opens the cracks wider and liberates gas. What comes gushing up is called flowback, a bubbly mix that looks like muddy champagne. Chesapeake senior director Brian Grove points to the 1. Watch Big Fish Download. Thats the plug at the opening of the well where gas will emerge. It will come up through the well head, he explains over the din. We will then put it through a large scale separator, which will send water in one direction into steel tanks to be recycled, and then the gas will go in the other direction. What To Do With Toxic WastewaterFlowback is nasty stuff. Grove explains that the water has been exposed to what once was a seabed. When you expose fresh water to it, you absorb the salts. That is something you dont want to spill on the surface. Besides salt, the water picks up minerals that had been buried in the rock, some of them toxic and some radioactive, like barium. And it still contains some of the chemicals that engineers add to the frack water, some of which are classified as toxic as well. This wastewater flows back up out of the well for about a month, but the well will continue to regurgitate a salty brine for years, which has to be collected and disposed of. How the industry handles this wastewater is a controversial issue. For a while, the wastewater was dumped directly into rivers, untreated. Some drillers shipped it to municipal water treatment plants, which werent equipped to handle the toxic material in the waste. A current practice is to pump it temporarily into man made, lined holding ponds. But some of those ponds have leaked. Trucks leaked wastewater as well. And there are the claims, most noticeably made in the HBO documentary Gasland, that backyard drinking water wells were being polluted by drilling. Grove says the industry should have warned people about the kind of mess fracking can make. I think the biggest mistake the industry made early on in Marcellus development was just remaining silent, he told me. I think the industry as a whole has, for 5. Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana. The folks that moved east were people that were not used to having to explain themselves they were used to being understood. So, under a lot of public pressure, the state Department of Environmental Protection cracked down. Since 2. 00. 8, the DEP has tightened rules for holding ponds where frack water is stored, to keep them from leaking. Another big change was to tell drillers to stop running frack water through public water treatment plants. A New Model For Wastewater Treat And Reuse. These rules helped create a new business recycling frack water. Cheseapeake Energy recycles its frack water itself, but other companies send their wastewater to recycling plants such as Eureka Resources in Williamsport, Pa. Eureka is in an old brick factory next to the Susquehanna River. The first thing you see are water trucks pumping polluted frack water into tanks. I put on a hard hat and went in to talk with plant owner Dan Ertel about this new business. We saw an absolute lack of any water treatment businesses or companies here, Ertel says. So in 2. 00. 8 Eureka modified off the shelf technology and set up a factory to clean up the peculiar mix of gunk in frack water.