Large impoundment ponds dot the rural landscape in Washington and Greene counties
A view of the Carter impoundment in Mt. Pleasant Township
An aerial view of CNX’s NVNorth No. 2 impoundment in South Franklin Township
Range Resources engineer Tony Gaudlip discusses the fracking process used to extract oil and gas from the Earth’s Marcellus Shale formation.
The CNX NV North #1 impoundment site.
The Jon Day impoundment is one of the impoundments owned by Range Resources that will be closed due to the DEP fine.
The Yeager impoundment is one of the impoundments listed in the DEP’s fine against Range Resources.
A large man-made, fenced-off pond containing orange water used by the booming Marcellus Shale natural gas industry is sandwiched into a rolling valley between neat rows of cornstalks and a scenic Christmas tree farm in Hopewell Township.
The Bednarski pond, otherwise known as a centralized impoundment, provides storage space for up to 15 million gallons of fresh water and fluid that flows back out of the ground while a driller fractures the shale 6,000 feet below the surface to draw out oil and gas.
The impoundment is one of 18 that the state Department of Environmental Protection has approved to meet the industry’s needs in Washington and Greene counties.
They’re needed “to allow for (flowback) recycling to occur,” said Scott Perry, the DEP’s deputy secretary of oil and gas management in Harrisburg.
In order for the recycling of flowback to occur, drillers must have a new well ready for fracking immediately after fracturing is completed at another nearby well, Perry said.
Frack fluid is 99 percent water mixed with sand to prop open paper-thin fractures in the shale, said Range engineer Tony Gaudlip. Range adds to the mix a friction reducer, bacteria nutritional supplement, naturally occurring bacteria culture, scale inhibitor and hydrochloric acid.
Nearly 30 percent of the fluid flows back to the surface as the shale is fractured under high pressure. That water is taken for treatment and returned to the impoundment, or sent directly to the pond or stored in above-ground tanks for recycling.
“Think of this as a tube of toothpaste,” Gaudlip said, discussing how fluid is injected into the well. “You squeeze one end and it’ll pop out of the other.”
The process adds chloride to the fluid because the shale is a “dried-up seabed, and its primary constituent is salt,” Range spokesman Matt Pitzarella said. Fresh water is returned to the mix as fracturing continues.
“Flowback water appears similar in composition to conventionally produced water, even in the presence of additives employed for performing hydraulic fracturing,” Pitzarella said.
The word impoundment is a regulatory term, one that has caused some people to mistakenly confuse it with something akin to police impounding a motor vehicle.
“We probably could have come up with a better word,” said Jeff Ventura, president and chief executive officer of the Southpointe-based Range Resources.
Impoundments are given a 10-year permit by the DEP, and their use since 2009 also has raised concerns from neighbors and activists about environmental damages from leaks and spills.
From the air, these impoundments can be viewed atop hills. They’re mostly out of view from the public, with temporary gravel roads leading to more than one large well pad.
One in particular, the Jon Day centralized impoundment in Amwell Township, appears as a large earthen scar as its owner, Range Resources, is under an order from the DEP to remove from the site 15,000 tons of contaminated soil after leaks were discovered.
The problem contributed to the DEP fining the company $4.15 million last month for violations at its work sites.
The first impoundment for flowback recycling was built in Hopewell Township, Washington County, in 2009, Gaudlip said. The ponds were designed to decrease the number of trucks hauling water to and from the sites during the fracturing process.
Some companies have used more than 400 trucks per day to transport water.
Deep-well injections – the disposing of wastewater by pushing it deep underground into rock formations where it is unable to migrate upward – are not a viable option in Pennsylvania. Patrick Henderson, energy executive in Gov. Tom Corbett’s office, said this is mainly due to the state’s geology, and fewer than 10 of these wells are located within Pennsylvania’s borders.
But, Henderson said, the primary reason for using impoundments is the ability to recycle and store water.
“There is a benefit to recycling and reusing flowback and produced water that is captured from the well,” Henderson said in an email. “In fact, Act 13 of 2012 requires a water management plan for all wells, and also requires a reuse plan.”
When the number of wells being drilled in the two counties began to rapidly increase in 2007, drillers opted to utilize larger impoundments central to many drilling locations.
According to SkyTruth, a nonprofit organization that maps impoundments using aerial imagery and crowdsourcing, the impoundments have grown in both size and number since they first started appearing in Pennsylvania. The group identified 11 impoundments in Pennsylvania in 2005, and the average area of an impoundment was about 610 square meters. In 2013, SkyTruth identified 529 impoundments, with an average area of about 7,550 square meters.
In the beginning, these impoundments were built with just one layer of a thermoplastic liner with a leak-detection system that simply amounted to pipes leading out from their sides and emptying on the ground, Perry said
Leaks at those ponds amounted to an “environmental impact,” Perry said.
A later impoundment version involved the use of two liners separated by a leak-detection system built with perforated pipe and emptying into a manhole. A sump pump also was installed in them to reroute the leaking fluid back into the pond, DEP records show.
Range, meanwhile, said it’s developing a new impoundment design similar to those used at landfills, one with a more sophisticated and trusted leak-detection system, Perry said.
Staff writers Mike Jones and Emily Petsko contributed to this story.