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Salty water fuels an acidic debate
By Karl Henkel
At the crux of the debate between state environmental legislators and Patriot Water Treatment, LLC, is brine.
But what is brine?
It depends on who you ask.
For Andrew Blocksom, president of Patriot, brine is high-salinity water that he wants nothing to do with.
But from the state’s perspective — more specifically, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources — Blocksom is in the brine business.
And that, by definition, is against state law.
But if state regulators don’t renew Warren’s brine-water permit, which allows the city’s wastewater treatment plant to accept pretreated brine water from Patriot, where will all that water go?
Injection wells, which experts say could cause damage to those wells.
That damage could also correlate with seven Mahoning Valley earthquakes this year, a revelation first explored by The Vindicator two weeks ago.
“It’s a huge problem,” said Greg New of Brineaway Inc., who has worked with injection wells in Ohio for more than three decades. “We couldn’t pump that stuff down an injection well.
“That would clog it up immediately.”
The scientific reasons why injection well operators should turn away low salinity brine water haven’t stopped some from taking risks with their million- dollar wells.
BEHIND THE SCIENCE
Brine, according to Ohio law, includes all saline geological-formation water resulting from, obtained from, or produced in connection with exploration, drilling, well stimulation, production of oil or gas or plugging of a well.
In other words, if it comes from a fracking site, consider it brine.
Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, is a process in which water, chemicals and sand are blasted through pipes into rocks thousands of feet below the ground to unlock natural gas and oil.
The broad definition of brine should be narrowed, according to many in the industry.
Mark Depew of Petrox, a company that works with oil and gas wells, said it would benefit all parties to clearly define the two types of brine.
“It sure wouldn’t hurt to be able to define what is [brine] and what isn’t,” he said.
Blocksom’s beef is that Patriot treats low salinity brine water from fracking not suitable for deep injection wells such as the one operated by D&L Energy near Salt Springs Road in Youngstown.
Brine’s chemical makeup — something Patriot has debated with state environmental regulators — differs depending on the water’s origin.
Most brine from fracking sites comes from deep beneath the Earth’s surface.
It’s extremely salty — 300,000 milligrams per liter salty, which is nearly 10 times the salinity of sea water.
That water, Blocksom says, is untreatable at his plant; he treats the small percentage of brine water that is murky and contains dirt and metals. It’s salinity level doesn’t exceed 50,000 milligrams per liter.
The dirt and metal is separated from the water through an extensive cleaning process, then compacted and sent to landfills. The cleaned water then goes to Warren’s wastewater- treatment plant.
If Patriot can no longer treat water, it will mean two things:
Ohio would have no brine-treatment plant. Patriot is the only one.
Disposal wells would then be forced to accept low salinity brine.
New said that injection wells are capable of handling small amounts of low salt brine, but with the upswing in oil and gas drilling operations in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio, there’s now too much low-salt brine.
“We have dealt with it in the past,” he said. “But now it’s a huge volume from Pennsylvania and we can’t deal with it.
“[Low salt brine] starts the gradual process of plugging our wells.”
WHAT HAPPENS BELOW
The weight and saturations of the water are also different: high-salt weighs about a pound more per gallon than low-salt brine.
Some underground rock formations are only capable of taking on water at a given weight.
“When we’re putting the natural production water, [salty brine], back into the natural source, there’s no problem,” New said.
When the weight of water is changed, along with the concentration of dirt and metals, it can interrupt the flow of water down a well, which is normally influenced by hydrostatic pressure.
“When you put lightweight water in the well, you have to increase the pressure,” New said.
If the pressure gets too high, well operators must cease production until pressure returns to permitted levels.
And that water loaded with dirt and metal can cause damage.
New likened it to a swimming pool filter.
“When it plugs up, you can’t get air to go through it unless you force the air through it,” he said. EARTHQUAKE CONNECTION?
New said that a connection between the incorrect disposal of some brine water and the recent uptick in earthquakes in the Mahoning Valley is “pretty speculative” and “highly unlikely.”
But there could be a correlation, according to some geologists, who say increased pressure against ancient buried fault lines could cause small tremors.
D&L Energy’s Youngstown site does accept low-salinity brine, but Nick Paparodis, vice president of land operations, said the company is not worried about plugging.
“All water is filtered ... prior to being injected by pump into the saltwater injection well,” he said.
That process, said Tom Tomastik of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, can avoid plugging.
“Some of the things we recommend is pretreatment of fluid to prevent plugging a formation underground,” he said.
Tomastik said he understands that some well operators have decided against accepting low-salinity water, but that the major oil companies think differently — they plan to inject everything.
That is, until they begin recycling it, a process that involves mixing salty brine water with new, fresh water. This dilutes the water to a point where it can be reused for fracking.
“I think it really needs to get to the point where everything gets recycled,” New said. “Our whole country is about recycling. Why wouldn’t we want to recycle this water?”