Public perception taints company

March 24, 2012 at 12:00a.m.

WARREN

An oil and gas industry official says the public is not ready for treated fracking wastewater to re-enter the ecosystem, despite Patriot Water Treatment LLC’s approved water-treatment technology.

Tom Stewart, executive vice president of Ohio Oil and Gas Association, said he is sure Patriot is “very, very good” at treating fracking wastewater but that public perception is working against the nearly 1-year-old company.

“To me, it’s a public- perception issue,” he said. “I don’t think the public perceives, no matter how well we manage some kind of technology to clean that water ... I don’t think they are ready to accept stream discharge.”

The public, however, has remained relatively mum regarding Patriot, at least when compared with fracking and brine-injection wells.

Only a handful of dissenters spoke out against Patriot at a January Ohio Environmental Protection Agency public meeting in Warren.

Patriot treats low-salt wastewater from fracking, a process in which water, chemicals and sand are blasted into shale rock thousands of feet below the ground. That pretreated water then goes through the city of Warren’s wastewater treatment plant and then ends up in the Mahoning River.

The process, more along the lines of filter and dilution, is different from desalinization, a commonly used technique to remove salt from sea water for drinking purposes. There are other treatment options, such as chemical precipitation and electric coagulation, but those are unnecessary in Patriot’s circumstance because the company does not treat high-salt brine.

Pennsylvania last May banned fracking wastewater from municipal treatment plants — its process did not have a “Patriot-like” middleman to filter out solid material — and accepted all forms of wastewater, even fluid that was 10 times saltier than seawater.

“That’s not an acceptable reason [to shut us down],” said Andrew Blocksom, president of Patriot, of the Pennsylvania situation. “Because another state did something wrong doesn’t mean that it can’t be done right.”

Those inside the environmental regulatory structure of the state, which includes the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, Ohio Environmental Protection Agency and the office of Ohio Gov. John Kasich, have acknowledged closing Patriot is more about dampening the public’s fear.

“It’s not fair to Patriot,” Stewart said. “But there’s a lot of things going on with the oil and gas industry that aren’t fair.”

Stewart also said the decision to shut down Patriot should not come down to money. Patriot does not pay taxes on fracking wastewater, or brine, a tax that Stewart originally proposed.

Injection-well operators pay a brine fee that the state implemented in 2010 with the passage of Senate Bill 165, levies a 5-cents-per-barrel tax on all injected brine that originates from Ohio.

It also imposes a 20-cents-per-barrel tax on injected brine from out of state.

Ohio made nearly $1.5 million from brine-injection wells during 2011 thanks to 12 million barrels of brine disposed of in the state’s 177 injection wells, a number Stewart said “beat expectations.”

“I don’t believe [Patriot] is competing in a realistic way,” he said. “No matter what they do, it’s miniscule.”