While many may think of the oil and gas industry as something that causes climate change through emissions, it is a big producer of radioactive waste that is “recycled” at treatment plants across the country.
Author and journalist Justin Nobel discussed the industry during recent stops in Athens to promote his book, “Petroleum-238: Big Oil’s Dangerous Secret and the Grassroots Fight to Stop It.” On May 1, he visited the Athens Public Library and the Athens Community Center.
Brine
Across the United States, the oil and gas industry produces 3 billion gallons of brine — a naturally occurring liquid that contains minerals and radium — a day, about 1 trillion gallons a year.
“If you need a way to visualize it: Take that trillion gallons and fill them into your standard oil barrel,” Nobel told about 40 people at the Athens Community Center. “Stack those barrels on top of one another. They would go to the moon and back almost 28 times. That is an incredible, incredible waste stream that the industry is tasked with getting rid of and that has been a problem for the industry since day one.”
In the early days of the extraction industry, brine was the most sought-after product. Once oil and gas became the prized commodity, people dumped brine wherever they could — right beside the well, a lined pit, ditches and streams.
“Brine has a really high levels of salt, about 10 times the salt found in seawater,” said Nobel, who has a master’s degree is journalism and environmental science from Columbia University. “You salt someone’s land to destroy their ability to grow crops. There is salted land across the country from oil and gas development from brine that has been fracked dating back generations.”
The Environmental Protection Agency is so worried about radium that there is a limit for drinking water — five picocuries per liter. The agency defines anything having 60 picocuries per liter as radioactive. Most brine in the Marcellus shale formation would qualify as radioactive under national regulations.
Nobel noted that the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection has conducted studies and found that brine from the “Marcellus can average 9,330 picocuries per liter and be as high as 28,500. So again, we have 5 picocuries limit for drinking water. You have 60, that’s ‘radioactive,’ and Marcellus is averaging 9,330.”
Fairmont Brine Processing
Nobel used a shuttered facility located in Fairmont, West Virginia — about 25 miles south of Morgantown — as an example of what can go wrong at a brine-processing plant.
The facility, Fairmont Brine Processing, closed in 2017. During a visit in June of 2023, Nobel accompanied scientists and a filmmaker to the site, located on a hilltop above the town. Their radiation-reading instruments read about 7,000 counts per minute, or just under 2 millirems per hour. According to Nobel, working at those levels for one week could take a worker over yearly safety limits set — 5,000 millirems (5 rem) — by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Nobel noted that like Ohio, West Virginia has plants that take in brine from other states. “A lot of sites in Ohio and Pennsylvania will take waste to West Virginia. Pennsylvania takes waste to Ohio.”
The facility, which has been closed off by the EPA since Nobel’s visit, had no gates and was littered with debris including a mattress and a ski boat.
Scientist Yori Gorby, lead scientist at the Athens-based FreshWater Accountability Project, noted that the site was more radioactive than most of Chernobyl.
After the plant’s closure, the site became a local party spot with buildings littered with “graffiti, beer cans and used condoms,” Nobel said. “The scrappers have been visiting to swipe copper.”
“What was most shocking is when I spoke to workers and learned what knowledge they had on (the toxicity and radioactivity), which was not very much at all,” Nobel said.
In September 2023, Nobel met with former employee Sean Guthrie. Guthrie worked at Fairmont Brine Processing for several years and eventually become operations manager.
“I felt good about the job and thought we were doing something beneficial for the environment,” Guthrie told Nobel.
Shortly after he was promoted, the company had trouble paying its debts and closed in 2017. Two of his coworkers died after suffering from stomach and brain cancers.
“Sean, himself, suffers a range of health issues that keep him away from labor jobs,” Nobel said. “He has been left on his own, and he says, ‘I would like to see some accountability.’”
Nobel noted there are several ways to hold the oil and gas industry accountable. One way is for the workers to speak up and talk about the harms of the industry, but many of them, like the companies they work for, “disappear.”
“They were told that these are good jobs,” Nobel said. “And like Sean said, they were often very happy to be doing a job that they thought was cleaning up the industry’s waste, and was making the oil and gas industry more environmentally friendly.”
The other way is through the legal system, which can be difficult. However there are several lawsuits in Louisiana related to workers’ health in which the courts sided with the workers, Nobel said.
Audience questions
Several audience members asked Nobel questions ranging from unionizing to state legislation to brine used to deice roads to the actual fracking process.
One audience member asked if a company that has caused environmental damage in one state ever moved to another state and continued its work.
Nobel noted that many of the companies fail or are bought out.
“The initial company kind of disappears into the night, and the workers, unfortunately, disappear into the night too,” Nobel said of treatment sites.
Athens County Engineer Jeff Maiden asked several questions regarding the brining process.
He asked what is done with the solids taken out of the brine.
Nobel noted that brine has too many solids inside of it to be “recycled” in the fracking process.
At some sites, brine is settled in a tank with a liner, almost like a “large swimming pool type setting.” The solids fall to the bottom, while the liquid stays on top.
The solids are usually too radioactive to be taken to a standard landfill as most have radiation detectors. They can be put into barrels that are stores in underground caverns or storage facilities.
Nobel noted trucks often take sludge to a treatment facility that attempts to lower the radioactive signature by mixing sludge with less radioactive materials.
“That job would often fall to workers who are not really informed about what they are doing,” Nobel said of the mixing process.
Some fracking sites use filter socks — a large mesh tube that collects the solid particles. “But again, now you’ve concentrated some of the most concerning elements. Filter socks are well known to be some of the most radioactive waste that the industry produces. And you’ve gotta do something with that.”
He noted that one Ohio activist gave him reports that said the filter socks at one facility went through a wood chipper for disposal. By doing this, the process created tiny particles in the air and workers did not have any protection against the contamination.
Nobel noted that the most up-to-date data on how much sludge the industry produces was made in the 1990s.
Maiden and others also noted water is a finite resource. If fresh water is used in the extraction process, and if 3 billion gallons of brine are being produced every day, how much usable water is still left on Earth?
One audience member noted that some places in the Western United States no longer have water because oil and gas companies have used it all for fracking.
“You’re removing water from the water cycle when you do this,” Nobel said of the process.
Maiden also asked if the injection process actually works. People can’t look underground to see if chemicals are leaked before they get into the well.
“The industry will say we’re putting it back where came from,” Nobel said. “That’s not necessarily accurate. … What they’re doing is they are injecting into porous layers. These are layers in earth that have natural pockets and spaces, and these are layers that fill up with things like groundwater, right? Groundwater exists because it’s not all just solid rock down there. There’s small little cracks and fissures and they can fill up with things. Now the industry is taking advantage of that and using those porous layers as a receptacle to hold waste.”
Nobel noted that in the 1970s, a study was done on the feasibility of injection wells. It concluded that the method was “a short-term fix, used with caution and only until better methods of disposal are developed. “
One researcher from that time noted the parallel over a concern about dumping waste into the sea. People assume the oceans are so big they can put waste in and if it sinks far enough, no environmental harm will be done.
“We know now that this assumption is wrong,” Nobel read from his book. “Like the seas, so the earth’s crust is too and vulnerable to damage by man’s activities.”
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