Report: Oil and gas waste treated at New Castle facility more radioactive when discharged
[Editor’s note: This article has been updated to properly characterize Public Herald’s investigation into 144 oil and gas waste disposal or treatment sites where the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection tested for radioactivity.]
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A team of investigative journalists have mapped out the 144 oil and gas industry waste disposal or treatment sites in Pennsylvania that were tested for radioactivity years ago by the state.
They found the waste being discharged into state waters far exceeds health guidelines for one specific cancer-causing material, despite federal regulators’ downplaying of the health risks. In some cases — including at a treatment facility along Riverpark Drive in New Castle — the released waste is actually more radioactive than before it was treated, the data shows.
“That story takes a really high-level overview and looks at the systemic impacts of this. … The public has never before been able to see with this much clarity on where this radiation is at the state level,” said investigative reporter Jake Conley, who authored the January report for Public Herald, a nonprofit, publicly supported investigative news agency that has been publishing deep dives into environmental health issues in Ohio and Pennsylvania.
The group last year published an exposé on the oil and gas waste accepted at landfills in Ohio, like the Republic Services Carbon Limestone Landfill in Lowellville — which contains “technologically enhanced naturally occurring radioactive material,” or “TENORM.” That includes radium, a radioactive and cancer-causing element that can take 1,600 years to break down. As more is dumped, it settles into waterways, they said.
“Radium-226, in particular, is [what] we have heard people refer to as a ‘forever problem,’” Melissa Troutman, Public Herald editor, told Mahoning Matters. “One of the things the regulators have not acknowledged is that cumulative impact over time. If we’re going to be discharging that in the same discharge points for 30 years, what does that buildup look like?”
Last summer, Public Herald sought public records from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection to identify the 144 public and private facilities for the first time ever, and show how much radium they’re discharging.
The DEP in 2015 released a study on the radioactive material coming from state oil and gas operations — which the department said in a news release “shows there is little potential for radiation exposure from oil and gas development” — but never named the facilities where the material was treated or disposed.
According to Public Herald’s map, at sites in or near Mercer and Lawrence counties, the radium content of effluent measured as low as 60 picocuries per liter (pCi/L) and as high as 11,282 pCi/L.
The regulatory limit for radium in drinking water is 5 pCi/L.
“Some of the numbers … are shockingly high,” Conley said. “That can serve as information for scientists, citizens. It holds the DEP accountable. … They’re allowing this to be propagated across the state.”
Oil and gas waste to be treated at sites like Covanta Environmental Solutions, 61 Riverpark Drive, New Castle, came into the facility with a radium content of 54 pCi/L, but was discharged with a radium content of 203 pCi/L, according to Public Herald’s map.
“The waste leaving Covanta is actually ‘hotter’ than when it came in,” Public Herald Editor-in-Chief Joshua Boaz Pribanic told Mahoning Matters. “The information [the DEP is] sharing with the public does not align with their own study.”
The oil and gas industry is allowed to skirt federal hazardous waste regulations through a legal loophole granted to the industry in 1988, Troutman said.
“The drilling and fracking waste that comes up out of the hole is exempt from hazardous waste laws, even though … the EPA has acknowledged it does contain hazardous material,” she said. “Part of the reason the feds granted this was it was an economic boon to the industry.
“We’ve gone over the numbers and found that the industry could have been complying all this time and still been one of the most profitable industries in the world.”
Pribanic said the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency could also step in and change the companies’ federal waste discharging permits “at any time” — but they haven’t.
“We’ve been asking that question to the EPA. We haven’t been getting answers,” he said. “The culture of the EPA is not much different than the DEP. They’re complacent. [They believe] dilution is the solution to pollution.”
An EPA webpage addressing TENORM reads:
“The problem of TENORM contamination is now known to be widespread, occurring in oil and gas production facilities throughout the world. It has become a subject of attention in the United States and in other countries. In response to this concern, facilities in the U.S. and Europe have been characterizing the nature and extent of TENORM in oil and gas pipe scale, evaluating the potential for exposure to workers and the public, and developing methods for properly managing these low specific-activity wastes.
“Many states with oil and gas production facilities are currently creating their own NORM regulations,” it continues.
The state of New York closed its hazardous waste regulatory loophole in 2020. There’s currently pending legislation to do the same in Pennsylvania, but as of March 2, it had yet to have a committee hearing, Troutman said.
But state lawmakers are taking note, Pribanic said. Some have asked the Public Herald team to brief their constituents on TENORM, he said. Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf has allocated $3 million to study a cluster of cancer cases in the southwestern part of the state. That University of Pittsburgh Medical Center study can make use of Public Herald’s map, Pribanic said.
Conley said he thinks one of the major flaws in hazardous waste regulations is oversight agencies like the EPA aren’t actually designed to reduce harm — merely regulate it.
State-level data initially provided to Public Herald via its records request was inaccurate, and much of it was missing, Pribanic said. Public Herald successfully appealed the state’s open records office for the full dataset, he said.
“The most important next step would be for the attorney general’s office to issue indictments to the state agencies to reign in their permission for this to happen across the state over the last decade,” Pribanic said.
This story was originally published March 15, 2022 at 5:00 AM