Coast Guard wants barges to ship fracking water : Stltoday

Coast Guard wants barges to ship fracking water : Stltoday

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"We expect that shale gas wastewater can be transported just as safely," said Jennifer Carpenter, of American Waterways Operators, a trade group based in Washington, D.C.

Environment America, a federation of 29 state-based groups, strongly disagrees. The group said in a statement that it gathered 29,000 comments opposed to the proposal from people around the country. Courtney Abrams, the clean water program director for the group, urged the Coast Guard to "reject this outrageous proposal."

Extracting natural gas trapped in shale formations requires pumping hundreds of thousands of gallons of water, sand and chemicals into the ground to break apart rock and free the gas. Some of that water, along with large quantities of existing underground water, returns to the surface, and it can contain high levels of salt, drilling chemicals, heavy metals and naturally occurring low-level radiation.

The Marcellus Shale formation, underlying large parts of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio and some neighboring states, is the nation's most productive natural gas field. Thousands of new wells have been drilled there since 2008, and hundreds of millions of gallons of wastewater needs to be disposed of each year.

Some states, such as Texas and Ohio, have many underground waste disposal wells. But Pennsylvania has only a few, meaning the leftovers have to be shipped elsewhere.