Deep disposal well fight comes to small town

• An EPA hearing aired debate over proposed rural 'fracking' waste water wells
• A National Research Council report in June warned of earthquake risks from the deep wells
• The hearing drew loud concern over disposal well safety near towns

LUTHERSBURG, Pa. — Hunters, homeowners, Amish farmers and Boy Scouts in their uniforms: No dancing was planned, but the parking lot was full at the community center.

When it comes to debates about people's water, pollution and the "fracking" boom reshaping small towns nationwide, the Environmental Protection Agency officials here for a public hearing must have known things might get a little crowded, and a little rowdy.

"We are here to listen to your comments, not to make any decisions," said the EPA's Karen Johnson at a community center hearing held on Dec. 10. Johnson and three other officials from EPA's Philadelphia office came to hear public comments on a proposed deep waste-water well proposed for a hilltop just outside the city of DuBois, a nearby town of about 8,000 people. They faced about 200 people interested in the prospects of their town becoming a place where the waste water from some of the several thousand hydraulic fracturing wells now dotting the state would be forced under pressure into a hole in the ground some 7,300 feet deep, the proposed Zelman #1 injection well.

Here, the bill for America's energy boom might come due. Hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking", deep shale layers underneath Appalachia, Texas and other parts of the country produces natural gas, lots of it, enough to cut its price from $8 to $3 or less for a thousand cubic feet since 2008. Each fracking well can also produce hundreds of thousands of gallons of waste water, loaded with salt, chemicals and radionuclides from deep underground. That waste water can either be treated or dumped, and dumping it down a deep hole into a porous layer of limestone such as the one proposed for DuBois, is a cheaper option.

People at the meeting weren't very pleased with the prospect. "We're not here to have an argument," Johnson said to one man before the formal start of the hearing, who accused the EPA of "protecting big corporations making money off us," from the crowd. (Regularly depicted by critics as regulation-happy tree-huggers, the EPA officials at the hearing found themselves accused of protecting plutocrats from a crowd drawn from one of the most conservative parts of Pennsylvania.)

In June, a National Research Councilreport concluded that unlike fracking wells, deep-injection wells can pose a risk of causing earthquakes. A series of quakes in 2011 outside Youngstown, Ohio, tied to a disposal well culminated in a small temblor felt as far as DuBois, which forced that state to shut down the injection well. Unlike Ohio, Pennsylvania has only five such disposal wells already in operation, and none are right next to a town.

"Earthquakes are a legitimate concern in and around the well site," argued Randall Baird, a homeowner who lives on the street below the hilltop site of the proposed well. He echoed comments made by many people at the hearing. Many noted faults in the rock layers above the limestone intended for the disposal of the waste water.

In response, the EPA's Johnson said that the Youngstown, Ohio, quakes seem tied to disposal well operators injecting waste water to 9,000-foot-deep "basement" bedrock depths instead of 6,000-foot layers of porous rock.

However, "people in this town should be concerned," says injection well earthquake expert Leonardo Seeber of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y. "I don't think EPA has a very good handle on estimating the risk of earthquakes from injection wells," says Seeber, who says he supports use of deep disposal wells where appropriate. "There are faults everywhere in this region, and most of them we have no clue about. It's safer to just assume they are there when you do the analysis."

The basic way that injection wells are thought to trigger earthquakes is by putting fluids under pressure into contact with faults, essentially cracks running through rock layers, that tip them into buckling further. In the middle of a continent where there are usually few earthquakes, the crust is under tremendous pressure, Seeber says, "so just a little extra pressure can push faults to move unexpectedly." Sometimes, pressure from wells can take up to a decade to make their presence felt on a fault, he adds, long after the fluids were pumped underground.

The EPA issued a draft permit for the proposed injection well in April under safe drinking water regulations, Johnson reminded the crowd, so earthquakes by themselves weren't the agency's big concern as much as leaks from the well. Earthquakes aside, the town is honeycombed with coal mines and old gas wells that could be contaminated by the disposal well fluids, Baird and others contended, noting shafts within the well permit review area that run out to near the city's reservoir.

To comply with EPA regulations the well's mouth would be surrounded by three layers of steel casing pipe, with the innermost 8-inch one cemented to 1,000 feet deep, and with 24-hour monitoring of the well pressure, said Michael Hoover of Windfall Oil and Gas Inc., in Falls Creek, Pa. "I was born and raised here in this community, and I intend to stay here. I truly would not have proposed this if I thought it would cause a health hazard to anyone."

In three decades of EPA regulation, no such injection well has ever ruptured, Johnson said. Why not put it somewhere farther away from a town then, suggested State Rep. Matt Gabler,who noted the rural state has plenty of more remote places.

It being central Pennsylvania, the rain outside had turned to snow by the time the meeting ended, and Johnson extended the public comment period to Dec. 17 to accommodate folks who needed to get home early. People shouted at times, and a state trooper watched the proceedings from the back of the room, but the meeting ended amicably enough. The agency is expected to decide on a final permit for the disposal well next year, after all the comments are considered.

"These are exactly the arguments we should be having about the costs of these resources and the waste they create," Seeber says. "We should recover this energy and use it, but we have to be realistic and honest about the risks, and the limits of what we know."