Salt In Produced Water Might Be Harmful When Used For De-Icing Roads

Roads in New York and Pennsylvania get coated in oil and gas wastewater during the winter, since the high salt content melts snow and ice. But new research suggests this practice may be harmful to the environment.

"The salty liquid does a great job: The brine can be as much as 10 times saltier than typical road salt. Plus it comes cheap; oil and gas companies, glad not to have to pay for disposal, will sell it to towns for cheap, or give it away free,"Newsweek recently reported.

In both states, environmental regulators say that this process qualifies as "beneficial reuse." That means, "in legal terms, that recycling it in this way 'does not harm or threaten public health, safety, welfare or the environment,'" Newsweek reported. The produced water is pulled from conventional oil and gas sites, not fracking sites.

But according to Newsweek, new research shows that this practice may be dangerous.

"States barely track it; New York doesn’t know how much of the stuff is being used on its roads, and the Pennsylvania department charged with regulating it appeared to not fully understand its potential effects until Newsweek got in touch," the report said.

The magazine cited Avner Vengosh, a Duke University professor, to illustrate the negative effects of using produced water to melt ice on the roads.

Vengosh says that "the conventional drilling waste is nearly identical in many of its most toxic components to the highly controversial fracking waste. Vengosh says the levels of radioactive material found in conventional brine samples taken from New York are equal to levels he has seen in fracking brine, for example," Newsweek reported.

A study by Vengosh, published in January in Environmental Science & Technology, analyzed the contents of produced water from conventional oil and gas sites.

"The study shows high levels of iodide and ammonium in both hydraulic fracturing fluids and produced water from conventional oil and gas wells," according to Vengosh's website. "Elevated levels of iodide and ammonium (up to 50 times the EPA regulation for ammonium) were found also in effluents that are discharged to waterways from disposal sites in PA and a spill in WV that caused direct contamination of the associated streams and rivers."

So what does that say about produced water used to de-ice roads?

"While the volume of brine used to de-ice roads would be much lower than what was being dumped into rivers, Vengosh says it is important to keep in mind that 'you need a very tiny amount of ammonium for it to start to be toxic," Newsweek reported.

“No one was much aware of the ammonium.... We were very surprised to find that level in wastewater,” Vengosh said, per the report. “If it would be sewage [that was] being released on roads, it would have similar or less ammonium, and it would be criminal to release it like that.”

A spokesman for Pennsylvania's top environmental regulator responded to Newsweek on this issue.

“We don’t have any data to suggest that that is causing a problem. [Brine spreading] has literally been going on for at least this century and the last,” he said.