Living on Earth: “Arsenic and Frackwater Waste”
FrackCheckWV
Living on Earth: “Arsenic and Frackwater Waste”
Public Radio International — Living on Earth: “Arsenic & Frackwater Waste”
From Steve Curwood, et al., Living on Earth, PRI, July 10, 2015
STEVE CURWOOD: It’s Living on Earth. I’m Steve Curwood. Earlier this year, the US Geological Service detailed what exactly it found in wastewater left over from fracking natural gas and oil.
Treating and disposing of the huge amounts of noxious wastewater that result from frack wells depends on a proper analysis of the water, and a few months ago, Reid Frazier of the public radio program the Allegheny Front checked in on the scientists hard at work to figure this out.
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FRAZIER: The sediment is from a clean streambed. It’s been inside the bottle for 90 days. Akob holds up a second bottle. This one’s not so clear. Inside of it is sand from a stream in West Virginia that was polluted by a leaking oil and gas wastewater impoundment.
AKOB: You actually can’t even see through the bottle.
FRAZIER: An orange goo coats the sides of the second bottle. The goo is iron oxide–rust. It’s the result of a chemical reaction between microbes in the sediment and contamination in the streambed. The experiment is part of a research project at the USGS to determine the risk posed by fracking wastewater. The oil and gas industry produces billions of gallons of this waste every year. It’s the briny liquid that comes out of a well after it’s been hydraulically fractured with millions of gallons of water. The waste is tainted with chemicals from fracking fluid, and has toxic levels of metals and salts from underground formations.
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FRAZIER: And some bacteria eat crude oil and chemicals found in oil and gas waste. So if some it spills on the ground, it’s like an all you can eat buffet for bacteria. That seems like good news right? The bugs can eat the contamination. But there is a catch. These bugs need to breathe, too. And they need to breathe more when they’re given a large new food source, like a frackwater spill. But underground, there is very little oxygen. Cozzarelli’s group says the bacteria they study evolved to thrive in this inhospitable environment.
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FRAZIER: That’s right. These bacteria don’t need oxygen to breathe. They can even breathe in metals, like iron. Here’s where the problem starts though. The more food they get from a spill, the more iron they breathe. Iron minerals found in soil are a frequent host for another element – arsenic, a known human carcinogen. When a bacteria breathes that iron in, the arsenic is released, and becomes water-soluble.
COZZARELLI: And you can get more arsenic released into groundwater.
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