Whistleblower Decries ‘Unregulated’ Fracking Wastewater Network in Pa.

A whistleblowing Pennsylvania oil and gas worker, together with the state’s former lead environmental regulator, are ringing the alarm bell on an unregulated and shadowy network of pipelines at least hundreds, and perhaps even thousands of miles long. The pipeline system was constructed over the past decade by oil and gas operators in Pennsylvania to transport toxic and radioactive fracking wastewater. 

“There is no oversight,” said Robert Green, who works in southwestern Pennsylvania as a hydrostatic tester, a niche job in the industry that involves assuring pipelines can appropriately handle the complex and often hazardous fuels and waste streams they contain. “They don’t even understand how to appropriately regulate these pipelines,” Green said.

The regulatory abyss is recognized even among those who have worked at the top of Pennsylvania’s environmental regulatory structure.

“No state agency has authority over how these wastewater pipelines are constructed, operated and monitored, not Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), or the state’s Public Utility Commission, and as a result there are no standards,” said David Hess, who led DEP from 2001 to 2003. He now runs a popular environmental news site, PA Environment Digest Blog, and in July ran a story on the fracking wastewater pipelines, revealing this waste can be toxic and radioactive, and that the pipelines leak regularly. 

“Again,” Hess said, “there is no regulation.”

Related A Slow-Rolling Disaster in Fracking Country

In one fracking wastewater pipeline failure that occurred in 2022, 18,000 gallons of waste spilled from a pipeline operated by an oil and gas company called Seneca Resources and into a wooded landscape in Cameron County, in north-central Pennsylvania, contaminating the water well of John Rosenberger, a retired state trooper, and his wife, Paige. 

The Rosenbergers ended up showering in what was dangerously toxic and radioactive fracking waste. Seneca is the oil and gas exploration and production segment of National Fuel Gas Company, headquartered in Houston. In April 2023, the couple filed a lawsuit over the ruination of their aquifer in Cameron County Court of Common Pleas, against Seneca Resources and Highland Field Services, a subsidiary created by Seneca to manage fracking wastewater. Seneca Resources has not replied to requests for comment. Depositions in the case are due in March 2025.

“I have been to the ocean many times, got saltwater in my mouth — it was far saltier than that,” John said.

“We actually met with the Department of Environmental Protection and asked them what the regulations are,”  Paige said. “And there are none.” 

It is a stunning lack of regulatory authority for a waste stream that has been shown to pose considerable risks to oil and gas country communities and the industry’s workers. 

Oil and gas development brings an extensive liquid waste stream to the surface often referred to by the industry as brine or “produced water.” Despite these innocent names, brine can contain extraordinary levels of salts and highly elevated levels of hazardous heavy metals like lead, arsenic and the radioactive metal radium. Brine from the Marcellus formation, which underlies much of Pennsylvania, can be particularly radioactive, with radium levels recorded by DEP registering at 5,700 times the safe drinking water limit EPA has set, and nearly 500 times the limit at which the agency defines a liquid waste stream as radioactive. DEP found even average radium levels in Marcellus brine to be nearly 1,900 times the safe drinking water limit.

“Produced water is cradle-to-grave toxic waste,” said State Sen. Katie Muth, D-Chester/Montgomery/Berks, who has been closely tracking a blossoming of oilfield waste-related problems across her state. 

The fracking wastewater pipelines may hold brine as well as another toxic and radioactive industry waste stream called flowback, which contains heavy metals, radioactivity and toxic chemicals used in the fracking process spewed back to the surface. “And they are running it all through these plastic pipes,” said Muth, who has become increasingly frustrated by the industry’s recklessness and her state’s paltry regulatory response. “These are completely unregulated pipelines of toxic and radioactive shit.” 

It is a regulatory failure that directly confronts the messaging of Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who received national attention this year as a contender to be Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate. Shapiro has promoted an “all-of-the-above” energy policy that relies on the controversial techniques of modern fracking as a hallmark of his governorship. 

“My administration is setting a new standard for Pennsylvania natural gas to be produced in a responsible, sustainable way,” Shapiro stated in April, in discussing a collaboration with oil and gas operator CNX, a notorious polluter in the state. The collaboration, called “Radical Transparency,” features the energy company monitoring its own emissions, and environmentalists have ridiculed the plan.  

However, Green, the industry whistleblower, said he believes Shapiro and operators such as CNX have whitewashed the industry’s problems and are covering up the dilemma Pennsylvania faces in dealing with the more than 1.5 billion gallons of oil and gas wastewater the state produces each year.

“The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection has kept this quiet for the sake of this industry,” Green said. “I have spoken several times with the Pennsylvania state attorney general’s office regarding these pipelines, and the Pennsylvania Utility Commission, and them and the governor have all failed miserably.” 

The Pennsylvania Utility Commission’s “Bureau of Technical Utility Services has no information on such systems,” press secretary Nils Hagen-Frederiksen told DeSmog. “Questions would best be directed to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.”

DEP has not replied to questions from DeSmog. Shapiro’s office and CNX have also not replied to questions. 

“While EPA does not collect this data, DOT PHMSA [Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration] or the aforementioned states may have this data and the answers to these questions,” EPA spokesperson Dominique Joseph stated when asked about the wastewater issue. PHMSA also did not reply when reached for comment.

“The problem,” Green said, “is many of these producers think they are above the law, and feel like they can’t be held accountable.” 

Oilfield brine: A thorn in the industry’s side 

Disposing of oilfield brine is an enormously difficult problem for the industry. 

The substance, reads one 1953 report of the Michigan Geological Survey, is the “oilmen’s headache” and “can do severe damage to animal, aquatic and vegetable life and to fresh water supplies.” Early disposal practices involved discharging brine into unlined pits, swamps, creeks, culverts, bays and bayous — whatever pathway was cheap and convenient in carrying the stuff away; out of sight and mind. 

“The problem started in 1859,” said Hess, the former lead DEP regulator, referring to the fact that the first commercial oil well was drilled in Titusville, Pa., in 1859. “Every well from the time it is drilled until it is plugged produces wastewater, day in and day out, and it has to be dealt with,” he added. 

During the 1980s and 1990s, hundreds of millions of gallons of oilfield brine in Pennsylvania were annually disposed of at treatment plants that discharged supposedly treated wastewater back to some of the same Pennsylvania waterways state residents rely on for drinking water. This practice carried forward into the modern fracking boom, which kicked off across the state in 2005, and is “creating a long-term” source of radioactivity in local creeks, wrote Penn State researchers in a paper published this year in the journal “Science of the Total Environment,” which documents oilfield radioactivity accumulating in freshwater mussels in the Allegheny River. 

Presently, about 96 percent of the oilfield brine generated each year in America — some trillion gallons — is disposed of at controversial facilities called injection wells, where the waste is injected deep underground. But communities have grown increasingly critical of this disposal practice, and reporting revealed in a recent book, “Petroleum-238: Big Oil’s Dangerous Secret and the Grassroots Fight to Stop It” (written by the author of this story), conveys that early officials with the U.S. Geological Survey, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, and the EPA all criticized injection wells as being unreliable and scientifically meritless. “We really do not know what happens to the wastes down there,” stated Stanley Greenfield, EPA assistant administrator for research and monitoring, in 1971. “We just hope.”

Regardless of where the waste is ultimately disposed, it has to get there, which in the oil and gas industry has typically meant transport by truck. But trucks filled with fracking waste have also become a thorn in the side for the industry. “We are getting yelled at from landowners, we get cussed at, we get flicked off, they hate us with a passion,” said Richard Cummins, an Ohio trucker who hauled waste for a decade across the Marcellus formation. 

It is this distaste, even in the heart of oil and gas country, for fracking wastewater and the trucks that carry it, combined with the high cost of fueling them, that appears to have made fracking wastewater pipelines a popular alternative in some oilfields in recent decades. In the oil-rich Bakken formation in North Dakota, transporting fracking wastewater by pipeline has become a practice that is both commonplace and littered with problems that pose risks to public health. 

A 2014 New York Times investigation revealed that from 2006 to the middle of October 2014, 11.8 million gallons of oilfield brine spilled in North Dakota, an average rate of almost 3 gallons a minute. On the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in the western part of the state, Duke University geochemist Avner Vengosh found that even a year after a million-gallon brine spill on a hillside above Lake Sakakawea, which is the tribe’s primary source of drinking water, the land remained contaminated with radioactivity and would continue to be “for thousands of years.” 

One issue raised in this research: In rural areas, pipelines of fracking wastewater can leak copious amounts of waste before anyone even notices there is a problem. 

A whistleblower speaks out 

In 2013, Jodi Borello, a community organizer with Center for Coalfield Justice, an environmental advocacy group based in Washington County, one of the most heavily fracked areas in Pennsylvania, investigated a pipeline going through her backyard. She figured it was just another one for carrying natural gas out of the region. But she was stunned to learn the lines were actually carrying waste. After noticing the pipelines had access points visible from Google Earth, she spent hours poring over aerial images and put together maps linking the system together. “I became obsessed,” Borello said. “I had to know what was being run through these pipelines and where it was all going.” 

The latter question remains unanswered, but a few years ago Borello connected with Green, who knew the answer to the first question, because he tested the pipelines for a living. As operators do with cranes and other important load-bearing structures, Green’s job is to ensure the pipelines can operate at pressures reasonably beyond what is typical for the system. “But when I got into it,” Green said, “I realized they were having all kinds of issues.” 

The pipelines are made of high-density polyethylene (HDPE), a type of plastic known for strength, and are typically from 4 to 24 inches in diameter. They are pieced together in 40-foot segments, Green said, and can be run along the surface or buried. Both methods invite problems. Running pipes aboveground puts them at risk of damage by rocks, water, tree roots and most importantly, Green said, the sun, which heats the pipes and causes thermal expansion that over time weakens its integrity. Running the waste pipelines below ground risks “that they can have slow leaks, literally for years, and no one would ever know,” he said. 

The best size estimate of the network that former DEP regulator Hess could provide was that there are “hundreds of miles of wastewater pipelines” in Pennsylvania. Another issue involves the hilly and rugged Pennsylvania topography that the unregulated fracking waste pipeline system traverses. “As you drape them over miles of hills, fluid lays at the bottom in the valleys, and its weight exerts a pressure and strain that affects the integrity of the pipe at higher elevations,” Green said. “The higher you go up in elevation, the more pressure you will have, and that can cause ruptures.” 

Unlike steel pipelines, whose sections are welded together, the plastic pipeline segments are fused with heat. The connections become points of potential future weakness and rupture, Green said. 

There is also the issue of the toxic and radioactive waste running through the pipelines. “The salt water, sand and chemicals in the waste will corrode pipes, and while it is better for them to be plastic than steel because of the corrosive factor, the produced water does eat these pipes,” Green said. “It permeates the plastic and degrades the polyethylene.” 

The chemicals and contaminants in the waste running through the pipes are solids, and these solids settle out as a sludge that accumulate at the bottom of the pipe, particularly at points of low flow within the pipeline. Industry reports convey that this sludge can be highly radioactive, posing a problem for a shadowy group of oil and gas workers called “piggers” who clean pipelines, Green said. It also is a disposal problem for what’s to be done with the resulting toxic and radioactive waste. Left in the pipeline, the waste can impede flow and degrade the pipe. “There is no plan on how to abandon these lines at the end of their use,” Green said. 

“I have turned all of this information into the state of Pennsylvania and they’ve shown no interest in correcting their procedures and acting on it,” Green said. “The enforcement that is out there doesn’t even know what they are supposed to be looking at. DEP is shirking their responsibility.” 

DEP has not replied to DeSmog’s questions about how many leaks have occurred, but Hess said he believes that based on DEP’s Oil and Gas Inspection Reports, leaks in the system may occur “frequently.” Green, meanwhile, put out an open challenge to the agency and the governor’s office: “Show me where they have a procedure to show that these lines are not leaking underground.” 

In December 2023, in response to the announcement of the partnership between CNX and Shapiro’s administration for the Radical Transparency program, Green said he wrote a letter to CNX’s board of directors. 

“It seems like a good time to take the transparency of the hydrostatic test of HDPE water pipeline to the next level as well,” Green wrote. “There are many issues challenging these lines that are not covered by current procedures.” 

His biggest concern? That leaks would occur in a way that puts people and their water at risk. In one Pennsylvania community, that has already happened.

An unregulated system confronts human harms

The trouble for John and Paige Rosenberger began on the morning of July 4, 2022. They turned on their faucet to find no water and, realizing that their well pump was not functioning properly, called a plumber. 

The retired state trooper and his wife live on 46 acres in Cameron County, in north-central Pennsylvania, within a sweet-spot region of Marcellus shale development. A plumber arrived the following afternoon, and by the evening of July 5, the Rosenbergers had a new pump installed. They had been two days without a shower in the height of summer, and both eagerly jumped in different showers. 

“I am a kind of hairy guy and I can’t lather up, so I am like, ‘What’s going on here?’” John recalled. “I take a drink and spit it out. It was the saltiest water I have ever tasted in my life.”

An oil and gas company called Seneca Resources operates in their area, and John said that in a conversation that occurred on July 6 with one of Seneca’s executives, he was told, “This is 100 percent our fault. We had a fracking wastewater spill on Sunday, July 3rd, at 4 p.m. where a pipe ruptured and the fracking wastewater spewed into the air, into the forest and ran down the hillside” and “disappeared in a hollow.” John said that the executive told him that 18,000 gallons of waste had spilled, the equivalent of about four truckloads. 

DEP inspectors investigated the spill on July 5 and issued a report on the “Four Mile Hollow Run brine release,” which they said was caused by a rupture to a “16” HDPE aboveground brine line that released “flowback fluids” into the environment.

“The soils and waters of the Commonwealth were contaminated” and “this contamination constitutes a creation of a danger of pollution and pollution as defined in the Clean Streams Law,” stated a DEP report issued several days later. “The inspection conducted on July 6, 2022, revealed impacts to soil and surface water that extend for approximately 1 mile downstream from the release point. Additionally, groundwater impacts were discovered at a nearby residence indicating contamination has migrated to the subsurface to an unknown degree.” The Rosenbergers live approximately a mile from the ruptured pipeline.

DEP sent samples to be tested for metals known to be constituents in fracking waste, such as lithium and strontium. Samples taken by Moody and Associates for Seneca Resources on July 6, 2022, conveyed that levels of salts and barium — also known constituents in fracking waste — were thousands of times higher than baseline tests conducted for the family by Penn State University’s Agricultural Analytical Services Laboratory in 2020 and 2021. 

On July 22, 2022, at the Rosenbergers’ request, Moody did a test of their well water for radioactivity. It found radium-226 at 222 picocuries per liter (pCi/L), 44 times EPA’s safe drinking water limit of 5 pCi/L, and more than three times above the threshold at which EPA defines a stream of waste as “radioactive.” The results showed that levels of the radioactive element thorium, a dangerous carcinogen, were also shockingly high.  

“I would be concerned about the Rosenbergers drinking that water,” William Burgos, a Penn State environmental engineer professor who has done extensive research on oil and gas wastewater, told PA Environment Digest Blog after reviewing the results.

“There is the potential for exposure, and that can lead to health impacts including kidney damage, liver damage, cancer and also neurological conditions,” said Larysa Dyrszka, a retired pediatrician and co-founder of Concerned Health Professionals of New York, an advocacy group that tracks the literature on the health effects of fracking contamination. “The impacts depend on the nature of the toxin and amount of exposure,” she said. “The health effects could possibly be great, and that should be taken into consideration in their lawsuit.”

For the Rosenbergers, what began as the holiday surprise of a broken water pump, an unpleasant shower and a sip of extraordinarily salty water turned into the fight of their lives and provided them a new window into the state’s fracking boom.

Their lawsuit in Cameron County Court of Common Pleas seeks compensation for the ruin of the aquifer that provides the family’s drinking, bathing and cooking water, and also punitive damages for, as Paige put it, “the extraordinary number of fracking wastewater spills” that have occurred along Seneca’s fracking wastewater pipeline system over the past several years. Depositions are due in March 2025, and the couple is hoping a jury trial will be scheduled for the summer or fall.

“We had never sued anyone in our lives for anything but we were given no choice,” John said. “Our aquifer is ruined, our land is ruined, and the home we moved into for retirement is gone. We are the first family in Cameron County to be affected, but this is going to be happening more and more.”

“DEP is not going to make them change, but maybe a lawsuit will compel them to think twice about dragging these pipelines around,” added Paige. “We are not just fighting for ourselves, we are fighting for the residents of Cameron County and victims all across Pennsylvania.”