DEP may partner with drillers to clean up acid mine drainage

The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection and several Marcellus Shale drillers are hoping to band together to tackle a major environmental issue by turning the drillers’ need for millions of gallons of water into an opportunity to clean up acid mine drainage.

The department has been in discussions with Range Resources Corp., Seneca Resources Corp. and others about a new way to ensure that Pennsylvania’s 5,000 miles of streams and rivers impaired by the orange, metal-heavy discharge from abandoned mines are kept clean.

Currently, local watershed organizations and the DEP treat mine drainage using, among other things, state Growing Greener grants that sunset next year.

“I think there’s a crisis looming across the state,” said Mark Fedosick, president of the Montour Run Watershed Association, whose latest mine drainage treatment system opened on Nov. 6 in Findlay Township.

Fedosick said he wonders where watershed groups like his will find funding when the grants expire. Adding to that anxiety is the seemingly infinite lifespan of an abandoned mine.

“Discharges don’t dry up. They’re ground water. They’re being fed by streams,” said J. Scott Horrell, environmental program manager with the state’s Bureau of Abandoned Mine Reclamation.

At the same time, the natural gas industry is facing a problem of its own — it needs millions of gallons of water to fracture each well, a process that involves pumping the water mixed with chemicals into the dense rock at such high pressure as to crack it and release the natural gas trapped inside.

Full article, click here.