ITHACA — Multiple drilling companies have approached the Ithaca Area Wastewater Treatment Plant about the possibility of Ithaca treating the wastewater they generate looking for natural gas in the Marcellus Shale.
The companies have not disclosed all the chemicals they add to water during hydraulic fracturing, and city officials repeatedly emphasized that Ithaca would not even consider taking any wastewater without complete information on the chemicals.
The Ithaca wastewater plant discharges into Cayuga Lake and is overseen by a state Department of Environmental Conservation permit, both good reasons to be sure that anything coming into the plant can be treated and safely discharged, said Superintendent of Public Works Bill Gray.
“They don't want to tell everything because they consider it to be ‘secrets of the trade,'” Gray said. “And we don't care so much about secrets of the trade. We need to know whether we can treat it.”
The Marcellus Shale runs beneath parts of Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and southern New York and is estimated to contain between 168 trillion to 516 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, according to the DEC Web site.
Enhancements in gas drilling technology, especially in horizontal well drilling and hydraulic fracturing, have renewed interest in the Marcellus Shale and raised fears about potential groundwater contamination and overuse of local water supplies.
Hydraulic fracturing requires as much as 1 million gallons of water per well, according to the DEC.
Disposing of that water, plus the chemicals added to make it more effective, is another environmentally sensitive issue.
At least one company has expressed interest in both bringing water to the plant to treat and trucking away treated wastewater to use in additional hydraulic fracturing, Gray said.
Jeff Soule, chief operator of the Ithaca Area Wastewater Treatment Plant, said the plant first began getting inquiries from gas drilling companies about six weeks ago.
The wastewater plant does currently treat wastewater that comes from outside the normal sewer systems they serve in the City and Town of Ithaca and the Town of Dryden, Soule said.
This includes processing septage pumped out of rural septic systems and sludge from other facilities, but these sources constitute a tiny fraction of what the wastewater plant processes, he said.
The wastewater plant treats about 5 million gallons per day and only takes in from outside sources about 1 million gallons per year, Soule said.
Taking in outside material is a revenue source for the primarily taxpayer-funded wastewater plant — it accounted for $300,000 out of a $2.6 million budget in 2007, according to the 2008 wastewater plant budget.
The plant is in the midst of a twice-per-decade study intended to give plant operators a better idea of what kind of additional capacity the plant can handle, Soule said.
“The engineering firm that is helping us, we've told them that we're getting some requests about this and we'd like to kind of focus the study on whether we can accept this water or not,” he said.
Yancey Roy, head of the DEC press office in Albany, said wastewater plants across the state have been approached by gas drilling companies, and the main issue of concern has not been so much unnamed chemicals as it is plain salt.
“It's briny. That's the main issue. It's so, so salty,” Roy said. “In the state there might be some wastewater treatment plants that wouldn't accept it simply because they wouldn't be able to handle it and it might foul up their operations.”
The DEC is reviewing its general environmental impact statement related to gas drilling, and companies in New York are waiting until that review is complete, Roy said.
But drilling is moving forward in Pennsylvania, and Ithaca isn't that far from the border, Soule and Gray both noted.
Wade Wykstra, chairman of the wastewater plant's Special Joint Committee, emphasized that the plant would not take any water without knowing what was in it and whether it could be safely discharged into Cayuga Lake.
“Certainly our plant doors are not open to just you know, ‘Bring it and we'll run it through,'” Wykstra said. “We are very careful. And people should know that.”
