The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency has issued a final permit modification to the city of Warren to accept and process gas well wastewater from drilling in the Marcellus Shale.
"I believe the city sees this as a revenue generator. From EPA's perspective, we're obviously concerned with any potential environmental impacts that discharging this wastewater to the Mahoning River might have," said Mike Settles, Ohio EPA spokesperson.
The city will work with a private company, Patriot Water Treatment, to pretreat wastewater generated by oil and gas exploration.
"And it'll come to the wastewater treatment plant, where then it's further processed and further treated, and then discharged to the river just like any other industry," said Tom Angelo, director of water pollution control.
The Warren Pollution Control Center conducted a pilot project last winter to study the effects of this process and found it should have no impact on the Mahoning River or any drinking water sources.
"We looked at that report and concur with it; however, again, because we want to take this cautious approach, we did require Warren to do some increased monitoring once they start putting this wastewater through their plant and discharging it to the Mahoning," said Settles.
Warren is allowed to accept up to 100,000 gallons of pretreated wastewater per day, creating new jobs and investment.
"If you look at what it's done in Pennsylvania, it has brought in tens of thousands of jobs, and hundreds of thousands of dollars into the Pennsylvania economy," said Angelo. "So this is going to open up that potential now in the state of Ohio."
Angelo said the average flow to the Warren Pollution Control Center is about 12 million gallons per day. So an additional 100,000 gallons from Marcellus Shale deposits isn't really that much of their total volume by comparison.
City leaders said their treatment plant is ready to go right now as soon as Patriot Water Treatment starts to pretreat the waste to remove any heavy metals. Angelo said most of the wastewater will come to Warren from drill sites in western Pennsylvania.
