PA Environment Digest Blog: Inside Climate News: Fracking’s Forever Problem: 3 Articles On Tracking, Disposing Of Oil & Gas Waste In Pennsylvania

Sunday, December 21, 2025

Inside Climate News: Fracking’s Forever Problem: 3 Articles On Tracking, Disposing Of Oil & Gas Waste In Pennsylvania - Still A ‘Logistical Mess’

Last week, Inside Climate News published three articles by reporters Kiley Bense and Peter Aldhous on tracking the generation, recycling, treatment and disposal of waste and wastewater from Pennsylvania’s shale gas and conventional oil and gas industries.

They provide valuable information on oil and gas industry waste management practices.

Part I - Tracking Oil & Gas Waste

Tracking Oil And Gas Industry Waste In Pennsylvania Is Still A ‘Logistical Mess’ Attempts to answer the basic questions: How much toxic oil and gas waste is produced in Pennsylvania every year, and where does it end up?

Despite state efforts to track it, there’s no way to know for sure.

For more than a decade, regulators have been aware of significant problems with their tracking system for the large volumes of waste created by Pennsylvania’s booming fracking industry.

Eleven years ago, reporters at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette found that nine Pennsylvania landfills had reported accepting tens of thousands of tons of oil and gas waste more than industry operators said were being sent there.

Two years ago, a University of Pittsburgh and Duquesne University study found the same unexplained gaps, this time totaling more than 800,000 tons.

The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection promised to investigate the discrepancies and look into updating its reporting standards for companies.

But an Inside Climate News analysis of state records from 2017 to 2024 found that the problem persists. The analysis revealed discrepancies totaling almost 1.4 million tons.

Click Here for the full article.

Part II - Radioactive Oil & Gas Waste

In 20 Years Into Shale Gas Fracking, Pennsylvania Has Yet To Reckon With Its Radioactive Waste former government officials say the state isn’t doing enough to regulate fracking waste, even as new research shows it’s far more radioactive than previously known.

When John Quigley became the secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection in 2015, he knew that he would be busy trying to keep up with the consequences of the state’s rapid increase in natural gas production.

But when reports landed on his desk that trucks carrying oil and gas waste were tripping radioactivity alarms at landfills, he was especially concerned.

“There was obviously a problem that the state was not dealing with,” Quigley said. “Which was the threat to not only public health, but to the folks driving the trucks and people handling the waste in the oil and gas industry. They were unnecessarily put at risk.”

Ten years after the alarms first unsettled Quigley, fracking in Pennsylvania has continued to grow, generating huge volumes of oil and gas waste and wastewater in the process.

Seventy-two percent of the solid waste ends up in landfills within state borders, and a truck carrying it sets off a radioactivity alarm every day on average, an Inside Climate News analysis found.

David Allard, former Director of DEP's Bureau of Radiation Protection who oversaw a 2016 DEP investigation into radioactivity in oil and gas waste said, “We tried to make it as comprehensive as possible, but I think it is timely to go back and visit some of these things.”

Road-spreading, the practice of using salty [conventional] oil and gas wastewater as a dust suppressant, is another area where he says the study could have done more to figure out how much radioactivity was ending up in the environment as a result.

Click Here for the full article.

Part III - Abandoned Mine & Oil & Gas Waste In PA Waterways

The ‘Toxic Cocktail’ Brewing In Pennsylvania’s Waterways describes how Pennsylvania is still cleaning up decades’ worth of coal mining pollution. Now it must also contend with millions of tons of fracking waste, some of it radioactive.

Off a back road in the hilly country south of Pittsburgh, a tributary to the Monongahela River runs through overgrown vegetation and beneath an abandoned railroad trestle, downstream from the Westmoreland Sanitary Landfill.

On a cool day in late July, it was swollen with rain. Tire tracks through the dense brush were puddled with muddy water.

Environmental scientist Yvonne Sorovacu and local watershed advocate Hannah Hohman, her glasses spattered with raindrops, stood together under an umbrella, watching the tumble of the stream.

Both women visit the landfill site regularly to collect water samples and record signs of contamination.

The water here, which flows downhill from the landfill’s discharge point, is often coated with stiff globs of foam, Sorovacu said. The water upstream of the outfall is clear.

Over the course of more than a decade, as Pennsylvania’s fracking industry took off, the Westmoreland landfill accepted hundreds of thousands of tons of oil and gas waste and wastewater, toxic and often radioactive byproducts that contain elements and heavy metals from deep inside the earth and synthetic chemicals used in the drilling process.

That melange can include radionuclides like radium, uranium and thorium as well as harmful substances like arsenic, lead and benzene.

After years of violations at Westmoreland, scientists and residents are keeping a close watch on the landfill, monitoring for any signs that runoff has made its way into public waterways.

But oil and gas waste is going to landfills across the state, often with far less scrutiny. At least twenty-two other landfills currently take Pennsylvania oil and gas waste, and some also accept it from other states.

Click Here for the full article.

Video Discussion

Click Here to watch a video of reporter Kiley Bense talking about the series and Pennsylvania’s oil and gas industry waste issues.

PA Oil & Gas Industry Public Notice Dashboards:

-- PA Oil & Gas Weekly Compliance Dashboard - Dec. 13 to 19 -- Shale Gas Abandoned Well Violations Hit 70; Conventional Well Not Plugged For 2,045 Days; MarkWest Loses Another 69,000 Gallons Of Pipeline Drilling Fluid To Mine Voids [PaEN]

-- DEP: MarkWest Liberty Midstream Reports 69,000 Gallon Pipeline Construction Fluid Loss Into Mine Voids Under Washington County; 476,600 Gallons Lost So Far [PaEN]

-- PA Oil & Gas Industrial Facilities: Permit Notices, Opportunities To Comment - December 20 [PaEN]

-- Susquehanna River Basin Commission Approves 3 Shale Gas Water Withdrawal Requests; 22 Total For 2025 [PaEN]

-- Susquehanna River Basin Commission Approved 31 Shale Gas Well Pad Water Use General Permits In November; 429 In 2025 [PaEN]

-- DEP Posted 51 Pages Of Permit-Related Notices In December 20 PA Bulletin [PaEN]

-- DEP Invites Comments On Renewal Of The NPDES Wastewater Permit For The BET Associates IV, LLC Anthracite Mining Discharge In Schuylkill, Carbon Counties Affecting 7,479 Acres [PaEN]