Presidential candidate Kamala Harris recently announced that, if elected, she would not ban fracking, re-igniting a debate that has roiled national politics again and again. Her new position seems to be based on the mistaken belief that fracking enjoys public support, when, in fact, an array of public opinion research shows that a clear majority of American voters—including in swing states like Pennsylvania—are opposed to it.
The debate over fracking often overlooks some of the most potent reasons why people nearby worry about the practice. Fracking for oil and gas produces a slew of toxic waste products. This waste is exceedingly difficult to manage and it contains numerous hidden dangers to both human health and the environment.
Studies have repeatedly found high levels of radioactive materials in rivers and streams near municipal wastewater treatment plants that handle runoff from the landfills that accept fracking waste from Pennsylvania. Radiation found in fracking chemicals is known to cause lymphomas, leukemia, and bone cancer when ingested or exposed. It may be no surprise then that the Pennsylvania Department of Health was forced to look into a cluster of rare cancer diagnoses among children and young adults in the Washington County school district, home to more fracking wells than any other county in the state. The study confirmed that children living close to active wells had an outsized risk of developing lymphoma and asthma.
Politicians looking for political safe ground when it comes to the issue of fracking could find it by supporting the commonsense regulation of its waste in order to protect public health. The problem (or benefit, depending on your view of fracking) is that forcing the fracking industry to pay the full cost to safely dispose of its waste could very well put it out of business.
Fracking is clearly harmful. Its waste products are even worse.
More than a decade of scientific research is clear and well documented: fracking takes an extraordinary toll on the environment and on public health. It results in air and water pollution, massive overuse of freshwater, runaway leakage of methane, a potent climate-warming gas, and more.
To extract oil and gas, fracking operations use millions of gallons of freshwater mixed with chemical additives. The resulting mixture, sometimes known as “flowback” or “produced water,” is a major problem. This liquid waste contains heavy metals, dangerous levels of radiation in the form of Radium-226 and Radium-228, and other contaminants, many of which are known carcinogens or otherwise harmful to human health. The vast majority of liquid waste, an estimated 97%, is not reused for further extraction and instead is transported off-site and injected into one of the estimated 180,000 Class II injection wells in operation throughout the US.
And it’s a lot of waste. According to data self-reported by industry to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), the state’s fracking industry generated about 2.6 billion gallons of liquid waste from oil and gas in 2022. That’s roughly equivalent to 4,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools full of toxic and radioactive liquid material from just one year of fracking in one state.
What to do with all that waste?
Since fracking began in earnest in the Marcellus shale formation, the waste has been a problem. As far back as 2009, a ProPublica report showed that the Pennsylvania DEP was caught off guard by the amount of wastewater the industry would produce—and state regulators have been playing catch-up ever since. Among other problems, wastewater treatment plants were unprepared to accept contaminated industrial waste and were unaware of necessary permits or modifications required.
Then Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell commissioned a report in 2009 that concluded Pennsylvania would need to spend $100 billion over the next 20 years to maintain its aging sewage plants and pipelines. To fund such an extensive overhaul, the report recommended a combination of state and federal subsidies along with rate hikes on water customers, once again suggesting taxpayers should shoulder the monstrous cost of upgrades to their wastewater infrastructure to accommodate for-profit gas companies.
It was a foreseeable problem. The liquid, sludge and solid wastes produced during the fracking process have long been a problem for industry, one that insiders have been aware of since the widespread adoption of fracking. For just one example, a 2009 paper written by industry experts and presented at a Society of Petroleum Engineers conference in West Virginia showed that researchers were concerned by high levels of total dissolved solids (TDS) found in flowback waters from fracking in the Marcellus. These levels make treatment difficult and expensive. The researchers concluded that “what to do with the post-frac flowback waters in light of scarce brine disposal facilities and substantial handling costs is an enormous burden to the economic development of the Marcellus natural gas resource.” Just so, the researchers acknowledged that “the implementation of threshold limits by states or regulators may well inhibit continued development of the Marcellus.”
In other words, waste regulation could have severely impacted the economic viability of fracking in Appalachia.
In 2021, a study published in Environmental Research Letters found that regulatory exemptions for hazardous waste management and well cleanup are saving oil and gas companies $60,000 dollars per well, on average.
Federal loopholes shield oil and gas companies from accountability
Yet the drillers pressed on undeterred, thanks largely to federal loopholes that exempted fracking waste byproducts from hazardous waste classifications, with no federal cradle-to-grave tracking requirements. Indeed, the oil and gas industry has long fought for deregulation of toxic wastes produced from oil and gas activities.
In 1988, the US Environmental Protection Agency had exempted oil and gas waste from regulation under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), the federal law regulating solid and hazardous wastes and their proper disposal, because regulations would hinder the oil and gas industry’s economic growth. Then in 2005, a provision in the Energy Policy Act that became known as the “Halliburton Loophole” continued to shield oil and gas companies from accountability. The notorious loophole classified fracking waste as residual waste and exempt from federal toxic waste regulations under the Safe Drinking Water Act, the law that regulates both public drinking water contaminants and the injection of chemicals underground.
It’s not surprising, then, that it is notoriously difficult even to know where liquid frack waste ends up. Due to these regulatory loopholes and the lack of federal cradle-to-grave tracking requirements, fracking waste continues to be considered an “orphan waste.” According to a 2019 study published in the journal Science of the Total Environment, the final location is unknown for fully 35% of liquid oil and gas waste in the US because reporting only lists intermediary locations for transfer or storage.
Likewise, there are major gaps in record-keeping, making it difficult for researchers and public health advocates to fully assess the risk to the environment and public health. In fact, in 2023, University of Pittsburgh researchers discovered that 800,000 tons of radioactive waste from Pennsylvania’s oil and gas industry is unaccounted for. The study, published in the journal Ecological Indicators, compared records on PA’s oil and gas waste from 2010 to 2020 and uncovered significant gaps between what oil and gas operators reported they had sent to landfills and what the landfills reported receiving. This year, DEP Deputy Secretary Kurt Klapkowski admitted to a House committee that about 86% of Pennsylvania’s smaller oil and gas drillers did not report how they disposed of their waste in 2023.
A recent investigation by Grist found that, despite Pennsylvania lawmakers banning the practice of “roadspreading” de-icing and dust-suppressing fluids derived from fracking waste, oil and gas companies have continued to spread their wastewater “practically unchecked” across the state, thanks to a loophole in state regulations. Grist reported that oil and gas producers have sprayed nearly 2.4 million gallons of wastewater on Pennsylvania roads.
The waste loopholes are a major economic vulnerability for the industry
Tracking, treating, and disposing of frack waste properly would seem like commonsense solutions to a thorny problem. These remedies are exceedingly popular, too. A 2021 poll commissioned by the Ohio River Valley Institute found that by a whopping 48 point margin, Pennsylvania voters believe fracking fluids should be subject to the state’s hazardous waste safeguards, a clear repudiation of the state’s current loopholes. And by a 76 point margin, they support requiring safer transport of the contaminated frack waste.
If Vice President Harris wins the election in November, she might not want to outright ban fracking, but she should close loopholes, increase transparency and make the oil and gas industry–not the public–pay the full cost of safely disposing of its toxic waste.
But broadly popular as they are, such measures would pose a serious problem for the oil and gas industry because, as Ted Auch of FracTracker explained, “the critical component of the profit margin for these companies is that they can get rid of the waste so cheaply.”
If the fracking business model doesn’t work without being shielded from accountability for dangerous byproducts, then that business model–or the fracking–must end.