Road Salt Is Bad, But Toxic Wastewater Would Be Worse

Drilling for oil and gas produces a lot of wastewater. There’s tons of the stuff just sitting around, too toxic to release back into the environment, and oil companies have long wondered what they’re supposed to do with it. Recently, it seems they’ve come up with a new idea: Just dump it onto roads in winter to stop snow from sticking.

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On one hand, you can see the thought process. Municipalities already dump salt on the roads to prevent snow buildup, and drilling wastewater is salty — why not just swap them out? Then you hear that drilling wastewater poisons cattle, and you go, Jesus Christ why are we even talking about this?

This is the angle that Neel Dhanesha took in a piece for Heatmap, which evaluated the pros and cons of using wastewater for road clearing. The result, it seems, lands firmly on the side of the cons. From Heatmap:

There are many red flags here, starting with “toxic” and “wastewater.” But it also speaks to a larger problem: Most of the fluid that comes out of the ground during oil and gas drilling operations is wastewater — more than 800 billion gallons a year — and we don’t really have a good solution for what to do with it. As I wrote last year, injecting the water back into the ground, which has been the go-to method for disposing of it in many places, has created earthquakes in both Texas and Oklahoma. And, as Inside Climate News also reported in a story yesterday, oil and gas companies have been spilling millions of gallons of the stuff in Texas, contaminating wells and poisoning cattle.

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[I]ndustry representatives are now trying to convince Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection to consider allowing its use in their state as well. But wastewater is more than just ancient, underground seawater — it also has benzene, arsenic, and the radioactive isotopes radium 226 and 228 riding in it.

Now, sure, this all sounds bad. Benzene certainly isn’t great, arsenic is worse, and once you start talking about radioactivity I start to think I should be wearing some protective gear. But, every innovation has tradeoffs — surely this wastewater is at least more effective in suppressing snow and dust than plan old salt, right? From Heatmap:

The wastewater, it turns out, washes right off the road without even suppressing dust.

Oh, goddamnit.