Siri Lawson and her husband live on a patch of wooded, hilly land in Warren County, Pennsylvania, located in the state’s rural northwest corner. During the summer heat, cars driving on the country’s dirt roads leave plumes of dust in their wake. Winter’s cold can cause a dangerous film of ice to spawn on paved roads. To protect motorists from both slippery ice and vision-impairing dust, communities across Pennsylvania coat these roads with large, inexpensive volumes of de-icing and dust-suppressing fluids. In Lawson’s case, her township used oil and gas wastewater as a dust suppressant, believing the material was effective.
But researchers found it is no better to control dust than rainwater. It can also contain toxic chemicals and have radioactive concentrations several hundred times the acceptable federal limit in drinking water. Given the risks it poses to human health and the environment, Pennsylvania lawmakers and the state’s environmental agency banned the practice more than seven years ago.
But oil and gas companies have continued to spread their wastewater virtually unchecked across the state, thanks to a loophole in state regulations. A Grist review of records from 2019 to 2023 found that oil and gas producers filed more than 3,000 wastewater discharge reports with the state Department of Environmental Protection, or DEP. In total, they reported spraying nearly 2.4 million gallons of wastewater on Pennsylvania roads. This number is likely a major undercount: About 86 percent of Pennsylvania’s smaller oil and gas drillers did not report how they disposed of their waste in 2023.
Wastewater dumping is an open secret on Pennsylvania roads. At a legislative hearing this spring, state senators Katie Muth and Carolyn Comitta, both Democrats, said they saw companies spreading wastewater during a tour of new fracking wells last fall. Lawson, who has become a public face of opposition to sewage dumping, experiences sinus pains and believes her symptoms are related to living near sewage-covered roads. Sometimes the pain was so intense that she had to leave her house “to get some fresh air.” She has filed several complaints with DEP over the years, but she says it has done little to drag the agency off the sidelines.
“I am told [by DEP] to catch the truck,” Lawson said. “I’m told to be my own policeman.”
Siri Lawson
Neil Shader, a spokesman for DEP, told Grist that the department is “committed to responding to all brine/road spreading complaints received from the general public” and that it investigates all complaints. “If/when a responsible party is identified, appropriate enforcement action is taken,” he said.
Lawmakers first banned the use of wastewater from fracking wells as a dust suppressant in 2016. Two years later, the DEP issued a moratorium on the use of wastewater from traditional drilling methods as well. But conventional oil and gas companies have found a loophole that allows them to circumvent these rules with impunity. The DEP requires permits for wastewater disposal, but the agency grants an exception if the wastewater can be reused for a “beneficial” purpose. Any waste that is no more harmful to the environment and human health than a commercial alternative can be classified as a “coproduct,” a designation that receives less DEP oversight.
Under Pennsylvania law, companies can grant their wastewater byproduct status by conducting internal analyzes to determine whether their waste is harmful to human health or the environment. These tests do not have to include a radiation analysis, although studies have shown that radium from oil and gas wastewater – which often contains 300 to 560 times the acceptable levels of radioactive substances in drinking water – has made its way into the roadside vegetation, fresh waterand up the food chain. A company is only required to submit its justification for using the co-product status if the DEP requests it.
The agency rarely asks. In 2021, the DEP requested justification for claiming co-product status from 16 companies. Only 10 responded. The DEP told them that the material they submitted was “inadequate.”
Any conventional driller that is audited and “roadcast” in the absence of an approved DEP co-product determination—and without updating or submitting a new by-product determination—technically violates the agency’s moratorium and places them in murky legal territory. But without agency enforcement, these companies face no consequences.
“As far as I’m aware, there have been no notices of violations, compliance orders, fines and penalties for anything dealing with the fraudulent discharge of wastewater,” said David Hess, a former DEP secretary. “No one is enforcing the moratorium.”
Shader, the DEP spokesman, told Grist that the byproduct term will no longer appear in waste reports because oil and gas companies “have been misusing the product type,” likely misunderstanding the term’s purpose. The agency “investigates reports of unauthorized roadside spreading of brine and will take enforcement action as appropriate,” he said. “DEP encourages members of the public who observe potentially unauthorized roadway spreading of brine to report the activity to DEP.”
The agency’s decision to drop the classification can be largely traced to the work of Karen Feridun. Feridun is the co-founder of the environmental organization Better Path Coalition, and in 2019 she noted that the DEP had newly listed “co-product” as a waste type in its oil and gas reports, implying to her that the agency had tacitly issued a blanket approval of dumping of waste water on roads. She then filed a public records request, which led to the DEP requesting a meeting with her. During the discussion, agency representatives told her that its oil and gas division added the term to its waste reports after a “verbal request” from Pennfield Energy LLC, a conventional driller in Pennsylvania. The agency told her it had no paper trail of the communications.
Feridun was furious. “I’m convinced they knew exactly what drillers were going to do,” she said. For her, the agency all but confirmed that it endorsed the dumping of wastewater.
The DEP denied Feridun’s interpretation of its decision. The agency sought to “readily identify” which companies had already conducted waste toxicity assessments as a precursor to dumping their wastewater, Shader said. “The addition of this product type code was in no way intended to imply that the requirements [for safety and efficacy] didn’t need to be satisfied.”
The incident also appears to indicate miscommunication within the agency. State waste codes are generated by the DEP’s Bureau of Waste Management, but oilfield oversight rests largely with the agency’s oil and gas division. Feridun wondered if the oil and gas department had informed the waste management department of its decision to include a new term in its records. Since the department told Feridun it had no paper trail, she said it could not give her an answer.
When asked if the DEP’s oil and gas division communicated its waste reporting change in 2019 to the waste management bureau, Shader said the divisions “communicate on a regular basis to discuss activities regulated by both programs.”
Lawson’s experiences, new research and the findings of Feridun’s records request have put oil and gas company behavior back into the state’s political spotlight. Bill Burgos, a professor of environmental engineering at Pennsylvania State University, told lawmakers at a state Senate hearing in April that “there is no more research that needs to be done” to determine whether oil and gas wastewater is safe and effective for treating roads. Burgos has published several studies on oil and gas wastewater, including one that recently found the liq ineffective as a dust suppressant.
In early May, Feridun and a group of other activists held a letter to Governor Josh Shapiro and members of the legislature asking them to ban companies from spraying roads with wastewater. Two lawmakers have since introduced dueling bills on the issue. Representative Martin Causer, a Republican who serves part of northern Pennsylvania, has proposed legalizing the practice while Representative Greg Vitali, a Democrat who represents a region east of Philadelphia, has moved to ban it.
Some of the public pressure seems to have paid off. In April, the DEP proposed modification of coproduct criteria to mandate an assessment of a material’s effectiveness, but it’s unclear whether that would include radiation testing, which would give the DEP — and the public — a more complete picture of oil and gas waste’s toxicity.
Earlier this month, the agency went a step further: At a legislative hearing before the state House Committee on Environmental Resources and Energy, the DEP said it supported Vitali’s bill that would ban oil and gas companies from spreading their wastewater on roads and prevent the liquid from being treated by the department as a by-product. The bill advanced out of committee with support split along party lines, but it faces a steep climb to the governor’s desk as Republicans control the state Senate.
Until something changes, people like Lawson are staying near roads covered in toxic wastewater. She said the spill has been more frequent lately. If the DEP is going to regulate oil and gas companies more aggressively, it needs to be better funded, Hess said.
“As long as [companies] can get away with it, they will,” he said. “It was the history of their entire existence.”
