[All] McKibben on Fracking

[Peter Kofler]

Interesting article on fracking by Bill McKibben. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/mar/08/why-not-frack/

The following excerpted lines caught my attention, which might be pertinent to our region:
A second concern has to do with the damage being
done to rivers and streams—and the water supply for homes and industries—by the
briny soup that pours out of the fracking wells in large volume. Most of the
chemical-laced slick water injected down the well will stay belowground, but
for every million gallons, 200,000 to 400,000 gallons will be regurgitated back
to the surface, bringing with it, McGraw writes,


not only the
chemicals it included in the first place, but traces of the oil-laced drilling
mud, and all the other noxious stuff that was already trapped down there in the
rock: iron and chromium, radium and salt—lots of salt.
Some enterprising drilling
companies have, Urbina wrote, “found ready buyers [for wastewater] in
communities that spread it on roads for de-icing in the winter and for dust
suppression in the summer. When ice melts or rain falls, the waste can run off
roads and end up in the drinking supply.”
Does anyone out there know if there are local safeguards against "enterprising drilling companies" or intermediaries selling drilling wastewater/frackwash to regional procurement people/snow removal operators/dust control service contractors under some presumably environmentally benign or techno-obfuscatory name like "brine fluids", probably at really reasonable prices? We're close enough to New York State, Pennsylvania and other states where fracking is currently practiced to serve as potentially unwitting disposal markets for this probable toxic waste. 
I'm aware of the somewhat circuitous route by which hydrofluorosilicic acid got "recycled" from phosphate fertilizer industry scrubber liquor toxic waste to water fluoridation chemical. I suspect there's a strong incentive for fracking companies or their subcontractors to use alternative disposal methods for frackwash to avoid high disposal costs, what with currently relatively low natural gas prices. 		 	   		  
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