Feds OK Marcellus wastewater disposal well in Plum

A planned disposal well in Plum is likely more than a year away from accepting its first truckload of oil and gas waste fluids, but the project advanced this week when it received a major federal permit.

Despite broad local opposition, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said Delmont-based Penneco Environmental Solutions meets the requirements to safely operate the Sedat #3A well as a commercial injection facility that will entomb waste brines from Marcellus Shale and other drilling operations. It issued the 10-year permit on Wednesday.

The company must still receive a state permit to convert the well from a producing gas well to a waste injection well. It also has to resolve a legal case it filed in Allegheny County Court challenging a provision of Plum’s zoning ordinance that excludes injection wells from the borough.

Plum Mayor Harry Schlegel said borough leaders are considering their options, but he knows other communities have fought expensive legal battles to try to stop disposal wells and lost.

“I do have an issue with us becoming a sewer,” he said.

The permit allows the company to inject 54,000 barrels of oil and gas waste fluids per month at the facility off Old Leechburg Road. Ben Wallace, COO at Penneco Oil and its affiliated companies, said that equates to 14 truckloads a day, or about a truck every 50 minutes during operating hours.

The planned injection site differs slightly from others in Pennsylvania where depleted oil and gas wells are being turned into waste conduits.

Most often, fossil fuel wells are reversed to fill the same rock layer with fluids that had been emptied of gas. The Penneco well will target a different layer, the Murrysville sandstone, about 2,000 feet above