By Sara Jerome@sarmje USA Water Online: ‘As new technologies promise to treat fracking wastewater to a point where it can be reused, there’s a new question: Is it clean enough to drink?
Probably not, researchers say. Returning fracking wastewater to the environment “is just as risky as dumping any municipal treated wastewater back into rivers. As runoff, it is safe but it shouldn’t be done in volume. In the case of fracking wastewater, existing facilities are not equipped to thoroughly deal with halides so until they are ready, it’s simply better to use fracking wastewater for fracking,” Science 2.0 reported.
The study, published in Environmental Science & Technology, focused on the contents of fracking wastewater. Part of the problem is what happens in the treatment process.
“Most sites recycle the water but one approach has [been] to treat it in municipal or commercial treatment plants and then release it into rivers and other surface waters. The problem is these plants don’t do a good job at removing halides. While there is no evidence yet, there is concern that halide-contaminated surface water subsequently treated for drinking purposes with conventional methods, such as chlorination or ozonation, could lead to the formation of toxic byproducts,” Science 2.0 reported.’