A big disconnect

How much toxic oil and gas waste is produced in Pennsylvania every year, and where does it end up? Despite state efforts to track it, there’s no way to know for sure.

For more than a decade, regulators have known of significant problems with their tracking system for the large volumes of waste created by Pennsylvania’s booming fracking industry.

Eleven years ago, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette found that nine Pennsylvania landfills had reported accepting tens of thousands of tons of oil and gas waste more than industry operators said were being sent there. Two years ago, a University of Pittsburgh and Duquesne University study found the same unexplained gaps, this time totaling more than 800,000 tons.

The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection promised to investigate and look into updating its reporting standards for companies.

But an Inside Climate News analysis of state records from 2017 to 2024 found that the problem persists. The analysis revealed discrepancies totaling almost 1.4 million tons.

Some landfills in the southwestern part of the state report receiving far more oil and gas waste than Pennsylvania operators say was sent.

Among the handful of landfills required to tell the state how much oil and gas waste they accept, the collective total reported from 2017 to 2024 in their annual reports was 3.1 million tons. That’s about 80% more than the 1.7 million tons oil and gas operators said they sent to those locations.

One theory is that some of the discrepancies, especially at landfills in the southwestern corner of the state, could be caused by large volumes of waste coming from Ohio and West Virginia and being disposed of in those landfills.

That would not be included in reports from oil and gas operators in Pennsylvania.

Another possibility is that Pennsylvania operators are underreporting the amount of waste they are sending to landfills, just as was found in the Post-Gazette’s investigation in 2014 and the universities’ in 2023.

The state’s outdated, disconnected and largely unaudited systems mean that no one — including DEP — knows how much oil and gas waste there is or where it is going, said David Hess, the agency’s secretary from 2001 to 2003.

Without accurate tracking, he said, it’s difficult to enforce regulations around spills, leaks, transport and dumping on roads or in public waterways. Contaminants in ths waste can include radioactive material, heavy metals and carcinogenic chemicals.

“It could be dumped right next to somebody’s house and they would not even know,” Mr. Hess said. “It is very important to track where this goes.”

He added: “If you don’t actually do the audits and find out where this stuff is actually going, if for no other reason than to keep the operators honest, it becomes very difficult to say with a straight face that you’re really effectively regulating this stuff. Because you just don’t know.”

‘No checking, no validation’

For months, Inside Climate News has been asking DEP to clarify how it tracks oil and gas waste. Although a spokesman, Neil Shader, confirmed that the agency does review landfills’ annual operations reports and audits landfills’ oil and gas waste numbers “as needed.”

DEP did not respond to questions about the state’s different systems for tracking this waste or the large volume discrepancies in the records.

Mr. Shader said the agency does not regularly audit landfills’ records unless there is an investigation or enforcement action underway.

Patrick Henderson, a vice president for a fracking industry group, the Marcellus Shale Coalition, said in a statement that “existing state and federal regulatory standards, combined with industry-led safety practices, have proven to be protective of public health and the environment.”

“Our members remain committed to operating safely, transparently, and responsibly,” he said.

As fracking in Pennsylvania enters its third decade, the volume of waste in landfills keeps growing. Operators reported producing almost 8.8 million tons of solid waste between 2017 and 2024 and sending about 6.3 million tons of that to landfills.

All told, the operators say they’re producing a little over a million tons a year of solid oil and gas waste.

For comparison, residents and businesses in all of Allegheny County produce about 900,000 tons of waste annually.

Most of Pennsylvania’s oil and gas waste goes to landfills within the state.

Inside Climate News found the largest discrepancies at Westmoreland Sanitary Landfill, Imperial Landfill and Arden Landfill in the southwestern corner of the state.

Together, these three accounted for about 98% of the almost 1.4 million-ton total discrepancies. They are close to the borders with Ohio and West Virginia, suggesting that waste from those two states might account for much of the difference.

There were also some improbable outliers in the reports filed by oil and gas operators. Notably, for three consecutive months in 2024, a single well in Greene County operated by EQT Corp. reported sending exactly 60,876.94 tons of waste to the Arden Landfill — each almost four times larger than any other monthly consignment of waste from a single well to a single landfill.

After Inside Climate News asked about these numbers, an EQT spokeswoman, Amy Rogers, confirmed that these reports were clerical errors. She said the company immediately reached out to DEP to correct the entries.

But in the absence of thorough auditing by the state, other errors may still be lurking.

“They’re at the mercy of the data that is given to them by the regulated community,” said John Quigley, who was secretary of the Pennsylvania DEP from 2015 to 2016 and secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources from 2009 to 2011.

“The simple fact of the matter is that the problem has been long-standing and it still has not been addressed,” he said.

From water consumption to waste disposal to radioactivity, he added, “I think it is fair to say that in the early days of the play, the state completely underestimated the potential impacts [of fracking]. The state started behind the eight ball, put itself further behind and hasn’t been able to catch up.”

DEP underestimated how much waste the state would be dealing with as natural gas production and well size both increased. “Originally a lateral, horizontal well was maybe a mile. Well, now it’s several miles. The consumption and the volumes are just multiplied almost exponentially,” Mr. Quigley said.

“Nobody was prepared for it.”

Both Mr. Quigley and Mr. Hess say the root of the problem is a shortage of funding and people at DEP. Even as more and more wells have been drilled, the number of state employees tasked with overseeing the industry has fallen.

In March, state Rep. Greg Vitali, D-Delaware County, wrote in an op-ed that the oil and gas program’s staff had dropped from 226 to 190 positions between 2015 and 2025.

Mr. Vitali argued DEP’s staffing issues were so serious that the agency “can no longer adequately enforce Pennsylvania’s environmental laws and regulations.”

At a hearing held by the Senate Democratic Policy Committee on oil and gas waste in 2021, DEP said it does not regularly cross-check the numbers it receives from operators and landfills, citing a lack of funding and staff.

Despite the potential dangers of oil and gas waste, it is not considered “hazardous” legally, the result of industry lobbying. The federal regulations governing its disposal are less strict as a result.

That gap leaves regulation largely up to the states.

“There are no national regulations. There are only state regulations, and they vary a lot,” said Sheldon Landsberger, a professor in nuclear and radiation engineering at the University of Texas at Austin.

“There is no comprehensive plan in the United States. No administration has wanted to touch oil and gas.”

The lack of a standardized set of regulations makes it harder to track waste and wastewater across state lines. Pennsylvania requires operators to report when their waste leaves the state, but DEP did not answer questions about whether it gathers any data on what comes in.

Ohio doesn’t track incoming oil and gas waste to landfills, and the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency confirmed that it doesn’t track waste that is leaving wells. West Virginia did not respond to questions about its tracking.

If the reporting discrepancies in Pennsylvania “is indeed waste being generated from out of state, then the agency doesn’t have the personnel needed to track it down,” Mr. Quigley said. “There’s no checking. There’s no validation.”

Losing track of the waste

The mismatch between operators’ and landfills’ records is just one of many challenges facing anyone trying to trace Pennsylvania’s oil and gas waste.

Data collection, organization and storage are spread across multiple offices at DEP, with varying time periods and requirements for reporting.

Oil and gas companies report monthly on the fracking waste they produce and where it goes, and the information is stored in an online database overseen by the Office of Oil and Gas Management.

The volume of waste that landfills accept is reported in a separate annual form sent to the Bureau of Waste Management, sometimes specifying how much came from oil and gas, but often not. Landfills send radioactivity reports about the waste they accept to the Bureau of Radiation Protection.

Most Pennsylvania landfills, meanwhile, aren’t required to disclose in their annual operations reports the amount of oil and gas waste they accept, so a comparison with operators’ records isn’t possible.

“It’s definitely a mess,” said Matt Kelso, manager of data and technology at the nonprofit FracTracker. “There’s so much of it that it’s kind of overwhelming . . . and keeping track of it all is just a logistical mess.”

Some DEP oil and gas waste reports show treatment facilities as the destination, but those facilities produce their own waste that then must go somewhere. “We kind of lose track of it,” Mr. Kelso said. “We don’t really know what happens to it at the end.”

The landfills’ tainted leachate — the liquid mixture that is created when rainwater flows through the waste — is another worry.

“That’s one of the holes in tracking waste in Pennsylvania,” Mr. Kelso said.

Landfills submit quarterly reports to DEP showing the average monthly flow of leachate and chemical testing. DEP did not respond to questions about how leachate is tracked if it is not discharged on site at the landfill.

This story is published in partnership with Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment.