Justin Nobel Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

How W.Va. Oil And Gas Industry Leaves Behind Radioactivity

In some places, the oil and gas industry is leaving behind industrial sites that are radioactive and dangerous — like Fairmont Brine in Fairmont, West Virginia. This abandoned site became a popular hangout spot for unsuspecting local residents. Investigative journalist Justin Nobel has written about Fairmont Brine. Inside Appalachia Host Mason Adams spoke with Nobel to learn more.

This conversation originally aired in the Feb. 25, 2024 episode of Inside Appalachia.

In some places, the oil and gas industry is leaving behind industrial sites that are radioactive and dangerous — like Fairmont Brine in Fairmont, West Virginia.

This abandoned site became a popular hangout spot for unsuspecting local residents. Justin Nobel has covered issues of radioactivity in the oil and gas industry for an upcoming book, Petroleum-238: Big Oil’s Dangerous Secret and the Grassroots Fight to Stop It.

Nobel wrote about Fairmont Brine for Truthdig. The story is titled “Inside West Virginia’s Chernobyl: A highly radioactive oil and gas facility has become a party spot in Marion County.”

Inside Appalachia Host Mason Adams spoke with Nobel to learn more.

Investigative reporter Justin Nobel.

*Photo courtesy of Justin Nobel*

Adams: Your story describes an abandoned industrial site where locals are hanging out. That rings true to me from my teenage years a little bit. But in this case, there’s something else going on here. What did you find out?

Nobel: Over the course of my reporting into oilfield radioactivity, I’ve learned that a lot more comes to the surface with oil and gas development than just the oil and gas. The industry brings a lot of really toxic materials up from deep in the earth. Often you have heavy metals, you have carcinogens, like benzene volatile organics, and you have radioactive metals as well.

One of the most concerning ones is the radioactive metal radium, which is a known human carcinogen. You have this really big waste stream in the oilfield brine that comes up. The industry also calls that “produced water.” This is a major waste stream across the U.S. — three billion gallons of oilfield brine a day comes to the surface with oil and gas development, and the industry has to do something with that. So the industry has had an interest in trying to “treat” that brine — trying to take out the toxicity. Take out the heavy metals, take out the radioactivity, and you’ve got a lot of salt. So you can transform that into a usable product, maybe like road salts. Then with the watery component, you can use that to frack new wells. And that sounds really great to the industry. They love to promote that they can take the waste stream and repurpose it for something beneficial.

The problem with brine is it has such a complex brew of toxic elements that it’s actually really, really hard to treat. It’s really hard to remove all the different contaminants from brine and get this clean product that you can then send back out into the world. Even if you do that successfully, you collected all the toxicity, right? And if part of that toxicity is radioactivity, you’ve created a facility where you are concentrating and collecting radioactivity.

At this particular site in West Virginia, this is exactly what they were trying to do: They were trying to treat the oilfield brine. And if your plan isn’t working perfectly, you’re gonna get gunked up really quickly. And you’re building up heavy metals, you’re building up radioactivity, and you’re building up potentially all sorts of problems. And across the board, these plants fail.

The Fairmont Brine Processing site was covered with graffiti and littered with detritus such as beer cans and condoms, indicating the place has become a recurring party spot for locals. Yuri Gorby expressed particular concern about the highly elevated levels of the extremely dangerous radioactive element polonium. Anyone partying at the site is “going to be getting dosed,” says Gorby. “There are going to be long-term chronic effects from this.”

*Photo courtesy of Justin Nobel*

Adams: At Fairmont Brine, your Geiger counter reads about 7,000 counts per minute, which maxes out the unit. You later drive home the point that working at those levels of radioactivity for one week will take a worker over a yearly limit set by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. But yet, teenagers could wander in here without being stopped. What’s the status of this facility?

Nobel: I think anywhere in America, if you have this kind of busted up industrial site, it’s going to be a place where kids are going to want to hang out. You’ve got this site sitting there up on a hill, just outside the city limits of Fairmont — it’s an attractive place to just go and hang out. There’s grassy fields, there’s this big parking lot. There’s these weird, beat up buildings that you can wander around in. And then containers of stuff, all this different equipment.

What we realized and learned when we went there is wild. Parts of it are really, really dangerous and radioactive. But as soon as the article came out, the EPA really kicked into high gear. They had found levels of radioactivity even higher than we found. The EPA is now working with the community. They’ve set up a call center for local residents to get information on the site. I was told by an EPA official they’re in the process of fencing it off, and moving forward to see if it fits the role of a national Superfund site. So they’re in the process of — I wouldn’t say cleaning it up — but setting it up for a possible cleanup and at least making sure that people from the town can’t move around in it.

Adams: The other piece of this that’s alarming is that this is not a unique situation. You found sites like this elsewhere in Appalachia as well as the U.S. So this is not a singular phenomenon limited to Fairmont Brine.

Nobel: Some of these sites, they often don’t operate for longer than a year or two or three, because it’s a really difficult task to remove all the contaminants. To treat oilfield waste is a lot harder than these companies make it out to be. So what you find is, you have a bunch of sites that are currently operating, they’re hard to access, no one’s gonna let you in there and want to show an investigative science journalist around. And then you have these abandoned sites that aren’t operating anymore, but maybe they’re fenced off and they’re deep in the woods, and there’s still a security person guarding it.

Fairmont Brine was different. It was just right off the main road, and it was all open. Other people were hanging out there and they were entering it, and we entered it just like them. So it was really a rare window to ground truth. The concerns that had piled up over time.

Veolia’s Clearater facility in Doddridge County, West Virginia.

*Photo Credit: Ted Auch/FracTracker Alliance, 2020*

In other instances, such as the Clearwater plant, which is in Doddridge County along Highway 50 in northern West Virginia, I didn’t have access to the site and I still don’t, but there’s an equal amount of concern, in my opinion. This is another facility that was processing oilfield wastewater. This facility claimed that they could take 600 truckloads a day.

So if you go around the oilfield, you see the brine trucks. They look like these little septic tank trucks can hold maybe like 4,000 gallons. Six hundred of those trucks a day. That is a lot of oilfield wastewater, and they had grandiose language for how they were going to operate this plant. I mean, they claimed that this Clearwater plant was going to be one of the greatest environmental assets for the oil and gas industry in recent American history. The West Virginia governor was there giving a statement for the opening. There was really big money behind this plan. It cost like a quarter of a billion dollars, and involved a union between a Colorado energy company and Terra resources, which is big in northern West Virginia, and this really savvy fancy French waste and water management company called Veolia, which has operations all over the world.

It kind of represents an opposite end of the spectrum from Fairmont Brine, which was operated by a company based out of Pittsburgh. It’s pretty local. They’ve got investors, but it’s on a different scale than this company where you actually have a really major company that is known all over the world. But I was skeptical from the beginning. I visited that site with oilfield workers, and then after less than two years of operations, the site was shut down. I think what’s significant there is, the local news story was that it was shut because gas prices went down and it wasn’t economically viable any longer. But what I learned in reporting that story is the site was actually shuttered because it just wasn’t working again.

Whether it was the local capital setting up this small plant in Fairmont, or whether it was international capital setting up this major facility with a lot of gusto — both of them did not work. The difference though, is with Fairmont Brine, we go in and we saw the mess, and the mess is devastating. We were able to test to know exactly how radioactive the waste left on site was — and it’s very radioactive. Clearwater is a bit more of a black box, because I don’t have access to that site, and so I think there’s a huge concern of what is left on site there. But until I can connect maybe with a former worker who can serve as a whistleblower and lay out just what happened there, or get access to the site, or work with the state to try and enable them to get access, we still don’t know just what sort of mess is left up on that particular hillside.

Part of what strikes me, as I talk to community members as they learn about this, it’s kind of like I went down the rabbit hole as a reporter, and when I publish these stories, and a community member or worker reads what was actually happening at these facilities and what was left behind, they go down their own rabbit hole. They suddenly are learning about a part of the oil and gas industry they never knew about. And what I think has been really unfortunate is that these facilities are still getting built, they’re still getting permitted by the state, and in most cases, the community is still unaware.

You have these harms piling up, and people are not informed about them. And this is especially the case in communities where there’s a legitimate need for jobs. And so you know, it makes our mission of trying to spread awareness on this topic really important. It’s like profiting off the lack of knowledge that’s really worrisome to me. These are the things we try and get to the bottom of, and dig up. So I appreciate [that] I have a chance to expose this, because it does need to be exposed.

Investigative Reporter Looks At Fracking Near Fairmont And Wilco Has Our Song Of The Week, This West Virginia Morning

On this West Virginia Morning, parts of Appalachia saw a natural gas boom from fracking, but as fortunes have changed, the industry has left behind dangerous industrial sites — including one near Fairmont, which became a popular hangout spot for the young. Investigative Reporter Justin Nobel has been looking into this and spoke with Inside Appalachia’s Mason Adams about what he discovered.

On this West Virginia Morning, parts of Appalachia saw a natural gas boom from fracking, but as fortunes have changed, the industry has left behind dangerous industrial sites — including one near Fairmont, which became a popular hangout spot for the young. Investigative Reporter Justin Nobel has been looking into this and spoke with Inside Appalachia’s Mason Adams about what he discovered.

Also, in this show, our Mountain Stage Song of the Week comes to us from Wilco. We listen to their performance of “Cruel Country” from their twelfth studio album of the same name.

West Virginia Morning is a production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting which is solely responsible for its content.

Support for our news bureaus comes from Shepherd University.

Our Appalachia Health News project is made possible with support from Marshall Health.

West Virginia Morning is produced with help from Bill Lynch, Briana Heaney, Chris Schulz, Curtis Tate, Emily Rice, Eric Douglas, Jack Walker, Liz McCormick, and Randy Yohe.

Eric Douglas is our news director and producer.

Listen to West Virginia Morning weekdays at 7:43 a.m. on WVPB Radio or subscribe to the podcast and never miss an episode. #WVMorning

Q&A: Rolling Stone Reporter Examines The Risks Of Radioactive Drilling Waste

Across the Ohio Valley, natural gas drilling waste is trucked from the well pad to disposal sites. The waste contains naturally occurring radioactive elements.

Freelance science journalist Justin Nobel spent nearly two years reporting on this topic. He interviewed hundreds of scientists, environmentalists, state regulators and industry workers and uncovered never-before-released early reports from the oil and gas industry that highlight the radioactivity problem and its risks to workers and the public.

Energy and Environment Reporter Brittany Patterson spoke with Nobel via Skype about his investigation titled “America’s Radioactive Secret” that was published last month in Rolling Stone.

***Editor’s Note: The following has been lightly edited for clarity.

Patterson: You use a character, a pseudonym of a character, named Peter. Tell us where we meet him and tell us a little bit about him and his concerns.

Nobel: Peter does a job that has become quite common across northern West Virginia, southwestern Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, the heart of the Marcellus and also Utica shale areas, and that job is the job of brine hauler, or driving a truck that looks a bit like a septic truck, but is actually filled with this oil and gas waste product. The industry often refers to this product as brine, or produced water, but what my reporting revealed is that this is very misleading. Brine, especially in the Marcellus, can have a very complicated mix of different chemicals and there’s a lot of toxic heavy metals. There’s what’s known as volatile organics; these are known human carcinogens like benzene, and then there’s also radioactive elements such as radium. Drivers like Peter are told often that they’re hauling water or that they’re hauling saltwater, and yet they’re not. They’re hauling this really complicated brew of chemicals that also has radioactivity in it.

Patterson: What is the federal and state oversight of this activity?

Nobel: So, oil and gas waste has a stunning exemption that goes back to the late 1970s. The United States at that time knew there’s a lot of industry and that industry regularly produces hazardous waste, and under a law called the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, the United States determined that it’s going to appropriately label waste that is hazardous as hazardous. That means that waste can only go in certain types of trucks that are designed to carry hazardous waste. It can only go on certain routes that are appropriate for hazardous waste to be hauled on. Drivers will have to be appropriately trained, and the hazardous waste will have to end up in landfills that are appropriately designed to hold hazardous waste.

And it was a good way, a cradle to grave way, of dealing with hazardous waste. Except oil and gas waste, all of these different waste streams produced at an oil and gas well, such as brine, such as drill cuttings, such as other materials like scales and sludges, these wastes all received an exemption. And what’s just so striking is that the EPA actually looked at that exemption in 1988, and they determined that even though there are hazardous materials in oil and gas waste, there’s uranium, there’s toxic heavy metals, to label that waste as hazardous would cause a severe economic burden on the industry. There literally would not be enough landfills to deal with it. It would overwhelm regulators and so EPA sticks with this determination of non-hazardous and everything we see happening today — in regards to these trucks in the Marcellus, why are they not labeled, why are these drivers not being told what’s in them — it goes back to that exemption.

Patterson: One of the really striking things about your story and the reporting you’ve done on this topic is how deep you’ve gone. Can you tell us a little bit about some of the documents and research that you found and how that impacts workers’ health?

Nobel: So in my reporting, I would be talking to workers working in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, talking to community members, and hearing things that were quite concerning when it came to how this material was being handled and just what the radioactive content might be. And there is the question of well, ‘How concerning? What really are the risks? And just how worried should I be?’ And what helped answer that question was finding documents of the industry that conveyed that they had knowledge about this going back decades. And so some of the industry’s most prominent organizations and publications have actually written about this topic. And that’s significant because right now the industry still is actually denying that there’s a serious problem. And yet when you look 30 and 40 years ago, the industry themselves wrote about this problem. And I found a set of Louisiana legal cases only recently settled in 2016 that showed that oil and gas worker cancers had been linked indisputably to radioactivity exposure received on the job. That was just such a moment of alarm for me because it confirmed that if this job, and these different types of jobs, are done for long enough, a worker actually can get cancer and that cancer can kill them. So, in Louisiana workers got different types of lymphomas, different types of leukemias, colon cancer, liver cancer, kidney cancer.

Patterson: So we have the EPA that is sort of declining to regulate the disposal of this type of hazardous waste. And we have thousands of workers in this region that are working in this industry hauling brine, but also involved in other parts of natural gas drilling. And it’s an industry that’s growing. What does this mean for the people who work in this industry, for those oil and gas workers?

Nobel: There needs to be a massive health analysis done immediately. And what’s so worrisome about the Louisiana cases is we know the signature of the brine in Louisiana. The radium levels are significantly less than they are in the Marcellus, about eight to nine times less. So no one has looked at what it means for workers in the Marcellus to be handling different bines, scales, sludges, to be handling this oil and gas waste for a prolonged period of time. What’s just been so striking is that workers continue to reach out to me, and this is a difficult thing for them to do, but they’re not getting help from the regulatory agencies. They’re not getting help from their employer, certainly. And suddenly they’ve read this article which has information that connects to things that they’ve been seen and wondering about. And so, with each week, really since the story’s been published, more people have been reaching out. And many of them are workers and they help fill in a picture that’s already forming and the picture is really a concerning one.

West Virginia Public Broadcasting reached out to the trade group, the West Virginia Oil and Natural Gas Association. In a statement, executive director Anne Blankenship said the industry is highly-regulated and does not expose workers or the public to high levels of radiation. She said her association disagrees with the Rolling Stone article, calling it “purposefully misleading, biased and exaggerated.”