Antero Clearwater Facility – Bridgeport, WV

Laura Miner, QEP, Langan Environmental Compliance Manager, is working on the Antero Clearwater Facility, the first-of-its-kind plant for treating fracking water so it can be reused. This plant manages the produced and flowback water injected into the Marcellus Shale to re-cover natural gas. Laura’s team completed the application for the facility’s National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit and manages the ongoing facility compliance inspections, stormwater sampling, and electronic Discharge Monitoring Reports (eDMR) reporting by using local Langan Bridgeport office resources. The permitting process required an in-depth understanding of the facility’s processes, treatment system design, and water-quality standards and regulations. Clearwater allows Antero to purify 98% of water from production wells and reduce its withdrawal of fresh water from streams by about 30% to 40%. That’s about 1.7 million gallons of water that would have been withdrawn from streams. The benefits don’t stop there – the plant will create 50 needed full-time jobs, and by managing solids in an on-site landfill, the company estimates they will reduce truck traffic by 3.2 million miles a year.

“Besides getting an understanding of the thermo evaporative crystallizer technology, the project included permit technicalities,” said Miner. “The application was for an industrial NPDES permit that currently only includes stormwater outlets, but will include an industrial discharge point in the future. The application and permit language had to be crafted in a manner that would allow for compliance with the current stormwater discharge, but also include permit language and a mechanism to allow for the future industrial discharge.”

Miner has over 24 years of experience in the environmental consulting field. The Pennsylvania- and New York-based environmental compliance team supports Langan and our clients nationally with air-quality permit-ting and compliance; NPDES industrial and stormwater permits and water-quality compliance, hazardous, residual, and sustainable waste solutions and beneficial reuse; environmental audits; and contingency plan and tank compliance.