Please express your concern to protect ERWs at the public hearing to be held on Wednesday, July 31, 2019, at 6 p.m., at Southside High School, 334 South Side Road, Bee Branch, Arkansas 72013.

A request to Arkansas Dept of Environmental Quality (ADEQ) for permit to discharge recycled fracwater into an Extraordinary Resource Waterbody (ERW) near Bee Branch has been made by Flywheel Energy Production, LLC. The ERW designation was not noted in the public notice for Discharge Permit Number AR0052086. The discharge would be from a fracwater (used drilling water) recycling facility near Bee Branch.

Recycling fracwater for reuse in gas well drilling could save millions of gallons of fresh water from being contaminated by unknown drilling chemical additives and pollutants absorbed from underground. Reusing fracwater could greatly reduce the amount of additional fresh water needed. This would have been considerable economic and water savings during the peak of the fracing operations. To date, none of the three permitted recycling facilities have been built.

While the recycling process could be beneficial in many ways, the request for a permit to dump “excess” recycled water into an ERW is totally unnecessary!! The gas company would have total control over the amount of water recycled and should be capable of limiting it to amounts needed for drilling. Procedures already exist for disposal of contaminated fracwater and would preclude any need for dumping unmanaged excess into an ERW. Monitoring of the discharged water quality would be minimal and mostly controlled by the gas company.

The duty and responsibility of ADEQ should be to take EXTRAORDINARY measures to protect ERWs, rather than promoting permits to make them polluted commercial ventures.

Please express your concern to protect ERWs at the public hearing to be held on Wednesday, July 31, 2019, at 6 p.m., at Southside High School, 334 South Side Road, Bee Branch, Arkansas 72013. Call ADEQ at 501-682-0623 for an email copy of the public notice.