"The treatment of oil and gas field waste is a dirty industry’s dirtiest secret"
"Under a grove of pines in Maryland’s Appalachian Mountains, Nick Fischer gathered his childhood friends around a campfire on a June night in 2023. Tucker wore a trucker cap and sported a beard. Bobbie’s flowing dress glowed green and blue in the light of the flames. They passed around beers and settled in. Then Fischer let his story unravel: His former job, he believes, destroyed his health. “I am falling apart,” he said. “I don’t know where to begin.”
Not all jobs in oil and gas country involve pulling fossil fuels out of the ground. During the extraction, an incredible amount of waste—often loaded with carcinogens, heavy metals, and shocking amounts of radioactivity—comes to the surface, and an invisible workforce inside the oil and gas industry toils away handling it. Fischer was part of it.
His introduction to the world of treating fracking wastewater started in November 2017, when he got a job at Clearwater in Doddridge County, West Virginia. The newly opened $255 million plant was a product of globalization: located in northern West Virginia but operated jointly by a Colorado energy company, Antero Resources, and the French environmental services firm Veolia. Clearwater was a hulking complex of strange tanks and pipes that pulled salts out of the wastewater from nearby gas wells. Once run through the treatment system, the water would be used to frack new wells, and the salts would be used as a deicer or even on food, explained Conrad Baston, a facility engineer, at a 2015 community meeting. “If anybody wants some, I can get you a big bag of it,” he said. “I thought about calling it Taste of the Marcellus,” he added, referring to the gas-rich geologic formation that produced the waste. The process was a model for closed-loop resource use. Earl Ray Tomblin, West Virginia’s former Democratic governor, applauded Clearwater in 2015 before it opened, and in 2019, one Antero official dubbed it “The best project like this in the world. Bar none. Period.”
Twenty-two months later, the plant shuttered. Fischer said he and his colleagues were dismissed without warning. “Clearwater was a failure,” reads a lawsuit Antero filed against Veolia in 2020. The fracking wastewater turned out to be a radioactive brew, and the salts a soupy mess. After combining the salts with fly ash—also toxic—Fischer had been required to scoop, transport, and grade the mixture with his bulldozer, building a controversial landfill adjacent to the plant that locals vehemently opposed, worried it would leach radioactivity into their rivers and contaminate drinking water."
Justin Nobel reports for Sierra magazine with photos by Rebecca Kiger March 24, 2025.
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