Guest Op/Ed: Piney Point Deep Well Injection

It should not be a surprise that Manatee County is on the brink of a financial and environmental disaster, again. The holding ponds at the Piney Point Phosphogypsum stacks are nearing their capacity to hold contaminated water.

In a recent update to the Manatee Board of County Commission, HRK Holdings LLC, owners of the site, said Piney Point is holding about 750 million gallons of water and is operating at about 92 percent capacity. The site can only handle about 19 more inches of rainfall.

Although there are no long-term plans to get rid of the contaminated water, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, HRK Holdings, and a few of the Manatee County Commissioners appear to subscribe to the theory that the solution to pollution is injection. It is assumed the Piney Point effluent would migrate to the Gulf of Mexico, however, because there are no long-term plans to filter the wastewater, the necessary high-pressure injection will likely create new paths of migration.

There are many problems associated with deep-well injection. All wells are subject to failure and there are too many unknowns to safely inject treated or partially treated effluent. The operation of a deep well relies very heavily on predictions and good faith.

Deep well injection is done because liquid wastes that cannot be discharged into surface waters are injected into deep wells, thus the worst wastes end up in these wells. If a failure occurs, very little can be done to correct it. If an aquifer is contaminated, it's too late.

Confining layers don't confine and effluents will ultimately migrate beyond the point of injection. Monitoring programs are mostly ineffective. Little is known of the chemistry and the biology of well-injected wastes, excepting that those wastes move underground.

The composition of underground aquifer formations is not always as uniform as scientific models would have us believe. Nevertheless, most studies of deep-well injected wastes are based upon such models.

While the models upon which decisions to inject wastes are based look good on paper, changing conditions in the aquifers can allow wastewater to seep into the ground-water supply, and it would be too late then, to correct the problem.

Over the long term, it will be cheaper to treat the Piney Point Phosphate wastewater to advanced water quality standards rather than trying to dump wastes out of sight and finding later that serious pollution problems have occurred.

Glenn Compton is the Chairman of ManaSota 88, a non-profit organization that has spent over 30 years fighting to protect the environment of Manatee and Sarasota counties.