BISMARCK, N.D. — North Dakota’s Health Department will allow salty oil-field wastewater to again be sprayed on roads as a de-icer or for dust control even though oil companies and environmental groups have questioned the practice.
The department said Monday that its studies found that the briny water left from oil production was no more toxic than commercial road salt when applied to highways.
But oil companies are reluctant to give away the water, and government road crews are hesitant to use it, fearing liability issues, said Dave Glatt, director of the Health Department’s environmental health section.
“Applicators and oil companies are being cautious at this point, which is good,” Glatt said.
State transportation director Francis Ziegler said there are no immediate plans to resume spraying salty wastewater on North Dakota highways.
But he said: “Never say never. If the cost of road salt keeps going up, we may look at it again.”
North Dakota Transportation Department spokeswoman Billie Jo Lorius said the price of road salt has jumped from about $40 a ton in 2004 to about $67 a ton now. The state spent about $1.6 million for 29,000 tons of road salt last year, Lorius said.
This season, the state has been using a mixture of sugar-beet pulp with commercial salt brine, officials said.
The Transportation Department had been using the oil-well wastewater, 10 times as salty as sea water, to melt ice and snow on North Dakota roads — mostly in the western part of the state — since 1963. It stopped last year after The Associated Press reported on the practice. Some health officials had never heard of the practice until then.
The Health Department has since conducted studies and found the salty oil-well wastewater did not harm water or vegetation along roadsides, Glatt said.
Health officials tested about 10 oil wells, Glatt said. Some wells contained pollutants that would prohibit water from those wells to be dumped on the roads, but the water in others was as safe as commercial road salt, he said.
