Abstract

Wastewater treatment facility siting for Marcellus Shale Gas Play
Track: Water, Wastewater, and Stormwater
Authors: Chung Shih

While the rich natural gas deposits in the Marcellus shale represent a tremendous economic stimulus opportunity, development can cause serious impact to the environment, especially water resources. The well completion process produces huge amount of wastewater with high Total Dissolved solids (TDS) which has to be treated by specialized plants to meet the new regulation.
It is essential to find optimal locations for new wastewater treatment facilities to meet the increasing wastewater treatment demand, to maximize the potential profitability, and to minimize environmental impacts. The geospatial nature of this problem makes it hard to be analyzed by traditional risk and cost analysis methods.
The goal of this project is to develop a siting framework based on a criteria matrix to spatially process the resources and to filter out potentially low profit areas. This framework can be applied during the project planning and decision making to control risks for capital investments.