Coshocton, Ohio - Buckeye Brine, LLC, an established waste disposal facility in Ohio, has begun operations with a new Class I Underground Injection Control (UIC) permit allowing it to manage non-hazardous wastewater. 

Buckeye Brine’s Coshocton, OH disposal facility has been recognized as the most advanced and environmentally secure oilfield waste facility in Appalachia and has operated without a violation or a recordable accident since its startup in 2012. The new Class I permit allows the facility to manage non-hazardous wastewaters from any industry. 

Buckeye Brine president Steve Mobley said, “Our new Class I permit brings safe, responsible, and much-needed disposal resources to waste generators in our region. We have a capacity of 420,000 gallons a day and our state-of-the-art facility allows us to safely dispose of nearly all types of nonhazardous wastewaters. Constituents that present challenges to discharge operations, such as ammonias and high BODs, don’t constrain us at all, nor do emerging contaminants. This makes our facility a particularly good fit for landfill leachates.” 

Deepwell injection is a technology that was developed for oilfield wastes in the 1930s and became established in other industries in the 1950s. The practice came under federal regulation in the 1980s under the Safe Drinking Water Act’s UIC program. Construction standards, real-time monitoring, and periodic wireline testing work together to ensure that waste goes into the permitted injection zone and nowhere else. In the 40 years of federal regulation of this technology, no Class I well has failed to confine wastewater to its permitted injection zone.

Buckeye Brine’s UIC operation injects wastewaters more than a mile below the groundwater, isolating them permanently from all rock formations above the injection zone. “We’re the only technology that removes contaminants from the biosphere, as opposed to just rearranging them on the surface of the earth,” Mobley said.