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We protect and restore
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Environment Matters.
>>AMANDA PITZER: We've been working on this
watershed for a long time but this is the
keystone.
This is the piece that had to happen.
>>NARRATION: A state of the art water treatment
plant now coming online is bringing a stream
poisoned by acid mine drainage for nearly
a quarter of a century back from
the dead.
Plus:
>>NATHAN HALL: This is the most extreme conditions
this equipment has ever been used in, but
it's working really well.
>>NARRATION: A demonstration project in southern
West Virginia is looking to convert reclaimed
surface mines into fertile, productive farmland.
>>JAKE GLANCE: Hello everyone and welcome
to
another edition of Environment Matters.
I'm Jake Glance.
In 1994 and again in 1995, water trapped underground
inside the T&T mine in Preston County blew
out the hillside above Muddy Creek, sending
millions of gallons of untreated acid mine
drainage into the stream and the
Cheat River beyond - killing fish for 16 miles
downstream and leaving Muddy Creek a lifeless
orange ditch.
T&T declared bankruptcy in 1995 and the DEP
has been
treating the discharge ever since.
Now a new treatment plant is the final piece
in the decades long process to restore the
lower Cheat watershed.
The DEP's
Mike Huff has the details.
>>NARRATION: The water leaving the new Muddy
Creek
treatment plant near Albright is clean and
clear.
It's a day it's been a long time coming.
>>AMANDA PITZER: This is a huge deal.
T&T was the site that really brought friends
of the Cheat together.
The blowout in 94 and then again in 95 was
the wake-up call to this community.
So to be standing here 25-ish years later
is just amazing.
I mean I've been, frankly I've been a little
emotional just standing on the sidelines looking
around at people
that have been involved since day one - and
this is a reality I mean we are standing on
the bank of Muddy Creek
talking about trout!
I mean that's -- I never would have thought
that that was possible.
So it's a huge deal.
>>NARRATION: The lower three-and-a-half miles
of Muddy Creek were in declining health even
before the mine blowouts of the 90s, thanks
to acid mine drainage coming from higher up
in the watershed - here at
Martin Creek and farther upstream from Fickey Run.
>>AMANDA PITZER: Above that confluence, Muddy
Creek's a trout fishery - a healthy stream
- cold water temps, trout that survive year
round - so we really have this small little
stretch to connect to the greater Cheat and
we have a lot of good populations of macro
invertebrates to
help repopulate so, you know, we don't want
to make any promises that are too big, but
in a couple of years, you know, I think we'll
see bugs coming back very
soon and fish not too long after that.
>>NARRATION: The DEP hosted a tour of the
eight and a
half million dollar facility recently.
The plant treats water from four different
acid mine drainage sources in the watershed.
Incoming water is mixed with a slurry of lime
and polymers. That raises the pH to neutralize
the acid and
causes the metals - iron, aluminum, and manganese
- to settle out in these two 80-foot diameter
clarifiers.
The resulting sludge is pumped back into the
mine or
into a series of geo-tubes for later processing.
The plant can fully treat 4,200 gallons per
minute.
In extreme high flow events, it's capable
of hydraulically passing up to 8,000 gallons
a minute while still
adjusting the pH to neutralize the acidity.
>>DAVID McCOY: It is conveyed through pipelines
and manholes and we gravity flow it down here
to the new plant location and across Route
26 here, we also put in new mine seals on
the Ruth Belle Preston Energy mine complex
that previously had never been treated before.
So, it's about equal flow that matches our
T&T mine and
it was also plumbed underneath of Route 26
and gravity flows into the treatment facility
and then upstream, to the north of us on out
Route 26, we have approximately 7,000 feet
of force main with 10-inch HDPE buried line
and a
1,300 gallon per minute pump station so we're
pumping the water from two other sources on
our Fickey Run and our Viking Coal Company
forfeiture site.
>>NARRATION: Fickey Run is arguably the most
acid impacted stream in all of West Virginia.
Mining in
the watershed dates all the way back to the
1800s and many of the mines were abandoned
prior to 1977, when a law was passed requiring
mine operators to reclaim the sites once operations
ceased.
>>LADD WILLIAMS: Fickey Run was the real deal
killer there and, quite frankly, the lion's
share of all our pollution in the watershed.
So we needed - we knew we needed to address
the Fickey Run area in order to really restore
lower Muddy Creek and that all came in...
When we when we saw that we needed to address
that, we decided, well,
you know, this plant can do a little bit more.
We can we can bring Fickey Run in but we can
also bring in a couple of other major bond
forfeitures, you know,
just by simply plumbing into these water sources
and bringing pipelines down to this major
plant and by pulling all of that acid mine
drainage out of these these headwater areas
in this watershed and consolidating them here
in one large plant just makes that much more
sense
economically and environmentally to treat
it - to deal with it that way.
So, that's the approach we really took and
that,
you know, that's what we think will give us
that that restorable 3.4 mile section of lower
Muddy Creek back to - back to its original
condition.
>>NARRATION: And that's where natural gas
producer Southwestern Energy comes into the
picture.
Southwestern provided a significant part of
the funding to build the pipelines that lead
to the plant.
Southwestern is
also contributing to the operation and maintenance
cost of the plant.
It's part of the company's fresh water neutral
initiative.
The Muddy Creek facility is DEP's most ambitious
acid mine drainage treatment project and even
though it's only been online for a short time
it's already showing results.
>>LADD WILLIAMS: To see Muddy Creek come back
and ultimately the main stem of the Cheat,
the Cheat Canyon -
it's huge for me.
I think it's a really, really cool project.
It's going to be really great for the the
economics of
the area.
I think the recreation industry could potentially
thrive again if we see significant improvements
in water
quality and, you know, it's really, really
a huge project for water quality in Appalachia.
>>AMANDA PITZER: After the pollution blowouts
on T&T, the the local community and the paddling
community rallied and formed that, you know,
a unique partnership with agencies and private
business that we call The River of Promise
and the River of Promise was focused on the
Cheat.
The Cheat was the River of Promise, and now,
working up into Muddy Creek again is just
something that I don't think that original
group even thought was feasible.
To see those people still engaged and being
here today and then what is to come, I think
should inspire other groups to stick with
it.
Patience, persistence, and thinking outside
of the box...
We don't have endless resources, so we have
to use the ones we have wisely and partner
and work together and that's how we've come
this far is cooperation and collaboration
and big props to, you know, the folks that
had that vision in the beginning - to let
us carry it through.
>>NARRATION: In Preston County, I'm Mike Huff
for Environment Matters.
>>JAKE GLANCE: The DEP has also installed
an in-stream
treatment facility on Glade Run, an acid mine
drainage impacted tributary of Martin Creek.
When that comes online in October of this
year, the restoration work on Muddy Creek
will be complete.
The DEP's watershed improvement branch recently
awarded nearly $100,000 in grant funding for
watershed groups across the state.
The grants, ranging from five thousand to
more than twenty thousand dollars, will go
toward things like volunteer monitoring, capacity
building, targeted
water quality analysis, fisheries and benthic
studies in priority areas, as well as outreach
and education.
The grant supports short-term projects - typically
two years - with a focus on non point source
pollution.
A list of this year's grant recipients is
available on our
website www.dep.wv.gov.
As we've seen earlier in the program, treating
acid mine
drainage in West Virginia is an ongoing and
expensive problem, but a new process developed
by researchers at WVU may have found a way
to turn that liability into an asset.
The DEP's Brianna Hickman joins us now with
the details.
>>BRIANNA HICKMAN: Jake, as we've shown you,
the process of treating acid mine drainage
leaves behind a
sludge of metals - iron, aluminum, and manganese
mostly - a waste product that had no value...
until now.
>>NARRATION: In a lab on the campus of West
Virginia
University, 100 tiny machines quietly spin
a liquid mixture.
They're separating a specific group of minerals
- rare earth
elements, they're called, from a solution
derived from acid mine drainage sludge.
Despite their name, rare earths like scandium,
yttrium, and the lanthanides - elements 57
to 71 on the periodic table
- widely distributed in the rocks of the earth,
just rarely concentrated enough to get a commercially
viable
deposit.
Right now, most of the world's supply is controlled
by China, but that could change.
>>PAUL ZIEMKIEWICZ: I'm really optimistic
about this and - no one ever accused me of
being a reflexive optimist - but this, I think,
is one of the more exciting projects I've
worked on in my career here.
>>NARRATION: Dr. Paul Ziemkiewicz is director
of the Water Research Institute at WVU.
His team developed the process and is currently
working to determine how to
expand it to an industrial scale.
The project is funded by the Department of
Energy, which was looking for new ways to
extract and refine the valuable materials.
>>PAUL Z: It's just almost a matter of serendipity,
but when USDOE first came out with original
solicitation for
looking at coal-based rare earths streams,
they really didn't have acid mine drainage
in mind.
They were thinking
more like coal ash and coal refuse partings
-- that sort of thing, but I just so happened
to have a an old data set
from 1999 from a friend of mine in USGS.
I decided to check out that old data set and
found that there were there were lots of rare
earths coming in to their AMD treatment plants
and then none going out.
That can only mean one thing - all of those
rare earths were winding up in the sludge
along with all the other metals and it
takes them out in a form that's really, like
I say, easy to recover.
All you have to do is acidify.
You don't have to grind the stuff up.
It's already in a very finely divided
form.
You don't have to break it out of a mineral
matrix
which is a big cost if you're mining this
stuff and the other
thing that's really attractive about this
source is that the mixture of heavy and critical
rare earth elements versus the light ones,
which are less valuable, is really favorable.
So, if you add up to critical and and heavy
rare earth elements against the total rare
earth elements in AMD sludge, it's something
like 60%.
The last operating rare earth mine in the
United States in Mountain Pass, California,
had only something like 12% heavy rare earths
in it.
The rest were lights.
>>NARRATION: The DEP is providing the team
with its feedstock - sludge from the nearby
Omega Mine treatment plant.
>>PAUL Z: And it just so happens that that
particular
sludge - like 17% of the rare earths in that
sludge are an element called scandium.
Scandium is, by far, the most
valuable of all the rare earth elements and
it's something worth something - it's, as
an oxide it's worth four thousand, five hundred
dollars per kilogram.
That's a
lot of money.
It's - that's the richest source of scandium
we've come across so far and DEP is is is
treating this water they're separating out
the sludge by running the the effluent from
their treatment plant into these things called
geo-tubes which are these big long sacks that
naturally de-water, leaving these sacks full
of sludge behind.
Each one of
those sacks is worth something like $20,000
in rare earth value alone and they've got
something like 18 or 20 of them out there
at the Omega site right now.
So, it gives you some idea the kind of potential
value that could be
realized if this does turn into an industry.
>>NARRATION: Treating acid mine drainage is
expensive.
Besides the cost of building the treatment
facility, the operations and maintenance costs
to run a facility like Omega run into the
tens of thousands of dollars annually.
>>MIKE SHEEHAN: Sludge management is a huge
expense for when you're treating acid mine
drainage, so if we can find a beneficial use
of this byproduct of the treatment process,
it would be a tremendous savings to the state.
>>PAUL Z: I've spent most of my career working
on acid mine drainage problems in West Virginia
and we're still working on mines that were
in production in 1911.
It's all over the Appalachian coal basin.
Finding a way to incentivize treatment of
that water - which is a major pollutant.
It wipes out more stream miles than any other
pollutant we have in the Appalachians, so
just finding a way to incentivize that to
get people thinking
about that as a resource rather than just
a pollutant and a liability that has to be
dealt with, it does a couple things.
One, it helps clean up streams because it
brings money into that sector because you
can't extract the rare earths
without actually cleaning up the acid mine
drainage.
It's - so that it's a benefit in that regard.
Secondly, in these coal communities where
the acid mine drainage comes out of the old
mine portals or refuse piles or whatever,
you
have infrastructure.
You have a road network.
You have transportation.
You have a workforce.
You have a lot of things already there that
allow you to move into commercial operations
relatively quickly.
>>NARRATION: Right now, researchers are fine-tuning
the process to optimize the rare-earth extraction.
The end result will be a highly enriched rare
earth oxide that can be further refined into
rare earth metals.
>>PAUL Z: What we really need to find out
is how much it costs to process a ton of material
through this kind of
technology, and once we get those operating
conditions under control, we understand what
they are now, we can
start designing the next stage which is a
field scale pilot or demonstration plant or
maybe even a commercial scale.
>>BRIANNA HICKMAN: Dr. Ziemkiewicz says they've
done
a survey of mines and AMD treatment sites
in the northern and central Appalachian coal
basins and have determined they produce about
800 tons of rare earth elements with a value
somewhere north of 190 million dollars a year
- so if this can be expanded to an industrial
scale, this has a huge potential impact on
the region's economy.
For Environment Matters, I'm Brianna Hickman.
>>JAKE GLANCE: Thank You Brianna.
This second
phase of the process is expected to be completed
by this time next year.
We'll keep you posted on the team's progress.
The sounds of heavy equipment moving earth
is not that unusual in the southern coal fields
of West Virginia,
but on a mountaintop in Mingo County, there's
a new sound - and a new machine that's turning
reclaimed mine sites into farm fields.
The DEP's Mike huff has the
details.
(engine revving)
>>NATHAN HALL: It's like a jet fighter cockpit...
>>NARRATION: This is no ordinary piece of
farm
equipment.
Welcome aboard the Seppi Supersoil stone crusher.
That's Nathan Hall, President of Reclaim Appalachia
at the controls of all this noise and vibration
and what he's doing is turning this...
into this...
but first a little background.
>>NATHAN HALL: There are hundreds of thousands
of acres of land throughout Central Appalachia
- in West Virginia, Virginia, and Kentucky,
that have been surface mined and reclaimed
over the past 30 to 40 years and really, only
a small fraction of that is in what I would
consider an active production of any type,
really.
Especially in terms of, you know, really productive
agriculture and so it's been my mission for
the past
several years to find out what is the most
effective and cost-effective way to take these
- many times very large
landscapes, and convert them into much more
farmable land.
>>NARRATION: Reclaimed surface mines tend
to have very compacted and rocky soils with
a lot of large stones
close to the surface -- not ideal for large-scale
agriculture.
>>NATHAN HALL: So if you were to try to go
back to it with any type of typical tillage
equipment like a roto tiller or a disc or
a chisel plow, you'll either break that equipment
very quickly or just won't even go in the
ground at all.
>>NARRATION: Enter the stone crusher.
It was built to take on the rocky soils of
Europe and can pulverize rocks up to 16 to
20 inches in diameter.
It's made by an Italian company but if you're
expecting Ferrari or Lamborghini speed, think
again.
>>NATHAN HALL: Even though you're only going
point four miles an hour, it's constant work
to monitor the ground conditions and respond
to them in time.
I've always got to try to maintain as much
working depth as possible without bogging
the machine down.
As you can see, this is very uneven terrain
after we run the ripper across it.
>>NARRATION: Before the stone crusher does
its thing, crews use a ripper attachment to
break up the soil and bring the larger rocks
to the surface.
The ones that are too big for the stone crusher
are shoved into windrows or broken up into
more manageable sizes with an excavator and
a jackhammer attachment, and then it's time
to fire up the stone crusher and help speed
up the geologic time scale...
>>NATHAN HALL: Taking about 500,000 year process
and doing it in about five minutes.
If you think about it, it's really the same
as just breaking down rocks from wind
and rain and natural processes which is how
soil is
made in the first place.
We're just doing all that mechanically, very
quickly.
>>NARRATION: This is the second trip to Coalfield
Development Corporation's agroforestry test
site at 22 Mine Road in Mingo County.
The group used the stone
crusher last November to condition a small
test plot - about a fifth of an acre.
That was planted this spring with a variety
of crops - cut flowers, vegetables, and berries,
as proof of concept that land prepped like
this could support a variety of plants.
They also planted some cover crops that will
be plowed back under to help introduce organic
matter back into the soil.
>>NATHAN HALL: Immediately after using the
stone crusher, we're planting that into a
mix of buckwheat and
soybeans, sorghum sudangrass and then we'll
till that in and then will replant in mid
to late September with a mix of wheat and
Austrian winter peas and vetch and things
of that nature.
So, by doing that continuous cycling of cover
crops, as well as bringing in some organic
matter, I think, you know, we can really quickly
have soils that rival your
high quality bottom land soils.
>>NARRATION: There's even potential options
for grazing livestock, but the primary focus
is high-value crops.
>>NATHAN HALL: If you go to any existing reclaimed
mine site, you see blackberries galore and
also wild
raspberries.
So, to me, that shows that these plants already
do really well.
These are natural pioneers.
Commercial blackberry and raspberry farming
is quite profitable.
So, I think that's one of the really suitable
types of, you know, high-value crop production
that or the
bramble fruits, also grapes really like stony
kind of semi arid conditions, so I think viticulture
is definitely a possibility in these lands.
Lavender is kind of a Mediterranean plant
that that likes rocky kind of
well-drained soils.
>>NARRATION: This summer's demonstration conditioned
about 15 acres in about a hundred hours of
stone crusher
operations, so the process does seem to be
scalable to larger plots of land.
>>NATHAN HALL: As we're entering this phase
of
understanding that, you know, we are going
to keep having coal mining in this region,
but it may not ever be quite at
the level that it had been previously and
also as we keep realizing that many of these
reclaimed mine sites aren't very likely to
be turned into a Walmart or a hospital or
a golf course and whatnot.
I think we're at a really good point in time
to start thinking creatively about, you know,
what really works on these sites - what is
really scalable and so that's really been
my motivation is figuring out, you know, what
works physically on the landscape.
What do we know that we can actually do from
a physical standpoint then also what is going
to be economically viable into the future?
>>NARRATION: In Mingo County, I'm Mike Huff
for Environment Matters.
>>JAKE GLANCE: This summer's demonstration
has generated interest from several parties
looking to lease
time with the machine.
They say plans to purchase the super soil
stone crusher are currently underway.
A partnership between the Forest Service and
the
watershed group Friends of the Cheat is offering
folks a chance to experience the waters of
West Virginia in a whole new way.
The DEP's Brianna Hickman joins
us now with the details.
>>BRIANNA HICKMAN: Jake, on a stream called
Horseshoe run in the Monongahela National
Forest, folks are getting a fisheye view of
an underwater world
.
>>NARRATION: First the wetsuit...
>>BOY: Hey, do you know how to put these on?
>>NARRATION: and then getting fitted for a
snorkel and a mask and then it was off to
the water and a new
perspective on aquatic life.
>>MADISON BALL: A lot of people just see a
stream or a creek from the surface, from above.
We're terrestrial
creatures so we're trying to introduce them
to the aquatic world in a new way and to see
what actually goes on under there.
It's pretty surprising what you see with a
snorkel that you can't see from the shore.
>>NARRATION: Horseshoe Run is located inside
a
National forest in a sparsely populated part
of the state and because of those protections,
it's in pristine condition,
unlike many other streams in the state that
suffer from problems like acid mine drainage,
erosion and sediment problems, and high levels
of bacteria caused by failing septic systems
or inadequate wastewater treatment.
>>MADISON BALL: So what we're trying to do
is show the public what a healthy watershed
should look like and so when they're out recreating
and and maybe seeing some of these impaired
watersheds, they can see what we're striving
towards and maybe some of the components that
are lacking from those systems that have been
impaired.
>>NARRATION: But besides the educational opportunities
and raising awareness, this day was also about
having fun.
>>AUDREY SOLDERHOLM: It was awesome!
I saw some minnows and some BIG fish!
>>MADISON BALL: I think a lot of people they're
not really aware of how unique this area is
and how unique these species are.
So what we're trying to do is immerse them
into that world - to come and enjoy and learn
a little bit more about the awesome aquatic
ecology that we have here on the Monongahela
National Forest and also
within the Cheat River watershed.
>>NARRATION: The snorkeling events are open
to the public and take place at various locations
within the Cheat watershed during the late
summer when the water flowing out of the mountains
is its warmest, relatively speaking.
>>AUDREY SOLDERHOLM: It was a little cold,
but I liked it.
A lot!
>>BRIANNA HICKMAN: The Forest Service has
been hosting these snorkeling excursions for
the last four summers and say they've been
growing in popularity.
In fact, the day we were there the group that
had just finished up were asking about when
the next snorkeling event was
being held.
This was the first year they partnered with
Friends of the Cheat and they hope to expand
the program
next summer.
If you'd like to find out more, check out
their website at www.cheat.org.
For Environment Matters, I'm Brianna Hickman.
>>JAKE GLANCE: Thank You, Brianna.
That looked like fun.
We leave you now deep in the forest along
the Allegheny trail in Preston County.
On behalf of all of us here at
the West Virginia Department of Environmental
Protection, thanks for watching.
We'll see you next time.
(wind and forest sounds)
>>ANNOUNCER: More than eight hundred people
with one
mission: promoting a healthy environment.
We are the West Virginia Department of Environmental
Protection.
