He hauls a salty substance called “brine,” a naturally occurring waste product that gushes out of America’s oil-and-gas wells to the tune of nearly 1 trillion gallons a year, enough to flood Manhattan, almost shin-high, every single day. In a squat rig fitted with a 5,000-gallon tank, Peter crisscrosses the expanse of farms and woods near the Ohio/West Virginia/Pennsylvania border, the heart of a region that produces close to one-third of America’s natural gas.
“Throw a little money at us and by God we’ll jump and take it.” “This is a poverty area,” he says of his home in the state’s rural southeast corner. every morning and not home until well after dark - but the steady $16-an-hour pay was appealing, says Peter, who asked to use a pseudonym. The hours were long - he was out the door by 3 a.m. In 2014, a muscular, middle-aged Ohio man named Peter took a job trucking waste for the oil-and-gas industry.
This story was supported by the journalism nonprofit Economic Hardship Reporting Project Justin Nobel is writing a book about oil-and-gas radioactivity for Simon & Schuster.
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