Wastewater Jitters in New York As I report in Friday's Times, disposing of the waste produced by natural gas drilling will become a larger and more contentious issue if New York State gives the go-ahead to horizontal hydraulic fracturing, which uses millions of gallons of fluids per well to release gas from the Marcellus Shale. New York already deals with waste from about 6,800 active vertical and horizontal gas wells upstate. Although these wells require just a fraction of the water that would be needed for fracking in the Marcellus, they still produce waste that needs to go somewhere. Officials with the New York Department of Environmental Conservation say that in 2010, New York's gas wells produced more than 23 million gallons of waste, 17 million of which stayed in New York. Most of it went to sewage treatment plants or was used for de-icing roads. Take the sewage treatment plant in Auburn, N.Y., near Syracuse. The sewage plant has treated industrial waste, including wastewater from natural gas wells, for about a decade. But last summer, a jittery city council voted to ban the practice after the state's proposal to allow fracking brought more attention to the contamination risks of drilling in general. "We've heard the horror stories about the composition of the water," said Mayor Michael Quill, who voted for the ban. But the city's director of municipal utilities, Vicky L. Murphy, pointed out that drilling waste amounted to less than 1 percent of all the waste treated at the plant. The city also stood to lose $600,000 a year in revenue from eight drilling companies that would have to be made up by increasing water rates or taxes, she said. In March, after new elections in the city of 27,000, a newly configured city council lifted the ban, and the plant is in the process of seeking state approval to resume the treatment of gas well wastewater. Council members said that there had been no discernible harm to the Owasco River, where the treated water is discharged (although city officials knew of no specific studies of impacts to the waterway.) But for now, officials there said, they have no plans to offer to treat fracking waste if horizontal hydraulic fracturing is allowed in New York. Waste from fracking contains metals, toxic chemicals and high levels of salt. There are two types of byproducts: first, the "flowback" fluids that return after the shale rock is blasted with sand and with water laced with chemicals to release the gas, and, second, the brine produced by the gas well during its lifetime State environmental officials say that no treatment facility in New York has applied to accept wastewater from high-volume hydraulic fracturing.