Martin Milita is senior director with Duane Morris Government Strategies, a business consulting firm affiliated with the international law firm Duane Morris LLP. Beginning in 2014, Martin Milita has served under appointment by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection as a monitor of one of the state’s solid waste, recycling, and transportation companies. Previously he served as deputy attorney general in the state’s division of criminal justice as chief of the solid waste unit.
Hydraulic fracturing drilling is spurring the current boon in America’s energy sector but byproducts from the drilling process pose potential environmental hazards that remain largely unregulated at the federal government level. Oversight by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of the drilling process is limited to regulation of drilling emissions only, as underground injections from drilling are exempted from federal Safe Water Drinking Act provisions by the Energy Policy Act of 2005. Although hydraulic fracturing drilling has not yet come to the shores and inlands of New Jersey, drilling is conducted in neighboring states of Pennsylvania and New York. Wastewater with possible environmental hazards created by hydraulic fracturing drilling in these contiguous states creates the need for wastewater storage and treatment in neighboring landfills as well as the potential for wastewater runoff and seepage into New Jersey’s waterways.
Because federal oversight of hydraulic fracturing drilling is limited, New Jersey state legislators moved to curtail and shut off the potential for state water environmental damage from other states’ drilling wastewater. Voting 4-1, the state’s Senate Environmental and Energy Committee adopted legislation that blocks the storage and treatment of hydraulic fracturing drilling wastewater in New Jersey. In addition, the bill passed by the state senate prohibits the disposal of hydraulic fracturing wastewater into New Jersey waterways.
