With the oil exploration industry swelling to more than 20,000 workers in North Dakota, the state looks to regional lagoons and continued land application to handle the waste stream

Let me tell you a story. In the early 1980s, I was on a steering committee that was trying to decide what to do with the septage produced by escalating rural development. The conclusion was more land application. Then, as now, when people heard that term, they envisioned the contents of their toilet dumped on agricultural fields. The Pennsylvania legislature responded by passing stringent land application regulations.