And with the hundreds of thousands of unplugged wells in Pennsylvania, perhaps half a million, some abandoned over 100 years ago, there is a short route to the surface. This previous neglect causes increasing problems with expanding the hydrocarbon industry. Higher pressures, more varied and powerful chemicals used in such large quantity, currently threaten to leave Pennsylvania in a condition like the background of the Mad Max science fiction movies.

Vacuous mouthpieces like Range Resources’ “Mouthy” Pizarella, Director of Corporate Communications, who has long misrepresented his educational achievement (see ) and the slick web presence of these corporations, sound like a gift from above to the public and politicians who get their news from the companies. In fact, just like a bull, they have only one thing in mind, but theirs is joining the country club set.

Bystanders get out of the way.

BY SUSAN PHILLIPS, NPR State Impact PA, Auust 4, 2016

Photo: Crews weld a pipeline from a wellhead in the Loyalsock State Forest.

The Wolf Administration says Pennsylvania will be getting tens of thousands of miles of new pipelines over the next couple of decades. Recently we reported on how poorly mapped some of these pipelines are.  Many of those unmapped pipelines are also unregulated. These are rural gathering lines, or pipelines that take the gas from the wellhead to a larger transmission line, or gas processing facility.

DEP Secretary John Quigley told StateImpact that he expects the industry to add 20-25,000 miles of gathering lines. Most of those lines will be in rural areas, the so-called “class one” lines, which no state, federal or local authorities oversee.

The Pipeline Hazardous Material Safety Administration is looking at changing those rules. Linda Daugherty, a deputy associate administrator for field operations at PHMSA, told a room full of pipeline safety workers at a conference back in 2013 that the agency has been working on new rules, but the process was slow.

“What keeps me up at night? Gathering lines,” said Daugherty. ”This worries me. There are a whole lot of gathering lines out there in Pennsylvania that are not regulated.”

…. See the original article for much more …..