E - Day, WV State Capitol, Feb. 27, 2017

It’s a Gas 3 – Conference on Marcellus Shale Gas Development

Compiled for FrackCheckWV by S. Tom Bond, Lewis County, WV

“It’s a Gas 3″ was a West Virginia Pipelines and Fracking Strategy session held at Jackson’s Mill on January 20-22, 2017. It was attended by representatives of most of the West Virginia groups questioning pipelines and fracking, along with representatives from Kentucky, Virginia and Maryland. Representatives from Pennsylvania participated via a video call.

The primary purpose was to plan and coordinate activities among the various groups so as to protect human health and the physical environment from the impacts of Marcellus shale gas development.

Opposition to natural gas development is widespread in the United States and in many countries overseas, due to the need to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide going into the air and the damage to the surface and water of the earth where pipelines and fracking are put into place. Specific problems in various places were shared, and ways to get local people involved before they are hit with earthmovers.

Proximity to homes is a big problem. Homeowners are treated with contempt both in planning and execution. The needs of society in the future with the rising population and the need for clean water and space to grow food takes a back seat to a corporate view that doesn’t run beyond five to seven years.

Ethics and morality take first place when talking to people. The ethical and moral breaches involved in taking land, making people sick, and how their interests are ignored by companies and government agencies when dominated by the companies. It is necessary that concerned citizens get out and talk to real people and local governments about what has happened elsewhere and how they can expect the same if it comes to them. Science is on the side of protecting ourselves and our property in all respects. Health claims can no longer be dismissed as anecdotes. Contamination of land and water, sound and light, are being measured and recorded and published. All reasonable persons now know that human induced climate change is taking place at an accelerating rate.

Opponents of gas shale drilling & fracking need to cooperate with each other in state and out of state. They should share information and ideas, working for the good of people and the generations to come, against short thinking and those who would profit at the expense of others. In many places renewable energy is already cheaper than burning gas.

One of the problems with pipelines is that they will lock in fracking activities for decades, which does further damage. There is a need to deny 401 permits when there are stream damages involved. There is a need to encourage banks and investors to disinvest in pipelines and fracking, which leads to climate change. One of the worst things about pipelines is, once in the ground, they will be paid for by gas customers, even if they are not used to full capacity, because utilities are cost plus by law. The utilities make a profit whether the rates are low or high. There is a serious problem as to whether they are needed in the first place. Gas shipped overseas contributes to the carbon burning problem, too.

Most people take pride in the environment. They like to see natural forests, nice farms, clean water with fish and wildlife. Appeals to love of beauty have an important place. Fishermen and hunters are natural friends of environmentalists, because they don’t want barren streams or sick game.

Local governments present an opportunity. They are strongly influenced by local businessmen, but the entire populace elects them. They are never given the faintest idea of the safety equipment they will need to fight pipeline explosions and fires. (It is possible the pipeline builders have no idea either.) A 42 inch pipeline under 100 times the atmospheric pressure has a blast radius of a mile. Things ignite up to two miles. Several miles of contents between valves would have to come out into the atmosphere and burn even if they were automatically shut when the leak occurs. Although the pipes are a few feet underground they are an easy target for sabotage or enemy attack. What a terrible thing it is to put pipelines within a few hundred feet of a school or densely populated neighborhood.

As for jobs, construction only lasts for a few months, and then workers are gone, because most jobs are specialized and workers have to be brought in. Jobs in the drilling rigs average a little below $100,000 a year, but they are very hard, dangerous work. See the five minute video here. What happens if one of the chains in the video is out of place? Accidents are potentially disastrous. See this 45 minute video of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. What can happen on land is a smaller version of this.

Christian DeHaemer reports in Seeking Alpha the statistics of rig accidents and says since it is so dangerous and expensive a company called Robotic Drilling Systems is developing the world’s first fully autonomous robotic oil drilling rig in Norway. He recommends it as an investment. Can the U. S. be far behind? Another company is writing the computer code “to integrate all the robots needed, from drill floor robots to pipe-handlers, lift, robotic roughnecks, and everything else. This automatic rig will be out in the beta version in 2017.”

Another discussion of automation of drilling is this article from Bloomberg news:

“Rigs have gotten so much more efficient that the shale industry can use about half as many as it did at the height of the boom in 2014 to suck the same amount of oil out of the ground, says Angie Sedita, an analyst at UBS Corp. Nabors Industries, the world’s largest onshore driller, says it expects to cut the number of workers at each well site eventually to about five from 20 by deploying more automated drilling rigs.”

Less labor and far more investment! Take that labor! Take that, you local businessmen!

Fracking has been getting less rewarding to everyone. But, bad  laws keeps coming along to advance company interests at the expense of the public. In Montana, they can’t get a minimum setback from buildings. The Virginia legislature doesn’t want to have full information about contents of fracking fluids released even to doctors taking care of victims of fracking accidents. It is a common practice to continue taxation of land at the old rate even when there is a pipeline or fracking activity resulting in reduced value. Enforcement of existing laws has been minimal. It was recently discovered there had been 9442 complaints to the Pennsylvania DEP on 10,027 fracked wells drilled over 12 years. Some 44% of those were drinking water related. Many were ignored by the Pennsylvania DEP.

The “It’s a Gas 3” conference developed areas of importance in the form of a grid of topics for attention, what group(s) was taking responsibility for each, timelines and leaders. Connections to groups in other states were designated. Participants also received a list of all participants to facilitate communication.

See also:  West Virginia Environmental Council

Editorial Opinion: “Accurately Map Pipelines” Please in PA (& WV)

From the Editorial Board of the Scranton Times-Tribune, August 6, 2015

Pennsylvanians need look no further than the legacy of coal mining to understand the hazards of inaccurately mapping underground infrastructure. Official mine maps often do not reflect the actual extent of underground voids, and sometimes misidentify the location of some mine chambers.

Over the decades, the inaccurate information has caused an array of problems, from buildings being constructed over unmarked voids to problems with utility lines.

Now, the Wolf administration estimates that the natural gas industry will construct about 30,000 miles of natural gas pipelines over the next 20 years to gather gas from wells and carry it to main pipelines and then to market.

StateImpact Pennsylvania, which covers the economics and environmental aspects of the gas industry, has detailed that mapping of existing pipelines is inexact and often inaccurate. It noted that a heavy equipment operator was badly injured July 15 in Armstrong county while clearing a right-of-way for a new pipeline. His bulldozer struck an existing unmarked, unmapped pipeline, which exploded. His company had received a go-ahead from a state clearinghouse that keeps track of underground infrastructure.

As the gas industry took off in Pennsylvania, the state Legislature gave the Public Utility Commission the authority to regulate gas pipelines. But there are different categories based on size and population density in the areas that they traverse. Some lines are lightly regulated or not regulated.

The general locations of most pipes are known because companies must acquire rights-of-way from property owners. But in many cases the exact locations of the pipes within those rights-of-way are not known.

The Legislature should expand the PUC’s authority over all classifications of pipelines. And it should require companies to provide exact data for every pipeline so that contractors will be able to avoid them and first responders will know exactly what they are dealing with in emergencies.

NOTE: This above request goes out to the State of West Virginia as well. See also the August 18 protest rally in Pt. Marion, PA, at 12:30 pm and 6:30 pm over interstate pipelines: “Hands Across Our Land”