Frack Check WV » fumes

WV Environmental Quality Board says OK to Chemical Tank Regulations

Duane Nichols — Sat, 07 May 2016 18:40:59 +0000

Chemical Storage Tanks -- Elk River

EQB upholds WV-DEP chemical tank designations

From an Article by Ken Ward, Charleston Gazette, April 26, 2016

The state Environmental Quality Board has upheld decisions by state regulators about which chemical storage tanks would be covered by new safety standards passed to try to prevent a repeat of the January 2014 Freedom Industries spill that contaminated drinking water for thousands of people in Charleston and surrounding communities.

In a 10-page order, board members said that the state Department of Environmental Protection had legal authority to make the designations.

Lawyers for the Independent Oil and Gas Association of West Virginia and three related companies, C.I. McKown and Son Inc.; Pocono Energy Corp.; and Tempest Energy Corp., had appealed the WV-DEP designations and a formula the agency used to make them.

At issue in the case were decisions the WV-DEP made about which tanks are within two different zones within certain distances and stream-flow times from sites where public drinking water intakes are located. Under the law, originally passed in 2014 and then rolled back significantly last year, the WV-DEP designations — of “zones of critical concern” or “zones of peripheral concern” near intakes — determine what level of regulation applies to different tanks.

Natural gas lobbyists had tried to have their industry exempted entirely from the chemical tank legislation, but lawmakers declined to adopt that proposal.

Among other things, the gas industry appeal argued that the WV-DEP wrongly did not make its zone designations through a separate rulemaking that would have been subject to public review and comment, and that in making tank decisions, agency officials used “arbitrary and capricious” assumptions.

Board members said that the Legislature had required the WV-DEP to use the rulemaking process for certain parts of its implementation of the chemical tank law, such as setting fees and spelling out inspection procedures, but did not require that for other matters — such as the formula for determining tank designations.

“The Legislature did not state that a rule was required for making the mathematical model,” the board ruling said. “The board refrains from reading more into the statute than is expressly provided.”

Board members also said that the WV-DEP’s model “was essentially an invention required by law” and put together by the agency “with limited funds” in a six-month period, requiring “innovation, assumptions, and acceptance of limitations.”

“This is especially understandable given no alternative has ever been presented,” the board said.

The board did rule that the WV-DEP had wrongly implemented a 1,320-foot buffer zone for the Ohio River, adopted from the Ohio River Valley Sanitation Commission, rather than using the 1,000-foot buffer mandated by the Legislature.

Board members, ruling after a hearing in January, also ruled that it was right to allow two citizen groups, the West Virginia Citizen Action Group and the West Virginia Rivers Coalition, to intervene in the case.

Aggressive Tactics on the Western PA Fracking Front

Duane Nichols — Sat, 05 Jul 2014 11:40:19 +0000

Residents off PA Route 88 & Cardox Road

A Pennsylvania gas company offers residents cash to buy protection from any claims of harm

From an Article by Naveena Sadasivam, ProPublica, July 2, 2014

For the last eight years, Pennsylvania has been riding the natural gas boom, with companies drilling and fracking thousands of wells across the state. And in a little corner of Washington County, some 20 miles outside of Pittsburgh, EQT Corporation has been busy – drilling close to a dozen new wells on one site.

It didn’t take long for the residents (off PA Route 88 north) of Finleyville who lived near the fracking operations to complain – about the noise and air quality, and what they regarded as threats to their health and quality of life. Initially, EQT, one of the largest producers of natural gas in Pennsylvania, tried to allay concerns with promises of noise studies and offers of vouchers so residents could stay in hotels to avoid the noise and fumes.

But then, in what experts say was a rare tactic, the company got more aggressive: it offered all of the households along Cardox Road $50,000 in cash if they would agree to release the company from any legal liability, for current operations as well as those to be carried out in the future. It covered potential health problems and property damage, and gave the company blanket protection from any kind of claim over noise, dust, light, smoke, odors, fumes, soot, air pollution or vibrations.

The agreement also defined the company’s operations as not only including drilling activity but the construction of pipelines, power lines, roads, tanks, ponds, pits, compressor stations, houses and buildings.

“The release is so incredibly broad and such a laundry list,” said Doug Clark, a gas lease attorney in Pennsylvania who mainly represents landowners. “You’re releasing for everything including activity that hasn’t even occurred yet. It’s crazy.”

Linda Robertson, a spokeswoman for EQT, said in a statement that the company had worked hard and conscientiously to address the concerns of the residents. She said consultants had been hired, data collected on noise and health matters, and that independent analysis had shown the company was in compliance with noise and air quality requirements. She would not comment in detail on the financial offers.

“When landowner and leaseholder concerns arise, it is a standard practice for EQT personnel to work diligently to listen to and understand their concerns, particularly those related to the temporary inconveniences of living near a production site,” Robertson said. “Regarding the neighbors on Cardox Road, the majority of whom are leaseholders, we have been in regular and ongoing communications with residents and local officials to address and resolve questions as they arise.”

The liability agreements EQT has used in Finleyville — they are often known as nuisance easements — have been used in other circumstances. Residents living close to airports, for instance, are often offered such easements as compensation for having to bear with the noise, vibrations and fumes from air traffic. Property owners close to landfills and wind farms may also sign similar agreements.

But experts say such easements are rare in the oil and gas industry. “This is only the second time I’ve seen one,” said Clark, the Pennsylvania attorney. “They’re absolutely not common at all.”

Clark says it is unlikely that companies will start handing out such agreements en masse, saying doing so could decrease landowners’ confidence about the safety of the company’s operations and their personal health. “People are going to say the gas companies must be concerned about air pollution because they’re offering these easements,” said Clark. “Everybody’s going to get suspicious.”

Earlier this year, a couple in Texas was awarded $3 million in a lawsuit against a gas drilling company. The couple alleged that the company’s operations had affected their health, decreased their property value and forced them to move away. The case was one of the first successful lawsuits alleging that air pollution from gas drilling activity caused health issues.

Experts say that verdict and others like it have emboldened landowners to take their claims to court. Nuisance easements may be one way to ensure that the company can easily block landowners from claiming damages.

Apart from drilling and fracking wells, EQT also builds and operates the infrastructure — pipelines and compressor stations — necessary to move natural gas to market. Its operations are headquartered in Pennsylvania but it also owns wells in Kentucky and West Virginia.

In 2008, landowners in Finleyville signed a gas lease for drilling with Chesapeake Energy. The company only drilled one well, but last year it sold its leases to EQT, which has since drilled 11 additional wells. So far the company’s strategy to reduce its liabilities has worked with some landowners.

Muriel Spencer, whose house is about 500 feet from the drilling, took the money. She said she did not consult with a lawyer, but had asked the company to put a five-year time frame around the release. The initial contract released the company from liabilities indefinitely. “I cannot complain about the drilling to this point,” Spencer said, adding that EQT “has been nothing but fair with me.”

The company’s spokeswoman would not comment on how many landowners EQT approached with the proposed agreements, but said that “approximately 85% of the residents” had signed them.

An initial version of the proposed standard agreement listed 30 Finleyville residents and required that they all sign the agreements in order to receive the $50,000. When the residents refused, EQT modified the agreement such that the compensation was not contingent on all landowners signing it.

ProPublica found that at least four of the 30 residents have agreed to some version of the initial agreement that EQT proposed and have received $50,000 in exchange. It is unclear what changes were made to the agreement during negotiations.

Robertson, the company spokeswoman, said in her statement that “any changes made to the agreements during negotiations were based on requests directly from the resident, and/or their attorney.”

But some of the residents have refused to negotiate with the company. ”I was insulted,” said Gary Baumgardner, who was approached by EQT with the offer in January. “We’re being pushed out of our home and they want to insult us with this offer.”

Baumgardner says his house is like an amphitheater, constantly vibrating from the drilling. At times the noise gets up to 75 decibels, equivalent to a running vacuum cleaner, he said. Earlier this year, EQT Corp. put up a sound barrier to limit the noise, but Baumgardner says it has made little difference to his quality of life. ”We took the pictures down in the bedroom because they still vibrate at night,” he said.

Baumgardner says he has had to leave his house at least three times so far because the gas fumes from the well site were too much to bear. A local health group has installed air quality monitors in his home and several of his neighbors. Last year when the one of the monitors began flashing red, his daughter, pregnant at the time, fled the house. She has since moved away after her doctor advised her not to live close to a drilling site.

“Our house is most often not livable,” said Baumgardner. EQT’s response to his complaints, he said, has been “constant dismissals, excuses, delays and broken promises.”

Robertson would not respond to Baumgardner’s specific assertions. She did point to several mitigation efforts she said the company had taken, including the sound wall, but also involving switching to quieter machinery and applying for permits to transport water via pipes instead of trucks.

Baumgardner believes the nuisance easement he was offered is a part of the industry’s tactic to silence landowners.

“Throughout the last several months, an EQT regional land manager, one of our community advisers, and our community relations manager have all been engaged in phone calls and personal meetings with residents, attended township meetings, and visited the production site on multiple occasions to identify and confirm the reported issues, if any,” Robertson’s statement said.

“The easements are part of our overall consistent and ongoing effort to address leaseholder concerns.”

NPR: ‘Close Encounters’ With Gas Well Pollution

Duane Nichols — Wed, 16 May 2012 14:21:33 +0000

: Garfield County, Colorado

PART 2. NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO SERIES ON SHALE GAS DRILLING & FRACKING.

Here is a condensed version of the NPR report:

Living in the middle of a natural gas boom can be pretty unsettling. The area around the town of Silt, Colo., used to be the kind of sleepy rural place where the tweet of birds was the most you would hear. Now it’s hard to make out the birds because of the rumbling of natural gas drilling rigs. The land here is steep cliffs and valleys. But bare splotches of earth called well pads are all over the place.

What’s In Those Fumes?

Nearly a decade ago, Garfield County in Colorado started trying to tackle that question, and was chugging ahead of the whole country in pursuit of scientific truth. Local politician Tresi Houpt was the engine pushing that effort.

As she started to campaign to be a Garfield County commissioner, she came down from her home on a ski mountain to meet people in ranches, rural neighborhoods with the big blue skies and clear starry nights. She couldn’t believe what she saw: drill rigs right outside homes, armadas of diesel-spewing trucks, fumes wafting from equipment called compressors and condensate tanks. In Colorado, you can have a drill rig 150 feet from homes.

In 2002, Houpt won her election. And one of the first things she wanted to know was: Did scientists have any answers for what was in the air near wells?

Houpt and the other commissioners agreed to start spending some of the county’s gas royalties to try to get answers. They brought in Jim Rada to create an environmental health office. “There are pipelines, there are storage yards, compressor stations, gas plants,” he says, as we drive along in his hybrid SUV past thousands of sources of air pollution. Diesel exhaust spews from trucks and drilling rigs. Methane, chemicals that make ozone, and fumes that contain cancer-causing benzene leak from wells and storage tanks.

Rada figured it would be impossible to track all this pollution, so back in 2005, he set up monitors in towns where most of the people lived. Gadgets on the roof monitor soot, smog and volatile organic compounds, known as VOCs. Years of data from these and other monitors around the county have shown that the industry is putting a lot more chemicals into the air that create smog. But levels of smog and other air pollutants still meet EPA health standards.

In 2008, he got permission from companies to put air sampling canisters around eight wells that were being drilled. Then, for 24 hours, those canisters captured the chemicals that were coming off the wells. He found very large amounts of chemicals. Some of them, like benzene, can cause cancer. Others, like xylenes, can irritate eyes and lungs.

Rada’s air monitoring work was rare enough that it was getting attention at some higher levels. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Colorado’s state public health agency were analyzing his data for answers.

But they didn’t really find any. For instance, Rada’s eight-well test was just a pilot study. He didn’t test the air long enough or at enough places to know how much chemicals people were really being exposed to.

At that point, Rada says the job got too big for him. This was 2009. Nearly 3,000 wells had gone in the year before. The county needed help. And its next move turned out to have some pretty painful consequences.

Rada called in the Colorado School of Public Health to examine whether lots of new drilling within a neighborhood might hurt people’s health. To make their conclusions, the researchers were supposed to use existing studies, such as the county’s monitoring data, and whatever other science they could find. A draft assessment by the school predicted small increases in risks of cancer, headaches and lung ailments.

People who live near gas wells held up the researchers’ work to attack the industry in lawsuits and in the media. And gas companies fought back. “Both sides were fighting,” recalls John Martin, a longtime county commissioner. “They wanted to use this document in both arguments — that it didn’t hurt anything and that it killed everyone.”

In May of last year, the commissioners gathered for a meeting and voted to end a contract with the Colorado School of Public Health. Tresi Houpt, who had lost her re-election and wasn’t part of the vote, saw her years of work unraveling. All that momentum the county had built up came to a screeching halt.

So, 10 years have passed since Houpt first drove around her county, hearing complaints about air pollution and the gas industry. And Garfield County’s 800 gas wells have grown to more than 8,000. People who live near wells — whether they’re in Texas, Pennsylvania or Utah — still don’t know what they’re breathing.

Houpt believes Garfield County’s saga shows how politics, industry pressure, technical challenges and the slow pace of science have blocked the search for answers — not just for her community, but for the whole country.

Loud Noises from Marcellus Operations Keeping Residents Awake in Taylor Co.

Duane Nichols — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 01:23:19 +0000

As reported by WBOY in Clarksburg, Roger Findley lives about 655 feet from the Equitable drilling site. “Our bedroom is in the front of the house, facing the well. And, we cannot sleep in our bedroom at night.” Often times, Findley sleeps on the floor in the back of his house to avoid the noise.

…………………

He says that the noise, dust and fumes from the site have kept him and his family indoors. “You have loud noises 24 hours a day, seven days a week. But, most of the time you smell exhaust and you smell fumes from some kind of chemicals they’re using, too. You know, you can smell that and when you start smelling that you don’t want to be outside because you don’t know what they are,” Findley said.

Back in 2009, Equitable started building the site across from Findley’s house. According to Findley, after he called the company regarding the noise and trucks along the road, Equitable offered to pay him about $1,500 in damages. “They wanted to write us a check and settle with us because of the noise, but the amount that they were going to give us was very small. And, when you sign the check, then you’re releasing all damages from that well that would happen from then on, as long as the well is there,” Findley said.

Findley says that the company has never offered an explanation for the noise or why the drilling site seems to operate every day during the week. “We were trying to get legislation passed, so that other people wouldn’t have to go through this. There’s no reason they had to drill so close to the house,” Findley said. Neighbors in Flemington say noise from a Marcellus shale drilling site there has been keeping them awake and never seems to stop. Equitable is now EQT.

Wetzel County Residents Say Marcellus Gas Wells Cause Air Pollution Problems

Duane Nichols — Sat, 21 May 2011 16:26:16 +0000

Some residents of Wetzel County are asking the state to regulate the fumes coming off certain natural gas drilling sites into the Marcellus shale. Bill Hughes with the Wetzel County Action Group says the Division of Air Quality places some limits on emissions from compressor stations, but not enough and none on the wells that feed these stations. He says the wells can release so much pollution that it can temporarily run people out of their houses, as it did one young boy and his mother.

“Her son woke her up and, ‘Mommy, it smells in here. Something smells, mommy.’ And she got up and realized, well, God, the whole house was just filled with fumes that were coming off the well the next hilltop over.” Hughes says if all drillers were required to use the best of existing standard technologies, it would be fair and the problems would be greatly reduced. And he says the companies could make up a good part of the cost by selling the fumes that don’t leak away. “The money is there to do it right, not release methane into the air, have vapor recovery units on all their condensate tanks, many many other things. But if they do that in the long run it’s better for all of us.”

Mr. Hughes’ appeal (10-3-AQB) was heard by the Air Quality Board on Thursday (May 19, 2011) at the WV-DEP headquarters in Charleston. Mr. Hughes was represented by Joe Osborne of the Group Against Smog and Pollution (GASP) of Pittsburgh. He was opposed by two lawyers from the WV-DEP and three or more lawyers for the Appalachia Midstream Services, an affiliated company of Chesapeake Energy. This latter company has already constructed the two compressor stations in question, the Pleasants and Miller Stations that are now operating in the Victory gas well field of Marshall and Wetzel counties.

This operating company requested a “directed verdict” after the first of two scheduled days of hearings, which was granted by the Air Quality Board. This decision ended the hearing in favor of Appalachian Midstream Services. The AQB said that insufficient evidence had been presented to support a claim that the new compressors stations and/or the wells feeding them were in fact “contiguous or adjacent”, as defined by the legal definitions of these terms under the Clean Air Act in spite of existing pipelines interconnecting them. Mr. Hughes will have 30 days after the AQB decision is posted to appeal this case, if he so chooses, to the Kanawha County Circuit Court (and ultimately to the WV Supreme Court of Appeals).