Explosion sent flames 200 feet high seen for 15 miles

From an Article by Scott DiSavino, Reuters News Service, January 23, 2019

(Reuters) – U.S. natural gas output in the Marcellus and Utica shale in Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia dropped by 7 percent on Wednesday, following an explosion on Enbridge Inc’s Texas Eastern (TETCO) pipeline on Monday.

The blast, which injured two people who lived nearby and damaged three homes, occurred on TETCO’s 30-inch (76.2 cm) line about two miles south of Summerfield in Noble County in southeast Ohio at around 10:40 a.m. EST, the Calgary-based company said in a statement.

Before the incident, drillers were producing about 30 billion cubic feet per day (bcfd) of gas in the Marcellus and Utica region. That dropped to just 28 bcfd on Wednesday, according to Refinitiv, a financial data provider.

One billion cubic feet is enough gas for about 5 million U.S. homes for a day.

At the time of the blast, gas was flowing through TETCO from the Marcellus and Utica shale fields south toward the Gulf of Mexico, according to gas traders.

The amount of gas moving through TETCO south of the damaged pipe in Athens and Scioto Counties in southern Ohio dropped from around 1.2 bcfd on Monday to less than 0.1 bcfd on Wednesday, according to Refinitiv data.

In Bath, Monroe and Boyle Counties in Kentucky, flows also fell from over 1.0 bcfd on Monday to about 0.1 bcfd Wednesday.

In Pennsylvania, meanwhile, flows in Greene County in the southwest corner of the state reversed direction from 0.6 bcfd moving West on Monday to 0.4 bcfd heading east on Wednesday. Greene County is one of Pennsylvania’s biggest gas producing counties.

Officials at Enbridge could not say when the damaged section of pipe would return to service. The Calgary-based company said it was working with the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio and the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) to identify the cause, monitor repairs and evaluate environmental impacts.

Enbridge said the damaged section of pipe was built in 1952-53 (65 years) and an inspection of the line was performed in 2012 (6 years) with no remediation needed.

The 9,029-mile (14,531-km) TETCO pipeline was designed to carry gas from the U.S. Gulf Coast and Texas to high-demand markets in the mid-Atlantic and Northeast. It became bi-directional over the past five years, enabling it to also carry gas from the Marcellus and Utica shale, where production is growing rapidly, to markets in the U.S. Midwest and Gulf Coast.

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NOTE: We believe that 65 years is an excessive lifetime for a buried metal pipeline operating at high thru-put and high pressure. Further, safety inspections should take place every year for old pipelines, not to five or six or more years. Water lines are relatively safe but natural gas and LPG pipelines are explosive with fires resulting. DGN

The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (PA DEP) announced the launch of a one-year ambient air monitoring project beginning on July 23, 2012 to study pollutants near permanent Marcellus gas facilities such as compressor stations and gas processing installations.  Canister samples will be tested for methane, ozone, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, hydrogen sulfide and particulate matter as well as an array of toxic compounds.

There was a spate of public attention this spring to the issue of illnesses experienced by southwestern PA shale-field residents and the reported failure of public agencies (Department of Health and DEP) to respond to complaints of headaches, nausea, vomiting, sore throats, nosebleeds, eye irritation and rashes associated with visible emissions and/or odors. Anecdotal reports such as the closure of the Cornerstone Care community clinic due to noxious fumes suspected to be related to nearby drilling fed the interest. An inquiry by the Associated Press revealed that the Pennsylvania Department of Health didn’t begin tracking health complaints possibly tied to drilling until 2011, and also noted that there were obstacles to filing an official complaint with the agency.  PennLive.com reported in April, 2012:

“The Pennsylvania Department of Health said this week that it has received fewer than 30 complaints over the last year from people who feel natural gas drilling has affected their health, but it’s not clear how many came before that. Last June the agency head suggested it had already received several dozen.”

That article further noted that the health agency staff does not have manuals or guidelines describing how to respond to health complaints related to natural gas industry.  “This is not surprising,” said Bernard Goldstein, professor emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health. “It hasn’t got enough resources to do its core job.” The health department will not receive any funding from the state’s newly legislated natural gas impact fee.

Nonprofits are attempting to take up some of the slack.  In February of this year, the McMurray-based nonprofit, Southwest Pennsylvania Environmental Health Project, was founded “to assist and support Washington County residents who believe their health has been, or could be, impacted by natural gas drilling activities.”

In June, 2012 the Clean Air Council (CAC), an environmental nonprofit,  sent a letter to the US Environmental Protection Agency requesting federal intervention i.e. asking the EPA to assist the PA DEP in it’s duty to respond to complaints about air quality.  Per the letter signed by Joseph Minott, Executive Director of the CAC, “Due to residents’ concerns about PA DEP’s inability to process and respond to complaints, the Council decided to fill in these gaps by designing an online (and hard-copy) reporting mechanism for residents’ complaints related to air quality issues of natural gas operations.” The CAC received 13 complaints in 6 months. The organization intends to submit compiled reports monthly to the EPA and other agencies.  The letter to the EPA contains charts of the symptoms associated with visible emissions and noxious odors in the 13 cases, details the frustrations of residents, and takes the PA DEP to task for it’s poor responsiveness record per resident’s reports.

Joe Osborne, Legal Director for Pittsburgh-based GASP (Group Against Smog and Pollution), applauded the commencement of the study but also noted it’s limitations.  In an email comment to FrackCheckWV, Osborne said:  ”This long-term study is a step in the right direction, but ultimately states in the Marcellus and Utica need a larger scale monitoring network to characterize shale gas emissions. Consider Texas’s network of over a dozen automated gas chromatographs.” Also Osborne noted that the study involves only 3 monitoring sites and all are owned by the same operator. “We know that there is significant variation in the environmental performance of companies operating in the Marcellus…..A single operator is unlikely to accurately reflect the varied environmental performance we see company to company.”  A link to FracTracker was provided in support of this assertion.

Related Story Don Hopey of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported recently  The Lung Association’s State of the Air 2012 report, released this morning, again ranks the eight-county Pittsburgh-New Castle metropolitan area among the 25 most polluted regions in the U.S. for ozone and fine airborne particle pollution. But the gas industry’s role in contributing to ozone through the burden of nitrogen oxides is grist for another post, another day.

Shell Oil Co. has announced plans to develop an ethane cracker making the plastic feedstock ethylene — and possibly downstream polyethylene units — at an undisclosed location in Appalachia, which includes parts of Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio. In a June 6 news release, officials with Houston-based Shell said polyethylene (PE) is “the leading option” for downstream derivative choices. They described PE as “an important raw material for countless everyday items” and added that most of the resulting PE production will be used by Northeastern industries.

Shell Oil President Marvin Odum said, “With this investment, we would use feedstock from Marcellus to locally produce chemicals for the region and create more American jobs. A cracker and derivatives complex “typically takes at least five years to build, from the early definition of the project to being on-stream.”

It’s possible Shell would want to work with international firms that have been eyeing the North American market — such as Saudi Basic Industries Corp. of Saudi Arabia or Brazil’s Braskem SA — to develop new PE sites. Other firms such as Dow Chemical Co. and Westlake Chemical Corp. have announced ethylene expansions to take advantage of the new natural gas, but Shell is the first to place such a project in the Northeast. The Shell project would be the first new ethylene cracker to be built in North America since 2001.

Shell owns or leases the natural gas rights for 700,000 gross acres in the Marcellus. Most of that acreage is in Pennsylvania, which makes it likely the new cracker would be located there. The firm operates an office in Warrendale, Pa., about 30 miles north of Pittsburgh, and employs almost 250 in natural-gas-related businesses across Pennsylvania. In July, Shell acquired East Resources Inc., a Warrendale-based oil and gas supplier.

Among those who follow plastics and chemicals markets, reaction to Shell’s big news was mixed. One observer who was less than thrilled with the announcement was Emily Wurth, water policy director for Food & Water Watch, a non-profit organization in Washington. Wurth’s group and other environmental organizations have questioned the hydraulic fracturing process — know as “fracking” — used to access shale gas because of the possibility of groundwater contamination. “We have a lot of concerns about the new technologies around fracking and the risk it poses,” Wurth said in a phone interview. “There’s a risk to public health and to the environment.”

In the third article in a series about the dangers of hydraulic fracturing, Ian Urbana of the New York Times tracks 25 years of government officials and industry influence has not only limited the scope of EPA research, but kept results of those studies secret.

“It was like the science didn’t matter,”said Carla Greathouse, author of a 1987 study that concluded some gas drilling waste was hazardous and should be tightly controlled. “The industry was going to get what it wanted, and we were not supposed to stand in the way.” Greathouse’s experience was not an isolated incidence.

Now, the EPA is about to undertake a broad new study to examine the potential risks of natural gas drilling and preliminary results are scheduled to be released next year.  As pressure to find alternatives to foreign oil rises along with gas prices, will history repeat itself? Read the full article here…

The West Virginia Legislature website has not been fully updated to reflect the amendments to hydraulic fracturing bills over the last 24 hours.  However, it is reported by sources who work at the Capital that the bills have been dramatically abbreviated.  This translates into less protective law.

In review, two versions of bills were introduced to the Legislature, one originating from the Joint Interim Judiciary Subcommittee A, the other from the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection.  There is an informal agreement between the House and the Senate that the House will process the bills and send whatever is approved to the Senate. The WVDEP bill was 140 pages at the outset of its somewhat chaotic journey through the House under the label HB3042.  On Wednesday the House Judiciary Committee combined HB3042 with HB2878, the Judiciary SubA bill.  But today sources say that that the 210-page combo-bill was aggressively pared down into a 33-page bill and has been referred to the House Finance Committee with the recommendation that hearing of the bill be waived.

There may be more information about what was cut from the bills in the weekly Legislative Update written by West Virginia Environmental Council lobbyist Don Garvin.  Don’s posts appears on the WVEC website at the end of each week.

Meanwhile, in the Senate, SB424, the twin to the introduced version of HB3042, has been reduced to a 66-page document.  It passed out of the Energy, Industry and Mining Committee and is now in Judiciary.

March 2nd is the crossover date.  This is the date by which a bill must be finished in one chamber and crossover to the other.  Stay tuned!

The Bureau of Business and Economic Research at West Virginia University has released a study of the economic benefits to the State of the Marcellus Shale natural gas industry, according to an article in the Charleston Gazette. In 2009, the study shows, West Virginia’s natural gas industry generated more than $12 billion in business, created more than 24,000 jobs in the state and paid more than $550 million in wages.

The economic impact of the Marcellus Shale development in the state in 2009 was calculated to be $2.35 billion of business volume and accounted for the generation of 7,600 jobs. Marcellus Shale is believed to hold trillions of cubic feet of natural gas thus the development of the Shale is expected to continue to have a significant economic impact on the state in the future. This report examines these impacts for 2010 to 2015 in addition to the legal, regulatory, and environmental considerations.

Titled “The Economic Impact of the Natural Gas Industry and the Marcellus Shale Development in West Virginia,” the study is available at  www.bber.wvu.edu.

West Virginia severance taxes are now 5 percent of the gross value of natural gas production – higher than the other states. However, the new report adds, “For overall state and local tax burden, West Virginia’s general tax policy climate is relatively more conducive to natural gas industry operability than other states with significant Marcellus Shale deposits.”

West Virginia legislators are now considering whether to regulate fracking. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is examining the fracking process to determine whether it endangers supplies of drinking water, as many critics argue. Environmental groups, such as the Natural Resources Defense Council, believe Marcellus Shale drilling could have long-term negative environmental impacts.

This same conclusion from testing for methane in Wyoming has been reported.  Now here it is in Dimock, PA.