Natural gas is primarily methane, i.e. CH4

From the Republican & Herald, Pottsville, PA, October 18, 2022

Schuylkill County, Penna — Cleaner air, progress against dangerous climate-warming and well-maintained highways all are in the public interest, which means that there is no guarantee that any of them will materialize in Pennsylvania — where polarization and parochial politics are more important.

The state government faces a December 16 federal deadline to adopt regulations controlling emissions from gas wells. Although the rules apply primarily to a class of smog-forming gases known as volatile organic compounds, the regulation also would result in reducing emissions of methane — one of the most potent gases responsible for trapping heat in the atmosphere.

Methane is what drilling companies sell as natural gas. Any captured methane would be sold, generating revenue for the companies.

Gas escapes from two types of wells in Pennsylvania — “conventional” vertical wells characteristic of the state’s older drilling industry, and new “unconventional” deep, horizontally drilled wells that mark drilling across the Marcellus Shale fields.

Regulations to better reduce those emissions are required by federal law. Likewise, the federal sanction for not doing so is mandatory rather than discretionary. If the state misses the deadline, the federal government will withhold from Pennsylvania about $450 million in highway funds for this fiscal year. If the delay carries into the next fiscal year, that year’s federal highway funding will be at risk.

This should be an easy one, but this is Pennsylvania. The Department of Environmental Protection broke the regulation into two parts — one covering conventional wells and the other applying to modern wells — after majority Republicans on a House environmental committee objected to the combined rule.

In June, the Environmental Quality Board approved the rule applying to modern wells. And Wednesday, by a 15-3 vote, it approved the regulation for unconventional wells.

But two of the “no” votes came from chairmen of House and Senate committees. They don’t have the power to void the regulation, but they can order a six-month review. That would cause the state to miss the December 16 deadline, putting $450 million in highway funds at risk.

Operators of older wells don’t want to assume the cost of long-overdue environmental regulations. But that narrow interest should not exceed that of Pennsylvanians in healthy air and roads. The obstructionists should get out of the way.

Flares involve incomplete combustion of VOCs & pollution

Accident Compressor Station in MD

YOU are Invited to Come to Accident in Maryland with purpose!

From Engage Mountain Maryland, June 10, 2015

Have you heard of the “Accident Dome”? It is a name used for part of an aging underground natural gas storage facility in Accident, MD built in the 1960s. The site houses a compressor station and an underground storage field covering roughly 53 square miles which is owned and managed by Spectra Energy (Texas Eastern), a natural gas company.

The site is currently emitting into the air an estimated 10,000 tons of methane and other fugitive gases per year, some carcinogenic, which is of concern to many area residents.

Engage Mountain Maryland will be hosting a public information meeting about the state and federal regulations for facilities like the Accident Compressor Station and Storage Dome. Residents will have an opportunity to hear about this facility and associated natural gas infrastructure directly from the Maryland Department of the Environment, Spectra Energy, and Department of Natural Resources. Presenters will help explain the permitting process to educate the public about measures taken to protect our air and water quality, and health and safety of neighboring communities. Engage Mountain Maryland would like to extend an invitation to all citizens of Western Maryland and surrounding areas for this very informative evening:

Come to Accident with purpose on June 23^rd at 7:00 PM

Location: Career Technology Training Center, 116 Industrial Drive, Accident, MD 21520

>>> If you have a friend or neighbor who is not internet connected, please share this important meeting with them. We will be running two public announcements in the Republican News paper to try to reach the broadest audience. <<<

Bigger than Accident …….. Emissions are not isolated:
The map below shows the general area of the Accident Storage Field which is a natural underground formation. The small red circles indicate the numerous vertical wells that have tapped into the natural gas deposit. These wells are old and no longer active but they are leaking. The concern with emissions is that once they are released, they cannot be contained. Besides the direct area of emission, those positioned down-wind can also be affected. Our hope is that the massive amounts of methane and volatile organic compounds, VOCs, being released can be regulated and reduced to within a safe level for those in and around the 34,000 acre footprint of the storage field. It is exceptionally important that we set a precedent now for Garrett County regarding what we expect for our citizens’ health and safety. Please come and become educated and be heard. This will prove to be a highly informative evening!

GUEST SPEAKERS

Paul Durham, Engage Mountain Maryland — Introduction and Overview

Ann Nau, Myersville Citizens for a Rural Community — Federal Energy Regulatory Commission permits for compressor stations

Eric Robison, Engage Mountain Maryland — Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration regulations

Karen Irons, Manager, Air Quality Permits Program, and Angelo Bianca, Deputy Director, Air and Radiation Management Administration, Maryland Department of the Environment — Compressor station construction and operating permits, air monitoring & compliance

Richard Ortt, Director, Maryland Geological Survey, Department of Natural Resources — Geologic storage of methane and potential geological faulting in the Accident Quadrangle

SPECTRA Energy (formerly Texas Eastern) — Accident facility and air monitoring

Accident Gas Storage Field Between I-68 & Deep Creek Lake, MD

A first of a kind study from West Virginia will help Americans inside the fracking boom understand the dangers of exposure to VOCs

Article by Zahra Hirji, Lisa Song and David Hasemyer, Inside Climate News, October 10, 2014

When Mary Rahall discovered that oil and gas waste was being stored in open-air ponds less than a mile from a daycare center outside Fayetteville, W. Va., she started digging for information about the facility’s air emissions and protections for a nearby stream. She wasn’t satisfied with the answers she got from state regulators and politicians, so the mother of two set out to find a scientist who could help. Eventually her questions found their way to William Orem, a chemist at the U.S. Geological Survey office in Reston, Va., and he began collecting air and water data at the site last fall.

Orem’s small study could have implications far beyond Fayetteville, because it’s among the first scientific efforts directed at how air emissions from oil and gas waste could be affecting human health. He suspects waste disposal might turn out to be “the weakest link of all” in the oil and gas extraction and production cycle.

The industry’s waste isn’t subject to regular air monitoring, because in 1980s the energy industry lobbied Congress and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to exempt most of it from hazardous waste laws, even though it can contain benzene and other chemicals known to affect human health. In a recent story about waste pit emissions in Texas, InsideClimate News discovered that, nationally, there’s little data or regulatory oversight regarding air quality at oil and gas waste disposal sites.

A handful of short-term air studies involving drilling wastewater—the most toxic form of drilling waste—have been conducted. But most were designed to determine how the emissions contribute to ozone, not how they might directly affect public health. Orem’s waste pond study is apparently the first prompted by local health and environmental concerns and the first to collect continuous air sampling over many months.

Rahall said the foul stench from the ponds at the Danny Webb Construction facility, outside Fayetteville, sometimes drifted into town. “It smells like it’s going to explode,” she said. Orem hasn’t smelled anything, but he has heard similar complaints from other residents. “Whether those [citizen] concerns are justified or not is still unclear,” he said.

Orem hasn’t begun analyzing his data. When he does, he said the following questions will serve as his guide: “Is there a problem? Is there not a problem? If there is a problem, what are the contaminants of concern?”

Limited Air Studies

Short-term studies of waste-pond emissions in Utah, Colorado and Wyoming between 2009 and 2013 have either focused on how the emissions contribute to ozone (a major respiratory irritant), or to test air-monitoring equipment that could be used by the EPA. But several of these studies have produced data and anecdotal evidence that the emissions can reach levels that might trigger health problems.

A 2009 EPA report examined emissions data collected near three evaporation ponds operated by a drilling company in Western Colorado. The goal wasn’t to gauge the risk to human health but to test equipment and measurement techniques the agency could use to track emissions from oil and gas or similar industries, according to EPA spokesman Richard Mylott.

While benzene, toluene and xylene levels were generally below risk levels established by the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, the EPA found that a few of the measured concentrations exceeded those guidelines, particularly downwind of the ponds.

In their introduction to the report, the authors said there was an “immediate need” to better understand emissions from volatile organic compounds (VOCs), including benzene and toluene, from oil and gas waste pits. Depending on the concentration and length of exposure, these chemicals can cause a range of ailments, from headaches to neurological damage and cancer.

In 2011, Gabrielle Petron, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientist working at the University of Colorado, was trying to determine whether emissions from two well sites in northeastern Utah were causing a rise in winter ozone. During the course of their work, Petron and her team of researchers discovered “out of this world” levels of benzene and toluene coming from small ponds of untreated wastewater near the well sites. At one point, the vapors were so thick that Petron felt nauseous and moved her team out of the area.

“You had to go upwind of the ponds,” she said. “You could not stand to be in the downwind emission stream.”

Robert Field, a University of Wyoming scientist, had a similar experience when he led a winter ozone study funded by his school and state and federal regulators. Field and his co-researchers spent three winters in the Upper Green River Basin taking air samples near hundreds of wells in a rural area where oil and gas production is the main industry. There was also a wastewater recycling facility with large open ponds, where liquid waste from fracking and other processes evaporates into the air.

Field said he often smelled a strong chemical odor at the fence line of the facility. “You don’t want to breath this pollution,” he said.

Air monitoring data he collected close to the facilities found concentrations of toluene and xylene that far exceeded levels found in urban areas. This chemical signature, characteristic of oil and gas wastewater, was also present in air Field measured about three miles downwind of the facility.

Field’s team also found occasional spikes in benzene. About half of the 20 samples taken near the facility in 2012 exceeded health guidelines set by the California EPA for short-term benzene exposure (9 parts per billion). One sample had a benzene concentration of 109 parts per billion. (Neither Wyoming nor the federal EPA has short-term guidelines for benzene).

Field said the data show VOCs from the facility, most likely from the large treatment and storage ponds, contribute significantly to the area’s ambient air quality. The impact of the facility’s emissions was an unexpected discovery, he said.

Results from the study were published as a discussion article by the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. Although the study wasn’t designed to address human health effects, Field said he hopes scientists studying waste health effects will take notice of his findings.

Last winter Seth Lyman, an environmental scientist who directs the Bingham Entrepreneurship and Energy Research Center at Utah State University, measured air emissions from ponds at disposal sites and other oil and gas facilities in northeastern Utah’s shale region. The air quality testing was part of an ozone study supported by a Uintah County group and the Trust Lands Administration. Some of the ponds had frozen over and had very low levels of VOCs. But some air samples taken from ponds that didn’t freeze exceeded California’s EPA standard for short-term benzene exposure.

Lyman recently received federal funding to extend his study of air quality near industry waste ponds, and also to test the air near pits containing solid waste.

A third winter ozone study in Utah, by NOAA scientist Carsten Warneke, took short-term samples of air downwind of three oil and gas waste ponds. It has also been published on the Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics website. Benzene levels at two sites were low, but they exceeded California’s standards at a third site.

Promising Study Underway in West Virginia

Orem, who is conducting the West Virginia study, was already searching for an oil and gas disposal site to test when a scientist at West Virginia State University told him about Mary Rahall’s concerns about the Fayetteville disposal site. Orem had previously studied the chemical profiles of produced water at shale and coal-bed methane drilling sites across the country. “We jumped on it as soon as we heard about it,” he said.

His team set up four air monitors around the site. The facility’s owner wouldn’t let him install a monitor at the ponds, so he positioned one as close “as legally possible,” he said. He installed the other three further away, to track how chemicals in the air might travel and identify any other sources of emissions. The monitors are equipped with foam discs that continuously absorb volatile organic compounds from the air. He swaps out the discs every couple of months.

The parameters of Orem’s study have shifted since he began his work. Danny Webb Construction’s operating permit was renewed in February, but on the condition that the ponds be closed. When environmental groups appealed that decision, the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection revoked the permit, although an injection well used to dispose of wastewater deep underground still operates at the site.

Orem had gathered five continuous months of air quality data while the ponds were up and running. He continued collecting data during and after the reclamation process, which involved removing the waste and liners and backfilling the depressions with dirt.

Meanwhile, Orem is trying to expand his understanding of the air and water issues surrounding oil and gas production waste. He’s searching for additional disposal sites to monitor, as well as active drilling sites that have on-site waste storage and disposal.

>>> This article is part of an ongoing investigation by InsideClimate News and The Center for Public Integrity into air emissions created during oil and gas production. CPI’s Jim Morris contributed to this report. <<<

Gas flaring could be eliminated in most cases under proposed regulations. Photo courtesy of GreenPacks.

Some very exciting news just came out of the EPA.   In Ken Ward Jr.’s blog, Sustained Outrage, there is a July 28 post that informs us that the EPA just released Proposed Amendments to Air Regulations for the Oil and Natural Gas Industry (ONG).  An 8-page  Fact Sheet on the document is available on the EPA website.   Generally, the proposed changes fall into one of four categories: reducing volatile organic compound (VOC) emissions, reducing sulfur dioxide emissions, revising the air toxics standards (to reduce cancer risk and other ill health impacts) from oil and natural gas production and revising air toxic standards to reduce risk of health impacts from natural gas transmission and storage.   The EPA will accept public comment for 60 days after publication in the Federal Register.  Final action must be taken by the EPA by Feb. 28, 2012.

Here’s the very distilled recap :

REDUCING VOC EMISSIONS During the flowback stage of well completion, fracturing fluids, high-salinity water and gas come to the surface at a high velocity and volume.  Flaring is employed to burn off the gas during this gushing phase until the majority of the liquid and solid contaminants have been forced out by the pressures generated by the fracking process, the gas flows more purely, and is then collected and treated.

Much methane is lost during flowback and flaring, and other VOCs and hazardous air pollutants (HAPs) such as benzene, ethylbenzene and n-hexane are also released.  Raw natural gas is primarily composed of methane, a VOC and greenhouse gas which is 20 times as potent in greenhouse effect as carbon dioxide. Oil and natural gas production accounts for nearly 40% of all US methane emissions. VOCs contribute to the formation of ground-level ozone (smog).

The green completion process, also known as Reduced Emissions Completions, is a technology which captures gas which would otherwise be lost during well completion and puts it into the production line so that it can be treated and sold.

Interestingly, employing the green emission technology results in sizable savings to the natural gas industry.   The EPA estimates the net savings to industry through application of the proposed rule would be nearly $30 million annually.  (One seriously wonders why it takes a federal law to force an industry to employ technology that not only raises net revenue, but also reduces public health risks.)

EPA estimates that the use of green completion technology will reduce VOC emissions from hydraulic fracturing by almost 95%, methane being one of the VOCs.  VOCs across the ONG industry are expected to fall by nearly 25% if the proposals are implemented.  Wyoming and Colorado already require green completions.

Other equipment proposals: 1)Centrifugal compressors would have to be equipped with dry seal systems.  Reciprocating compressors would have to replace rod systems every 26,000 hours.  2)  The proposed regulations would require that new or replaced pneumatic controllers be driven by a non-gas power source.  3) Condensate tanks which handle a certain volume of condensate or crude oil must reduce VOC emissions by 95%.  4) Natural gas processing plants must strengthen leak detection an repair.

SULPHUR DIOXIDE Stronger source performance standards for sulfur dioxide would be required for plants processing gas with the highest sulfur dioxide content.  (Sulphur dioxide standards were issued in 1985.)

REDUCING CANCER RISK/HEALTH IMPACTS (for both ONG production and natural gas transmission and storage) All large dehydrators would have to reduce emissions of air toxics (such as benzene) by 95%.  Emissions standards would be established for small dehydrators at major sources.  The proposed regulations are expected to reduce emissions of air toxics by 30%.

BACKGROUND The Clean Air Act (CAA) requires a review every 8 years for  new source performance standards (NSPS) for industries that contribute to air pollution which endangers public health.  The existing NSPD for VOCs were issued in 1985.  You do the math. A similar story can be told about air toxics standards.  The CAA requires a one-time review after a standard is issued to find out what risks remain and whether or not more protective standards are needed.  The CAA also requires technical review every 8 years to identify better emission control technologies.  Both the standards for ONG production and those for natural gas transmission and storage were issued in 1999.  Environmental groups sued the EPA in Jan. 2009 for failing to review the NSPS.  The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. District entered a consent decree in Feb. 2010 that required the EPA to sign proposals related to the review of those standards by July 28, 2011 and issue final standards by Feb. 28, 2012.