Marcellus gas well pads & wastewater impoundment in prime forest of north central Penna.

From an Article by Ad Crable, Bay Journal, 5/3/21

Pennsylvania’s robust natural gas industry has been embarrassed by three environmental scandals in 15 months. Among the fallout: temporarily closed pipelines, the state’s largest environmental fine, the elimination of streams, and the illegal burial or alteration of parts of 163 wetlands.

In one case, Texas gas company Range Resources was found to have classified spent gas wells as temporarily inactive, rather than closed, thus avoiding a requirement to plug the wells to prevent leaks of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.

In another case, Chesapeake Appalachia, an arm of Chesapeake Energy and one of the largest fracking gas companies in Pennsylvania, signed a consent agreement March 24 with the U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.

The agreement, which included a $1.9 million civil penalty, acknowledges that Chesapeake Appalachia had, according to its own reports, filled approximately 26 acres of wetlands with dirt, rock or sand, without state or federal authorization, at 76 of its gas wells across five counties.

The company will have to restore about 11 acres of affected wetlands. To compensate for the remaining 15 acres, which are irreparably damaged, the company must create twice that many acres of new wetlands nearby, ideally in the same watershed.

Chesapeake Appalachia’s record of the damage goes back to 2013, when the EPA and Justice Department fined the company $3.2 million for violations in West Virginia. The company agreed then that it had impounded and filled in 2.2 miles of streams and smothered portions of wetlands at 27 well pad sites without required federal permits from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The violations were discovered by routine EPA inspections, complaints from nearby residents and reports from the gas company itself.

After that case and a management shake-up at the company, Chesapeake Energy did an internal audit of 500 gas well sites in Pennsylvania and informed state officials that it had discovered similar violations at 76 sites.

Gordon Pennoyer, a Chesapeake Energy spokesman, said of the enforcement action, “Having voluntarily disclosed these issues with the DEP and EPA seven years ago, we are pleased to resolve this legacy matter.”

Under federal regulations, Chesapeake has a choice of restoring violated wetlands or creating new ones elsewhere at double the amount destroyed. The company has submitted a plan to restore wetlands at some of the drilling sites, restore wetlands elsewhere to compensate for places where steep slopes prevent work at the original location, and conduct a combination of on-site and off-site work in some cases.

DEP Secretary Patrick McDonnell applauded Chesapeake Appalachia for coming forward with its violations and called the settlement a “significant benefit to Pennsylvania’s public natural resources” because it will result in an increase of wetlands in the Chesapeake Bay watershed.

Diana Esher, acting administrator of the EPA’s Mid-Atlantic region, said wetlands are “critical ecological and economic resources for all Pennsylvanians.”

The Chesapeake Appalachia penalties followed another high-profile case that concluded in early 2020, when a gas pipeline company was fined an unprecedented $30.6 million by the DEP, partly for widespread wetlands and stream violations.

The case against ETC Northeast Pipeline stemmed largely from a landslide that ruptured the one-week-old Revolution Pipeline in rural western Pennsylvania on Sept. 10, 2018. The blast from ignited natural gas burned one house, caused six power transmission poles to collapse, and destroyed two garages, a barn and several vehicles, as well as forced evacuations.

The DEP found that the company, an arm of Texas-based gas pipeline builder Energy Transfer Corp., used poor construction and oversight practices in building the pipeline. But an investigation after the blast uncovered more widespread environmental harms along the 40-mile pipeline.

According to the DEP, the company’s violations included 120 altered streams, 23 “eliminated” streams, 17 buried wetlands, 70 altered wetlands, 352 cases of erosion and sedimentation, 540 cases of sediment washing into streams, and 1,359 violations of required best management practices.

That laundry list of violations prompted the DEP to take the rare step of freezing pipeline permits for Energy Transfer Corp. subsidiaries, including that of the cross-state pipeline known as Mariner East 2.

That pipeline’s construction had already amassed a list of environmental violations, including sinkholes and 320 spills of drilling fluids. One spill into a central Pennsylvania lake cost Energy Transfer a $2 million fine.

“There has been a failure by Energy Transfer and its subsidiaries to respect our laws and our communities,” Gov. Tom Wolf said at the time of the Revolution Pipeline consent order. “This is not how we strive to do business in Pennsylvania, and it will not be tolerated.”

But after a one-year freeze, the DEP allowed Energy Transfer pipelines to resume or proceed with construction. The DEP ordered Energy Transfer to restore all wetlands and stream sections where possible. Seventy of the 87 damaged or destroyed wetlands will be restored. The other 17 harmed wetlands will be atoned for with the restoration of four times as much wetlands in the same watershed.

In a much smaller case, the DEP and Range Resources agreed in February to a consent order after the DEP found that the company was trying to avoid plugging spent gas wells as required. The agency fined Range Resources $294,000 and required plugging all but one of the 42 wells in question.

“Abandoned wells can be an extreme hazard to the health and safety of people and the environment,” said Jamar Thrasher, DEP spokesman. “That contributes to air, water and soil contamination, so it’s an environmental hazard.” Abandoned wells can leak methane, a potent greenhouse gas. These were conventional gas wells dating mostly from the 1980s or older, and not new fracking wells.

The company had filed paperwork with the DEP, mostly from 2012 to 2016, saying the wells were “inactive.” But an internal memo that Range sent to the DEP three weeks before paperwork was received on one well had reported that the well “was incapable of economic production.”

The DEP then investigated other wells and found 41 more that had been improperly classified.

Well pads are purple, UIC wells are chartreuse & earthquakes are orange

From an Article by Kate Mishkin, Charleston Gazette – Mail, May 2, 2019

State and federal regulators are skirting their obligations to protect West Virginia’s drinking water from the effects of fracking, a report from the Natural Resources Defense Council says.

The report, made public this week, examines the way the state Department of Environmental Protection (WV-DEP) regulates oil and gas underground injection activities, and how hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, can threaten underground drinking water if operators aren’t held accountable.

By examining records from the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection, the group detailed the times the state was inconsistent in its reporting, and found it often sidestepped the state underground injection control program, and federal Safe Drinking Water Act requirements.

In some cases, companies submitted reports that said they’d been injecting wastewater under an expired permit, and that wells had been abandoned without being plugged.

Companies extract natural gas by shooting water, chemicals and sand at a high pressure into wells, often generating large amounts of wastewater, which can contain contaminants such as radiation and heavy metals. Companies often dispose of the large quantities of wastewater by injecting it underground.

And as companies continue to tap into the sprawling Marcellus Shale, the amount of wastewater injected grows, too — “exacerbating the need for safe waste-management practices,” the report says.

“It is crucial that underground injection be properly designed, constructed, operated and maintained — and eventually plugged and abandoned — to ensure that they do not threaten underground sources of drinking water protected by federal and state statutes,” the report says.

In many cases, though, the WV-DEP allowed companies to inject without a permit, continue to operate without applying for a renewal permit before the permit expired and continuing to inject after the WV-DEP issued an order stopping it.

The wells, the report says, “reveal a pattern of unsafe practices and lax enforcement over the years. Any improperly operated well has the potential to cause environmental problems, and potential violations should be taken seriously.”

There are currently three active disposal wells that have received Notices of Violations but haven’t been abated, said Terry Fletcher, a spokesman for the WV-DEP. Of those, two have been abated but aren’t in the department’s database; one well isn’t injecting.

“The WVDEP acknowledges that abandoned and unplugged wells are a legitimate issue and has been working with well operators and others within the industry to find viable solutions to this issue,” Fletcher said.

He said the WV-DEP hasn’t logged any incidents of groundwater contamination from a UIC disposal well.

Amy Mall, senior policy analyst for the NRDC, said some of the failure comes from a lack of accountability.

“I think there’s a combination of the fact that a lot of these sites are in rural areas, companies may think nobody’s watching them [and] nobody’s going to find out if they don’t fully comply with the law,” she said.

And in many cases, companies don’t have a reason to be deterred from breaking rules, Mall said. “Companies don’t have the incentive to comply with the law unless there’s strict enforcement and penalties, otherwise there’s no incentive for them to comply,” she said.

The report recommends the WV-DEP establish stronger operating standards, enforce its rules and be more transparent. It asks the federal Environmental Protection Agency to enforce the Safe Drinking Water Act in the state.

Multiple states and millions of people depend upon the Delaware River

From an Update by Miguel Cordon, S&P Global Market Intelligence, August 22, 2018

A New Jersey agency in charge of protecting state ratepayers asked a federal appeals court to review the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approval of PennEast Pipeline’s 1.1-Bcf/d natural gas pipeline project.

The New Jersey Division of Rate Counsel in a Monday letter asked the US Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit to review a FERC order that issued a Natural Gas Act certificate to the project and another order that turned down a request that the commission reconsider that approval. The state agency said it was “aggrieved” by the FERC rulings.

The New Jersey agency has disagreed with the federal commission’s conclusion that the project was needed. During the pipeline’s federal review, the state agency submitted evidence that it said demonstrated a lack of gas demand from New Jersey gas utilities (US Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit docket 18-2853).

FERC recently issued a number of orders that shut down challenges to its approvals of major interstate gas pipeline projects. One of these orders rejected a rehearing request by the Delaware Riverkeeper Network related to the FERC approval of PennEast. The environmental group has asked the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to review the FERC approval and rehearing orders on PennEast.

The PennEast pipeline would run from Pennsylvania to New Jersey to deliver gas from the Marcellus Shale. Shippers for the project, including local distribution companies and electric power generators, have subscribed to about 1 Bcf/d of the project’s firm transportation capacity in binding precedent agreements. The project would consists of a 36-inch-diameter pipeline running 120 miles from Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, to an interconnection with Transcontinental Gas Pipe Line in Mercer County, New Jersey (CP15-558).

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Kayakers call for ‘full’ fracking ban in Delaware River basin

From an Article by Kyle Bagenstose, The Doylestown PA Intelligencer, August 21, 2018

Demonstrators launched a protest from Bordentown Beach, saying they want New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy to ban importation of wastewater from drilling operations.

Call them kayak-tivists.

A group of demonstrators took their self-powered watercraft to the Delaware River on Tuesday morning, along with a banner carrying their message to “Ban Fracking and Frack Waste” in the river’s basin. A small contingent also took a three-hour excursion up the Crosswicks Creek in Bordetown, New Jersey, forgoing an earlier plan to cross the Delaware River to Bristol Borough due to an ominous weather forecast.

The demonstration is the latest iteration of a nearly decade-long effort to ban hydraulic fracturing, a natural gas drilling technique, in the basin. The focus is directed on the Delaware River Basin Commission, an inter-state regulatory agency whose five-member voting body comprises the governors of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and New York, along with a federal government representative.

The DRBC is currently mulling regulations on fracking, which has been de facto banned in the basin since the commission punted on the issue in 2010 following intense public pressure.

Draft regulations presented in late 2017 would ban the use of hydraulic fracturing to reach natural gas deposits, a technique that has propagated throughout much of central and western Pennsylvania over the past decade. But they would allow for the regulated importation of waste from fracking operations elsewhere into the basin for treatment, and for clean water to be withdrawn from the basin for use in drilling operations.

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie abstained from a vote last year that advanced the draft regulations, and activists on Tuesday directed the most attention toward current Gov. Phil Murphy.

“We want him to stand with us to defend the Delaware River, and vote at the (DRBC), where they will be voting before the end of the year,” said Tracy Carluccio, deputy director of the nonprofit Bristol-based Delaware Riverkeeper Network. “We want all three of the activities to be banned.”

Kate Schmidt, a spokeswoman for the commission, wrote in an email the DRBC has “no set schedule” for when it will vote on the regulations. “As always, the Commission may adopt final rules only at a duly noticed public meeting,” Schmidt added.

Whenever the vote does come, Murphy’s ability to change the course of regulations is uncertain. After they were proposed last year, the governors of Delaware, New York, and Pennsylvania all voted in favor of advancing to a formal review, with New Jersey abstaining and the federal government voting against. If that majority holds when the draft regulations are taken up for an official vote later this year, New Jersey’s vote would be extraneous.

Jeff Tittel, president of the New Jersey Sierra Club, said Tuesday he thinks Murphy could still exert influence. He pointed out Murphy is now the chairman of the commission.

“We want him to lead as chair to amend the rules, to take out the fracking waste and withdrawal of water,” Tittel said. “If you give them the water for fracking, and then they turn around and give you the waste back, it doesn’t make any sense.”

Tittel added he believed the Murphy administration is waffling from a campaign trail commitment to support a full ban. He said Kathleen Frangione, Murphy’s chief policy advisory, and Catherine McCabe, New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Agency secretary, said recently they were “studying” the issue of banning wastewater importation.

A news release still on Murphy’s campaign website also includes the text of a letter he submitted to the DRBC in June 2017 advocating for a full ban. “I fully support a ban on the importation of fracking wastes into New Jersey — to protect against an accident or spill that would harm our lands and waters,” Murphy wrote.

However, Murphy’s office did not say Tuesday whether the governor would take any actions to pursue a full ban. Asked for the governor’s position, deputy press secretary Liza Acevedo pointed in part to a February 2018 letter Murphy wrote to Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf.

In the letter, Murphy wrote only that he “Supports a ban on fracking and the commission’s efforts to drive this policy through these draft regulations.”

Acevedo later added “The Governor does not comment on draft regulations, particularly ones that received a high volume of comments that are being reviewed by staff.”

Carluccio and Tittel said they are primarily concerned about toxic materials in wastewater from fracturing operations reaching the basin’s waterways. Particularly of interest is the Delaware River itself, which serves as a source of drinking water for millions in the region.

Carluccio said she’s concerned wastewater treatment processes are not capable of fully removing toxic substances from the wastewater before discharging them back into the environment. Much of what’s in wastewater is uncertain due to trade secrecy, although it’s known the water can also pick up contaminants such as barium and radium from underground.

She added she’s worried that as the gas industry runs out of underground injection wells in which to discharge wastewater, they may focus on exporting it to areas such as the basin for disposal.

However, the Marcellus Shale Coalition, a drilling industry group, provided figures stating the industry recycles more than 90 percent of its wastewater for use in other wells.

The coalition also argues hydraulic fracturing can be done safely and with little impact to water resources. Often cited is the Susquehanna River basin, which encompasses drilling areas and has its own commission, the SRBC.

“For more than a decade now, the SRBC has safely managed water resources, while allowing for responsible development of property rights,” David Spigelmyer, president of the Marcellus Shale Coalition, told state lawmakers at a June hearing. “The unconventional natural gas industry has worked closely with the SRBC to ensure that water withdrawals and water usage within the basin are done in a safe and responsible manner.”

Commission officials also are adamant that the draft regulations would be an improvement over what currently exists and discourage the importation of waste water. Schmidt said the current moratorium on drilling does not extend to importation, and the commission can only review any permit applications when they involve withdrawing more than 100,0000 gallons of water or importing more than 50,000 gallons of wastewater per day. Instituting the regulations would place new scrutiny on any such activities for drilling activities, officials said.

Fracking consumes incredible amounts of water, toxic chemicals and speciality sand

From an Article by Jon Hurdle, State-Impact Penna., August 15, 2018

Water use for fracking by oil and gas operators in the Marcellus Shale region rose 20 percent between 2011 and 2016 as longer laterals were drilled to fracture more gas-bearing rock, even though the pace of well development slowed in response to low natural gas prices, a Duke University study said on Wednesday.

The rise was the smallest of any of the six U.S. regions studied, including the Permian Basin area of Texas, where water use surged by 770 percent over the period.

The study also said the volume of fracking waste water produced in the Marcellus – which includes Pennsylvania, West Virginia, eastern Ohio and southern New York, where fracking is banned — rose four-fold to 600,000 gallons in 2016, forcing energy companies to rely increasingly on holding the waste in underground injection wells.

But the Marcellus waste water increase was also significantly smaller than other regions, where it rose as high as 1,440 percent during the period, the report said.

Although fewer new wells were drilled during the period than in the early stages of the fracking boom, more water was needed because longer wells required the fracturing of more rock, said Andrew Kondash, the paper’s lead author. The median water use per Marcellus well rose to 7.4 million gallons in 2016 from 6.1 million gallons in 2011, Kondash said.

The peer-reviewed study, published in the journal Science Advances, shows the fracking industry is having an increasing impact on water resources after more than a decade of operation, said Avner Vengosh, professor of geochemistry and water quality at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment.

“We clearly see a steady annual increase in hydraulic fracturing’s water footprint, with 2014 and 2015 marking a turning point where water use and the generation of flowback and produced water began to increase at significantly higher rates,” he said in a statement.

The study, titled “The Intensification of the Water Footprint of Hydraulic Fracturing,” was based on six years of data from industry, government, and nonprofit groups on water use and waste-water production at more than 12,000 wells in major shale gas and tight-oil producing regions.

The data were used to model future water use and waste-water volumes, and concluded that if oil and gas prices recover to levels last seen in the early 2010s, water and waste water volumes could surge by as much as 50 times in unconventional gas-producing regions such as Pennsylvania by 2030.

Even if gas prices stay at current low levels, the model predicts large increases in water and waste-water volumes by 2030, Kondash said.

Natural gas futures have traded below $5 per million British thermal units on the New York Mercantile Exchange for most of the last eight years amid plentiful supply from the Marcellus and other major U.S. shale reserves. On Monday, the contract ended at $2.93, and has shown little movement this year.

The Duke study is in line with one by Pennsylvania State University in 2015 showing that fracked wells in Pennsylvania used about three times as much water in 2014 than they did in 2009 as drilled laterals extended to an average of 7,000 feet from 2,200 feet.

Those wells produced about three times as much gas and three times as much waste water, said Dave Yoxtheimer, an extension associate with the university’s Marcellus Center for Research and Outreach, and a co-author of the study. He said there has been a roughly ten-fold increase in gas production in the Appalachian Basin since 2010.

The use of water per foot didn’t change much over the Penn State study period, but the big extension of laterals underground consumed a lot more water, he said. “Certainly as you see longer laterals and greater production you’ll use more water and generate more brine,” Yoxtheimer said.

The longer laterals have been enabled by improvements in technology, said John Quigley, former secretary of Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection and now director of the Center for the Environment, Energy and Economy at Harrisburg University.

Demand is also fueled by the fact that some 80 percent of water used in fracking remains underground, even though more of it is being recycled, he said, arguing that increased use of injection wells to hold frack waste water threatens ground water and increases the risk of seismic activity, as seen in some locations where minor earthquakes have been reported near injection sites.

Quigley said pressure on water supplies for fracking is likely to intensify if climate change brings droughts, as predicted, possibly forcing energy companies to curtail fracking. That outlook may improve the prospects for adoption of waterless fracking technologies that use CO2, LPG or nitrogen instead, he said.

The Duke report echoed the concern about the sustainability of fracking in arid regions such as the U.S. Southwest where groundwater supplies are stressed or limited.

Duke’s Vengosh said the report, after more than a decade of the so-called fracking boom, provides a more accurate picture of the industry’s water use than earlier studies which used only the early years of the boom to conclude that fracking didn’t use any more water than other energy sources. “We now have more years of data to draw upon from multiple verifiable sources,” he said.

An industry representative said officials will review the Duke report in light of the industry’s current practice of managing fracking waste by reducing, recycling, treating and disposing of it in an environmentally sensitive manner.

“Throughout each step the focus is on environmentally sound and responsible methods of disposing of generated waste materials,” said Stephanie Catarino Wissman, executive director of the Associated Petroleum Industries of Pennsylvania, a division of the American Petroleum Institute.

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Response Comment from Anthony R. Ingraffea, August 16, 2018

In shale gas and oil, it has always been about SCALE: the stuff is so damn stingy you have to bludgeon it. Generation I wells used 3-5 millions gallons of water and 1-2 hundred pounds of sand per foot of lateral; gen II Wells, 5-10 million gallons, 500-1000 pounds of sand per foot; current gen III Wells, 10-30 million gallons, a ton of sand, and the laterals are now longer than 2 miles long. EIA forecasts a million more such wells in the next 20 years: you do the math. Might as well just transport The Fingerlakes and much of Wisconsin underground.

Getting so absurd that one needs a calculator with only scientific notation to run the numbers: 10 trillion gallons of water, 20 trillion pounds of sand. Think about the carbon footprint of acquiring and transporting it….

We have solutions to this nonsense.

Best, Tony Ingraffea, Physicians-Scientists-Engineers for Healthy Energy

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See also: The Need to Protect Fresh and Brackish Groundwater Resources During Unconventional Oil and Gas Development | PSE | Physicians, Scientists, and Engineers for Healthy Energy

The Ohio River needs monitoring & protection

ACTION ALERT from the West Virginia Rivers Coalition, February 20, 2018

The Ohio River serves as a 256-mile border between West Virginia and Ohio. In this photo, the left bank is Chesapeake, Ohio and the right bank is Huntington, West Virginia.

The mighty Ohio River is in danger and the drinking water for millions of people who depend on it is at risk. The commission in charge of the river’s pollution limits is considering abandoning their responsibility by rolling back pollution control standards during their triennial review process.

Act Now: Contact the Ohio River commissioners, tell them you want strong and protective pollution control standards for the Ohio River.

The Ohio River already tops the list of the nation’s most polluted waterways. Don’t let the Ohio River Valley Water Sanitation Commission (ORSANCO), the commission charged overseeing the Ohio’s water quality, rollback critical protections!

Contact ORSANCO by Saturday, February 24, and tell them to say NO to eliminating pollution control standards for the Ohio River!

Antero "Clearwater" Construction

Residents wary of Antero’s answer to fracking wastewater problem

From an Article by Ken Ward, Jr., Charleston Gazette-Mail, September 17, 2016

<< Antero Resources is still seeking some of the permits it needs for a massive fracking wastewater treatment operation, but construction of the facility is well underway along the Doddridge-Ritchie County line >>

Greenwood, WV — Large cranes loom over the rolling hills just off Sunnyside Road. The tip of a large industrial tank and the steel skeleton of a building peek over the tree line along U.S. 50 near the Doddridge-Ritchie County line. Construction crews crowd the narrow road that winds up the hill from the four-lane, as workers push forward on a $275 million, two-year effort to complete what Antero Resources has dubbed “Clearwater.”

Antero officials say their new major complex — including a water treatment plant and adjacent landfill — will help solve a nagging problem faced by its natural gas operations across Appalachia: Getting enough water for gas drilling and then disposing of that water once it is contaminated with salts from underground mineral deposits and chemicals used to help release the gas from the region’s Marcellus Shale formation.

“This significantly improves the safety and reduces the environmental impact of shale development by removing hundreds of thousands of water truckloads from the roads every year, and recycles and reuses the water rather than dispose of it,” Antero CEO Paul Rady said when the project was announced a little more than a year ago.

But in the months since that announcement, residents near the project site and in the surrounding communities have become increasingly wary. Some residents have simple questions, like whether a new stoplight eventually will be installed at the intersection where the plant is being built. Others aren’t convinced that the water treatment facility will really remove some of the most potentially dangerous contamination — metals and radioactive materials — from the water from Antero’s natural gas production activities.

Still other critics of Antero’s plan worry that installing such a huge piece of industrial infrastructure simply furthers the state’s ties to another polluting fossil fuel industry, hindering any effort to make West Virginia a state that thrives on renewable energy production.

“There’s been strong community interest about this significant project coming to Doddridge and Ritchie counties,” said Angie Rosser, executive director of the West Virginia Rivers Coalition, which has been working with the local Friends of the Hughes River Watershed Association to help educate the public about the project and open dialogue between Antero and the community.

Last week, the two citizen groups hosted a community meeting on the project. About 50 people gathered in Harrisville, at the Women’s Club Center on Main Street, a few miles west of the construction site. Representatives from Antero attended. So did someone from the Department of Environmental Protection’s Office of Environmental Advocate, which works to help citizens be better heard and understood during DEP’s review of permit applications for projects like Antero has proposed.

Conrad Baston, Antero’s project manager, explained why he and his company believe that the water treatment plant and the landfill are such good ideas. “It’s a centralized way of dealing with this waste, trying to compress this issue into as small a package as you can,” Baston said.

The whole process presents obvious problems: Where will all that water come from, especially during dry months when streams are low? What will companies do with all that contaminated water that comes back up?

Those underground injection wells have drawn increasing scrutiny, sometimes because they might be leaking, and others because scientists have found underground injection causes earthquakes.

Antero’s project would change all that, Baston said. Wastewater produced at the company’s wells would be trucked to the treatment plant, where it would be cleaned of salts and other contaminants. The water could then be reused at other gas wells. Salts would be disposed of at an adjacent landfill. Material with other contaminants would be hauled by train to some other dump somewhere else, probably in Utah or Idaho. No more on-site waste pits. No more underground injection wells. Less truck traffic.

“As an engineer, I just see this problem that I’m trying to compress into a smaller and smaller footprint,” Baston told residents.  That description, though, didn’t sit well with Lissa Lucas, who lives a few miles west of the project. “I wonder if you recognize that what you regard as a problem or an obstacle to making profits is different than what someone who lives nearby regards as a problem,” Lucas said. For example, Lucas said, “You may be saying there’s only 10 houses affected, but if you live in one of those houses, that’s a big deal.”

‘Right on top of us’

The scale of the Antero project alone has many residents worried. Located on a nearly 500-acre site, the landfill would accept 2,000 tons of salt per day, according to a Rivers Coalition fact sheet. Environmental groups also note that the landfill project alone would bury more than 5 miles of streams.

Antero officials like to point out that, overall, the facility — especially with an adjacent landfill that eliminates having to ship the salt for off-site disposal — actually helps to greatly reduce truck traffic related to the company’s operations. But residents worry that the treatment plan, by processing 60,000 barrels per day of wastewater, creates one giant, congested industrial site.

“You’re consolidating,” said one resident, who didn’t give his name. “What you’re consolidating is the problem — right on top of us.”

For some residents in places like Doddridge and Ritchie counties, West Virginia’s natural gas boom has brought with it not only concerns about water quality, but what one local sheriff has called an “invasion” of truck traffic, along with constant noise and light and localized air pollution concerns.

Lyn Scott Bordo, a sixth generation Ritchie County resident, said that the noise from a natural gas compressor station that started up near her home ended her ability to even have a conversation while sitting on her porch in the evenings.

Residents especially are resentful toward Antero. They note repeated water pollution problems and workplace incidents that left workers hurt or dead. And Antero is the main company targeted by hundreds of residents who have filed lawsuits over truck traffic, mountains of dust, constant heavy equipment noise and bright lights that shine into their homes day and night.

Kevin Ellis, an Antero vice president, reminded residents who brought up such issues during last week’s meeting that a lot of their neighbors work for Antero and its many contracting companies, and that those neighbors do their best every day to operate safely and to minimize any negative effects from the company’s operations. “We take seriously our obligation to do right,” Ellis said.

Still, residents and environmental groups have a variety of questions about the finer details of Antero’s plan.

For example, the company proposes to permit its landfill as a non-commercial facility — one that would take only Antero’s own waste — a move that avoids dealing with siting review by the local solid waste authority, which is required for commercial operations under the state’s decades-old law aimed at reducing out-of-state garbage. But Antero officials also talk about the possibility that they might accept and treat wastewater from other natural gas producers at the Clearwater facility, and then dispose of the salt from that treatment at the landfill, under the theory that the salt becomes internal to Antero when it comes out of the treatment facility.

Also, residents worry that they don’t yet have enough information about exactly how the treatment plant would ensure that only the salts, and not other contaminants like metals or radioactive materials, would be kept out of the landfill. In written comments submitted to the state Department of Environmental Protection, a coalition of environmental groups noted that the project is located so that spills or leaks or other discharges could affect the drinking water supply for the Hughes River Water Board, which provides water to Pennsboro, Harrisville and Cairo.

The groups complained that the company’s permit applications have not described these potential impacts or any steps that would be taken to avoid them. Antero says its landfill has many layers of protections to avoid any water contamination, but residents and others are concerned that there’s no way to absolutely guarantee any such system is foolproof.

“Landfills leak,” said Kendra Hatcher, an environmental scientist who has been examining the project for the Morgantown-based environmental consulting firm Downstream Strategies. “It might not be a big, catastrophic event, but landfills leak, so there is a legitimate concern for the groundwater.”

‘Good for the environment’

Compounding the concerns for local residents is the fact that while the DEP is still reviewing permit applications from Antero — and asking members of the public for their comments on those applications — construction has not only started, but appears from what residents can see to be fairly well along.

Jane Hearne, of Ritchie County, wondered aloud at last week’s meeting if approval by DEP of the project’s permits isn’t a “done deal … when you see the [construction] process is already underway.”

Residents who worry about the politics underlying such projects and their review by state agencies were greeted at last week’s meeting with promotional material from Antero that included a quote from Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin in which the governor praised the company and its project as “good for the environment and good for West Virginia’s economy.” That quote appeared in Antero’s press release announcing the project, with approval from the governor’s office, Tomblin communications director Jessica Tice said last week.

Antero already has a construction and operation permit for the treatment facility and a construction stormwater permit, issued by separate divisions of DEP. The company still needs several other DEP approvals, including an air quality permit for the landfill, a draft of which was issued for public comment on the day of last week’s public meeting in Harrisville.

The process, with separate permits under separate laws, rules and programs — and divisions of DEP — has been confusing for residents, even setting aside the issue of whether, with a facility already being built, a review of other permit applications is no more than an academic exercise for agency officials and citizens.

For example, as late as December 2015, when the DEP Division of Air Quality issued the treatment plant’s air permit, residents who asked questions about the company’s landfill plans were told by the agency that Antero hadn’t submitted a landfill permit application and that the company had told DEP only that “they are exploring this option, but no decision has been made yet.” The application was submitted a month later.

Some residents complained during the air permit comment period that their community is “already besieged by the gas industry — well pads, diesel truck traffic, compressor stations, pipelines, and major processing facilities … [that] already emit toxic substances into our air. We who choose the fresh air, clean water, and quiet of country life find these destroyed.”

WV-DEP officials responded that they are “aware of the increased activity in the oil and gas industry as it pertains to horizontal drilling in the Marcellus Shale.” “The increase in drilling activity has created new challenges with maintaining healthy air, water and land usage,” the DEP Division of Air Quality said. “Air quality issues associated with the oil and gas sector are an expanding aspect of the DAQ’s regulatory responsibilities.”

John King, of the DEP Office of Environmental Advocate, told residents last week that the agency doesn’t allow housing developers to segment their projects into small pieces to avoid having to get stormwater construction permits, and that some sort of “common plan of permitting” is something DEP could consider and residents could encourage the agency to employ when they submit public comments on the Antero project.

‘They created the problem’

DEP Secretary Randy Huffman said last week that he doesn’t recall a situation with a major project where his agency has ever “lumped all of the permits together and required all of the permits before you can do anything.” Such an approach, Huffman said, probably would only be relevant to citizens who view the permit process as a “thumbs up or thumbs down” on a project, as opposed to an opportunity for the public to point out things DEP permit reviewers may have missed or ways the agency could improve a project’s air or water permits.

Huffman said his agency’s job is not to decide whether a particular activity — such as natural gas drilling using hydraulic fracturing — is allowed. Lawmakers and governors set such policies, and DEP enforces them, Huffman said.

“We’re not there to make policy decisions about whether some activity should occur or should not occur,” Huffman said. “The presumption with any permitting action is, if all of the requirements are met, then you will be issued the permit.”

When lawmakers passed and Tomblin signed a 2011 law aimed at better regulating oil and gas drilling, they weakened some provisions of it that would have provided more protections for residents near gas production operations. State officials said they would study those issues and could come back to them later.

The studies were done, and recommended more protections, but the law hasn’t been updated based on the findings. Instead, environmental and citizen groups have had to spend their time beating back legislative proposals aimed at lessening controls on drilling and blocking citizen lawsuits against companies like Antero.

It all creates a tough situation for residents confronted with permit applications for operations like the one Antero has planned for Doddridge and Ritchie counties, or already living with the realities of large-scale natural gas production in West Virginia’s Marcellus Shale region. They feel like a big part of the discussion is left out of the public hearings and comment periods DEP encourages them to take part in, and permit decisions are made without looking at the whole picture of a project or industry.

Rosser, the Rivers Coalition director, said that the Antero project should be “part of a broader discussion of where we are going with energy production. This infrastucture we see, with projects like this and pipelines, the more we are setting ourselves up for that future with more and more waste and not moving toward renewables.”

And as for Antero’s specific plan, Rosser recalled what one resident at last week’s meeting said as the event was breaking up: That it was good that Antero officials were trying to come up with a solution for the wastewater problem, but that, “what underlies that is that they created the problem in the first place.”

Magnitude 5.8 Earthquake (9/2/16)

Several new earthquakes rattle Oklahoma

Recent Quakes Could Signal Larger Event(s)

From an Article of the Associated Press, September 8, 2016

Oklahoma City, OK (AP) — Two earthquakes this year in Oklahoma greater than magnitude 5.0 — including a record-setting quake last weekend that damaged more than a dozen buildings — are expected to increase the likelihood of a more violent quake in the future, a top earthquake researcher said Wednesday.

The earthquake centered in northeast Oklahoma on Saturday was upgraded to magnitude 5.8 by the U.S. Geological Survey on Wednesday, making it the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in the state. It was the second earthquake exceeding magnitude 5.0 recorded in Oklahoma this year, which likely will increase the chances of a more powerful quake to come, said USGS geophysicist Daniel McNamara.

“You’ve had two 5s this year, which means a lot more energy,” McNamara said during a break in a seismicity workshop in Norman that attracted some of the top earthquake researchers from across the country.

A 5.1-magnitude quake was reported in February near the town of Fairview in northwest Oklahoma. 

The previous strongest recorded quake in Oklahoma was a 5.6-magnitude temblor in 2011, which also was upgraded Wednesday to a 5.7-magnitude quake. The revisions were based on further analysis of recordings of seismic activity, the USGS said in a statement.

One man suffered a minor head injury in Saturday’s quake when part of a fireplace fell on him, and emergency management officials said there have been reports of damage to more than a dozen buildings.

The uptick in earthquakes in Oklahoma over the last five years has been linked to the high-pressure injection of oil and gas wastewater deep underground, although researchers say it’s too early to tell what may have caused Saturday’s quake, which was located much further east than most of the previous quakes in Oklahoma.

“I’m a little surprised to see a really large earthquake really on the fringes of our earthquake area of interest,” said Jeremy Boak, the director of the Oklahoma Geological Survey. “It could be a natural earthquake. It could be some (injection) wells nearby. It could be the regional pattern of injection.”

Another possibility, Boak said, is that a pulse of high water pressure deep underground has slowly moved eastward, until it hit a natural “fault that was cued up and ready and had enough seismic energy that once triggered, it really let go of the big one.”

As a result of the increase in seismic activity in Oklahoma, state oil and gas regulators have ordered hundreds of disposal wells to either shut down or reduce the amount of wastewater they are injecting. About 54 wells in a 725-square-mile area near Saturday’s quake were ordered shut down by state and federal regulators. 

In early 2015, state regulators said the amount of disposed wastewater was decreased by about 800,000 barrels a day, a roughly 25 percent decrease from 2014 levels. Boak said the reduction in wastewater disposal appears to be producing the desired effect, dropping the number of quakes 3.0 and larger from 907 in 2015 to 472 this year through September 4th.

Still, both Boak and McNamara said the possibility exists that a quake as large as 6.0 could rattle Oklahoma sometime in the future.

“That’s what we worry about,” McNamara said. “There are definitely faults in Oklahoma big enough to produce that size of a rupture.”

See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net

Speakers at Antero Hearing

Letter from April Keating, Mountain Lakes Preservation Alliance, August 28, 2016

Antero Resources has been holding meetings for its proposed landfill and water processing facility, ironically named “Clearwater.” The 400-acre facility, a 25-year project located upstream of the Hughes River, will affect 11 wetlands and over 5 miles of streams in the area.

The WV Rivers Coalition, in its letter to the WV-DEP, states that there is no mention of a Groundwater Protection Plan in its stormwater permit, a document that must be made available to the public at all times, according to WV law. “The landfill will discharge into streams that are located within the Zone of Peripheral Concern (ZPC) for the Hughes River Water Board, which sells bulk water to Pennsboro, Harrisville, and Cairo in Ritchie County,” states the letter. The ZPC is the riparian land between a 5- and 10-hour travel time upstream of a public water supply.

The Stormwater Pollution Prevention Plan (SWPPP) also does not include a section about spill prevention and response procedures, as required by the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit for Stormwater Associated with Construction Activities.

The stormwater permit is not the only permit being sought for the facility. A 401 permit is required to show that the company will comply with Clean Water Act regulations.

Nine speakers spoke for almost an hour about their concerns for the project at Tuesday’s stormwater permit hearing, which took place at Doddridge County High School and was sponsored by the WV-DEP.

>> Charlotte Pritt, Mountain Party Candidate for governor, spoke about the health hazards of radiation found in frack waste, and called for a ban on fracking.

>> Lew Baker of the West Virginia Rural Water Association noted that there should be continuous monitoring at the facility, not just at the water intake.

>> Bill Hughes of the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition noted that this project is experimental and should never be done on this scale.

>> Cindy Rank of the WV Highlands Conservancy mentioned the inadequacies of the permit applications, and the fact that the effects of such a project should be looked at in aggregate and not separately.

>> April Keating, of Mountain Lakes Preservation Alliance, pointed out that 4,000 new wells were planned over the next 40 years, and the water supply would be adversely affected. She also noted that leaking pipelines and gas infrastructure, such as compressor stations, would affect air quality and accelerate climate change rapidly, leading to numerous effects on the environment and economy.

The WVDEP is taking comments on the stormwater permit until September 3. Comments can be submitted electronically at DEP.comments@wv.gov, or by writing to:

West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection, Permitting Section, Division of Water and Waste Management, 601 57th Street, Charleston WV 25304

 Contact: April Keating, 115 Shawnee Drive, Buckhannon, WV 26201

Internet: www.mountainlakespreservation.org 

Email: apkeating@hotmail.com   See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net

www.appalmad.org

New Appeal to Defend Ban on Fracking Waste in Fayette County, WV

From an Article by the Appalachian Mountain Advocates, August 17, 2016

Yesterday we filed an appeal to help defend Fayette County’s ban on underground injections of fracking wastes. The County passed the ban on the disposal, storage or use of oil and gas waste within its borders earlier this year. The ban would prevent injection of fracking wastes county-wide, keeping the waste from leaching into the County’s water. Despite the ban’s overwhelming public support, it has been challenged by two companies that own disposal wells.

We are representing the Fayette County Commission in appealing a June federal court ruling deeming the county’s fracking waste disposal ban invalid.

Read the Register-Herald’s full story below (here).

>  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >

 Fayette appeals federal decision on fracking waste ban

From an Article by Sarah Plummer, Beckley Register-Herald, August 17, 2016

The Fayette County Commission will appeal a June federal court ruling deeming the county’s fracking waste disposal ban invalid because such regulations are pre-empted by state and federal law.

Appalachian Mountain Advocates Senior Attorney Derek Teaney filed the notice of appeal Aug. 15.

In June, Judge John T. Copenhaver granted Pennsylvania-based petroleum company EQT Production Company’s motion for summary judgment, and the ruling was issued just hours before the hearing was scheduled.

Copenhaver ruled provisions in the ordinance that supersede state or federal permits, like those issued by the Department of Environmental Protection, and allow residents to sue violators in circuit court, are not enforceable.

Fayette County’s ordinance is rooted in state code that allows commissions to develop regulations to eliminate hazards to public health and to abate nuisances.

During past interviews with The Register-Herald, Commission President Matt Wender said the commission has increasing concerns over the health and safety of underground waste injection wells as studies conducted near one of the county’s wells operated by Danny Webb Construction shows fracking waste fluids have migrated into a nearby creek, which feeds into the New River.

In April 2016, two studies led by the U.S. Geological Survey confirmed waste from oil and gas disposal was found in surface waters and sediments near a controversial underground injection control well in Lochgelly operated by Danny Webb Construction.

One of those studies is on endocrine-disruption, which can cause adverse health effects in aquatic organisms.

These 2016 studies confirm a 2014 Duke University study near the same well which found injectate in Wolf Creek, signaling a well as a leak or breach.

EQT and Danny Webb Construction operate the only underground control injection wells in the county. Webb has also filed a suit challenging the ordinance. EQT operates 200 oil and natural gas producing wells in Fayette and one waste disposal site.

The commission is being represented pro bono by Charleston firm Appalachian Mountain Advocates and Rist Law Offices, Fayetteville.

Source: www.wvpolicy.org

Tax Reform Committee Public Hearing This Tuesday in WV

The Joint Select Committee on Tax Reform will host its first public hearing on Tuesday, October 20 starting at 9:00 AM in the House Chamber at the State Capitol.

West Virginia policy makers are already struggling to maintain funding for important programs. Governor Tomblin recently announced additional across-the-board budget cuts for the current fiscal year.

Individuals wishing to speak to the Committee will be given a chance to sign up that day and speak in the afternoon. Groups or agencies will speak during the morning session and were required to preregister.

For more, please visit the Committee’s Facebook page. See also the WV Center on Budget & Policy, advocates of a WV state tax on natural gas liquids production.

Last month, a diverse coalition of organizations that cares about kids, families, seniors and working people, community organizations and local governments released basic principles of fair taxation which we urge legislators to consider as they deliberate changes to the tax code.

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Carbon Fee and Dividend Promoted by Citizens Climate Lobby

Concerned about our changing climate? Come hear how you can get involved in doing something about it, Wednesday, October 21st at 6 pm at the Morgantown Public Library.  This is a free presentation and all are welcome.

The speaker will be Jim Probst of the Citizens Climate Lobby.  Other advocates are the Monongalia Friends Meeting and the Mon Valley Clean Air Coalition.

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New Concern Over Quakes in Oklahoma Near a Hub of U.S. Oil

From an Article by Michael Wines, New York Times, October 14, 2015

A sharp earthquake in central Oklahoma last weekend has raised fresh concern about the security of a vast crude oil storage complex, close to the quake’s center, that sits at the crossroads of the nation’s oil pipeline network.

The magnitude 4.5 quake struck Saturday afternoon about three miles northwest of Cushing, roughly midway between Oklahoma City and Tulsa. The town of about 8,000 people is home to the so-called Cushing Hub, a sprawling tank farm that is among the largest oil storage facilities in the world.

Scientists reported in a paper published online last month that a large earthquake near the storage hub “could seriously damage storage tanks and pipelines.” Saturday’s quake continues a worrisome pattern of moderate quakes, suggesting that a large earthquake is more than a passing concern, the lead author of that study, Daniel McNamara, said in an interview.

“When we see these fault systems producing multiple magnitude 4s, we start to get concerned that it could knock into higher magnitudes,” he said. “Given the number of magnitude 4s here, it’s a high concern.”

The federal government has designated the hub, run by energy industry companies, a critical national infrastructure. Major tank ruptures could cause serious environmental damage, raise the risk of fire and other disasters and disrupt the flow of oil to refineries nationwide, said Dr. McNamara, a research geophysicist at the National Earthquake Information Center in Colorado.

The Cushing quake is among the largest of thousands of temblors that have rocked central and northern Oklahoma in the past five years, largely set off by the injection of oil and gas industry wastes deep into the earth. The watery wastes effectively lubricate cracks, allowing rocks under intense pressure to slip past one another, causing quakes.

The tens of millions of barrels of injected wastewater have helped make Oklahoma the second most seismically active state, behind Alaska. Although quakes have damaged or destroyed buildings and roads and, in a few instances, injured people, regulators do not have the authority to seriously curb waste disposal, and politicians in a state dominated by the energy industry have made no move to give it to them.

The state had three earthquakes of magnitude 3 or greater in 2009. Last year, it had 585, and this year’s total exceeds that.

Many scientists say the largest earthquake recorded in Oklahoma, a magnitude 5.7 temblor in 2011, was apparently unleashed by injected waste. Research suggests that the Cushing faults hold the potential for a quake as large as magnitude 6, Dr. McNamara said.

The Cushing oil hub stores oil piped from across North America until it is dispatched to refineries. As of last week, it held 53 million barrels of crude. The earth beneath the tanks was comparatively stable until last October, when magnitude 4 and 4.3 earthquakes struck nearby in quick succession, revealing long-dormant faults beneath the complex. Three more quakes with magnitudes 4 and over have occurred within a few miles of the tanks in the past month.

The Department of Homeland Security has gauged potential earthquake dangers to the hub and concluded that a quake equivalent to the record magnitude 5.7 could significantly damage the tanks. Dr. McNamara’s study concludes that recent earthquakes have increased stresses along two stretches of fault that could lead to quakes of that size.

The vice chairman of the state’s oil and gas regulatory body, the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, said in an interview that the potential for a large earthquake in Cushing was among her biggest worries. “It’s the eye of the storm,” said the vice chairwoman, Dana Murphy. Nevertheless, Oklahoma’s attempt to deal with the earthquakes this autumn faces continuing obstacles.

The government’s chief seismologist, who came under oil industry pressure to minimize the quakes’ origins in waste disposal, left this fall, and his successor is scheduled to depart soon. The state budget for the fiscal year that began in July slashed appropriations to the Corporation Commission by nearly 45 percent.

The commission has used its limited power over oil and gas exploration and production to persuade some companies in quake-prone areas to reduce the amount of waste they inject underground. This week, however, a Tulsa energy company filed the first challenge to those efforts, calling them arbitrary and a violation of due process. The two sides are negotiating an accord.

See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net