Bradford County water wells tested for methane
www.stargazette.com/article/20120521/NEWS11/205210388/Bradford-County-water-wells-tested-methane?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE&nclick_check=1
May. 21, 2012
Pa. officials, Chesapeake try to determine cause of gas migration
Pennsylvania officials and Chesapeake Energy are investigating a possible methane gas migration issue in Leroy Township in Bradford County.
The Department of Environmental Protection’s Oil and Gas Program received the initial report on Saturday evening, said Daniel Spadoni, the agency’s community relations coordinator.
Methane was detected in the headspace of two private drinking water wells. Both wells have been vented, DEP says. There have also been reports of gas bubbling documented in nearby wetlands.
Chesapeake’s Morse well pad — which contains two wells — is about one-half mile from the affected private wells. DEP has sampled four private wells in the area and a Chesapeake consultant is screening all private wells within a 2,500 foot radius of the Morse pad.
Brian Grove, Chesapeake’s senior director of corporate development, said the company was alerted Saturday to a complaint regarding residential water supplies and nearby surface water. The company, Grove said, is “working cooperatively with the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection to investigate the situation.”
More information will be released as the investigation proceeds, the company said.
Methane migration, when methane gas leaks into water wells, happens when a gas well hits a pocket of naturally occurring methane gas in the earth, allowing the methane to seep into the soil. In the cases where it can be proved the contamination has been caused by natural gas drilling, gas companies can be made responsible for any remediation methods — installing new water wells, providing bottled fresh water or installing equipment to vent the methane.
Although the DEP strengthened its drilling regulations in February 2011 by mandating a higher grade of cement be used in the well casings, pressure testing the wells and more inspections, the methane migration problem has persisted.
In May 2011, DEP fined Chesapeake Energy for a series of water contamination incidents and a well-site fire that injured three workers. The company agreed to pay $900,000 for allowing methane to migrate up faulty wells in Bradford County and contaminate 16 families’ drinking water beginning in 2010.
In January, DEP sent a violation notice to Chief Oil & Gas for three gas wells in Wyoming County’s Nicholson Township saying there is 100-percent combustible gas between the cemented steel casings, which the agency uses as a sign of flaws in construction of the well. The investigation began after a nearby resident complained of high methane levels in well water supplies.
Methane levels above 28 milligrams per liter are a cause for concern because at that point, water can no longer hold the gas and it begins to escape to the air.
Meanwhile, DEP’s Spadoni said, and no methane has been detected inside any of the homes near the Morse well pad.
One of the wells being tested provides drinking water for a niece of Patricia Klotz, of Rome, Pa. Her niece lives near Rockwell Road in Leroy Township, and Klotz said her niece’s water is being tested every 12 hours and that the testing has been going on for a couple of days.
“But she and her neighbors are afraid to say anything, for fear of repercussions,” Klotz said.
The investigation is continuing and no determination has been made as to the source or sources of the methane, DEP says.
Residents: Pa. health dept. lacks in investigating claims of illness.
www.timesleader.com/stories/Residents-Pa-health-dept-lacks-in-investigating-claims-of-illness,149927
By KEVIN BEGOS
May 13, 2012
Inquiry finds several other shortcomings by agency concerning gas drilling.
PITTSBURGH — The Pennsylvania Department of Health says it investigates every claim by residents that gas drilling has caused health problems, but several people say the agency’s actions don’t match its words.
Two western Pennsylvania residents told The Associated Press that health officials have fallen short in responding to their health complaints.
The AP also found that the toll-free number the agency gives out for gas drilling complaints doesn’t mention the issue in its automated menu, and the agency’s website doesn’t have a specific place for people to file such complaints.
And the AP inquiry showed that the agency didn’t begin keeping track of possible health complaints tied to gas drilling until 2011, several years after a surge of activity in the gas-rich Marcellus Shale.
“Everybody kind of just passed the buck,” said Sheri Makepeace, a northwestern Pennsylvania resident who said that starting last year she tried calling the Department of Health and other agencies over fears that nearby drilling created health problems. “I’ve talked to so many different people and have gotten so many different stories.”
Christine Cronkright, a spokeswoman for the agency, said the agency stands by earlier statements that it responds to, investigates and issues a formal response to all complaints about gas drilling and public health. Officials are working on how and where to share information on the issue with the public and expect to release details in the near future, she said.
The AP also found that previous responses from the Department of Health about the numbers of complaints it has received about drilling and health have been at best confusing and at worst misleading.
The agency first told the AP that it had received a total of about 30 complaints, and then modified that to being 30 over the last year. Now, the agency says it didn’t even begin recording such complaints until 2011.
Cronkright also told the AP that the agency has no current investigations regarding people who claim gas drilling has impacted their health.
That puzzles Janet McIntyre, one of Makepeace’s neighbors.
She made a formal complaint by phone in late February and said a health department employee replied that he would get back to her in a few days. McIntyre said she purposefully waited 30 days for a response but none came.
“He sounded as if he wanted to get right on it. And that I would have people calling me,” she said. “I was very frustrated. I was getting nowhere. That was disheartening.”
The AP started asking the health department about problems in responding to complaints in April, and then in early May McIntyre sent a letter to the agency, outlining her experience.
On Thursday, a health official called her to apologize, she said, adding that “they dropped the ball. But at least they picked it up again.”
One public health expert who’s working on gas drilling complaints in Pennsylvania said the health agency is in a difficult position.
“I’m not surprised that their protocols are a little difficult to get in place. The response to something like this is really hard,” said David Brown, a former head of environmental epidemiology in Connecticut who is now working with the nonprofit Southwest Pennsylvania Environmental Health Project to examine complaints about gas drilling.
Until a few months ago, Pennsylvania health officials had expected to get a share of the revenue being generated by the state’s new Marcellus Shale law, which is projected to provide about $180 million to state and local governments in the first year.
But representatives from Republican Gov. Tom Corbett’s office and the state Senate cut the health appropriation to zero during final negotiations, so now the agency is left with a new workload but no funding for the job.
About one-third of drinking water wells are contaminated with bacteria
www.publicopiniononline.com/ci_20566632/about-one-third-drinking-water-wells-are-contaminated/
By Jim Hook
Penn State Extension ups awareness of testing
CHAMBERSBURG — Homeowners often don’t know the quality of the water they are drinking, and an estimated one third of their wells are contaminated with bacteria.
About one quarter of homes in Franklin County get their drinking water from private wells.
Typically only half of homeowners ever have their water tested, and then only once, according to Penn State Extension Educator Thomas Richard McCarty.
“The major risk for most people is contamination from bacteria,” he said. “This is hidden both from sight and taste. Health effects may be hidden too by building resistance to the presence of bacteria, which suffices as long as bacteria counts are low and the householders are in generally good health. Symptoms properly due to poor water may easily be blamed on something else.”
Penn State Extension is offering discounted water testing kits this week.
According to Penn State Extension data for well water in Franklin County:
– About 35 percent of private wells have coliform bacteria in their water. Coliform bacteria come from soil, sewage, or manure and enter groundwater from heavily fertilized areas – home lawns, farm fields or septic systems.
– One in 10 has fecal coliform levels exceeding safe drinking water standards. This branch of the coliform family includes the dreaded E. coli.
– One of every six have nitrates above the limit for drinking water. Nitrate is of concern when infants under six months drink the water or older people with stomach problems.
– One of every 13 homes supplied by a well has lead levels exceeding the maximum allowable concentration. Children absorb more of the lead in their diet than adults do. Lead in water comes primarily from solder joints in copper pipe. Exposure to high levels of lead can result in delays in physical and mental development, along with slight deficits in attention span and learning abilities. Adults exposed to lead over a number of years can develop high blood pressure or kidney problems.
“The lack of testing by well owners is not for a lack of concern over their water quality, but instead, a lack of awareness and understanding of what testing should be done,” according to a 2009 Penn State study Drinking Water Quality in Rural Pennsylvania. “The great majority of well owners that were told of health-related water quality issues in their water supply had voluntarily solved the problem within one year.”
A deeper well does not always have purer water. Limestone bedrock has more to do with bacterial contamination of wells than does the depth of the well, according to a 2001 U.S. Geological Survey study of wells in south-central Pennsylvania. Bacterial concentrations actually increased with depth to the waterbearing zone in limestone. Many of the wells in Franklin County are drilled in limestone geology.
Franklin County lacks current data on the use of private wells.
“The 1980 Census reported that 63 percent of homes were on public water,” said Phil Tarquino, chief of the county planning department. “The remaining 37 percent were on drilled wells, dug wells or cisterns. It would seem that the percent of homes on public water has increased in the last 30 years as most new development has occurred in areas where public water is located. In addition public water has been extended to areas that were previously on wells or cisterns.”
Pennsylvania has more residents using private wells than any other state, except Michigan, and each year another 20,000 are drilled, according to Penn State’s manual for well owners.
McCarty said he is at a loss to explain why interest in Penn State’s water testing program has declined of the years. A steeply discounted program in Adams County attracted few participants.
State investigating methane in water near Dimock Twp.
citizensvoice.com/news/state-investigating-methane-in-water-near-dimock-twp-1.1307137#axzz1t9VLaOeL
By Laura Legere (Staff Writer)
Published: April 28, 2012
State environmental regulators are investigating a possible case of methane migrating into water supplies just north of the 9-square-mile box in Dimock Township where the state halted a gas driller’s operations because of methane contamination in 2010.
Regulators with the state Department of Environmental Protection emphasized that they have not determined the source of elevated methane discovered in two Susquehanna County water wells and whether it is caused by Marcellus Shale drilling or a natural occurrence of gas in the aquifer.
One focus of the investigation is Cabot Oil and Gas Corp.’s Greenwood 1 well, where the company recently squeezed additional cement between steel barriers that are meant to seal off gas and fluids from the aquifer.
The work in late March was an effort to stop the problem, DEP spokesman Kevin Sunday said, even though inspectors have not pinpointed the well as the cause.
“The next step is to determine the effectiveness of the remediation work and to continue water well sampling,” he said.
Regulators began investigating the elevated methane levels in August 2010 after a resident complained about water quality.
The gas wells being evaluated are less than 400 feet from the northern boundary of a section of Dimock where Cabot’s drilling and hydraulic fracturing operations have been on hold since April 2010, when state regulators blamed faulty Cabot wells for allowing shallow methane to channel into 18 private water wells. Cabot disputes the state’s findings in that case.
The current investigation is separate from the ongoing review of Cabot’s wells in the off-limits area.
Cabot spokesman George Stark said Friday that the company “always investigates landowners’ concerns as they are brought to our attention. Cabot has been working closely with the Department of Environmental Protection on this matter and will continue to do so with the best interest of our landowners in mind.”
Neither of the two water wells involved in the current investigation has been vented because one well is buried and has not been located and inspections of the other have not found gas trapped in the open space above the water in the well, Sunday said.
Methane in drinking water is not known to cause any health risks, but at high concentrations it can seep out of water into the air and create an explosion hazard in enclosed spaces.
The state has not reached a determination 20 months into the investigation because a number of factors need to be considered, including the construction of nearby gas wells and identifying features of the methane, DEP spokeswoman Colleen Connolly said.
“It’s not different from any case,” she said. “There are just many issues to deal with.”
The Greenwood 1 well was the first Marcellus Shale well drilled by Cabot in Dimock, in September 2007, according to state records.
Three horizontal wells later drilled on the same pad in November 2009 and May 2010 were among the top-producing wells in the state early last year.
Those wells, the Greenwood 6, 7 and 8, have also been evaluated as part of the investigation. Cabot was cited by DEP for a “failure to case and cement” the three wells “to prevent migrations into fresh groundwater” in January 2011 but Cabot has argued in a letter to the state that the wells were properly constructed and the violations should be rescinded.
Connolly said that DEP is addressing the violations with Cabot. The defects cited by the department “could have been a means of allowing methane to migrate into the fresh groundwater, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the water supply has been impacted,” she said.
llegere@timesshamrock.com
1.8 million gallons of sewage leaks into river in Tamaqua
republicanherald.com/news/1-8-million-gallons-of-sewage-leaks-into-river-in-tamaqua-1.1306715#
By KENT JACKSON (Staff Writerkjackson@standardspeaker.com)
Published: April 27, 2012
TAMAQUA – Contractors on Thursday finished patching a concrete pipe through which workers accidentally drilled, causing up to 1.8 million gallons of sewage to spill into the Little Schuylkill River in Tamaqua a day earlier.
The state Department of Environmental Protection will continue to investigate how the accident occurred about 3:15 p.m. Wednesday during construction of the bridge on state Route 309 and whether any penalties will be assessed, Colleen Connolly, the department’s spokeswoman, said.
Fish didn’t appear to have died from the spill, said Connolly, who estimated the amount of sewage that leaked into the river. She also noted that the section of the river near the bridge is tainted by acid water from mine workings.
Workers pierced the concrete pipe, which is 24 inches wide, while sinking a caisson for a temporary bridge, said Ronald Young of the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation.
At the Tamaqua wastewater treatment plant a short distance from the bridge, workers noticed flow in the plant plummeted from 1,700,000 gallons a day to 200,000 gallons per day, said Tamaqua Borough Manager Kevin Steigerwalt.
Their observation led to the discovery of the broken pipe.
Steigerwalt heard what happened at the treatment plant at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday and went to the bridge with a supervisor from the plant.
“I had a suspicion that the bridge was involved. The plant is just a short distance south of the bridge,” he said.
No workers were on bridge when they arrived, but discharge was flowing from a combined sewer overflow that should have been quiet.
The overflow provided an outlet for the sewage, which otherwise would have backed up into cellars of people’s homes, Steigerwalt said.
He and the plant supervisor contacted the project inspector from PennDOT and telephoned the emergency number for the Department of Environmental Protection.
Early Wednesday morning, officials from the state departments and the borough planned how to make repairs with workers from the contracting firm, Clearwater Construction of Mercer, Mercer County.
Workers built a coffer dam – an enclosure that kept the river water away from the sewage outfall. They rigged pumps to push the sewage to a manhole downstream, Steigerwalt said. That was complete by about 9 p.m. Wednesday, he said.
Young said tanker trucks also hauled away some of the sewage from the broken pipe. Meanwhile, other workers dug a trench to uncover the broken section of the pipe.
They affixed a new section of pipe about 1 a.m. Thursday, Steigerwalt said after checking a timeline prepared by Tamaqua’s public works director, Rob Jones, who stayed at the bridge through the night.
State officials told Clearwater Construction’s crew to remain on the job until the leak stopped. Attempts to contact the company were unsuccessful Thursday. A voice mailbox for a project supervisor was full, and a message left with a receptionist wasn’t returned.
Connolly said DEP wants to know more about how the accident occurred and why four hours passed before the department was notified.
By 10 a.m. Thursday, workers encased the new section of pipe with cement. They let the cement harden and filled in the trench to finish the repairs.
Replacing the bridge is a $3.18 million project for which the contract was awarded in July 2011.
Young said workers will erect a temporary bridge, demolish the existing bridge and build a new permanent bridge.
The work is scheduled to end in May 2013.
Relax, It’s Just a Run-of-the-Mill Nuke Spill
www.counterpunch.org/2012/04/26/relax-its-just-a-run-of-the-mill-nuke-spill/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=relax-its-just-a-run-of-the-mill-nuke-spill
by DAVE LINDORFF
April 26, 2012
The Limerick Incident Wasn’t an “EPPI”
A little over a month ago, back on March 19, at 3:00 in the morning, the Limerick Nuclear Power Station, which runs two aging GE nuclear reactors along the Schuylkill River west of Philadelphia, had an accident. As much as 15,000 gallons of reactor water contaminated with five times the official safe limit of radioactive Tritium as well as an unknown amount of other dangerous isotopes from the reactor’s fission process blew off a manhole cover and ran out of a large pipe, flowing into a streambed and on into the river from which Philadelphia and a number of smaller towns draw their municipal water supplies.
No public announcement of this spill was made at the time, so the public in those communities had no idea that it had occurred, and water system operators had no opportunity to shut down their intakes from the river. There was no report about the spill in Philadelphia’s two daily newspapers or on local news programs.
Only weeks later, after the regional office of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was finally sent an official report by Exelon, the owner of the plant, did a public notice get posted on the NRC’s website, after which some excellent reporting on the incident was done by Evan Brandt, a reporter for a local paper called The Pottstown Mercury.
We contacted the NRC regional office with oversight over Limerick and were told that Exelon had only reported the incident to state authorities — the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency (PEMA). A call to the DEP elicited a response that the state agency, now in the hands of a Republican governor who has shown open distain for environmental concerns ranging from nuclear waste to regulation of natural gas fracking chemicals, that it did not feel it was necessary to issue any public report on the spill. “Exelon assured us that it was not an EPPI incident,” explained DEP regional office spokeswoman Deborah Fries.
“What’s an EPPI?” she was asked. “It’s an Event of Potential Public Interest,” Fries replied.
In other words, Exelon and the state’s DEP and PEMA officials, meeting behind closed doors, agreed that the spilling of up to 15,000 gallons of radioactive isotope-laced reactor water into a river that supplies drinking water to hundreds of thousands of people was not an event of “potential public interest,” and so they didn’t make it public, thus insuring that it would not become a matter of public interest, or even of public knowledge! The logic is impeccable, though the NRC subsequently protested that Exelon should have reported the incident to the commission, which would automatically have posted it on its website as public notice of a spill.
Read more
Pennsylvania law on fracking worries doctors
www.pennlive.com/newsflash/index.ssf/story/pennsylvania-law-on-fracking-worries-doctors/dd15e865ab528519210b827575117d4f
April 25, 2012, 8:14 a.m. EDT
McClatchy/Tribune – MCT Information Services
AVELLA, Pa. _ About two years ago, Dr. Amy Pare began treating members of the Moten family and their neighbors from a working-class neighborhood less than half a mile from a natural gas well here.
A plastic surgeon whose specialty includes skin cancer, Pare removed and biopsied quarter-size skin lesions from Jeannie Moten, 53, and her niece, only to find that the sores recurred. “The good news is that it wasn’t cancer, and the bad news is that we have no idea what it is,” Pare said.
Determined to understand the illnesses, Pare went last May to the Motens’ neighborhood to collect urine samples from a dozen people. To her dismay, she found chemicals not normally present in the human body: hippuric acid, phenol, mandelic acid.
The Motens and their neighbors suspect their ailments could be tied to the natural gas well. Pare says she is not sure what is causing their problems. But she worries that she may have a hard time determining the exact cause because of a provision in a new Pennsylvania law regulating natural gas production.
The law compels natural gas companies to give inquiring health care professionals information about the chemicals used in their drilling and production processes _ but only after the doctors or nurses sign a confidentiality agreement.
Some physicians complain that the law is vague and lacks specific guidelines about how they can use and share the information with patients, colleagues and public health officials, putting them at risk of violating the measure. But refusing to sign the confidentiality agreement denies them access to information that could help treat patients.
“I just want to make my patients healthy,” Pare said, adding that she might sign an agreement. “And I can’t do that if I don’t know what it is that’s making them sick.”
The possibility that increased natural gas development could threaten public heath lies at the core of resistance to a controversial process known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. The technique involves high-pressure injection of water and sand laced with chemicals deep underground to break shale formations and unlock oil and gas deposits.
Some people living near well sites have complained that their well water has been contaminated by fracking. The industry asserts that tiny amounts of chemicals are used in fracking and that the water problems are unrelated to the procedure.
Supporters of the Pennsylvania law _ including the gas industry, Republican Gov. Tom Corbett and many legislators _ said it was designed to help health care providers. Environmental groups and opposing lawmakers said the provision was not in the natural gas law’s original version and was slipped in behind closed doors at the last minute by industry-friendly legislators.
Patrick Henderson, the governor’s energy executive, said the new law would increase disclosure. Companies would have to share the chemical composition of fluids they use in natural gas production, including proprietary mixes. The confidentiality agreement would not prevent doctors from sharing information with colleagues or patients, only with the company’s competitors, he said.
Dr. Marilyn Heine, president of the Pennsylvania Medical Society, said her group had been assured by the state that as regulations are developed to implement the law, state officials “will clarify the provisions so that physicians will know what they can do.”
Some doctors, however, want the details in writing before they sign any confidentiality agreements.
“Right now, any physician reading the law would not go anywhere near the issue, because the language of the law has a very chilling effect,” said Dr. Bernard Goldstein, former dean of the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health and an expert on possible health effects of natural gas development. “I very much hope that the regulations permit” information sharing, he added.
So far, there are no comprehensive, independent studies of the possible health effects of natural gas development.
Dr. Sean Porbin, a family practitioner in Avella, thinks natural gas development could revive many struggling towns in Pennsylvania. “We need to ask questions,” he said. “It’s not about shutting down industry, but fixing it. And if the data show what they’re doing is safe, then we need to defend them.”
Pennsylvania’s new law is not unprecedented, according to the state’s Republican leadership, the natural gas industry and at least two prominent environmental groups. The measure is based on a new rule in Colorado and on two decades-old federal laws from the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Health and Safety Administration.
The comparisons between Pennsylvania’s provision and the federal laws, however, are inexact, experts said. According to a statement from OSHA, what doctors can disclose and to whom would come down to “the terms of the agreement between the employer and the health care provider.”
In any case, there is little precedent for how nondisclosure agreements between doctors and companies would work when the patients are residents near a fracking site, not company employees, experts said.
If the state guidelines are stringent, doctors probably will forgo the agreement _ and the information they are seeking from a company, Goldstein and other physicians said. That, too, could imperil doctors.
“It exposes us to lawsuits from our own patients, who might say, ‘Why didn’t you sign the confidentiality agreement?’ or if you did, ‘Why didn’t you share the information with so-and-so?’ ” said Dr. Mehernosh Khan, who has filed suit against the state over the provision. “The law sets up a precedent for doctors not being able to practice medicine properly.”
Environmental, legal expert speaks about recent ‘fracking’ legislation
www.lehighvalleylive.com/thebrownandwhiteblog/index.ssf/2012/04/environmental_legal_expert_spe_1.html
Published: Monday, April 23, 2012
Michael Krancer, secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), spoke and answered questions about Act 13 —a new state law establishing regulations over the hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, process being used to drill natural gas out of the Marcellus Shale deposit in many northern and western Pennsylvania counties— at a town hall meeting in Packard 101 Friday.
Act 13 requires drilling companies to report to the DEP the chemicals they use in the fracking process, including concentrations on a well-by-well basis, as well as publically disclose chemicals on FracFocus.org, according to the website of the Pennsylvania Environmental Council, a watchdog group Krancer referenced in his talk.
Questions have been raised about difficulties medical professionals are having under the new law. According to the PEC website, doctors are having trouble getting access to chemical information needed in the diagnosis or treatment of patients. Fracking involves boring a high-pressure mix of water and toxic chemicals into fissures in the ground to force natural gas to the surface.
Evidence that chemicals are leaking from natural gas drilling sites and contaminating private wells and public waterways has turned fracking into a serious environmental and public health concern in Pennsylvania.
The Marcellus shale deposit extends throughout much of northern and western Pennsylvania, and into New York, where a moratorium was placed on drilling in December 2010.
Krancer said that 3 million Pennsylvania residents get their water from private wells — one of the highest proportions of any state in the country. He said 40 percent of the state’s wells have exceeded maximum contaminant levels at some point, regardless of fracking.
Act 13 is the state government’s first attempt to regulate fracking, and Krancer’s talk was intended to reassure residents that the DEP is robustly monitoring the actions of drilling companies.
“We do need to pay attention to what happens at the front end,” he said. “We can’t get the promise of cleaner air through the use of natural gas in transportation without paying attention to what’s happening during the exploration and drilling phase.”
Krancer promised “additional boots on the ground, paid for by permit not taxpayer money” in Bradford county in northeastern Pennsylvania, which has been at the center of the fracking controversy.
“I frankly think we’re getting it right,” Krancer said. “Any form of energy production has aspects that need to be managed. That’s true of coal and oil; it’s true of nuclear power, and it’s true of wind and solar.”
When asked by one audience member how the state can allow fracking to occur in an aquifer, Krancer explained that groundwater supplies usually occur at depths of several hundred feet below the earth’s surface and that natural gas drilling occurs far below those depths —at depths of around 8,000 feet.
Krancer called Act 13 one of the most progressive and environmentally forward-thinking regulations in the country; he said it is modeled on a Colorado law that was hailed by environmental groups nationwide when it was passed.
“We’re going to have increased monitoring during the earthmoving process,” Krancer said. “We have more inspectors than Oklahoma; and if we need more, we’re going to get more.”
Krancer said that the state will take cases of non-compliance seriously, prosecuting where necessary.
“I happen to believe in enforcement and so does the governor,” Krancer said.
He also reminding the audience that Pennsylvania’s Republican Governor, Tom Corbett, served eight years as state attorney general, and as chief U.S. attorney in Pittsburgh before that, where he prosecuted environmental violators.
Krancer called himself a believer in free-market economics. He said drilling companies that don’t comply with the new environmental regulations are trying to “steal a competitive advantage from those that are complying.”
“I have a fundamental idea that cheaters should be called out,” he said.
Regulation and monitoring makes sense from both environmental and economic standpoints, he said.
“The free marketplace is the engine for a lot of research and development, opportunities that don’t exist in other parts of the world,” Krancer said.
Krancer also said “the ethos of compliance has to be in the company.”
He cited his experience as general council for Excelon Corporation, an energy company where, Krancer said, the CEO enforced compliance with a top-down mentality. Ten members of Lehigh’s environmental student group Green Action attended Krancer’s talk.
“We wanted to mobilize for this event because Secretary Krancer takes a strong stance in favor of drilling the Marcellus Shale, and we hoped showing him that well-educated students think he is making a big mistake,” said Green Action president Tyler Tobin, ’12, in an email.
“Natural gas wells emit plumes of methane into the atmosphere contributing to climate change; the well casings are not 100 percent perfect, allowing frack fluids and gases to escape the well shaft and enter ground water,” Tobin said, detailing some of the environmental concerns associated with fracking.
“The lagoons where spent frack fluid are held infiltrate into ground water and run off into surface water; on top of it all there seems to be a huge environmental justice issue where companies pay off poor families for their mineral rights then completely de-value their land and livelihood,” Tobin said.
The meeting was co-sponsored by Lehigh’s Environmental Initiative, the Office of the Vice President and Associate Provost for Research and Graduate Studies and the engineering school.
Story by Brown and White news writer Kirk Greenwood, ’12.
Ex-DEP Official Says All Pa. Oil, Gas Waste Needs Treatment
www.manufacturing.net/news/2012/04/ex-dep-official-says-all-pa-oil-gas-waste-needs-treatment
Mon, 04/16/2012
PITTSBURGH (AP) — A former top environmental official says Pennsylvania’s successful efforts to keep Marcellus Shale wastewater away from drinking water supplies should be extended to all other oil and gas drillers.
“It’s the same industry. It is the same contaminants. And the goal should be the same,” said George Jugovic Jr., who was formerly the Department of Environmental Protection’s southwest regional director. He’s now president of PennFuture, an environmental group.
An AP analysis of state data found that in the second half of 2011 about 1.86 million barrels — or about 78 million gallons — of drilling wastewater from conventional oil and gas wells were still being sent to treatmentplants that discharge into rivers.
The core issue is whether a problem in waterways has been solved, or if more needs to be done.
In 2010 health experts raised alarms when they found soaring levels of ultra-salty bromides in rivers and streams that are major sources of drinking water. The general view was that wastewater from Marcellus Shalegas drilling — polluted with heavy bromides from deep underground — was contributing to the problem.
High levels of bromides can contaminate drinking water with levels that exceed national safety standards and are potentially harmful. Though not considered a pollutant by themselves, the bromides combine with the chlorine used in water treatment to produce trihalomethanes, which may cause cancer if ingested over a long period of time.
Bromide levels were so high in rivers during 2010 that they caused corrosion at some plants that were using the water.
But since the spring of 2011 most Marcellus drillers have been recycling the fluids, or sending then to deep underground wells mostly in Ohio.
The gas-rich Marcellus, which lies thousands of feet underground, has attracted a gold rush of drillers who have drilled almost 5,000 new wells in the last five years. But the state also has about 70,000 older oil and gaswells, according to DEP statistics, that target different, shallower reserves.
Researchers say the bromide levels did drop last summer, but they had also expected even more of a decline after virtually all of the Marcellus Shale drillers stopped disposing wastewater into plants that discharge into rivers.
But conventional oil and gas wells weren’t included in last year’s recycling push — a loophole that state environmental officials downplayed at the time.
Jugovic said DEP secretary Mike Krancer should now take “the next step” and get voluntary compliance from the rest of the gas industry.
“It’s hard scientifically to justify a distinction between treating conventional wastewater differently. The wastewater is being disposed in plants that are not capable of treating those contaminants,” he said.
Dave Mashek, a spokesman for the Pa. Independent Oil & Gas Association, declined to comment.
Kevin Sunday, a DEP spokesman, claimed that the volume of conventional oil and gas waste is “substantially smaller” than the Marcellus amounts.
But the AP found that 78 million gallons of oil and gas wastewater were still being taken to treatment plants in the last half of 2011 — about 33 percent less than the Marcellus quantity that was raising concerns in 2010, but still a substantial amount. If that rate continues, the conventional wells will send about 150 million gallons of the wastewater to treatment plants that discharge into rivers this year.
Sunday said the agency encourages wastewater recycling, “regardless of the industry involved,” and added that the conventional oil and gas drillers don’t produce as much wastewater as the Marcellus drillers.
Sunday also said that the agency has created a new, revised permit to encourage recycling of waste. Ten facilities have applied for the new permit, and if all are approved, that would double the number of such facilities in the state.
David Sternberg, a spokesman for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, didn’t directly answer a question about whether there was any scientific justification for treating the non-Marcellus waste differently. Sternberg said EPA, which urged Pennsylvania regulators last year to halt the dumping, is working closely with state regulators “to ensure that, where wastewater treatment facilities are accepting oil and gas wastewaters, discharges from these treatment facilities are in compliance with the Clean Water Act.”
Jugovic said that some previous assumptions about the non-Marcellus waste turned out to be false. For example, there were suggestions that it generally contained much lower levels of bromides and other contaminants.
He said some of the shallow wells had very high levels of total dissolved solids and other contaminants that can be a problem for drinking water supplies.
Jugovic also said that the fact that 97 percent of Marcellus drillers appear to be complying with the wastewater restrictions raises a fairness issue. Why, he asked, should the conventional oil and gas drillers and the remaining 3 percent of drillers get a pass?
Now, researchers are waiting for expected lower river levels in the summer, to see if the bromide problem has really gone away. The higher flows in early spring dilute any contaminants and make it harder to draw conclusions about the bromides.
Drilling law hurts health, docs say
thetimes-tribune.com/news/gas-drilling/drilling-law-hurts-health-docs-say-1.1298897#axzz1rpg4bvIU
Published: April 12, 2012
PITTSBURGH – Public health advocates and doctors on the front lines of Pennsylvania’s natural-gas-drilling boom are attacking the state’s new Marcellus Shale law, likening one of its provisions to a gag order and complaining that vital research money into health effects was stripped at the last minute.
Doctors say they don’t know what to tell patients who suspect their ailments are related to nearby gas industry activity because of a lack of research on whether the drilling of thousands of new wells – many near houses and drinking-water supplies – has made some people sick.
Yet when legislative leaders and the governor’s office negotiated the most sweeping update of the state’s oil and gas law in a quarter century, they stripped $2 million annually that included a statewide health registry to track respiratory problems, skin conditions, stomach ailments and other illnesses potentially related to gas drilling.
Just last week, the Department of Health refused to give The Associated Press copies of its responses to people who complain that drilling had affected their health. That lack of transparency – justified in the name of protecting private medical information – means the public has no way of knowing even how many complaints there are or how many are valid.
Studies are urgently needed to determine if any of the drilling has affected human health, said Dr. Poune Saberi, a University of Pennsylvania physician and public health expert.
“We don’t really have a lot of time,” said Saberi, who said she’s talked to about 30 people around Pennsylvania over the past 18 months who blame their ailments on gas drilling.
Working out of public view, legislative negotiators also inserted a requirement that doctors sign a confidentiality agreement in return for access to proprietary information on chemicals used in the hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, process.
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