Pa. GOP to seek vote on drill bill
www.timesleader.com/news/Pa__GOP_to_seek_vote_on_drill_bill_02-06-2012.html
February 6, 2012
Party has notified lawmakers that it hopes to hold votes on impact fee, regs this week.
HARRISBURG — A final framework is at hand on sweeping legislation to impose an impact fee and update safety regulations on Pennsylvania’s booming natural gas industry, top Republican state lawmakers say.
Republicans notified rank-and-file lawmakers Saturday night that they hope to hold votes this week on a framework reached by negotiators from the House, Senate and Gov. Tom Corbett’s office during closed-door negotiations over the past six weeks.
“These discussions have progressed rapidly over the course of the last two weeks,” House Speaker Sam Smith and House Majority Leader Mike Turzai said in a letter to lawmakers. “In fact, staff have been working throughout the weekend and will be working (Sunday) in order to have a proposal that we can consider as early as this week.”
Pennsylvania is the only major gas-producing state that doesn’t tax natural gas production, and Democrats have not been part of the negotiations after trying unsuccessfully for three years to win enough Republican votes to impose a severance tax on the industry. Because Corbett opposes a tax on the industry, Republicans, who control the Legislature, have instead pursued an “impact fee” that he views as being fundamentally different than a tax. But House and Senate Republicans have clashed over the size of the fee, while Democrats and environmental groups view their proposals as too low and members of the industry have been split over paying any levy.
The 15-year impact fee would rise and fall with the price of natural gas and inflation. Currently, the price of natural gas is about $2.30 per million British thermal units — a measurement used at major pipeline hubs. If the price is between $3 and $5, the total per-well fee would be $310,000 over 15 years, not counting inflation, according to a summary distributed to senators.
At the current price of gas, the 15-year fee total would be $240,000 per well, not counting inflation, according to a summary distributed to House Democrats. The maximum per-well fee a company would pay is $355,000, if gas stays above $6, while the minimum would be $190,000, if gas stays below $2.25, again not including inflation.
But the fee at any price would be well below the average lifetime per-well tax paid in other natural gas states, including $993,700 in West Virginia, $878,500 in Texas and $555,700 in Arkansas, according to the Harrisburg-based Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center, a liberal think tank.
Counties that host the drilling would have the option of whether to impose the fee — a key element sought by Corbett and disliked by senators — but a critical mass of municipalities would have 60 days to override a county’s refusal. Counties and municipalities that refuse the fee would not get a share of the money.
Money from the impact fee and state forest drilling royalties would be distributed to a wide range of purposes, including bridge repairs, open space, water and sewer plant improvements, statewide environmental cleanup programs and purchases of natural-gas fleet vehicles. Local governments that are home to drilling would get 60 percent of the money from an impact fee, with 40 percent going to state programs or agencies, according to the summaries, even though Corbett had opposed using impact fee money for state programs.
The bill would increase the required distance between drilling and public water sources such as reservoirs, but not to the extent sought by Democrats and environmental groups, and it would require the state to develop regulations for transporting drilling wastewater and enforce qualifications of treatment plant operators.
The legislation also would address a top priority of the natural gas industry and set limits to prevent municipal officials from imposing zoning ordinances that effectively prevent drilling there. A drilling operator could ask state utility regulators to review a local ordinance to determine whether it allows for “the reasonable development of oil and gas.” If the Public Utility Commission or a state court decides that a local ordinance fails, the municipality would be unable to receive impact-fee money until it changes it, according to the summaries.
Pennsylvania lawmakers have talked about whether to tax the natural gas industry since it arrived in earnest in 2008 to tap into the Marcellus Shale natural gas formation, considered the nation’s largest-known natural gas reservoir. The drilling has drawn opponents who fear it is polluting the water supply.
Landfill proposes to mill Marcellus waste
citizensvoice.com/news/landfill-proposes-to-mill-marcellus-waste-1.1267758#axzz1lW6h1Lkv
By Laura Legere (Staff Writer)
Published: February 6, 2012
Keystone Sanitary Landfill plans to process rock waste from natural gas drilling at its properties in Throop and Dunmore in a switch from its years-old practice of accepting already processed waste from the region’s Marcellus Shale well sites.
The first-of-its-kind facility in the state, proposed in a permit application to the Department of Environmental Protection in December, has raised concerns in Throop, where community leaders oppose Keystone taking the waste at all.
“Bad enough bringing the stuff here,” Throop council President Thomas Lukasewicz said, “but treating it here is almost like adding insult to injury.”
Keystone proposes to import the rock waste, called cuttings, in “unprocessed or unsolidified form” then mix it in a custom-designed mill with lime-based material to solidify it for disposal or as a replacement for soil to cover the working face of the landfill at the end of each day.
The landfill has been accepting cuttings for years from Marcellus Shale drillers who mix it with lime or sawdust at their well sites. The cuttings are displaced as the drillers bore to and through the gas-bearing rock about a mile underground.
Keystone accepts 600 tons of cuttings daily, the landfill said last spring in an application to increase its total daily waste capacity, which is pending. It wants to increase its daily intake of cuttings to at least 1,000 tons – the processing capacity of the mill.
The cuttings will be captured in water-tight containers placed at drill sites, trucked to the landfill and processed six days a week, according to the application.
Efforts to reach Keystone site manager Joseph Dexter were unsuccessful.
Penn State Cooperative Extension associate David Yoxtheimer, a member of the university’s Marcellus Center for Outreach and Research, said it makes sense for the landfill to want to process the rock waste itself so the finished product used for daily cover is uniform.
“It would ensure they would get a more consistent material that meets their needs,” he said, “rather than get 10 different companies giving them the material which would probably vary in composition and texture.”
It might also be appealing to gas drillers, whose space at a well site is limited and whose costs might be higher with the current practice of processing containers of waste on site, one by one, he said.
Although Keystone refers to the lime-based material – either quick lime or lime kiln dust – as a “bulking” or “drying” agent for the sometimes-saturated cuttings, it is also used to counteract the potential for the rock to produce acidic runoff.
The gas-rich layers of the Marcellus Shale coveted by drillers also contain pyrite, which, when exposed to oxygen and water, can produce acidic, metals-laden fluid similar to the acid mine drainage associated with the region’s abandoned mines.
“If you mix it with enough lime it might counteract those properties,” Yoxtheimer said.
Keystone does not expect the cuttings to change the chemistry of the landfill’s wastewater, called leachate, which is treated then discharged through sewer lines to the Scranton Sewer Authority, according to its application. But it is not entirely sure what might concentrate in the rain and wash water that runs off the mill site into its treatment system.
“Given that this process is the first of its kind in Pennsylvania, there is not data on the exact makeup of the wash water that will be collected, stored and disposed of as a result of Keystone’s drill cuttings processing facility,” the landfill wrote in its application.
Such unknowns have alarmed Throop officials, who petitioned the DEP to consider the mill proposal a “major,” not “minor,” modification of the landfill’s permit – a classification that would trigger a more thorough public vetting of the project.
“Throop Council feels there is enough information confirming the need for a change in the approved leachate collection and treatment method, change in the groundwater monitoring plan, and the submission of a radiation protection action plan,” all items that should trigger a major permit review, council solicitor Louis A. Cimini wrote in a Jan. 11 letter.
DEP continues to consider the proposal a minor permit modification, a spokeswoman said.
Marcellus cuttings can contain elevated levels of naturally occurring metals and radioactive material, including radium-226, which is a key concern for Throop officials.
Recent DEP tests of the cuttings at Keystone found radium-226 “slightly elevated” above the background levels found in the region’s soil, but at a level that “does not present any worker exposure, public health, safety and welfare or environmental concerns,” the agency wrote.
The radiation monitor that screens all incoming waste loads at the landfill was triggered at least 19 times between July and November, but none of those incidents involved drill cuttings, a DEP spokeswoman said.
Throop has hired a contractor to do its own testing and plans to sample loads it suspects might have elevated levels of radioactivity.
Adding to Throop’s concerns is Keystone’s proposal to speed up the approvals necessary for it to accept cuttings from new gas well pads. Instead of having a laboratory analyze and submit the chemical makeup of the waste from each pad, as required by state regulations, the landfill wants to receive a full analysis for a gas operator’s first eight well sites then a summary of that data and an “abbreviated review” for the next 20 sites.
Past data indicated only small variations between the makeup of the drill cuttings from across the region, Keystone argued. The landfill will require drillers to sign a certification form indicating they used the same drilling process and materials for new wells as for past wells.
A full analysis will be submitted to the state and Keystone once a year.
DEP has approved the expedited procedure, a spokeswoman said.
llegere@timesshamrock.com
Cabot raises new questions about EPA data in Dimock
citizensvoice.com/news/cabot-raises-new-questions-about-epa-data-in-dimock-1.1265510#axzz1lEh9vXRN
By Laura Legere (Staff Writer)
Published: February 1, 2012
Cabot Oil and Gas Corp. sharply criticized federal regulators’ rationale for investigating a potential link between the company’s natural gas operations and contamination in Dimock Township water supplies on Tuesday, saying the government selectively cited or misinterpreted past water quality data to justify its probe.
The statement was Cabot’s fifth in less than two weeks seeking to raise doubts about an ongoing investigation renewed in December by the Environmental Protection Agency that involves widespread water sampling in the Susquehanna County township where Cabot has drilled dozens of Marcellus Shale natural gas wells.
The EPA is providing replacement drinking water supplies to four homes where water tests taken by Cabot, the state and others raised health concerns the agency said range from “potential” to “imminent and substantial” threats. It is also performing comprehensive water tests on as many as 66 wells in a 9-square-mile area of Dimock.
In its statement Tuesday, Cabot said the data shows there are “no health concerns with the water wells.” Instead, the agency’s decision to deliver water was based on data points the EPA selected over years of Cabot sampling, the company said, “without adequate knowledge or consideration of where or why the samples were collected, when they were taken, or the naturally occurring background levels for those substances throughout the Susquehanna County area.”
“It appears that EPA selectively chose data on substances it was concerned about in order to reach a result it had predetermined,” it said.
In its statement and through a spokesman, Cabot said the data highlighted by the EPA to justify its investigation is often old, “cherry-picked” to ignore more representative data, mistakenly attributed to the wrong sources or explained by natural conditions.
For example, the driller said the evidence EPA highlighted to show high arsenic levels in one water well was actually “a sample of the local public water supply that is provided to the town of Montrose by Pennsylvania American Water” – a contention Pennsylvania American Water refuted Tuesday with test data from the Montrose public water supply.
“We test for arsenic in all of our water systems,” Pennsylvania American Water spokeswoman Susan Turcmanovich said. “If there was any detection of arsenic at any level, it would be reported in the water quality report” sent to all of its customers and posted online. The reports for 2010 and 2011 show arsenic was not detected at any level, she said.
Cabot said a high sodium level cited by the EPA was found in a sample that was taken after the water ran through a softener, which raised the sodium by three to four times the level found straight from the water well.
It also said arsenic and manganese – two of the contaminants found at elevated levels and flagged by the EPA – are naturally occurring and “not associated with natural gas drilling.”
Both compounds are often found in the large quantities of wastewater that flow back from Marcellus Shale wells after hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, but Cabot spokesman George Stark said the company does not use either compound in its operations and there is “no natural pathway” underground for the wastewater to reach aquifers.
The EPA did not issue a direct response to Cabot’s newest statement. Instead, it released a letter from an assistant administrator and regional administrator sent Tuesday in response to an earlier letter from Cabot CEO Dan Dinges to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson raising concerns about the investigation.
“We did not take this step lightly but felt compelled to intervene when we became aware of monitoring data, developed largely by Cabot, indicating the presence of several hazardous substances in drinking water samples, including some at levels of health concern,” wrote Mathy Stanislaus, assistant administrator for the Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response, and Region 3 Administrator Shawn M. Garvin.
“Because the data available was incomplete and of uncertain quality, we determined that additional monitoring was prudent.”
The agency began providing replacement water only after it asked Cabot to deliver water and the company refused, they wrote.
Under criticism from both Cabot and Pennsylvania regulators for their actions, the administrators also emphasized the legal and scientific basis for their actions, which they called complementary with the state’s role. The Superfund law, which the EPA said authorizes its Dimock investigation, has allowed the agency to undertake similar water deliveries and investigations at “hundreds of sites across the country … when the presence of hazardous substances posed a potential risk to drinking water.” they wrote.
“States have important frontÂline responsibilities in permitting natural gas extraction, and we respect and support their efforts,” they wrote. “But EPA likewise has important oversight responsibilities and acts as a critical backstop when public health or the environment may be at risk.”
llegere@timesshamrock.com
DEP calls for Marcellus air data
republicanherald.com/news/dep-calls-for-marcellus-air-data-1.1264911
BY ROBERT SWIFT (HARRISBURG BUREAU CHIEF rswift@timesshamrock.com)
Published: January 31, 2012
HARRISBURG – Operators of Marcellus wells, drilling rigs and compressor stations are being notified by state officials to provide air emissions data by March 1, highlighting an issue activists want more attention given in pending impact fee legislation.
A notice by the Department of Environmental Protection in the Pennsylvania Bulletin calls for operators to provide emission source reports covering 2011 for facilities involved in different phases of the Marcellus production process. The agency notified 99 firms about the requirement last month and the notice in the Jan. 28 bulletin is to cast a wider net.
The March 1 deadline is set because DEP has to provide a comprehensive inventory of air emissions to the federal Environmental Protection Agency by year’s end. This inventory is updated every three years. This will be the first time emissions data for Marcellus production and processing operations is included in the inventory, which covers everything from refineries and manufacturing plants, to dry cleaners and gas stations.
The inventory is important for maintaining air quality standards and determining ozone levels, said DEP officials. The agency plans to start long-term air monitoring studies at several sites and the emissions data will be part of that effort. DEP did not identify any emission levels that would constitute a public health concern when it did short-term air quality sampling in 2010 in the drilling regions of Bradford, Susquehanna, Tioga, Greene and Washington counties, said DEP Secretary Michael Krancer.
A Pittsburgh-based environmental group said Pennsylvania needs to do more to address the issue of Marcellus-related air emissions.
DEP should look at the combined impact of emissions from stages of Marcellus production rather than permitting each emission as a minor source of pollutants, said Lauren Burge, an attorney for Group Against Smog and Pollution.
“Many sources in this industry are located near each other, connected to each other and owned by the same company. However, because DEP considers them to be separate sources of pollutants, many of these facilities are able to avoid being permitted as major sources.
Drilling fee legislation near?
www.timesleader.com/news/Scarnati__Drilling_fee_legislation_near_01-31-2012.html
January 31, 2012
HARRISBURG — Pennsylvania’s highest-ranking state senator said Monday he thinks an agreement on a sweeping bill to impose a fee on the booming natural gas drilling industry can be finished in a week, right before Gov. Tom Corbett unveils his budget plan.
Senate President Pro Tempore Joe Scarnati said negotiators from the House, Senate and governor’s office are trying to agree on the size of the fee and the distribution of the money.
He said negotiators are working toward a “hybrid” solution to iron out differences over whether the state or the county that hosts the drilling should enforce the fee.
Scarnati said Senate negotiators are trying to make a final bill more appealing to advocates of allowing municipalities to regulate drilling activity than earlier proposals that passed the Senate.
New databases improve access to state gas drilling records
republicanherald.com/news/new-databases-improve-access-to-state-gas-drilling-records-1.1263776
By laura Legere (Staff Writer llegere@timesshamrock.com)
Published: January 28, 2012
A redesigned website for the state’s Office of Oil and Gas Management features new data tools that simplify the public’s access to permit records, drilling dates, inspections and enforcement actions for the state’s multiplying natural gas wells.
The site debuted two weeks ago for the Department of Environmental Protection’s high-profile office, which has come under recent criticism for inconsistency in its public data about Marcellus Shale gas wells.
At the heart of the new site are several data tools that will be updated automatically and nearly immediately rather than manually by a DEP staff member every month or so. For the first time, visitors to the new compliance database will find details for every inspection, not just those that uncover a violation at a well site.
The compliance database, which takes the place of what DEP spokesman Kevin Sunday called a “cumbersome” but “workable Marcellus Shale Excel spreadsheet,” also presents years of enforcement information in one place.
“You can check out an operator and get a look at how they’ve performed over the last few years, how much they’ve paid in penalties, what the violations were,” he said. “This is one standard format that definitely improves our transparency and our communication.”
Sunday was unsparing in his assessment of the old website, which has been replaced with a cleaner, better organized design complete with a logo pairing a green leaf with a blue gas flame.
“It was a hodgepodge of links,” he said. “Once you knew where everything was you kind of ignored the mess, but there was a lot of mess there.”
The new site, in comparison, is “very neat, very orderly and organized with specific audiences in mind.”
The agency has admittedly struggled with the massive amount of data generated by the gas industry to comply with state reporting rules, but Sunday said the problem had more to do with the consistent presentation of data across several online reports rather than missing or omitted information.
“It’s not that we’re lacking the data,” he said. “It’s that the public reports weren’t quite communicating well with our internal databases.”
The new site should help that. Now more automated, the public databases will show when a new well is drilled or a site is inspected as soon as it is entered into the department’s internal database, limiting the opportunity for error.
As new industry-reported data comes online – as a huge amount of it will in February when six-month oil and gas waste and production reports are posted – the goal is to “tether” the databases together to present more uniform, accurate information, he said.
Matt Kelso, data manager for FracTracker.org, a natural gas drilling database and mapping tool, draws heavily from the state’s data to analyze industry trends.
He said the new Office of Oil and Gas Management site is better organized and easier to navigate, especially across years of records, although he found the data to be largely the same.
“It’s an improvement,” he said. “I think it’s an overdue improvement, but I’m happy that they made those changes.”
www.portal.state.pa.us/portal/server.pt?tbb=dep and oil and gas
pa.gov/portal/server.pt/community/oil_and_gas/6003
EPA Responds to Cabot Oil
www.wnep.com/wnep-susq-epa-responds-to-cabot-oil-20120127,0,6032822.story
January 27, 2012
There is now a response to a response.
Two days ago Cabot Oil and Gas criticized the federal government’s deliveries of fresh water and its testing of several wells in Susquehanna County.
Now the EPA responds to Cabot.
One week ago the Environmental Protection Agency started delivering the water to a handful of homes suspected of having their wells contaminated by Cabot’s natural gas drilling in the Dimock area.
Cabot called the move a “political agenda hostile to shale gas development.”
Friday the EPA responded by saying, “It is sampling and providing water as a direct result of requests from Dimock residents. Our priority is the health of the people there, and our actions are guided entirely by science and the law.”
In Dimock, EPA testing draws mixed reaction
citizensvoice.com/news/drilling/in-dimock-epa-testing-draws-mixed-reaction-1.1263801#axzz1klDNn16y
By Laura Legere
Staff Writer
Published: January 28, 2012
DIMOCK TWP. – Two teams of scientists sampling well water from four homes a day are producing a picture of the aquifer under this Susquehanna County town that will help define the impact of natural gas drilling on drinking water.
The water captured in vials and packed in coolers by scientists and contractors for the Environmental Protection Agency since Jan. 23 is the heart of an investigation spurred by concerns that Cabot Oil and Gas Corp.’s Marcellus Shale drilling and hydraulic fracturing tainted water wells.
In a divided village where gas drilling is as earnestly embraced as it is criticized, the controversy over the EPA’s fieldwork started before the sampling did. Test results are at least five weeks away.
The study has provoked strong criticism from the industry and its local supporters who accuse the EPA of meddling in what they consider a settled matter or a spectacle conjured by lawyers.
At the same time, the study has earned the grateful support of families, many of whom are suing Cabot, who have used their water warily or not at all since methane tied to drilling first intruded in 2008.
State officials determined faulty Cabot gas wells allowed methane to seep into 18 Dimock water supplies in 2009, but Cabot water tests from last fall raised federal regulators’ concern about the potential health threats posed by other contaminants in the water.
The contaminants – some of which are naturally occurring but all of which are associated with natural gas drilling, the EPA said – include arsenic, barium, the plasticizer commonly called DEHP, glycol compounds, manganese, phenol and sodium.
“If we see an immediate threat to public health, we will not hesitate to take steps under the law to protect Americans whose health may be at risk,” EPA spokeswoman Terri White said.
Residents who support Cabot’s operations sent a letter to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson this week calling for her to “rein in” the “rogue regional office” in Philadelphia that is leading the investigation based on what they said were “baseless claims” and “hyped-up allegations” of pollutants that occur naturally in the region.
The group, Enough is Enough, created a campaign called “Dimock Proud” with yard signs, a petition drive and a logo: “Where the water IS clean and the people are friendly.”
The petition to Jackson was bundled with an earlier petition signed by more than 400 Susquehanna County residents and sent to the state to ask for Cabot to be able to resume drilling in a 9-square-mile section of Dimock – where EPA is now testing – that has been off limits to the driller since 2010. The moratorium has continued because the state has not determined that the company’s wells have stopped leaking methane.
“The Philadelphia Regional Office’s action in enabling this litigation threatens our livelihoods and is destroying our community reputation,” the residents wrote to Jackson. “These actions are an assault on our property rights and basic freedoms.”
Cabot CEO Dan Dinges cited President Barack Obama’s support for domestic natural gas in his State of the Union address when he also wrote to Jackson this week. Her agency’s actions in Dimock “appear to undercut the President’s stated commitment to this important resource,” Dinges wrote.
In another statement released this week, the company said it “is concerned that this recent action may be more of an attempt to advance a political agenda hostile to shale gas development rather than a principled effort to address environmental concerns in the area.”
The industry group Energy in Depth posted historical state and federal data on its website showing some of the pollutants that triggered the EPA investigation – manganese and arsenic – occur in the geological formation that is used for groundwater in Dimock. It cited a 2006 U.S. Geological Survey study that found arsenic in 18 of 143 domestic water wells it sampled in Northeast Pennsylvania, although none of the samples taken in Susquehanna or Wyoming counties detected the compound.
The arsenic level that triggered the EPA to truck water to one home in Dimock was nearly four times the federal standard.
The EPA rebuffed Cabot’s criticism this week, saying its actions “are guided entirely by science and the law.”
“We are providing water to a handful of households because data developed by Cabot itself provides evidence that they are being exposed to hazardous substances at levels of health concern,” the agency said. “We are conducting monitoring as a prudent step to investigate these concerns and develop a sound scientific basis for assessing the need for further action.”
While Obama’s address made clear his support for domestic natural gas extraction, the agency added, “he also affirmed our commitment to ‘developing this resource without putting the health and safety of our citizens at risk.’”
Despite some residents’ skepticism of the EPA’s actions, the agency has received permission from 55 of the 66 Dimock homes it approached to conduct sampling, spokesman Roy Seneca said Friday. The EPA has not received a final response from 11 of the 66 homes. It’s initial goal was to take samples from about 61 homes.
“I’m thrilled the EPA is here,” resident Victoria Switzer said Friday as five scientists wearing blue gloves huddled on a mound of melting snow in her backyard where her well water trickled from a spigot.
If the test comes back clear, she said, “I’ll be very relieved that our water is safe to use and we can go on living in our home.”
The water sampling will also provide key data for the future, she said.
“I’m considering it baseline testing for the next wave when Cabot roars back in here.”
llegere@timesshamrock.com