Susquehanna River Basin Commission faces difficult balancing act
http://www.pennlive.com/editorials/index.ssf/2011/05/susquehanna_river_basin_commis.html
Published: Sunday, May 22, 2011, 4:00 AM
By Patriot-News Op-Ed
While news that a modern-day gold rush is in full bloom this spring in the natural gas-rich Marcellus Shale region would surprise only a hermit, the question remains: Is hydraulic fracturing — a method of extracting natural gas from the shale — turning into yet another rape of the landscape?
Are Pennsylvania’s environmental guardians up to the task or, as some critics claim, are they just a hapless 21st-century band of Keystone Kops?
I believe the Susquehanna River Basin Commission is tackling the issue head-on. Its executive director through nearly half the agency’s 40-year history, Paul O. Swartz, and regulators are protecting our water resources, striking a reasonable balance between environmental needs and the state’s booming natural gas industry.
Just last week the SRBC came out strongly against some findings in a report by American Rivers, a national environmental group. The commission disagrees, for many reasons, with American Rivers’ call for the commission to impose a moratorium on water withdrawals and use approvals for gas drilling. SRBC believes the state’s regulatory improvements, including well casing, impoundments and other safety standards, will adequately protect water quality and their use and enjoyment by the 4 million-plus residents of the river basin.
“Accidents can still happen,” Swartz allows, “but the improvements are intended to make the industry abide by a higher standard.”
With 72 percent of the river basin underlain by the Marcellus Shale field, SRBC deals with the drillers daily. An analysis of its enforcement actions targeting gas drillers from June 2008 through December 2010 highlights its involvement. SRBC regulates water withdrawals, not water quality.
The most serious violations — and the biggest penalties, up to $475,000 — involved starting operations without SRBC approval. In 17 cases cited, the commission accepted settlement offers totaling $2.2 million (ouch). Cease-and-desist orders figured in five actions (some folks are slow getting the message), but nine other infractions were self-reported by the violators. SRBC detected eight violations (a vigilant, active staff).
Four gas drillers were repeat offenders (twice each), and the pattern in each case was that the violator’s first settlement exceeded his second.
While it’s tempting to conclude that the drillers can learn from their mistakes, one of those four repeat offenders, Chesapeake Energy Corp., last week was fined $1 million-plus by the state Department of Environmental Protection for well-water contamination in Bradford County and a tank fire in Washington County.
The SRBC OKs natural gas applications in two ways: The staff processes those for consumptive water use (in which water withdrawn is not returned), while the four commissioners handle any other requests for withdrawals.
Between June 2008 and May 6, 2011, SRBC received 313 applications for surface water and groundwater withdrawals for natural gas projects, approving 199 thus far. Simultaneously, by April 20, 2011, it had logged 1,755 notices of intent to file for consumptive water use in drilling operations, and OK’d 1,457.
By contrast, the commission in 2007 — before the flood of filings by gas drillers — approved just 44 projects.
The SRBC seems to thrive on challenge. Its four members — Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania and the U.S. government — originally pledged to bankroll the commission. Denied federal operating funds a decade ago, SRBC has turned to U.S. and state grants — this year totaling $1.6 million of its $17.6 million budget — and continues to receive the states’ aid ($1.3 million this year).
But the lion’s share of its funding comes from application fees and penalties paid by natural gas drillers. SRBC’s burgeoning budget, just $4.8 million in 2009, mostly goes to support a staff that — due to gas drilling — has increased from 43 full- and part-timers in 2008 to 65 this spring.
Here’s an agency whose expenses have tripled in two years and the taxpayers are not picking up the tab — those in the natural gas industry who use its services are. Hope this idea catches on elsewhere in government.
If all the applications and notices of intent that have bombarded SRBC to date were to result in full-fledged gas drilling, the effort would tap about 28 million gallons of water a day from the basin. The river empties 18 million gallons a minute into the Chesapeake — half of the bay’s total intake.
The amount of water the drillers would require — less than two minutes’ worth of the river’s average daily flow — roughly equals 20 percent of what the basin’s power plants currently draw. And that’s where SRBC focuses its attention.
Clearly, volume is less the issue than where it’s being withdrawn — from the smaller yet often best and purest sources, home to many delicate life forms.
Let’s hope the hydro frackers and their regulators get things right, for the sake of all those plants and animals.
And us, too.
Doug Dohne of Hummelstown is a retired copy editor for The Patriot-News