Corbett’s DEP chief gets panel’s approval
Michael L. Krancer
HARRISBURG — Gov. Tom Corbett’s pick to head the state Department of Environmental Protection breezed through his Senate confirmation hearing Wednesday, telling senators that he’s carefully reviewing recent reports raising questions about the safety of drinking water.
Michael L. Krancer, 53, of Bryn Mawr in Montgomery County was approved unanimously by the Senate Environmental Resources and Energy Committee. He’s a former judge on the Environmental Hearing Board, one-time trial lawyer, former attorney at Excelon Corp. and Civil War re-enactor. Like other Cabinet nominees, he’s on the job now as acting secretary.
The nomination goes to the full Senate, which Republicans control. Also yesterday, the Senate Law and Justice Committee endorsed the nomination of Frank Noonan as commissioner of the state police.
Senators asked Krancer several questions about stories by The New York Times raising concerns about the safety of Pennsylvania’s drinking water as a result of the “fracking” process used in natural gas drilling. The stories said no testing has occurred at more than 65 drinking water intake sites since 2008 and that most have not been tested since 2005.
The newspaper cited levels of radioactivity in wastewater far above federal standards for drinking water. Most of the public sewage treatment facilities cannot remove enough of the radioactive material to meet federal drinking water standards before it is dumped into rivers, The Times found.
Asked by Sen. Mary Jo White, R-Venango, if the state is likely to see testing for radioactive materials in water, Krancer said, “It is one of the things like everything else we are considering, I am considering.”
He took issue with some points in the story. For example, he said, there are 78, not 31, inspectors for 2,615 Marcellus shale wells.
All inspections are “unannounced,” contrary to what The Times stated, Krancer added.
At least 70 percent of Pennsylvania’s wastewater is recycled, Krancer said.
Sen. Daylin Leach, D-Montgomery County, who represents Krancer’s district in the Senate, said he couldn’t be “happier” with Corbett’s nomination. He called Krancer a “man of integrity, honesty and intelligence.”
By Brad Bumsted
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Thursday, March 3, 2011
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/breaking/s_725421.html
Pennsylvania’s Former Top Environmental Cop Gets His Wish
Former Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection Secretary John Hanger got his wish. Gasland did not win an Oscar Sunday night.
In a Feb. 26 blog post, Hanger wrote: “I am not pulling for Gasland to win an Oscar for Best Documentary”
Hanger, who agreed to be interviewed by filmmaker Josh Fox for the documentary when he was still serving as DEP secretary, argued on his blog that Gasland “presents a selective, distorted view of gas drilling and the energy choices America faces today. If Gasland were about the airline industry, every flight would crash and all airlines would be irresponsible. In Gasland, the gas industry is unsafe from beginning to end and is one unending environmental nightmare with no benefits. Gasland seeks to inflame public opinion to shut down the natural gas industry and is effective. In pursuing this goal, Gasland treats cavalierly facts both by omitting important ones and getting wrong others.”
Gasland takes a close look at the natural gas industry’s use of hydraulic fracturing technology to produce natural gas and its potential impact on drinking water supplies and the environment in general. The natural gas industry has been waging an aggressive campaign to discredit the documentary since it was released in early 2010. As part of its campaign, the industry has trumpeted comments Hanger made in an interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer in which he called Fox a “propagandist” and dismissed Gasland as “fundamentally dishonest” and “a deliberately false presentation for dramatic effect.’”
Fox interviewed Hanger in his office in Harrisburg. During the interview, Hanger argued that Fox, as the person on the other side of the camera, could “wash his hands” of what occurs as a result of energy development in Pennsylvania. But as the state’s top environmental cop, Hanger said he had a duty to make “real decisions in the real world” that often involve trade-offs. For example, the nation needs natural gas in order to run its economy. Extracting natural gas from the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania or any producing basin inevitably causes some level of environmental damage. But Hanger stressed the DEP was doing whatever it could to protect water supplies and that any residents whose water was contaminated by gas drilling would be provided with clean drinking water.
Hanger is a strong advocate of renewable energy. But he recognizes that renewables cannot completely replace fossil fuels in powering the global economy. Because it is a cleaner burning fuel than coal, Hanger has long been a proponent of natural gas.
In 2008, former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell named Hanger, who at the time was the top official at the Pennsylvania-based environmental group Citizens for Pennsylvania’s Future, a.k.a. PennFuture, to head the state DEP, which is the state agency responsible for ensuring compliance with state environmental regulations.
Rendell was a big supporter of natural gas development during his term in office, a period in which natural gas companies swarmed the state, buying up rights to drill for natural gas and then dramatically ramping up their drilling activities in the state’s portion of the Marcellus Shale. And Hanger was Rendell’s point man at the DEP during the final two years of his term.
During his tenure at the DEP, which ended in January when Rendell left office, Hanger often made statements touting the tremendous economic opportunities for landowners and drilling companies in the Marcellus Shale.
As the DEP’s acting secretary, prior to his official confirmation, Hanger told the Pennsylvania House Environmental Resources and Energy Committee during a September 2008 hearing that “there is no question that the Marcellus Shale holds tremendous economic potential for Pennsylvania’s families and its communities.”
Hanger added that “this exciting potential also brings with it the need to act responsibly and ensure that Pennsylvania’s valuable natural resources are not sacrificed in the process.”
Later that year, Hanger noted that the DEP had received approval to impose higher drilling fees on natural gas producers that would allow the state to receive greater funding to cover expenses for permit reviews and well site inspections.
“With nearly 8,000 drilling permits issued so far this year and drilling taking place in areas of the state outside our traditional oil and gas region, we need to make sure that we have sufficient personnel to properly manage development of Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale natural gas reserves,” Hanger said.
Nowhere in his comments do you get the sense that Hanger has any qualms about the staggering number of well permits being issued by the DEP and how the expanded drilling activity would turn regions of Pennsylvania into industrial drilling zones.
In January 2009, while still serving as the DEP’s acting secretary, Hanger highlighted the department’s partnership with natural gas producers. “The department is committed to working alongside the drilling industry to develop new treatment technologies to treat this wastewater that will allow our natural gas industry and our economy to thrive while protecting the health of our rivers and streams,” he said in a statement.
When it comes to natural gas drilling, the nightmare scenario for environmental regulators is if natural gas drilling companies start operating irresponsibly and cutting corners, leading to wastewater spills or contaminated drinking water incidents occurring on a regular basis. State regulators obviously would be appalled by the environmental damage caused by such incidents. But state regulators also are worried about losing the public’s confidence. If that happens, it could lead to a surge in support for a moratorium or the complete banning of drilling in certain regions—exactly what regulators in energy producing states are tasked to avoid.
Since leaving the DEP earlier this year, Hanger has spent large chunks of time defending his tenure as Pennsylvania’s top environmental regulator. He now edits an energy and environmental blog titled “Fact of the Day.” The tagline of his blog is: “Discussion about key facts in energy, environment, the economy, and politics. Tired of ideological junk? This is your place.”
Hanger apparently views his way of thinking as non-ideological, or as one that is not tainted by an agenda. But, of course, Hanger is as ideological as the people and organizations who he would claim are spreading “ideological junk.” His agenda, as it pertains to natural gas, is to promote natural gas as a fuel source as long as its production is performed as safely as reasonably possible.
Aside from expressing hope that Gasland didn’t win an Oscar, Hanger has used his blog in recent days to defend his tenure at the DEP from an article that ran last weekend in the New York Times. Hanger told a natural gas industry publication called NGI’s Shale Daily that the Times reporter, Ian Urbina, “had a goal to start with and he wanted to fit the information to a narrative. … It was willful and deliberate.” The reporter “knew how to get on the front page. It should be actionable… The New York Times would be successfully sued in Europe for this type of story,” Hanger told NGI’s Shale Daily.
Among other things, Hanger argued the Times story implied that Pennsylvania does not enforce its drilling regulations. To refute that claim, Hanger pointed to the enforcement actions for drilling violations imposed on EOG Resources Inc. and Cabot Oil & Gas Corp. “They had to stop drilling for months … costing them probably millions of dollars,” Hanger told NGI’s Shale Daily. “That’s not in the story.”
During his tenure as DEP secretary, Pennsylvania led the nation in natural gas oversight staff hiring, Hanger states on his blog. Under his successor at the DEP, who reports to the state’s new Republican governor, Tom Corbett, the department will likely be less aggressive in regulating natural gas and coal producers in the state. In fact, it would probably be fair to say that Hanger was one of the most conscientious state environmental chiefs in the United States. But such a superlative speaks more to the general lack of effective environmental protection among state regulators than it does to Hanger’s willingness to protect the environment at any cost.
Energy companies and their regulators believe humans have a God-given right to access the planet’s “natural resources” in order to sustain the American way of life. Other people believe humans need to immediately disavow their narcissistic and affluent way of life and start letting the planet heal. Such a move includes curtailing the consumption of fossil fuels, including natural gas, even if it burns 50% cleaner than coal.
By Press Action
March 01, 2011
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/padep02012011/
Casey calls for water testing
U.S. Sen. Bob Casey joined a chorus of lawmakers on Tuesday seeking additional testing of public water supplies following a report that the wastewater produced from Marcellus Shale gas wells in Pennsylvania contains higher levels of radioactive materials than was previously disclosed.
An article published Sunday in The New York Times, detailed a lack of testing for those radioactive constituents at 65 public water intakes downstream from treatment plants that have discharged Marcellus Shale wastewater into rivers.
State regulators have limited how much drilling wastewater publicly owned sewer plants can discharge since 2008 and further discharge restrictions were adopted by the state last August.
“Alarming information has been raised that must be fully investigated,” Casey said and asked the state Department of Environmental Protection and the federal Environmental Protection Agency to “increase inspections of Pennsylvania drinking water resources for radioactive material and to account for why sufficient inspections haven’t taken place.”
Several other federal lawmakers have asked for similar increases in oversight since the publication of the article. On Sunday, former DEP Secretary John Hanger wrote on his blog that DEP “should order today all public water systems in Pennsylvania to test immediately for radium or radioactive pollutants” and report the results to the public.
In that post and at least six subsequent posts, Hanger also criticized The New York Times for not detailing the stricter regulations, increased staff and more frequent well site inspections that have been adopted by the state in the last three years as it strengthened its enforcement of Marcellus Shale drilling.
DEP spokeswoman Katy Gresh said the department is still evaluating how to respond to the calls for further testing.
“We’re certainly taking into consideration these recommendations,” she said.
Acting DEP Secretary Michael Krancer will face questions at a confirmation hearing today before the Senate Environmental Resources and Energy Committee during which Marcellus Shale issues will surely be a primary topic.
Casey’s comments came as The New York Times published a second article in the series on its website on Tuesday afternoon that raised questions about the toxic constituents that remain in liquid or solid form after the Marcellus Shale wastewater is treated and recycled.
The article also details one occasion when more than 155,000 gallons of wastewater containing high levels of radium from an Ultra Resources well in Tioga County were sent to nine towns in Tioga, Bradford and Lycoming counties to spread on roads for dust suppression.
Pennsylvania regulations allow “only production or treated brines” from gas wells to be spread on roads for dust control or de-icing, according to a DEP fact sheet posted on its website. “The use of drilling, fracking, or plugging fluids or production brines mixed with well servicing or treatment fluids, except surfactants, is prohibited.”
Marcellus Shale brine is wastewater that gradually returns to the surface over the decades-long life of a well after a larger initial flush of fluids that had been injected underground returns to the surface in the first 30 days.
By Laura Legere (Staff Writer)
llegere@timesshamrock.com
Published: March 2, 2011
http://citizensvoice.com/news/casey-calls-for-water-testing-1.1112658#axzz1FMuTSTtV
Marcellus waste reports muddy
Waste reports submitted by Marcellus Shale drillers for the last six months of 2010 indicate that more of the toxic wastewater that returns from their natural gas wells is being reused or recycled, but incomplete and inconsistent reporting makes it difficult to assess real changes in the waste’s fate.
According to production reports due Feb. 15 and posted last week on the Department of Environmental Protection’s Oil and Gas Electronic Reporting website, Marcellus Shale operators directly reused 6 million barrels of the 10.6 million barrels of waste fluids produced from about 1,500 different wells between July and December.
At least an additional 978,000 barrels were taken to facilities that treat the water and return it to operators for reuse.
The amount reused or recycled is about seven times larger than the 1 million barrels of wastewater Marcellus Shale drillers said they directly reused during the 12 months between July 2009 and June, the first time the drillers’ waste reports were made publicly available on the website.
But the comparison is hazy because not all of the Marcellus Shale operators met the Feb. 15 reporting deadline or included all of their waste during the previous reporting period. Major operators, including East Resources, Southwestern Energy Production Co. and Encana Oil and Gas USA, reported no waste for the most recent six-month period.
And inconsistencies in how companies report their waste make it impossible to determine a complete picture of how its treatment has changed.
“I would take all of it with a grain of salt,” said Matt Kelso, data manager for FracTracker, an online Marcellus Shale data tool developed by the Center for Healthy Environments and Communities at the University of Pittsburgh.
“I wouldn’t say it accurately represents anything,” he added, “but it is the only data we have.”
He emphasized that the information is self-reported by the drillers, who have some discretion in how to categorize their waste. He pointed out one oddity – that more brine was reportedly produced in the last six months of 2010 than the entire year before that – and attributed the increase to better reporting.
The first round of reports was a “disorganized mess,” he wrote in a FracTracker blog post last year. Establishing trends from such a baseline would be difficult, if not useless.
“There may be some adjustments” in how the waste is now being handled, he said, “but they will be difficult to discern because the reporting was so bad before.”
State environmental regulators say that nearly 70 percent of the wastewater produced by Marcellus Shale wells is being reused or recycled. The Marcellus Shale Coalition, an industry group, puts the number higher, saying that on average 90 percent of the water that returns to the surface is recycled.
The advances were compelled in large part by a lack of deep disposal wells in Pennsylvania and state rules, adopted last August, that limit new discharges of the wastewater to streams.
Prior to the development of the new rules, wastewater was primarily treated and disposed of through industrial wastewater plants or municipal sewer authorities that could not remove total dissolved solids, or salts, from the discharge.
Even in the most recent reports, there is still an apparent lack of uniformity in how companies report their waste.
Liquid waste is categorized as either “drilling fluid waste” – fluids, generally in a mud form, created during the drilling process – “fracing fluid waste” – the salt and metals-laden waste fluid that returns for the first 30 days or so after wells are hydraulically fractured to release the gas from the shale – and “brine” – the even saltier waste that returns more gradually over the life of a well.
Most companies reported all three types of waste, but some companies, including Chesapeake Appalachia, reported only “frac fluid” while others, including Talisman Energy USA, reported only drilling fluid and brine.
Two companies, Talisman Energy and Chief Oil and Gas, both reported producing about 280,000 barrels of hydraulic fracturing wastewater during the six-month period, even though Chief had only about a quarter as many gas wells in production as Talisman during that time.
One thing the data make clear is that a lot of waste from Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale wells is being shipped out of state for treatment or disposal.
During the six-month period, more than 490,000 barrels of wastewater were sent to deep disposal wells in Ohio; 30,000 barrels of drilling fluids and brine were treated by Clean Harbors of Baltimore in Maryland; 32,000 barrels of wastewater went to recycling or treatment plants in West Virginia; 2,500 barrels of drilling fluid was treated by Lorco Petroleum Services of Elizabeth, N.J.; and 36,000 tons of drill cuttings, a solid waste, were sent to landfills in Angelica, Painted Post and Waterloo, N.Y.
By Laura legere (Staff Writer)
Published: February 27, 2011
Contact the writer: llegere@timesshamrock.com
http://thetimes-tribune.com/news/marcellus-waste-reports-muddy-1.1111329#axzz1FAVdxBzR
Industry tried to get ‘Gasland’ disqualified
Film is still contender for Oscar documentary; sequel planned.
The natural gas industry has spent months attacking the documentary “Gasland” as a deeply flawed piece of propaganda. After it was nominated for an Oscar, an industry-sponsored PR group asked the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to reconsider the film’s eligibility.
The reply: Let Oscar voters have their say.
“We do not have the resources to vet each claim or implication in the many (documentary) films that compete for our awards each year, and even if we did there would be no shortage of people disputing our conclusions,” Bruce Davis, the academy’s executive director, wrote in a reply obtained by The Associated Press.
“Gasland” is up for best documentary at Sunday’s Academy Awards ceremony. Director Josh Fox’s dark portrayal of greedy energy companies, sickened homeowners and oblivious regulators has stirred heated debate among the various stakeholders in a natural gas boom that is sweeping parts of the U.S. The film has galvanized anti-drilling activists while drawing complaints about its accuracy and objectivity.
In a letter to the academy, Lee Fuller, the executive director of an industry-sponsored group named Energy In Depth, called “Gasland” an “expression of stylized fiction” with “errors, inconsistencies and outright falsehoods.”
He asked the academy to consider “remedial actions” against the film.
Davis, the executive director, wrote to Fuller that if the academy were to act on every complaint made about a nominated film, “it would not be possible even to have a documentary category.” He said the academy must “trust the intelligence of our members” to sort out fact from fiction.
“If facts have been suppressed or distorted, if truth has been twisted, we depend on them to sniff that out and vote accordingly,” he wrote.
The letter was given to the AP by Energy in Depth, whose spokesman, Chris Tucker, said the group had no expectation that “Gasland” would actually be disqualified from Oscar consideration. The point, he said, was to educate academy voters.
“I think it’s a fairly good bet that a large majority of the folks who are going to be voting on this film don’t have a background in petroleum engineering,” quipped Tucker, who put together a 4,000-word rebuttal of “Gasland” last summer.
Fox said the industry’s campaign against “Gasland” has backfired.
“What they’re doing is calling more attention to the film, so I think it works against them,” the director said from Los Angeles. “But I think it shows how aggressive they are, how bullying they are, and how willing they are to lie to promote the falsehood that it’s OK to live in a gas drilling area.”
The documentary category is no stranger to controversy. Michael Moore films like “Bowling for Columbine” and “Sicko,” as well as Al Gore’s 2006 global-warming tale, “An Inconvenient Truth,” have likewise been attacked as biased and inaccurate.
Like Moore, Fox defends his film as accurate. But he rejects comparisons to the bombastic, ideological director.
“What they’re trying to do is make (’Gasland’) look like a liberal, elite, Michael Moore thing, which of course it isn’t. It’s bipartisan,” he said.
Fox, a 38-year-old New York City theater director, took an interest in drilling after a gas company approached him in 2008 about leasing his family’s wooded 20-acre spread in Milanville, near the Delaware River in northeastern Pennsylvania, where he has lived off-and-on since childhood.
Camera in hand, he went on a cross-country tour of places where large-scale drilling is already under way, interviewing residents who say they were sickened by nearby drilling operations and aiming his lens at diseased livestock and flammable tap water that he also blames on gas industry malfeasance.
February 26, 2011
MICHAEL RUBINKAM Associated Press
http://www.timesleader.com/news/Industry_tried_to_get__lsquo_Gasland_rsquo__disqualified_02-26-2011.html
Polarized hearing brings drilling debate to the Delaware River Basin
HONESDALE – Natural gas drilling in the Delaware River Basin will either save or devastate a region whose fate is in the hands of the interstate commission that regulates water quality there, according to the polarized testimony given by representatives of both sides of the drilling debate during hearings at Honesdale High School on Tuesday.
About 90 people spoke at an afternoon session attended by more than 300 people. It was one of four hearings held by the Delaware River Basin Commission in Honesdale and Liberty, N.Y. on Tuesday about proposed natural gas drilling regulations that would apply to the 13,539-square-mile watershed where drilling has largely been on hold while the commission develops its rules.
The basin contains most of Wayne, Pike and Monroe counties as well as slivers of Lackawanna and Luzerne.
If adopted, the regulations will complement rules in place or being developed by state environmental agencies – a necessary overlap because “the Delaware River Basin is a special place,” commission Executive Director Carol R. Collier said before the hearing: it provides drinking water to more than 15 million people and contains waterways whose exceptional value demands extra protection.
But the “redundancy” of regulations was one of the primary criticisms raised by speakers at the afternoon session, when comments were predominantly made by those who welcome the drilling.
Drilling supporters repeated concerns that the commission’s proposed regulations are so stringent that they will prevent drilling in Wayne County, they fail to balance economic concerns with environmental ones, and they take away private property owners’ rights.
“You have the audacity to claim that your proposed regulations prevail over our commonwealth, disregarding our own laws,” Wayne County landowner Carol Woodmansee yelled into the microphone in the high school’s auditorium. “Your true agenda is to never cut a tree, put Wayne County out of business and condemn us to an existence of bucolic poverty.”
The sole gas drilling industry representative – David Callahan of the Marcellus Shale Coalition, which represents most of the major operators in the state – gave an outline of the industry’s opposition to the proposed rules, especially a centerpiece of the regulations that would require drillers with more than five well pads to detail in advance their foreseeable activity in a defined geographic area, including each well pad, access road, pipeline and compressor station.
“The requirement of a ‘Natural Gas Development Plan’ is unworkable, mandating our industry to detail infrastructure plans years prior to any development,” Mr. Callahan said. “Few industries can provide such plans that far in advance.”
The gas drilling coalition also questioned the power the draft regulations give to the DRBC executive director to set standards on a case-by-case basis and whether the commission even has the legal authority to set standards for the siting, design and operation of gas well pads.
Drilling opponents, many wearing “Don’t Drill the Delaware” stickers, expressed frustration that the commission developed the draft regulations before any studies of the cumulative impact of natural gas operations on the watershed have begun.
They also argued the proposed rules rely too much on the industry to police itself and ignore what they say are inherent risks in the drilling process that will inevitably lead to accidents and contamination.
“These rules will not prevent individual catastrophic pollution events, and they also will not prevent the cumulative environmental degradation that you are supposed to prevent,” Tracy Carluccio, deputy director of the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, said as a handful of audience members raised small signs that read “Do No Harm.”
“The DRBC is our only defense against gasland, and we will not let you sacrifice our water for gas,” she said.
The audience at the afternoon session largely honored rules that barred protests and heckling, save for a few jibes at “Gasland” filmmaker Josh Fox, who testified against the drilling, and a comment that the commission is like “a manure salesman with a mouthful of samples.” Drilling supporters wore neon stickers that read, “I support NG in the DRB,” and someone snuck one onto the back of outspoken drilling opponent James Barth’s jacket.
Speakers lined up in the cold two hours before the doors opened at 12:30 p.m. to ensure a spot at the podium, which was first come, first served.
One request made by drilling opponents, for more time for public comment and more public hearings, will be addressed during a meeting of the river basin’s commissioners on March 2, Ms. Collier said.
About 1,600 written comments had been submitted to the agency before the start of Tuesday’s hearings. The draft regulations and a link to provide written comments online are at www.drbc.net.
By Laura Legere (Staff Writer)
Published: February 23, 2011
Contact the writer: llegere@timesshamrock.com
http://thetimes-tribune.com/news/polarized-hearing-brings-drilling-debate-to-the-delaware-river-basin-1.1109222#axzz1EhEszGKz
Drilling awareness group to meet Thursday
The monthly general membership meeting of the Gas Drilling Awareness Coalition will take place at 7 p.m. Thursday in the Graham Academy, 469 Miller St., Luzerne.
GDAC meetings are open to all who are concerned about the hazards of natural gas drilling and related activities in our community. For information, call 570-266-5116, e-mail gdacoalition@gmail.com or visit www.gdacoalition.org.
http://citizensvoice.com/news/drilling-awareness-group-to-meet-thursday-1.1108613#axzz1EbOFXxDI
Published: February 22, 2011
Porter Township opposes natural gas drilling
MUIR – The Porter Township Board of Supervisors made clear at its meeting Monday night that it opposes any Marcellus Shale natural gas drilling inside township borders.
“We will fight this if it comes to Porter Township,” Supervisor Bill Schaeffer said at the meeting after the issue was raised by several residents in attendance.
Rausch Creek Land LP, Valley View, has applied to the Susquehanna River Basin Commission for approval to withdraw up to 100,000 gallons of water each day from an abandoned strip mine pit in the township. In paperwork filed with Schuylkill County, the company states the water would be used for potential Marcellus Shale drilling, but questions remain and the company has refused to discuss its plans.
Nine township households bordering the land from which water may be withdrawn received letters from the company in December, but some of those residents believe those letters did not answer all of the outstanding questions.
Township resident Bonnie Minnich said she has considered starting a petition opposing potential gas drilling.
“I’m trying, but I’m only one” person, she said at the meeting.
Township resident Perry Pillar said the township will eventually have to address the concerns residents have.
“You’re going to have to take some of this in your hands,” he told the supervisors.
Schaeffer cited “horror stories” from northern Pennsylvania counties about water contamination when asked why the board of supervisors opposes potential drilling.
“We’re worried about our water safety,” Supervisor Troy Troup said after the meeting.
Rausch Creek Land owns property in Porter, Frailey, Tremont and Hegins townships.
While the paperwork filed in the county courthouse makes clear the water will be used for drilling on Rausch Creek land, it does not say if that land is in Schuylkill County. It is unclear whether the company owns land elsewhere in the state or if the water would be trucked to other areas in Pennsylvania where drilling is already under way.
The water withdrawal plan likely won’t be decided on by the SRBC until the summer.
http://republicanherald.com/news/porter-township-opposes-natural-gas-drilling-1.1108522
BY BEN WOLFGANG (STAFF WRITER bwolfgang@republicanherald.com)
Published: February 22, 2011
Natural gas drilling symposium scheduled
The Pocono Environmental Coalition and Wildlife Society is sponsoring a natural gas drilling symposium on March 5, 1:30 p.m., at Hughes Library in Stroudsburg.
For information call (610) 381-8989.
http://www.tnonline.com/node/176078
Reported on Monday, February 21, 2011
Pro-drilling group wants states to regulate gas drilling
A coalition of landowners in the Delaware River Basin plans to tell the interstate agency that regulates water quality in the basin to stop trying to regulate natural gas drilling.
Instead, the pro-drilling group suggests the Delaware River Basin Commission renegotiate and strengthen its agreements with its member states, including Pennsylvania and New York, and let those states handle the regulation of gas drilling in the basin’s borders.
“They are going to put in rules that duplicate what the states are already doing, they’ll be forced to create a staff which will be green and inexperienced, and they will not be able to do the job,” Peter Wynne, spokesman for the Northern Wayne Property Owners Alliance, said Friday after the coalition held a press briefing in Honesdale about its criticisms.
The group, which finds the commission’s proposed drilling regulations “totally unworkable,” will be among many concerned citizens, lawmakers and groups that will offer comment on the draft rules in written testimony and at public hearings next week.
The proposed rules are available for review at www.drbc.net.
A set of local hearings will be held at Honesdale High School at 1:30 and 6 p.m. Tuesday.
Published: February 20, 2011
http://standardspeaker.com/news/pro-drilling-group-wants-states-to-regulate-gas-drilling-1.1107714