DEP Taking Horizontal Drilling Application Comments Online
The State Journal
14 March 2012
By Pam Kasey
Public notice and opportunity for comment on horizontal well
applications are coming into place.
On March 14, the West Virginia Department of Environmental
Protection is launching its Horizontal Drilling Permit web page
for anyone interested in learning about and commenting on permit
applications for horizontally drilled oil and gas wells.
Public notice and comment were sought especially after two
Marcellus gas wells were permitted last spring just above
Morgantown's drinking water intake without residents' knowledge.
In December, the Legislature directed DEP in the Natural Gas
Horizontal Well Control Act to create a public-access web page on
its website. Combined with other provisions of the act, here's how
residents can make use of the new transparency.
Receive notice
Residents and other interested parties can now receive notice
of horizontal well permit applications in two ways, according to
DEP spokeswoman Kathy Cosco.
They can watch for public notice in their local newspapers. That
notice has to be published 10 days before a permit application is
filed. They also can sign up on DEP's Horizontal Drilling Permit
web page for e-mail notification of permit applications by county.
Map
It will be easy, now, to know the location of a proposed well.
Each public notice and well permit application will include a set
of coordinates, either latitude-longitude or Universal Transverse
Mercator. Entering those into a coordinate-conversion and mapping
page on the Horizontal Drilling Permit website will return a
fairly detailed map.
Chesapeake Appalachia, for example, published notice Feb. 11 and
Feb. 18 in the Dominion Post in Morgantown for a horizontal well
at UTM NAD83 coordinates Northing: 4395805.2 and Easting:
568125.8. Entering those in the mapper plots a site off Daybrook
Road near Blacksville in Monongalia County, and topographic
markings make it possible to see in some detail on which hillside
the wellpad would be located.
In another use of the mapping function, property owners also can
get some sense of whether proposed wells are close enough that
they want to have their drinking water supplies tested in advance
of drilling. Anyone whose water supply well lies within 1,500 feet
of the center of the proposed wellpad should automatically receive
a copy of the application from the applicant.
View permits
If the proposed location inspires further interest, the
Horizontal Drilling Page explains how to get access to the permit
application.
Applications unfortunately are not available online at this time.
Cosco said this is largely because applications are dynamic
documents, revised sometimes daily based on interactions among
permit writers, applicants and property owners, and the DEP's
Office of Oil and Gas doesn't have the resources at this time to
update the files online with every change.
She said their file sizes also can be extremely large — some
applications run to more than 100 pages and can include multiple
images.
Applications may in the future be placed on the agency's
ePermitting function along with mining permits, Cosco said. In the
meantime, they may be viewed at DEP's offices in Charleston or
obtained on CD for $15. See the web page for details.
Comment
Anyone can comment, and it's not always necessary to see a
permit application to provide valuable comments, Cosco said.
"If the road tends to slip in the rainy season, you can comment
about that," she said by way of example. "We don't have any
purview over the roads, but we would make sure the company is
addressing that with the highway or the county."
If a well is proposed for an area that floods, as another example,
a resident familiar with those conditions can make the DEP aware
of that.
To comment, or to view comments, enter the proposed well's unique
eight-digit API number that is assigned within a few days of the
time the application is received. The Horizontal Drilling Permit
comments page leads users to a permit search function. Entering
information from the public notice or from the e-mailed notice
will yield the API number.
The Horizontal Drilling Permit web page may be accessed from the
DEP's Office of Oil and Gas.
To review the web site requirements in the Natural Gas Horizontal
Well Control Act, scroll down to section §22-6A-21.
http://www.dep.wv.gov/oil-and-gas/Horizontal-Permits/Pages/default.aspx