DEP Evolving With Regard to Marcellus Permitting
Department of Environmental Protection Secretary Randy Huffman said
the state does need change, and change is happening.
The State Journal
11 June 2011
By Pam Kasey
MORGANTOWN -- As experience with Marcellus shale gas well activity
accumulates across the state, the Department of Environmental
Protection’s understanding of permitting needs is changing month by
month.
“I would say there is nothing static about what we’re doing right now —
that we are making changes, and it’s evolving on a regular basis,” said
DEP Secretary Randy Huffman.
Huffman traveled to Morgantown earlier this month to address residents
who are concerned about two Marcellus wells Northeast Natural Energy is
drilling just above the region’s drinking water intake on the
Monongahela River.
The DEP wasn’t prepared for the type and scale of activity associated
with the Marcellus shale ramp-up, the residents heard from Huffman. The
DEP’s proposed regulations on the matter were not passed by the
Legislature earlier this year.
Meeting participants said the DEP should stop permitting Marcellus
wells until it is prepared. In a follow-up conversation with The State
Journal, Huffman said the state does need change, and change is
happening.
He cited the DEP’s establishment in 2009 of a list of more than 40
pollutants of concern that wastewater treatment plants have to control
if they are to accept gas well drilling brine for treatment.
Clarksburg’s plant stopped taking brine, and no West Virginia facility
currently accepts it.
Huffman also pointed to the agency’s Water Withdrawal Guidance Tool
that went online in 2010 to identify in real time for drillers any
streams where high-volume surface water withdrawals for hydraulic
fracturing would be dangerous to stream life.
“We’re putting new policies and new guidance into place,” he said. “It
may not be to the speed which the public would like to see it happen,
but we’re doing a lot of the things that have been suggested using our
existing authority in bigger and better ways while we seek the
regulatory change we’re looking for.”
Cumulative Impacts
Huffman said he is taking concerns about cumulative impacts
seriously.
Most pressing among those, as measured by unaddressed resident
complaints, may be cumulative air quality impacts.
On that topic, Huffman’s expression of awareness may seem ill-timed.
His agency just fought and defeated a permit appeal in which Wetzel
County residents asked to have three compressor stations combined into
one source that would cross a threshold for regulation under the Clean
Air Act.
Asked why the agency fought that permit, Huffman responded through
spokeswoman Kathy Cosco that the compressor stations didn’t meet the
Clean Air Act criteria for aggregation.
However, Cosco said, the agency is designing a data collection program
to investigate residents’ concerns.
Several air quality studies conducted by the Pennsylvania Department of
Environmental Protection in the past year have found elevated levels of
some contaminants at some sites, but none at the level of health risks.
The Pittsburgh-based Group Against Smog and Pollution criticized at
least some of those studies as failing to account for cumulative
impacts.
Special Conditions, Public Notice
When it learned in early May of NNE’s wells, the Morgantown
Utility Board, provider of drinking water to some 90,000 area
residents, expressed shock to DEP that there had been no public
notification or comment period. MUB negotiated special safeguards with
the company — these included redundant spill prevention and containment
measures, integrity testing of well casings and documented removal of
all wastes from the site — and persuaded the DEP to place its
negotiated safeguards in the permits. DEP has learned from that
experience, Huffman said.
“Prior to this Northeast permit, we’d never discussed the proximity to
drinking water intakes of Marcellus wells,” he said. “We’d never
discussed in any depth the whole notion of a formal public comment
period.”
The agency learned special permitting conditions in locations where
drinking water intakes or other sensitive areas are concerned, as well
as public notice under certain circumstances, “are relevant to apply to
future permitting decisions,” he said.
As an illustration of the DEP’s new thinking, he noted special
conditions the agency already placed on two wells it permitted to NNE
in late May on Dunkard Creek, the site of a massive fish kill in 2009.
“That’s pretty unique to what we have done historically,” he said.
Permit Denials
There is a marked disconnect between those concerned about
drilling or hydraulic fracturing accidents and the DEP on the question
of whether any site is inappropriate for a well.
Participants at the June 2 public forum said it seems as though DEP
simply approves every permit application.
Huffman disagreed with that.
“Many oil and gas permits, I don’t know if all of them but many, are
denied in the form we originally receive them,” he said. “Sometimes
they get denied two, three, four times. We tell them what they have to
do to get permitted, but that’s the way the process works.”
Asked whether he believes any site in the state is inappropriate for
Marcellus operations — the claim of many Morgantown-area residents for
the NNE site — Huffman listed wetlands and very steep sites, but
excluded the NNE site.
“I think that we can manage the risk upstream of a public water intake
with existing authority,” he said.
Special Legislative Session?
Calls continue from many quarters for a special session to take up
proposed Marcellus legislation that was not passed during this year’s
regular session.
Huffman said Tomblin has been waiting for the sides to come closer so a
special session would more likely bring results.
Based on its new experience, DEP likely would revise the proposal it
wrote last summer, he said.
“Things like public notice, proximity to drinking water, issues related
to more sensitive areas like trout streams, those were not specific to
our proposal,” he said.
Huffman disagrees with any notion that permitting should stop until new
regulations are in place. “To whose satisfaction does it have to be
exactly right? Mine? The citizens’? The Legislature’s?” he asked.
“There’s always going to be the argument to be made by some entity that
it’s not right yet.”