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A photo taken by a Department of Environmental Protection inspector shows dead grass in the path of a spill from a tank at a conventional oil and gas well site.
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Pa. House advances bill to ease rules for conventional oil and gas drillers

Department of Environmental Protection

Pa. House advances bill to ease rules for conventional oil and gas drillers

HARRISBURG — A bill to revert to old environmental standards for Pennsylvania’s conventional drilling industry advanced in the state House on Monday, despite concerns by the state Department of Environmental Protection that it will “cause great harm to the environment and to the public.”

The chamber’s environmental resources and energy committee voted 14-12 to advance House Bill 2154.

The bill, a companion to Senate Bill 1088, would be less restrictive than regulations under Pennsylvania’s current Oil and Gas Act and bar the DEP from adopting some stricter proposals the agency has advanced in recent years.

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Conventional drilling trade groups say the bill is intended to turn back the clock — to before 2012, when environmental rules were strengthened to regulate the industrial-scale operations of drillers targeting the Marcellus Shale. They say small, traditional drillers who operate shallower wells were swept up in the changes.

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“The legislation provides for reasonable, responsible regulation of the conventional industry,” the bill’s sponsor Rep. Martin Causer, R-Cameron, said.

Gov. Tom Wolf and the DEP oppose the bill. DEP Secretary Patrick McDonnell wrote to legislators on Friday that the bill “presents environmental and public health risks and loosens current environmental protections to the point, in some cases, of nullification.”

In at least one instance, the bill would roll back measures that were included in the first oil and gas law from 1984: It would erase a requirement that before issuing a drilling permit DEP must consider a well’s impact on public resources, like publicly owned parks and historical sites. The proposed bill would replace that rule with a limited review that applies only to habitats of federally or state-listed threatened or endangered species.

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The bill would allow operators to spill up to 210 gallons of oil or 630 gallons of production brine at a well site without needing to report it to the department unless it poses “an immediate threat.” The current standard for reporting spilled oil or brine is 5 gallons.

It would allow conventional drillers that have polluted or diminished a drinking water supply to restore it to less than state clean drinking water standards if it was worse than those standards before the damage — a weaker restoration requirement than shale drillers have to meet.

Mr. McDonnell listed other concerns, including that the bill “promotes well abandonment and improper well plugging practices” and relaxes well casing and cementing standards that protect coal miners.

The conventional industry has struggled to find affordable ways to deal with its wastewater, so several provisions in the bill are meant to ease requirements for disposal. It exempts new and some existing treatment plants that take conventional wells’ waste fluids from having to comply with a 2010 rule that set strict limits on salty discharges to rivers, and it directs DEP to allow well production brines to be spread on unpaved roads for dust control.

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Mark Cline, president of the Pennsylvania Independent Petroleum Producers Association, wrote to legislators that the bill “will let our industry continue to grow and thrive.”

There were only 105 conventional wells drilled in Pennsylvania last year, according to DEP records, compared to 2,026 in 2009. Most of them were drilled in northwestern counties.

In Pennsylvania, the definition of a conventional well depends on its depth and product more than its design. Any oil well, for instance, is a conventional well, even those few that are drilled horizontally and fracked borrowing the high-intensity techniques more often used to get gas from shale.

House Bill 2154 differs from current law in other significant ways. It would narrow the Pennsylvania DEP’s oversight of wastewater disposal wells to surface features and leave the rest of the permitting and oversight duties for those wells to the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

Conventional drilling permits would be good for three years, rather than one. Money from fines and penalties would go to the state’s fund for plugging orphan wells instead of to a DEP fund used to pay for oil and gas oversight in general.

Reflecting a recent focus on tackling unplugged historical wells, the bill creates a process by which a person who voluntarily plugs an orphan well can apply for a $5,000 payment from an account funded by shale gas impact fees or receive a credit to offset future well permit fees. It also directs the state Environmental Hearing Board to mitigate fines for companies that plug abandoned wells.

The bill’s supporters championed those changes, which they said would speed up plugging of the hundreds of thousands of old abandoned and orphaned wells in Pennsylvania that were never sealed to modern standards.

Studies have shown that those wells could collectively be leaking significant amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

But Rep. Mike Carroll, D-Luzerne, said the proposal amounts to a “shell game” because it does not increase funding for plugging abandoned wells.

He said he does not see a future for the bill given “such severe opposition” from DEP and the Wolf administration.

Laura Legere: llegere@post-gazette.com

First Published: May 1, 2018, 12:00 p.m.

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A photo taken by a Department of Environmental Protection inspector shows dead grass in the path of a spill from a tank at a conventional oil and gas well site.  (Department of Environmental Protection)
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