Pipeline Company Slams EPA

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Worker checks a gas pipeline.

A New York com­pany has come out swing­ing against com­ments made by the Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency regard­ing a pro­posed gas pipeline in north cen­tral Penn­syl­va­nia. Last week we reported on oppo­si­tion to the 39-mile-long, 75-mile-wide, Marc 1 Hub pipeline project.

Cen­tral New York Oil and Gas, which is a sub­sidiary of the Kansas City based Inergy, wants to con­struct an inter­state pipeline through Lycoming, Sul­li­van and Brad­ford coun­ties. Envi­ron­men­tal­ists say the pipeline will not only hurt ecosys­tems, but also speed up the devel­op­ment of an indus­try they think needs greater over­sight. So their strat­egy is to ask the Fed­eral Energy Reg­u­la­tory Com­mis­sion to do a more exten­sive envi­ron­men­tal impact study. That would slow down the project, and there­fore, slow down drilling.

The EPA says the envi­ron­men­tal assess­ment was inad­e­quate and asks for the more thor­ough, and time-consuming review. But a response filed by Cen­tral New York Oil and Gas ques­tions why the EPA has taken the unusual step of weigh­ing in on the pipeline fray when no fed­eral fund­ing is involved. CNYOG accuses the EPA of suc­cumb­ing to envi­ron­men­tal lobbyists.

Cen­tral New York Oil and Gas says the envi­ron­men­tal law­firm Earth­jus­tice, which rep­re­sents sev­eral local groups, has cre­ated a con­tro­versy where none exists.

“…it is dif­fi­cult to envi­sion how any future pipeline project will be able to sur­mount oppo­si­tion armed with a com­puter and a blog capa­ble of gen­er­at­ing tens of thou­sands of elec­tron­i­cally gen­er­ated, unsigned let­ters of oppo­si­tion from indi­vid­u­als located lit­er­ally any­where on the planet.”

The pro­posal has gen­er­ated about 20,000 pub­lic com­ments. Both the EPA and Earth­jus­tice say FERC’s less exten­sive envi­ron­men­tal assess­ment doesn’t go far enough. They want a study that looks at the cumu­la­tive impacts of the Marc 1, which would con­sider the effects of other new pipelines, and sub­se­quent gas wells. The EPA’s com­ments sound a siren on the impacts of future drilling.

“…there are enough envi­ron­men­tal and pub­lic health issues of con­cern and sig­nif­i­cant pub­lic inter­est, and arguably pub­lic con­tro­versy, .…to war­rant” a full envi­ron­men­tal impact study.

But CYNOG says gas drilling in remote areas of Lycoming and Sul­li­van coun­ties is not depen­dant upon their pro­posed pipeline. In fact, CNYOG says with­out the Marc 1, gas com­pa­nies will have to build more smaller pipelines to get the gas to mar­ket. And those lines, called “gath­er­ing lines,” will not come under the same fed­eral scrutiny as the Marc 1. Read CNYOG’s full com­ments here.