DEP rejects industry pressure to remove some members from oil & gas board

Jon Hurdle

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Jon is an experienced journalist who has covered a wide range of general and business-news stories for national and local media in the U.S. and his native U.K. As a former Reuters reporter, he spent several years covering the early stages of Pennsylvania’s natural gas fracking boom and was one of the first national reporters to write about the effects of gas development on rural communities. Jon trained as a general news reporter with a British newspaper chain and later worked for several business-news organizations including Bloomberg News and Market News International, covering topics including economics, bonds, currencies and monetary policy. Since 2011, he has been a freelance writer, contributing Philadelphia-area news to The New York Times; covering economics for Market News, and writing stories on the environment and other subjects for a number of local outlets including StateImpact. He has written two travel guidebooks to the European Alps; lived in Australia, Switzerland, Israel, and Saudi Arabia, and visited many countries including Ethiopia, Peru, Taiwan, and New Zealand. Outside of work hours, Jon can be found running, birding, cooking, and, when weather permits, gardening in the back yard of a Philadelphia row home where he lives with his partner, Kate.

April 23, 2015 | 5:27 PM

The Department of Environmental Protection on Thursday rejected a call by the Pennsylvania Independent Oil & Gas Association for the removal of four non-voting members from a board that advises officials on oil and gas policy.

Elizabeth Nolan, an attorney for the DEP, said there were no grounds to dismiss the four members, who have been appointed by the DEP’s Acting Secretary, John Quigley.

Joe Ulrich / WITF

A natural gas rig in the Tioga State Forest. Rigs like this would be subject to tougher state regulations under DEP proposals.

Nolan told a meeting of the Oil and Gas Technical Advisory Board that the 2012 Oil & Gas Act doesn’t contain language that would allow for the removal of the members, and that the department has the authority to select members who have a range of relevant skills outside of the oil & gas industry.

“The department has a responsibility to develop regulations in an open and transparent manner with input from the public,” Nolan said, at a meeting to examine significant changes to oil and gas regulations, as proposed by the DEP.

She said the department is seeking “enhanced public participation” through the appointment of the four non-voting members, who include a professor from Carnegie Mellon University and a senior member of the Pennsylvania Environmental Council.

“The composition of the board has already been set,” Nolan said.

Her comments follow a letter from PIOGA to the other five board members on April 10, arguing that Quigley acted illegally in appointing the four new members, and noting that the state legislature made no changes to the duties or composition of the TAB when it passed the sweeping Act 13 Oil & Gas Act in 2012.

Kevin Moody, general counsel to PIOGA, urged the five voting members to reject DEP’s proposed TAB bylaws that would add the non-voting members to the board,

But Scott Perry, Deputy Secretary in the DEP’s Office of Oil & Gas Management, played down talk of divisions on the TAB, saying that industry representatives have been working constructively with regulators who have proposed tighter standards since Democratic Governor Tom Wolf took office in January.

“I think it’s been very productive. I would not view it as confrontational at all,” Perry told StateImpact, during a break in the three-and-a-half-hour TAB meeting. “I’ve been really appreciating the candor from the advisers as well as the TAB members. That’s exactly what we’ve been seeking from this advisory committee, was to have a much more open dialogue about issues and solutions.”

Still, he said “additional dialogue” was needed on some issues including water-supply restoration after gas drilling and noise mitigation. “Those are some of the more complicated issues.”

New rules under Chapters 78 and 78a, as discussed in Thursday’s meeting, require operators to restore drinking water supplies impacted by drilling to the standard set by the Safe Drinking Water Act or the quality determined before drilling took place.

The rules also set health-based standards for noise control and mitigation from unconventional oil & gas operations.

The challenges posed by noise from drilling and fracking were described to the meeting by Emily Krafjack, one of the non-voting members, who said she had suffered from loud noise at her home from nearby gas development since 2009.

Krafjack, who is with the community group Connection for Oil, Gas, & Environment in the Northern Tier, said she was not opposed to unconventional gas drilling but experienced long periods of interrupted sleep, and an inability to hear her phone or her TV inside her house as a result of noise from a gas some 500 feet from her house. She described the noise as “torture”.

She did not identify the operator but said it was not Shell, which has taken steps to moderate noise from its own gas operations, according to Robert Hendricks, an engineer with Shell and one of the five voting members of the TAB.

“Since all operations can’t be from Shell, we need these regulations,” she said.

Bryan McConnell, an environmental program manager with the Nebraska-based energy company Tenaska, and a voting member of the TAB, denied there were major disputes between panel members and the DEP, and said both sides are seeking common ground.

“It’s a collaborative process,” he told StateImpact. “I don’t think there are any principal areas of disagreement. Obviously, we don’t understand certain aspects, and we are still trying to feel our way through the process.”

Amy Nassif, who represented a group of parents in the small town of Mars, ButlerCounty, urged the DEP to finalize regulations that would keep oil and gas pads well away from schools. She said her community has five schools within half a mile of a prospective drilling site, and that she is concerned about the health impacts on their students.

While existing regulations won’t protect her own community from gas drilling, other school districts across the state could benefit if the DEP finalizes regulations that would increase the distance between gas pads and schools, said Nassif, who drove from western Pennsylvania to Harrisburg with her daughter for the hearing.

“There is hope for the remaining 500 school districts across the Commonwealth,” she said.

Note: this post has been updated to reflect the following correction. Emily Krafjack is with the Connection for Oil, Gas, & Environment in the Northern Tier (COGENT), not Northern Tier Energy.