The Gas and Preservation Partnership is not for absolutists. It's not for archaeologists who think any cultural resource should remain unbothered. And it's not for oil and gas companies that rely on a lack of regulation to drill though whatever cultural grounds may lie below.
"We believe that all cultural resources are valuable, but that some resources have more to teach us than others," the group's mission statement goes. "We believe that significance should be a factor in decisions about whether a site is preserved ... excavated ... or is destroyed."
The coalition of cultural preservation advocates and oil and gas firms, GAPP for short, held its inaugural summit at the Fairmont Hotel, Downtown, on Friday.
The group was formed in January 2013 and has spent the past year getting board members representative of its stakeholders -- it has four members from oil and gas companies including Marcellus operators Royal Dutch Shell and Southwestern Energy, and four professionals from cultural resource organizations.
The partnership is not unlike the Pittsburgh-based Center for Sustainable Shale Development, a coalition of environmental groups and oil and gas companies working to come up with best practices.
The emphasis isn't on pushing regulation but on establishing a mutually beneficial set of rules that each side can observe and promote.
Why a voluntary effort? Because the consensus between archaeologists and industry representatives at the conference held that regulations are either nonexistent or not enforced.
"We're proactively getting ahead of the problem," said Marion Werkheiser, co-founder of the Washington, D.C.-based Cultural Heritage Partners and counsel to GAPP's board of directors.
That's not to say problems haven't surfaced already.
In Washington County alone, 63 known archaeological sites have been impacted by gas wells, according to research done by Jason Espino, a cultural resource manager with Michael Baker who completed his master's thesis on the subject in December. Mr. Espino estimated it's likely that another 150 sites that weren't known were similarly destroyed in the county.
When archaeologists raised concerns that shale gas drillers were destroying cultural resources at the 2012 annual meeting of the Society for American Archeology, the organization established a task force to plot how natural gas exploration intersects with historic sites.
Last January, the group published its findings. In the Marcellus, where only 5 percent of the footprint has been surveyed for cultural and historic resources, there are 1,951 identified sites, including 24 battlefield sites, 32 historic cemeteries, and 87 prehistoric ceremonial, burial, or mound sites.
The task force extrapolated that there might be close to 40,000 sites across the shale play in yet unsurveyed territory. In its report, the group also suggested that archaeologists need a " 'hook' that will encourage industry to want to conduct these surveys."
"Shale gas development is often conducted on private property, and in many states strong land owner right will make it difficult to change state laws to require cultural resource surveys," the report said.
"Possible 'hooks' may include positive PR that documents the positive results of such a survey and/or positive environmental action. Other options may include providing a Society for American Archaeology Award to one or more gas firms who are currently completing surveys in the absence of a state or federal requirement."
Besides Shell and Southwest Energy, representatives from Chevron Corp. and Range Resources, two of this region's most active drillers, attended the conference.
Al Vish, a former archaeologist, started working at Range Resources as a senior technical geological technician four years ago. His job wasn't to mind archaeological resources, but Mr. Vish saw how vulnerable it left a company to be ignorant of them. So he started to rank each proposed well site on the probability that it would disturb a cultural resource.
"I tried to explain to my boss that we don't need to survey every site, but we need to evaluate every site, because you just don't know what's there until you look," he said.
An oil and gas operator doesn't want to be in a situation where a landowner claims there's cultural resources on his land to avoid development. Nor would it want to drill through an archaeological site only to be called out for it by someone who knew it was there.
Kevin Pape, president of Ohio-based consulting firm Gray & Pape Inc., reminded conference attendees what happened at the Kirshner site, an area near West Newton in Westmoreland County where archaeologists were uncovering two villages once inhabited by Monongahela Indians only to find the site destroyed and topped with a drilling rig.
"We're talking about 12,000 years of human experiences," Mr. Pape said. "These are powerful stories that belong to us as a nation."
Oil and gas development doesn't fit neatly into the jurisdiction of a federal agency, as many other major development projects do, said Cinder Miller, vice president at Gray & Pape.
The DEP has proposed in a rulemaking currently under consideration that operators be required to notify the appropriate agency if their proposed site is within 200 feet of a known resource. But they won't be required to do their own survey if the location doesn't come up with a hit on federal and state databases.
Because so few areas are actually surveyed, that might not be enough.
GAPP has four working groups focused on coming up with standards and implementing them. One concerns figuring out which data exists and how to improve it.
Donn Grenda, president of West Coast-based archaeological firm Statistical Research Inc., who chairs that group, wants to come up with a predictive model that looks at where surveys have identified resources and what those sites might have in common with other, yet untouched land.
But even having access to current data in a bulk format would be an improvement, Mr. Vish said.
"I think the state needs to be less precious with information and give that in bulk to the drillers. We're drilling hundreds of wells a year. We can't go through this process one well at a time. I need information immediately."
Steven McDougal, an archaeological reviewer at Pennsylvania's State Historical Preservation Office, admitted the state can be "rather squeamish" about releasing the coordinates of archaeological sites and has been burned when, on a couple of occasions, such sites were looted.
But it's likely that even more sites have been destroyed by oil and gas companies without access to the information, said Mr. Espino.
Others suggested that sensitive information could be restricted to approved company personnel.
Mr. McDougal countered with one of the underlying themes of the conference: oil and gas companies have money; preservationists don't. Mr. Grenda even joked that the cost of a single oil and gas project could buy up the entire archaeological industry.
"We don't have the funding and the technical staff," Mr. McDougal said. "We did once but they got jobs somewhere else. Someone pulled a dump truck up to them full of money."
The resource gap is another argument for collaboration, some in the crowd suggested.
Michael Jarvis, a geologist with Range, said he expects oil and gas companies would be willing to foot the cost for the state to develop better, faster, more accurate data and technology, just as the industry pays big bucks to private data companies for the same service and convenience.
"That is money the industry is willing to invest," he said. "We want you working quicker because we're working with you."
Anya Litvak: alitvak@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1455.
First Published: March 22, 2014, 3:54 a.m.
