The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection has shifted drilling, fracking and other temporary shale gas well site activities out of its controversial plans for methane-reduction permits, in a bid to cut down on leaks of the greenhouse gas without creating obstacles to new natural gas development.
Agency officials said Thursday that the final version of the permits will instead consider emissions from temporary activities through its current permit exemption process — a roundabout way of requiring drilling companies to meet certain environmental standards without needing to obtain air pollution permits before construction starts.
After the first drafts of the permits were released in February, the shale gas industry and its supporters were emphatic in their complaints that notification requirements and cumbersome equipment inventories would have made it impossible to run nimble drilling operations, where equipment is frequently moved on and off sites and can’t always be predicted in advance.
“We’ve done a lot of work to make sure we’re balancing the environmental impacts that we’re attempting to manage through the regulatory and permitting process with the operational realities,” DEP Secretary Patrick McDonnell said during an online presentation to outline the changes.
The general permits, known as GP-5 and GP-5A, will update existing air pollution control requirements for natural gas compressor stations along pipelines and supplement the permit exemption method that has been used for managing air emissions at new well sites since 2013.
The department plans to publish the permits in the first quarter of 2018, but it released details of the changes Thursday to give its advisers time to ensure the language is “clear and implementable,” George Hartenstein, DEP’s deputy secretary in charge of air programs, said.
The permits will allow 30-day and 60-day transition periods before the standards take effect.
Natural gas is mostly made up of methane, a potent greenhouse gas contributing to climate change that has a relatively short life in the atmosphere. Methane is also emitted in significant amounts from farm animals, landfills and coal mines.
The state’s official emissions inventory, which is based on formulas and not direct measurements, shows methane from the state’s shale gas operations fell between 2012 and 2015 even as gas production more than doubled.
But Gov. Tom Wolf’s administration has defended its focus on the gas industry by saying it is the only man-made methane source in the state that has shown significant emissions growth since the 1990s.
Legislators in the General Assembly’s Republican majority criticized the first drafts of the permits as an attempt by the Democratic governor’s administration to write regulations without going through the more rigorous review process that regulations require.
Among the Legislature’s efforts to dismantle the permits before they could be published was a proposal in a budget bill passed by the Senate this summer that would have created an advisory committee specifically to review the proposed methane permits with the ability to reject them.
The proposal would also have forbidden the department from applying the new permits to temporary well site activities — a suggestion the agency embraced — or to existing natural gas wells, a separate element of Mr. Wolf’s broader methane reduction strategy that will be addressed through a future regulation.
All of those provisions were ultimately cut from the bill.
The final drafts of the general permits retain a requirement that companies perform quarterly leak detection and repair surveys at new well sites with the ability to switch to semi-annual surveys if less than 2 percent of their equipment components are leaking.
They also retain the requirement that new operations that exceed certain air pollution thresholds use control devices to reduce emissions of methane and other contaminants by 98 percent.
Environmental groups praised the agency for moving toward finalizing the standards. The Environmental Defense Fund called it “an important and positive step for public health and the environment.”
Industry groups were less enthusiastic.
David Spigelmyer, president of the Robinson-based Marcellus Shale Coalition, said, “We remain concerned about the use of permits to regulate a proposed methane limit that has no scientific basis,” but he added, “We do welcome the opportunity to work with DEP to address serious concerns our industry has with regard to permitting and regulatory certainty.”
Laura Legere: llegere@post-gazette.com.
Correction, posted Nov. 30, 2017: In an earlier version of this story, the headquarters location for the Marcellus Shale Coalition was incorrect.
First Published: November 30, 2017, 7:47 p.m.
