Kirk Jalbert isn’t the type to hole up in a tree to get in the path of a pipeline, although he recently kicked in some money for a Huntington County resistance camp doing exactly that.
He doesn’t raise his voice, use hyperbole or say anything out of turn. He rarely smiles.
From behind his computer, he is engineering a series of social experiments — to see if giving citizens more data about their environment will spur a more participatory democracy.
He does this by making interactive maps of oil and gas wells and pipelines as the manager of community-based research and engagement at the Pittsburgh office of the Camp Hill, Pa.-based nonprofit FracTracker Alliance.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has used FracTracker information for stories in the past and most recently relied on its work on the Falcon project, a proposed pipeline that will carry ethane to the Shell cracker in Beaver County.
For all the leaflet peddlers, door knockers, protest sign makers and Facebook commenters, a growing number of coders, digital cartographers and “online toolkit” designers feel that a powerful way to organize against fossil interests is by organizing their industry data.
“[The] public has the desire and capacity to use data to find answers to questions that concern them and they should be allowed to do so,” Mr. Jalbert said. “This is increasingly the case as mapping tools become more intuitive and ubiquitous.”
The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection and other regulatory agencies have made great strides in how they collect and make oil and gas data available to the public in recent years.
Some questions now can be answered with a few mouse clicks — something that seemed vastly out of reach a decade ago:
- Does your municipality have an ordinance saying where companies can drill?
- How many schools and hospitals are close to oil and gas facilities?
- What’s coming out of the compressor station down the street?
- What’s coming out of Clairton Coke Works right now?
- How many other people are smelling what I’m smelling around Pittsburgh?
- Did your Allegheny County neighbors sign a lease with a gas company?
- Where has drilling or pipeline construction impacted water wells
- How much gas is leaking out of the wells in my county?
Technology and big data have been a game changer for shale gas. But it also has done a lot to fuel movements that seek to either hamper the industry or force public reckonings along its way.
The power of data
The Omni William Penn Hotel was a strikingly elaborate venue for something called “People vs. Oil & Gas Infrastructure: A summit for communities fighting back.” The gathering in mid-November spilled activists from all over the country into the basement hallways of the venerable Pittsburgh hotel.
A man in charge of registration wore a shirt that said, “I stopped the Keystone XL.” The “Water is Life” banners in the main meeting room — secured by blue masking tape — kept falling down. Attendees were as likely to introduced themselves by their names as the pipelines they were opposing.
Mr. Jalbert was one of the first to arrive at a session titled “Wet Gas = Chemicals = Plastics.”
He set down his laptop and exchanged some friendly words with Elise Gerhart, whose family farm is in the path of the Mariner East 2 pipeline and who had organized the resistance camp called Camp White Pine to prevent Energy Transfer Partners from clearing any more of the route through eminent domain. She thanked Mr. Jalbert for his help with the maps.
A tree platforms on Ellen & Stephen Gerhart's property in Unity Twp in Huntingdon County, June 27, 2017, where protesters have set up a resistance camp to keep the Mariner East 2 pipeline from being built on through the property. (Darrell Sapp/Post-Gazette)
The Mariner East 2 pipeline was big break for data transparency, Mr. Jalbert has said. It was the first pipeline for which GIS, or location data, was publicly posted on the DEP’s website.
Mr. Jalbert, who played a part in pressuring the regulatory agency to release the information, quickly put it to use. He mapped the route, all of the points where it would intersect streams and watersheds, how close it would be to homes and day care centers. He even created a blast zone analysis that showed how large the impact would be if the pipeline exploded at any particular point.
Pipeline opponents, especially in the suburbs of Philadelphia, zoomed in on their neighborhoods and printed out the maps, taking them door to door.
Ten days before the conference at the Omni, four Democrats campaigning against the pipeline flipped the boards of supervisors at two Eastern Pennsylvania townships.
“That’s the power of data,” Mr. Jalbert would later reflect. “And the power of maps. Maps are so powerful because [they allow] people to physically locate themselves within the discourse.”
Two months after the conference, many of its participants would rejoice at DEP’s decision to halt construction of Mariner East 2 for “egregious and willful violations” along its trail. A month after that, they would draft statements decrying the DEP’s lack of spine for allowing construction to continue after fining the company $12.6 million.
‘Fossil fools’
Called in at the last minute to moderate the plastics panel, Jennifer Krill, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Earthworks, admitted that she was still struggling with the new consciousness about the role of plastic in the shale game.
“I’m working on getting more practice in saying that the threat we’re up against is the oil and gas and chemical industries,” she told the advocates gathered at the Omni in November.
A woman who was knitting in the front row nodded her head.
It’s a full house here in Pittsburgh at #PeoplevsOilGas: A Summit of Communities Fighting Back! pic.twitter.com/MMdmUCXbC4
— Stand.earth (@standearth) November 17, 2017
It was shale gas that brought Royal Dutch Shell to Beaver County to build its ethane cracker to make plastic beads. The American Chemistry Council projects that chemical manufacturing, spurred by these newly abundant reserves of oil and gas, will increase 40 percent over the next decade, Ms. Krill announced.
The same statistic was delivered quite triumphantly at an oil and gas conference at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center a few weeks prior.
Here, it drew gasps and someone in the back shuddered, “Oh, my god.”
Mark Dixon, a Pittsburgh-based filmmaker who runs the website NoPetroPA, asked about “economically viable alternatives to plastic.”
Mr. Krill admitted that she may not be the right person for the question. There are no-waste cities, she offered, and those that ban plastic bags.
“People always call me a hypocrite because, ‘Oh, I’ve got plastic in my life,’ ” Ms. Gerhart said, holding up her phone case. “But, I’m not marketing single-use materials to people who have no choice.”
The point, they all agreed, is that plastics is now a major part of the economics of oil and gas. And so, it must be part of their agenda.
“We have too many fossil fools,” Ms. Krill said accidentally, but then, liking the sound of it, repeated it louder. “We have too many fossil fools with too much fossil fuel. And they’re looking for a market.”
‘What are you willing to live without?’
The paradox of linking the wellhead to the plastic lid on a Starbucks cup is that few regulatory venues weigh in on the entire supply chain.
When activists showed up at a DEP hearing on water and air permits for the Shell cracker plant in 2016, talking about a hemp-based economy to replace the nation’s “addiction” to plastics, they were widely regarded as distracting from the issue at hand.
To some extent, they were trying to answer the question that Tim Aydt, CEO of Marathon Pipeline, asked last month during a pipeline conference in Downtown.
He flashed a slide of some of the products that rely on plastics — playground slides, solar panels, medical IV bags — and encouraged oil and gas advocates to ask their opponents “the simple question: What are you willing to live without?”
When Mr. Aydt declared “there’s no doubt our industry is under attack,” he didn’t harp on employment and fees tied to the industry in the state. He focused on the ubiquity of oil and gas in nearly every aspect of people’s lives.
It was at the DEP hearing on Shell’s cracker permits that Mr. Jalbert got the idea for the Falcon project.
FracTracker, which spun out of the University of Pittsburgh in 2012 and is funded entirely through foundations, had been late to the Shell game and was looking for a way to get involved. Someone came up to him and shared talk about an ethane pipeline. The next morning, Mr. Jalbert began Googling. What he found blew him away.
Before him were the coordinates of every inch of the pipeline as it was shaping up, along with all the landowners contacted for surveys and easements. All this was available many months before Shell Pipeline Co. would make any of that information public. This was his chance to take the lessons learned from Mariner East 2 and apply them much earlier in the process to the Falcon Pipeline, he thought.
He reached out to local community and environmental groups like the Beaver Marcellus Action Committee, the Clean Air Council and others. As early as March of last year, he printed out maps of parcels and highlighted them according to their status in Shell’s database — yellow for easement granted, gray for unknown, red thatch for landowners who denied permission for the company to survey their land.
Dave Smith, a local organizer for Clean Air Council, mobilized dozens of volunteers to hit the streets with FracTracker’s maps and “walksheets” — one-page questionnaires asking questions like are you “concerned about the safety of the pipeline” and “will you lose uses of your property?”
He said that when he heard landowners who didn’t want the pipeline but chose to negotiate with Shell because they figured it would happen anyway, he refused to accept the premise.
“Who says it’s going to happen?” Mr. Smith asked.
Another group, the Citizens to Protect the Ambridge Reservoir, looked at how the pipeline would impact existing routes carrying raw water to the reservoir.
The Pittsburgh-based air quality advocacy group Breathe Collaborative and the Clean Air Council, meanwhile, started drafting an argument for extending the 30-day comment period on the pipeline permits that began on Jan. 20.
On Friday, four days before the comment period was supposed to end, the DEP granted the request and gave the public another two months to weigh in. And it announced that public hearings would be held in all three southwestern Pennsylvania counties through which the Falcon would pass: Allegheny, Beaver and Washington.
The DEP extends the #Shell Falcon pipeline comment period and will hold a public hearing, great news and a big win for those concerned including those who drink the Ambridge water! https://t.co/os5TJ9kYDq @cleanh2oaction @cleanairmatt @cleanaircouncil
— Breathe Project (@BreatheProject) February 16, 2018
“Congratulations to all,” Matt Mehalik, executive director of the Breathe Collaborative wrote in an email announcing the extension.
Now, on to the next steps, he said.
Public impact assessment
It’s no coincidence that Mr. Jalbert dubbed his analysis of Shell’s pipeline route the “Falcon public environmental impact assessment.”
Only pipelines regulated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission are required to have full environmental impact assessments that are supposed to look more holistically at a project than summing up all water crossings and dirt moving points along the way.
The Falcon isn’t regulated by FERC, and neither is the Mariner East 2 pipeline, Mr. Jalbert said.
He now sees his role as giving people and groups along the route the tools to cobble together their own environmental impact assessments. Unleashing all of this data gives fodder to local groups focused on accute impacts and broader momentum to regional and even national groups that are looking at the bigger picture, he said.
“That’s the power of telling stories at scale,” Mr. Jalbert said.
Anya Litvak: alitvak@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1455.
First Published: February 16, 2018, 6:55 p.m.
