There have been plenty of high-profile landslides dislodging and destroying oil and gas pipelines over the past few years, just as rains have wreaked havoc outside the oilfield — collapsing Route 30 in East Pittsburgh last year, opening up a giant sinkhole at a shopping plaza in Greensburg last month.
The oil and gas industry is both a victim and a perpetrator of this dislocated earth.
With hundreds of well pads and thousands of miles of pipelines newly added to the ground in Pennsylvania over the past decade, the industry’s development disturbs the surface and eliminates some trees and vegetation that would otherwise absorb rainfall. Then the rain, in turn, floods culverts, soaks the ground and moves soil without regard for what pipelines may be relying on its support.
What we usually hear about is the big stuff — the fireballs in the sky documented by live-streaming drivers and neighbors. Last year alone, three newly laid pipelines snapped under pressure from landslides in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio — causing explosions, evacuations and millions of dollars in damage.
But in the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection’s violations database, there are many more unsung examples of how the earth slips and slides around energy infrastructure, sometimes punching right through erosion barriers and sometimes just menacing them with increasing rain.
More than a few times, pipeline and extraction companies cited for erosion violations by the DEP pleaded not guilty by reason of weather — record-breaking, abnormal weather.
Breaking records
The weather is indeed not normal.
At least not yet.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said June of this year marked the wettest 8-month, 9-month, 10-month, 11-month, 12-month, 18-month, 24-month, 36-month and 48-month periods in Pennsylvania since record-keeping began in 1895.
Over the past 12 months, nearly 2 feet more of rain fell than in an average year in Pennsylvania last century.
According to Pennsylvania’s official Climate Impacts Assessment — last revised in 2015 — it will get worse from here.
Average annual precipitation in the state has increased 10% over the past 100 years. By 2050, it is expected to increase another 8%, with a 14% increase during winters, when it will fall mostly as rain instead of snow.
Rains will come more frequently in heavy bursts than in the past.
And that will make fixing hillside slips even more challenging.
“Sometimes the weather gets so inclement that you can’t do anything. It’s like a soup sandwich,” said Joe Todaro, who sells compost filter socks to pipeline companies for Ohio-based Millwood Natural LLC. “We were ready to build an ark.”
A few years ago, a heavy rain might have delayed Ben Wright’s hydroseeding company, Hydrogreen LLC, by an extra day.
“This year, if there’s a storm, we’re out for four to five days because the soil is too wet to get equipment on,” he said.
A two-day, 24-hour storm
The problem is evolving faster than environmental regulations. Those don’t prescribe how companies should control rainwater and erosion, but rather establish “the guidelines for best management practices during construction and post construction,” said Lauren Fraley, a spokeswoman for the DEP.
Costa Samaras, an engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University, said companies building energy infrastructure have to adhere to safety standards, but very few of the standards have been updated to account for how the climate is changing.
As a result, most new infrastructure isn’t designed to withstand the conditions it will face decades from now.
Take storm drains, for example.
The state says a drain has to handle a certain size storm, an engineer looks up how much average rainfall is associated with that storm in that spot and then determines how big the pipe has to be to carry that amount of water under a road.
“The challenge is that that information is based on the rainstorms in the 20th century,” he said. “That is fine if the rain patterns don't change, but the rain patterns are changing. And they're going to continue to change. And there's not a better way to do it except to make your pipe bigger than you thought it needed to be.”
A solution, at least for now, is for government agencies to demand that engineers be conservative in their design of critical infrastructure and infrastructure in populated areas.
“We don't really have time to wait five or 10 years for new standards to come out and then another five or 10 years for new infrastructure to get built,” Mr. Samaras said.
In Pennsylvania, the DEP requires that a company’s erosion controls have to withstand a two-day, 24-hour storm.
In the southwestern part of the state, that translates to less than 2½ inches of rain in a day. That means when a company is developing a project that disturbs the ground, it must design its erosion controls so that creeks and streams in the area see no change in flow and quality after a storm that dumps 2.3 inches of rain.
A few days after a landslide tore open a week-old natural gas pipeline in Beaver County last September, its owner, Energy Transfer, sent a letter to nearby residents citing unprecedented rainfall.
Federal data indicates that 3.73 inches of rain fell on the region the day before the landslide, the second highest for a September day on record and well above the storm baseline required by the DEP.
Best practices
The oil and gas industry cannot help but pay attention to this issue and has ramped up resources devoted to figuring out steep slope construction in the past decade.
A group that involved several Appalachian players, including EQT Midstream and Dominion Energy, was convened by the Nature Conservancy to hash out guidelines on the topic in 2017.
The Interstate Natural Gas Association of America, an industry trade group in Washington, D.C., and the nonprofit Pipeline Research Council International have put out their own best practice manuals.
And earlier this year, the Pipeline Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, which has had to investigate a number of rain-related landslide-nudged explosions in recent years, issued an advisory bulletin.
The document summarized steps that companies could take, such as commissioning geotechnical investigations, installing strain gauges on pipelines, and using drones to fly right of ways to spot earth movement.
Companies in Appalachia say they already are using these techniques.
MarkWest flies drones about every two weeks to survey its natural gas liquids lines, Greg Bezdek, a senior vice president at MPLX/MarkWest, said at the Developing Unconventional Gas East conference in Pittsburgh last year.
“Anytime we have heavy rain, we will walk or fly the right of way as soon as possible.”
Panels about landslide risks have become a staple at industry conferences. Pictures of collapsed roads and sloping trees are now shared more freely; speakers often caution that when one company has a landslide, it reflects badly on the whole industry.
The impacts domino in more tangible ways, too.
When a small landslide ruptured a MarkWest gas line, Mr. Bezdek said, the company was forced to shut in its own pipelines and to ask customers to shut in the wells connected to MarkWest’s fractionator, a processing plant that separates the gas stream into its various components, which also had to be idled.
“All of our facilities are connected with each other and externally to customers and to pipeline markets,” he said. “So, a landslide has a ripple effect. Anything that affects one of our pipelines can affect the whole region.”
This could mean producers lose money on wells that aren’t pumping gas into pipelines. Consumers in places such as New England, where on high-demand days the price of natural gas for electricity can spike tenfold when pipelines are constrained, may feel the impact in their bills.
‘It’s a township’s job’
Of all the regions where Chevron operates in the U.S., the geology in Appalachia is more prone to frequent landslides than any other, said John Johnson, general operations manager for Chevron. He was speaking on the same panel as Mr. Bezdek and was asked to put regional landslides into a broader context.
“We have operations in the San Juan Valley, in Silicon Valley — we don’t seem to have the same level of concern in those regions,” he said.
One problem, he said, is eroding local roads, which can cut off access to well pads and hold up millions of dollars worth of equipment.
“We’ve had road failures which have limited our ability to get onto our pads and remove water,” he said. “So, we’ve had to shut in production.”
Mr. Johnson estimated it would cost $30,000 to properly maintain a mile of road, including cleaning off debris and ensuring culverts empty properly.
“It’s a township’s job, but it’s cheap insurance,” he said. “Maybe that’s the right thing to do for us.”
Even well pads, which are not built on slopes and require flat land, are falling victim to rain-propelled erosion. When the shale boom began, Mr. Johnson said, companies were building these flat platforms “with no real thought on the drainage component.”
“The failures taking place on our pads are taking place six to seven years after [installation],” Mr. Johnson said.
Now companies are talking about installing draining systems a foot and a half below the ground.
The DEP, in written responses to questions, stressed that “while all (best management practices) are important, it is worth noting that properly installed and maintained water bars are particularly useful in directing water away from areas susceptible to slipping.”
Record rain ... and cost
The business implications of a landslide could be staggering.
The Revolution Pipeline, the Energy Transfer gas line that exploded in September when a few days of heavy rains dislodged the hillside it ran under in Center Township, has forced one oil and gas company, EdgeMarc, into bankruptcy and cost another, PennEnergy Resources, at least $75 million in lost sales.
To say nothing of the family whose house burned down in the fire and the dozens of nearby residents who remained, traumatized and worried for their safety and property values.
Energy Transfer had planned to have the pipeline repaired and running within weeks, but it couldn’t stabilize the hillside — an effort also foiled in part by rain and what the DEP described as ineffective erosion controls. The Revolution line remains out of commission.
Helen Delano, a senior geologic scientist for the Pennsylvania Geological Survey who specializes in landslides, said it’s hard to argue the record number of landslides in Allegheny County and surrounding areas in 2018 wasn’t linked to the record amount of precipitation that fell on the region last year.
“Something has to change before a slope that was stable yesterday is unstable today. The most common thing to change is water,” she said.
She has been worrying about the development of pipelines and haul roads ever since drilling activity increased in areas that are landslide prone.
In northeastern Pennsylvania, Marcellus Shale well sites are commonly built on hilltops, which are often flat and have undeveloped areas suitable for drilling. The well pads are “on nice firm bedrock,” she said, “but they have to get the roads up there and they have to get the pipelines somewhere and those have to cross areas that may not be quite as stable.”
In southwestern Pennsylvania, unstable areas are everywhere.
There are places where old landslide deposits have been mapped on “pretty much every hillside except at the very tops and in the very bottoms of the stream valleys,” she said. “It is hard to avoid them.”
Those historical records are good indicators of future risks. But researchers are still working to improve landslide inventories and develop modeling to evaluate the threshold of moisture that might cause slopes to slip.
“I can’t give you a number that says if we have so many millimeters of rain in two days, you’re going to have landslides, or that you’ll have them here but not here,” she said.
“It would be nice to be able to say that, but we just don’t have the datasets in Pennsylvania to do that at this point.”
Anya Litvak: alitvak@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1455. Laura Legere: llegere@post-gazette.com.
First Published: August 5, 2019, 11:44 a.m.
