The Pennsylvania Legislature is poised to let an array of new shale gas drilling regulations take effect in a deal that will cancel revised rules for the state’s traditional drilling industry, whose operations are generally smaller and shallower.
Gov. Tom Wolf’s spokesman Jeffrey Sheridan confirmed Wednesday that the unconventional, or shale, gas regulations will be published.
A resolution being considered in the House would have rejected the entire 260-page package of rules that has been five years in the making. The revisions contain new requirements to reduce disruptions to public parks and playgrounds near well sites, minimize the likelihood of new wells intersecting with abandoned ones, more strictly control waste handling and cleanup, and ensure that damaged drinking water supplies are restored to a safe quality or better.
Supporters of the drilling rules have said the Democratic governor feared that even if he vetoed the resolution, enough Democrats would join Republicans in the GOP-controlled chambers to override his veto and scrap the regulations.
Now, the resolution is expected to expire next week without action because a second bill, advanced by the House Environmental Resources and Energy committee on Wednesday, would cancel the revisions that apply to the conventional drilling industry.
Both Republican and Democratic legislators said the bill has the Wolf administration’s endorsement, but Mr. Sheridan would not directly confirm that, saying in a statement that the administration “will continue to work with the legislature to reach agreement on the conventional regulations.”
The Department of Environmental Protection separated standards for the state’s Marcellus Shale and conventional drilling industries to comply with a 2014 law, but kept the two chapters of rules linked as they moved through the regulatory approval process. The conventional industry protested that the changes to its rules were unfair, unnecessary and unduly influenced by the push to bolster rules for shale drillers.
Members of the conventional industry welcomed news of the deal.
Joe Thompson, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania Independent Petroleum Producers Association, said the agreement is a way for the governor and legislators “to keep what they really wanted in the first place, which was a regulatory framework that was appropriate for the unconventional industry” while sparing conventional drillers from rules he said were “an overreach and not properly issued.”
The bill that advanced on Wednesday, Senate Bill 279, does not prohibit DEP from crafting new regulations for conventional drillers, but it requires DEP to draft the conventional rules independently.
The bill also creates the Pennsylvania Grade Crude Development Advisory Council, whose membership will include a majority of representatives from the conventional industry and whose duties will include both advising DEP on policies and regulations that affect the conventional industry and promoting the industry’s long-term viability and boosting Pennsylvania grade crude oil production.
Environmental advocates condemned the agreement.
A coalition of six environmental groups said if the state adopts Senate Bill 279 it will make Pennsylvania “the only state in the nation to abandon oil and gas regulations after they’ve been fully developed and vetted.”
Rep. Greg Vitali, D-Delaware, the minority chairman of the House environment committee, said in a statement that he is “very disappointed that Wolf has succumbed to the pressure of the drilling industry.”
Citing DEP compliance records, he said the conventional industry was responsible for about half of the 248 water supplies contaminated or disrupted by drilling in Pennsylvania from 2008 to 2014 and had three times as many violations and DEP enforcement actions as shale drillers during 2014.
Mr. Thompson said his industry is already heavily regulated. “It’s not like we’re running roughshod out here,” he said. “If people are, those are bad players. We have a lot of environmentally minded businessmen and women in the oil and gas patch.”
One of the duties of the Pennsylvania Grade Crude Development Advisory Council will be to work with DEP to develop “an environmentally responsible and economically viable” option for managing the salty wastewater that surfaces in oil and gas wells, because small producers have struggled to find affordable options for its safe disposal.
The Pennsylvania Independent Petroleum Producers Association surveyed its members about wastewater disposal in 2013 and nearly a third of the 80 operators who responded said they dump the wastewater directly on the ground from tanks connected to their wells, a practice that has been against state environmental laws for more than three decades.
Laura Legere: llegere@post-gazette.com.
First Published: June 9, 2016, 3:48 p.m.
