By Veronica Coptis, Mountain Watershed Association

The Marcellus Citizen Stewardship Project (MSCP) has been developed to empower citizens to take steps to protect their property, their health, and the environment, principally our water resources, from impacts of extracting Marcellus shale in southwestern Pennsylvania. The Marcellus Citizen Stewardship Project will be a model so that other watersheds and communities can easily replicate the project in their region.

The Mountain Watershed Association is currently piloting the project in the Youghiogheny River watershed. Collaborators include the Center for Healy Environments and Communities, Three Rives Waterkeeper, Clean Water Action, PennEnvironment, Group Against Smog and Pollution, and the Fayette County Conservation District.

Our goal is to hold informational meetings on Marcellus shale throughout the Youghiogheny River watershed in order to ensure that people have the tools necessary to protect themselves and their properties from drilling. Additional informational meetings will be held in the Somerset, PA and Farmington, PA areas in Spring 2011. We are following these informational meetings with visual assessment training. The visual assessment trainings are designed to involve citizens in using their senses in providing oversight of drilling operations, for example, learning to recognize illegal water withdrawals or spills or air pollution. At these trainings citizens are provided with in-depth information on permitting, regulations, air and water impacts, a safety briefing, the Fracktracker data system, and an overview of our MCSP data reporting forms, through which citizens can report impacts to us and also to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.

To date, Mountain Watershed Association has sponsored two informational meetings in Connellsville, PA and Greensburg, PA. Approximately 60 people attended these meetings, and each received a toolkit with valuable information on topics including private water well protection, health impacts, and permitting and regulations. This packet is available for download at our website: www.mtwatershed.com. Presentations at the informational meetings included:

Visual assessment training

We have also sponsored one Visual Assessment training session in Mount Pleasant, PA. Fifteen people attended and each person received our Citizen Surveillance Manual, an 80 page manual designed to provide an in-depth overview of Marcellus shale and also instructions for how to safely and effectively conduct visual assessments. This training session was designed to be very interactive, and there was excellent discussion with those in attendance regarding Marcellus development throughout the Yough River watershed. The Citizen Surveillance Manual is also available on our website at www.mtwatershed.com.

Presentations include:

• Chuck Christen from the Center for Healthy Environments and Communities, the drilling process and the potential public health impacts from Marcellus shale extractions
• Ned Mulcahy from Three Rivers Waterkeeper: regulations and laws related to the natural gas industry
• Myron Arnowitt from Clean Water Action: water impacts from Marcellus shale activity
• Sue Seppi from Group Against Smog and Pollution: air impacts from Marcellus shale activity.
• Heather Fowler from the Fayette County Conservation District: well site hazards and safety

The Marcellus Citizen Stewardship Project gives citizens in Southwestern Pennsylvania an opportunity to take action to protect their watersheds and communities from the impacts of Marcellus drilling. For more information on the MCSP you can email veronica@mtwatershed.com or call at 724-455-4200 ext 4#. We also encourage those interested to join our mailing list in order to receive updates on this project. Visit www.mtwatershed.com to join. The data gathered from this process will eventually be uploaded onto FracTracker’s DataTool [link removed]. Check it out to see the other data presently available to registered users.

Reposted with permission from Mike Benard, Spectra Energy Watch

Spectra Energy Watch recently conducted an email interview / conversation with Ben Wallace. Ben Wallace is Chief Operating Officer (COO) of PENNECO, an oil and gas exploration company headquartered in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania.

PENNECO owns interests in more than 1,200 wells in 5 states, according to its website, and most of its wells are hydraulically fractured.

‘A Belief That Industry Will Not Answer Direct Questions’

In an exchange of three e-mails with Spectra Energy Watch’s blog, Wallace noted: “… I sense that one of your great frustrations is a lack of access to industry – or a belief that the industry will not answer direct questions…”

Yes – industry will not answer direct questions. It prefers platitudes like this one from Spectra Energy: Safety is our franchise. It’s what we ‘do.’

The gas industry wants it both ways. For example, on one hand it says hydraulic fracturing has been in use for 60 years with no adverse effects.

This is a half truth at best. Hydraulic fracturing has evolved as a technique over several decades. Slickwater, high-volume hydraulic fracturing began in the mid-to-late ’90s in Texas; and there is ample evidence that it has adverse effects on water and air.

Despite the gas industry’s claim of 60 years of hydraulic fracturing, it then claims to be a “nascent industry” that needs time to grow in states like Pennsylvania and New York (without a severance tax).

What is so hard about telling the truth about hydraulic fracturing?

PENNECO COO Ben Wallace was sincere in answering questions directly, but many of his responses illustrate how wide the gulf (no pun intended) is between the gas industry and those who experience the adverse effects of high-volume, slick-water hydraulic fracturing from shale gas wells.

For example, here are excerpts from Wallace’s comments:

• “I personally have no objections to injecting frac fluid into oil and gas bearing reservoirs and I, as a private citizen, am quite comfortable with the regulations in force by the individual states regarding this activity. Hydraulic fracturing presents no threat to clean safe drinking water.”
• “It does not bother me that a Marcellus fracture treatment uses 20 tons of chemicals diluted in 1,000,000 gallons of water and that the slurry is injected into a natural gas bearing formation multiple thousands of feet below any fresh water aquifers isolated by steel casing and cement.”
• “I would not support requiring closed loop systems to eliminate plastic lined ponds nor would I support installing vapor recovery units on tanks. Again, the relative risk is minimal and it only serves to increase the cost of energy to the consumer.”
• “In general, I do not support restrictions on drilling beyond those that currently exist. Sufficient zoning regulations are already in place within individual communities to govern this activity.”

Ben Wallace, like many of his industry colleagues, speaks in absolutes with complete confidence that only the ‘perfect world’ model exists in gas industry operations.

Then he offers comments like this:

I suggest that all those who are opposed to drilling and to the extractive process cease using energy. Turn of [sic] the cell phones. Turn of [sic] the lights. Power down the laptops. Park the cars. Turn of [sic] the air conditioner. Eat raw food. Stop using refrigeration. Until the critics are willing to do that, they are hypocritically pointing the finger of blame. The energy industry simply provides the product to which our society is complicity addicted.

The defect of that kind of emotional venting is that it can fly back in your face – tit for tat. Gas execs argue that the hydraulic fracturing fluid – chemo frack fluid, laced with toxic chemicals – is benign. Great. Drink it yourself.

In fact, PENNECO COO Ben Wallace is on the record in a letter to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) suggesting (carefully) that, “hydraulic fracturing chemicals in dilute solution” is comparable to Coca-Cola.

He agrees, of course, “it would be foolish to drink frac fluid.”

Okay, we got carried away. Don’t drink the frac fluid. But what about leadership by example from the gas industry? If “Study after study has found hydraulic fracturing to be safe,” as Wallace says in his letter to the EPA, why is this blog still unable to identify executives (senior managers) who have such operations on their property, near their home?

Ultra NIMBYs of the Gas Industry

As Wallace acknowledges: “I do not have a shale gas drilling rig on my property.” Nor is there a frac pond on his property.

Imagine gas industry execs with hydraulic fracturing operations near their homes who step up and acknowledge that they believe so strongly in the inherent safety of shale gas extraction that they “live” the principle, so to speak.

The great shame of the gas industry is that its execs want these wells on YOUR property, but not THEIR property. Gas industry senior managers are the new ultra NIMBYs.

Public Opinion Turning Against Gas Industry

No wonder Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, while declaring himself a “protector” and a “good spokesman” for the gas industry, worries that “public opinion is starting to turn [against the gas industry] because I don’t think the industry’s done a great job of public relations.”

While the industry and Penneco’s Ben Wallace declare hydraulic fracturing to be safe, the “protector” and “good spokesman” for the gas industry admits there are “five challenges” – all of them environmental.

The five “challenges” of shale gas extraction, in Rendell’s own words:

1. How to divert the millions of gallons of water that are necessary to operate the drilling?
2. How to prevent gas migration?
3. What do we do with the frac water – how do we dispose of it or beneficially reuse the frac water?
4. What about the infrastructure? What about the roads with the heavy truck traffic that’s coming in and out of shale drilling areas – mostly in our northern tier itself which is a fairly undeveloped part of Pennsylvania? And
5. How do we protect the natural beauty of the state? Pennsylvania was given by the Lord an incredible bounty of natural and wild lands. There are more natural and wild acres in Pennsylvania than the entire states of Connecticut and Rhode Island put together. And Pennsylvanians feel very strongly about that. We’re a great sportsmen’s state – fishing and hunting; and our wild and natural areas are very treasured.

Rendell made his remarks in a roundtable discussion with gas and oil execs in Dallas on March 25. If the “protector” of the gas industry in Pennsylvania acknowledges multiple risks to the environment, why can’t the gas industry?

Links and Resources

Reposted with permission from Nadia Steinzor, Earthworks, OGAP

When the landman comes knocking, it’s tempting to open the door wide. The promises made can be beguiling: fast cash, payments for years to come, and hardly any change on your property. Just sign up now…

But harsh reality can set in fast. Maybe it’s a road built right behind the house or through a crop field. Or barrels of toxic chemicals stored next to a drinking well. Perhaps the wastewater pond wasn’t fenced, so thirsty livestock got sick. And when the royalty check arrives, it’s far smaller than expected.

Across the Marcellus Shale region and beyond, there’s abundant evidence that a rush to drill without strong regulations causes environmental and health problems. Less well-known is how the rush to lease in the absence of information, legal advice, and safeguards is harming many landowners, as well as their neighbors and communities.

For more than a decade, OGAP has worked to inform property owners about their rights and what to consider before signing a lease — most recently at landowner workshops in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Citizens turned out to hear how leases can contain legally binding guidelines for precisely how and where gas development occurs. They learned from OGAP staff about what’s happening across the Marcellus region and nationwide. Attorney and leasing expert Bob Miller detailed what protective leases can look like, and why we all benefit when they exist. Petroleum accountant Mary Ellen Denomy explained the “fine print” of gas payments and how to make sure that companies pay landowners what they deserve. These presentations provide key information for anyone considering leasing or interested in leasing practices.

OGAP is all too aware of the many problems wrought by oil and gas development—and works much too hard to prevent and solve them—to be in the business of encouraging leasing. But we also know that because many people make the choice to lease, it’s far preferable to have it done in a way that protects land, water and air quality, and health, and which doesn’t leave impacted landowners financially high and dry.

Let’s face it—gas companies rarely do the right thing voluntarily on their own. They usually have to be pushed (and pushed) by policymakers, landowners, and the public to drill responsibly. This is the only way to keep citizens in the driver’s seat, ready to put on the brakes, as the gas development train rushes down the tracks.

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