The majority of FracTracker’s posts are generally considered articles. These may include analysis around data, embedded maps, summaries of partner collaborations, highlights of a publication or project, guest posts, etc.
This page has been archived. It is provided for historical reference only.
Due to all of the reports we receive daily about citizens’ experiences with shale gas extraction, CHEC has created an online form that people can use to submit these reports or questions. The information you provide can be anything from a road degradation issue in your municipality, an increase in DUI rates, a spill or leak on your property including photos, or even questions about the gas extraction process in your region. It would be very helpful to us if you could provide an exact location of an issue. We will do our best to respond to your questions.
The information you provide here will eventually be loaded onto the data tool. CHEC will use your data for research purposes only.
Unfortunately, if you describe an incident in the form below, it does not automatically get forwarded to the PA Department of Environmental Protection (PA DEP) or to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA); you can report incidents by completing the PA DEP’s online reporting form or by contacting EPA Eyes On Drilling: 1-877-919-4372, eyesondrilling@epa.gov.
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Environmental and Environmental Health Considerations and Sources of Data on Pipeline Incidents
By Conrad (Dan) Volz, DrPH, MPH
Archived
This page has been archived. It is provided for historical reference only.
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Two recent articles highlight this activity. The first, published by Greater Binghamton NY pressconnects.com, describes a pipeline that would run through Forest Lake, Susquehanna County, PA and Great Bend PA into Broome County, NY connecting to the Millennium Pipeline in Windsor, NY. The proposed pipeline would require construction of three compressor stations in Windsor NY (see the article’s correction). The second story published in the Wayne Independent announces that Penn State Cooperative Extension will host a workshop titled “Understanding Natural Gas Pipelines and Rights of Way” in Honesdale, PA on Wednesday, September 8 at the Wayne County Park Street Complex. This meeting will start at 6:30 pm and will include representatives from the Cooperative Extension, Tennessee Gas Pipeline, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Wayne Conservation District and the law firm of Tressler-Saunders LLC, Scranton. Topics of discussion of this meeting will be the Tennessee Gas Pipeline looping project, federal pipeline regulations and understanding right of way agreements.As the shale gas industry continues to develop and expand, and in some areas to expand to produce byproduct gases and organic compounds, pipelines are needed to connect these new producing areas with major supply lines. Byproduct gases and other useful organic chemicals will also need to be more efficiently transported to petrochemical facilities, and/or new petrochemical facilities will need to be built. This also means that new compressor plants will need to be established.
Installing pipeline – Photo from DownSteamToday.com
Methane gas pipelines and pipelines carrying other organic gases and vapors, their site requirements, and proximity to population centers have important public health implications for both occupational and environmental health and community and behavioral health and have been the subject of public health research in the past (Binder S, 1989). Also, gas pipelines can have significant impacts on forests, fragmentation of habitat and endangered and threatened species and severe ramifications for wildlife systems in the event of catastrophic releases (Dey PK, 2002). Pipeline explosions and fires and acute inhalation of gases, which can have immediately dangerous to life and health consequences, occur at varying frequencies throughout the United States and in fact around the world. A branch of public health termed “emergency preparedness” is dedicated to the prevention of accidental or intentional incidents resulting in infrastructure failures and includes nuclear power plants, water treatment systems as well as oil and gas pipelines. More info: see Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Preparedness for All Hazards and the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Public Health Preparedness (UPCPHP) that trains public health professionals, including professionals in related organizations, to respond to public health threats and emergencies. This project is funded through the Center for Public Health Practice by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cooperative agreement number U90/CCU324238-05.
In the United States the Department of Transportation’s (DOT) Pipeline and Hazardous Material Safety Administration (PHMSA), acting through the Office of Pipeline Safety (OPS), administers a regulatory program to assure the safe transportation of natural gas, petroleum, and other hazardous materials by pipeline. OPS develops regulations and other approaches to risk management to assure safety in design, construction, testing, operation, maintenance, and emergency response of pipeline facilities. PHMSA is committed to a data-driven approach to developing and refining pipeline safety programs.
On PHMSA’s stakeholder communication website, there are extensive pipeline incident and mileage reports. These reports present information and trend analyses for pipeline incidents over the past 20 years. Categories of important data and reports are grouped by:
Serious Incidents – defined as incidents involving a fatality or requiring in-patient hospitalization;
Significant Incidents – defined as incidents which include a minimum value for property damage, value or volume or product lost and certain criterion for a fire and/or explosion;
All Reported Incidents – which includes tables and charts covering all pipeline incidents reported to PHMSA in accordance with regulatory reporting criteria.
In the last category of all reported incidents, the reports provided are generated from numerous data sources maintained by PHMSA and span decades of collection, evolving methods of oversight and multiple reporting formats. To generate these reports, PHMSA has standardized the data over various file formats, normalized incident costs over time to a common basis year- 2009 dollars, and standardized incident cause categories – all with the goal of producing a coherent and meaningful picture of National and State-specific trends in pipeline incidents. If you prefer to produce your own analysis, the raw data used in these reports are available to the public.
On this site PHMSA offers access to significant incident data. This is a treasure trove of important data that are all available to the public. In addition to 2010 data to present, there are data on flagged and significant incidents from 2006 to 2/17/2010. Below is the gateway to each year’s incident reports:
These files are a flagged version of all operator reported incident files that can be accessed from the PHMSA FOIA On-Line Library (a Freedom of Information Act library). The above flagged version of files differs from the FOIA on line library in they have been flagged to indicate incident significance, flagged to indicate fire-first Gas Distribution incidents, and include indexed costs in addition to raw (nominal) costs.
The 2010-present PHMSA flagged dataset reports 38 total incidents across the country. Thirty Three (33) or about 87% of these incidents were reported as significant incidents. Reported in this dataset is an explosion and fire at a major natural gas pipeline; it occurred June 7, 2010 in Johnson County, Texas near Cleburne. The blast and fire killed one worker and injured seven others. It was caused by utility workers digging holes for utility poles. There was only one home within ½ mile of the explosion and fire, and it was not affected. CHEC recently converted some of this data from excel spreadsheets to comma separated values so that it could be displayed and visualized on FracTracker’s data tool:
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A whitepaper produced by principle investigator Mark Stephens of C-FER Technologies under contract with the Gas Research Institute presents an approach to sizing ground area potentially affected by the failure of high pressure natural gas pipelines (Stephens M, 2000). It states that rupture of a high pressure natural gas pipeline can produce threats to both people and property in the area where the failure occurs. In this whitepaper an equation was developed relating both the diameter and operating pressure of a pipeline to the area that is affected in the event of a real world worst case failure incident. The model on which the hazard area equation is based depends on three factors:
“A fire-based model that relates the gas release rate from the pipe to the heat intensity of the resultant fire,
An effective release rate model that provides a representative steady-state approximation to the actual transient release rate, and
A heat intensity threshold that establishes the sustained heat intensity level above which the effects on people and property are consistent with the adopted definition of a High Consequence Area.”
The equation given in the manuscript is as follows:
This whitepaper used actual explosions and fires to demonstrate the usefulness of their model. These incidents are excerpted from the manuscript to show the types of incidents possible and the damage and fatalities that can result.
Public hearing to be conducted for proposed natural gas pipeline and the article’s correction [links removed]
Natural gas pipelines – understanding the infrastructure development [link removed]
BINDER, S, 1989, Deaths, Injuries, and Evacuations from Acute Hazardous Materials Releases, American Journal of Public Health, Vol. 79, No. 8.
Dey, Prasanta Kumar, 2002, An integrated assessment model for cross-country pipelines. Environmental Impact Assessment Review, Volume 22, Issue 6, November 2002, Pages 703-721.
Stephens, MJ, 2000, A model for sizing high consequence areas associated with natural gas pipelines. C-FER Technologies, 200 Karl Clark Road, Edmonton, Alberta, T6N 1H2 Canada, C-FER Report 99086; GRI 8600 West Bryn Mawr Avenue, Chicago, IL, 60631-3362, GRI document number 00/0189.
For More Information
Mike Benard has written a blog post on some of the unanswered questions surrounding pipelines, as well as lessons learned from other shale regions. Read more.
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This page has been archived. It is provided for historical reference only.
The Mountain Watershed Association (MWA) is developing a pilot ‘Marcellus Citizen Stewardship Project’ in collaboration with the Center for Healthy Environments and Communities at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health and other environmentally-focused organizations to increase public awareness of issues associated with developing the Marcellus shale in western Pennsylvania. As part of this project, MWA will host four informational meetings and two citizen training sessions located in the Yough basin.
The informational meetings for citizens will include information on the drilling and permitting process, leasing pitfalls, compliance and the DEP’s role in oversight, and water, air and health impacts.
Informational sessions will be held on the following dates in the following PA communities:
September 28, 2010:
Connellsville
October 5, 2010:
Greensburg/Latrobe
November 4, 2010:
Farmington
November 9, 2010:
Somerset
Time and location TBA.
MWA will also be hosting citizen surveillance trainings designed to assist the public in conducting visual assessments and basic water monitoring associated with well development throughout the area. For more information on this initiative, contact Veronica.
This page has been archived. It is provided for historical reference only.
CHEC would like to thank the Western PA Conservancy for allowing their raw GIS data to be published online. The following snapshot was creating by layering two separate datasets:
Core Habitat Biological Diversity Areas
Marcellus Shale Drilling Permits in PA from 2007 to Aug. 2010
A core habitat area is the essential habitat of the species of concern or natural community that can absorb very little activity or disturbance without substantial impact to the natural features. Zoom in on the map below to view these sensitive areas and their proximity drilling permits in closer detail. (Just click on the zoom button in the gray toolbar.)
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Data uploaded by Josh Knauer, CEO of the data tool’s developer, Rhiza Labs.
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This page has been archived. It is provided for historical reference only.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency may consider including in their hydraulic fracturing study the impacts on air quality that the shale gas extraction process could have. Direct conversations with EPA staff indicate that they plan to conduct a full life cycle analysis and assess greenhouse gas issues, and may also look at air quality in general. You can read the full explanation in the reposted article from the Daily Sentinel below, but sometimes pictures are worth a thousand words; in the following snapshot from FracTracker’s DataTool, check out the lack of ozone monitors located near current Marcellus Shale gas wells in PA.
Recently retired Environmental Protection Agency environmental engineer Weston Wilson is best known for criticizing his employer’s 2004 finding that hydraulic fracturing poses little or no risk to domestic groundwater.
Now, the Denver EPA whistleblower is encouraged by the agency’s interest in studying the natural gas development procedure’s potential impacts on air quality as well.
“I’m proud of EPA now,” not just for undertaking the study, but indicating it may expand the study’s reach beyond water, Wilson said.
His position puts him at odds with the oil and gas industry. At a Denver EPA meeting this summer, several industry representatives argued the study should be limited, as directed by a congressional committee, to the relationship between fracturing and groundwater. “And certainly not air quality,” as Kathleen Sgamma of the Western Energy Alliance put it.
But one of a number of Garfield County residents who say their health has been affected by drilling says he supports the idea of the EPA considering whether fracturing creates airborne health concerns as well.
“I think they should look at all aspects that affect public health,” Ron Galterio said.
He and several other Battlement Mesa residents say they’ve suffered ill effects from fumes from recent nearby fracturing operations by Antero Resources.
Josh Joswick of the San Juan Citizens Alliance told the EPA during its Denver meeting, “I don’t think you can study water without studying air.” Read more.
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This page has been archived. It is provided for historical reference only.
During a recent FracTracker training session, CHEC’s director Dr. Conrad Dan Volz used the following maps created with FracTracker’s DataTool to demonstrate the potential impact that additional oil and gas activities in Pennsylvania could have on the state’s watersheds and waterways. The first map you see below shows all of the facilities in PA that applied for and received approval from the state to accept and treat the liquid waste that results from oil and gas operations.
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Some things of note in the map above:
The number of facilities in the Monongahela drainage, which is a source of drinking water for many people in the Pittsburgh area.
The facilities in the Allegheny River and Susquehanna River drainage.
In the map below, we have zoomed in on the Monongahela River drainage to take a closer look at the 13 permitted facilities that could impact that area.
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The signifiant number of permitted facilities along the Monongahela River got us wondering what the cumulative impact could be on the Monongahela drainage, especially since the TDS (total dissolved solids) level fluctuated above drinking water standards in 2009; below are some approximate calculations on the amount of contaminants that could be discharged into the river from those facilities on any given day.
Major Facilities Accepting Wastewater in the Monongahela Drainage and Volume Permitted
Permitted Site
1000 Gallons/Day
1) McKeesport – Monongahela (POTW)
115
2) Clariton Municipal Authority – Peters Creek (POTW)
60
3) Mon Valley Brine (Monongahela River)
200
4) Authority of Borough of Charleroi – Monongahela (POTW)
30
5) Municipal Authority of Belle Vernon – Monongahela (POTW) (2 permits)
10
6) Municipal Authority of Belle Vernon – Monongahela (POTW)
5
7) Borough of California – Monongahela (POTW)
10
8) Brownsville Municipal Authority – Dunlap Creek (POTW)
9
9) Franklin Township Sewer Authority – South Fork Tenmile Creek (POTW)
50
10) Waynesburg Borough – South Fork Tenmile Creek (POTW)
8
11) Shallenberger-Ronco – Monongahela (NPDES permit effective. As of 10/31/09, WQM permit in progress.)
500
12) Shallenberger-Rankin Run (NPDES permit effective on 11/1/2008.)
125
13) Shallenberger Connellsville – Youghiogheny
1,000
14?) Somerset Regional Water Resources (East Branch Coxes Creek) (RO and Evaporators proposed. NPDES permit granted on 12/17/2009. Amendment to the NPDES permit is pending.)
?
Range of TGD:
612 – 2112
Concentrations of Selected Important Contaminants from Marcellus Shale Flowback Water (FBW)*
We will add more information to this post as we investigate the above amounts of contaminants and how they compare to the volume of fresh water in the river and to other types of discharges that regularly enter the waterway.
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BY LAURA LEGERE (STAFF WRITER) – THE TIMES-TRIBUNE
Reposted- Published: August 13, 2010
Archived
This page has been archived. It is provided for historical reference only.
There are no unleased acres left in Pennsylvania’s state forests where Marcellus Shale natural gas drilling sites, pipelines and access roads could be built without damaging environmentally sensitive areas, according to a new analysis by the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources.
Nearly 139,000 acres of state forest have been leased for gas drilling since 2008 and money from those lucrative leases – a total of $354 million – has been used to help balance the last two state budgets. But DCNR Secretary John Quigley said the era of leasing large parcels of state forests for gas drilling is over. “We may do some little stuff here and there,” he said, “but in terms of large-scale leasing, we’re done.”
The department’s findings, demonstrated in a series of overlain maps on DCNR’s website, show the forests in northcentral Pennsylvania above the gas-rich Marcellus Shale crowded by leased land, parcels where the state does not own the mineral rights and places where development must be restricted.
Of the 1.5 million acres of state forest underlain by the shale, 700,000 acres have already been leased or the mineral rights under them are controlled by an owner other than the state. An additional 702,500 acres are in ecologically sensitive areas – places with protected species, forested buffers, old growth or steep slopes. Another 27,500 acres are designated as primitive and remote lands, 49,600 acres were identified through a forest conservation analysis as priority conservation lands, and the last 20,400 acres are so entwined with the other sensitive areas that they cannot be developed without damaging them. Read more.
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This page has been archived. It is provided for historical reference only.
Shale gas is considered by many in the industry to be an ideal transition fuel toward renewable energy. This article written in June by Daniel Botkin, professor emeritus of the University of California, Santa Barbara, discusses whether extracting shale gas is worth the risk and also compares the benefits and drawbacks of other energy sources. Great read!
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This page has been archived. It is provided for historical reference only.
Our GIS Specialist, Drew, has added an updated dataset from the PA DEP onto the data tool showing all of the Marcellus Shale wells that have been drilled in PA since 2007. (We don’t have the records for anything before that – YET – because all of those records are still just on paper.)
[archived content]
We know that leases are already being sought after and signed within Pittsburgh’s city limits. Tell us what you think about drilling that is occurring near sensitive areas (e.g. on school properties, biologically diverse lands, or in major cities). Do you feel that the regulations and policies currently in place are stringent enough to properly protect public health? To learn more about some of the issues associated with gas extraction activities, be sure to check out the PA Land Trust Association’s incident report.
This page has been archived. It is provided for historical reference only.
The FracTracker meeting that we planned to host on August 13th in West Virginia has been postponed. We will let you know when this meeting is rescheduled. In the meantime, please give us your feedback: malone@fractracker.org.
