Beaver County Blue

Progressive Democrats of America – PA 4th CD Chapter

-2010/11/14 – Eminent Domain, Enter the Feds

(4 articles: eminent domain, water issues, local organizing, and federal gas legislation)

1. Pipeline companies may seek eminent domain

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10318/1103192-454.stm

Sunday, November 14, 2010
By Timothy McNulty, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Sitting in his family’s 1785 stone farmhouse, Fayette County’s Jim Rosenberg may look out on his 49.5 acres one day soon and see a natural gas company digging a 50-foot-wide Marcellus Shale pipeline through his property — regardless of whether he approved of it.

Unlike their immediate neighbors in rural Grindstone — three miles east of Brownsville — Mr. Rosenberg and his wife have already resisted requests to drill conventional natural gas wells on the property they’ve lived on since 1974. If gas companies make pleas to build a pipeline through their land, they plan to resist those too, but they may not have a choice.

It’s the latest worry for those Pennsylvanians suspicious of the growing Marcellus Shale industry. Under applications currently before the Public Utility Commission in Harrisburg, pipeline companies would be able to use condemnation powers to gain rights-of-way, even from unwilling landowners.

Peregrine Keystone Gas Pipeline, a Fort Worth, Texas, company that builds and operates pipelines for transporting natural gas, is proposing a $16 million project in Fayette, Greene and Washington counties and has applied to the state to become a public utility, which would give it the quasi-governmental power to traverse private properties through eminent domain.

The company, which has utility status in Texas, says it has rarely used the condemnation power and would much rather pay upfront for rights-of-way than go through the complicated and costly eminent domain process. Peregrine Keystone vice president Loren Fuller notes the company has a spotless safety record and promises to avoid homes when laying its pipeline.

Furthermore, according to gas industry experts, the move toward public utility status by pipeline firms is likely driven more by long-term business strategy than the ability to get condemnation powers.

Plenty of rural Pennsylvania property owners are in favor of getting paid to host drilling rigs that bore a mile down to the Marcellus Shale deposit, or to grant easements to let “midstream” companies such as Peregrine build pipelines between wells and long-distance distribution pipelines. It is other owners such as Mr. Rosenberg who are worried by the latest move.

“If eminent domain seizes property from one private property owner and gives it to another private property owner, that is very problematic. Things like that I have a big problem with,” said Mr. Rosenberg, an information technology technician who officially objected to Peregrine’s utility application.

“It’s common talk around here to hear people say, ‘You might as well sign the lease, they’re going to take it anyway.’ That’s not true. … People commonly believe it, but it’s pretty important to be asking if this is a real thing, and to get an awful lot of clarification,” he said.

Peregrine filed its application for public utility status in September, following a similar request in January by another pipeline firm called Laser Northeast Gathering in Susquehanna County. Both applications are being watched — and in many cases criticized — by other firms in the natural gas industry that worry utility status would invite unwanted government oversight of the state’s fledgling midstream pipeline industry.

Utility status means extra regulation from the utility commission and a ceiling on rates and tariffs, which some firms want to avoid. Competing firms — such as Laurel Mountain Midstream of Moon, which operates in the same counties as Peregrine — complained to the PUC that utility status could give Peregrine exclusive pipeline rights to the area.

“The administrative granting of service territories to natural gas gatherers, and particularly exclusive service territories, runs contrary to the business of natural gas gathering, which is a competitive industry where market forces govern behavior, particularly with respect to siting,” said the company’s official complaint.

Pipelines are a major growth sector in the Marcellus-related gas industry. It looks like there will be a glut in the natural gas industry for some time — with the amount of gas in excess of its demand — a factor that should benefit pipeline companies that are paid to move and store it, explained Duquesne University energy industry expert Kent Moors.

Marcellus Shale gas may be cheaper than that produced elsewhere in the country and that will “move the more expensive gas out of the market. That’s one of the reasons why, maybe, these companies are coming up from Texas,” Dr. Moors said.

He said eminent domain power is not the big driver behind utility status — companies that move gasoline and some hazardous materials are already recognized as public utilities by the state — and the firms would rather avoid the procedure when negotiating for rights-of-way. If a landowner resists a utility easement request, the matter goes before a judicial board that determines a fair value, which is paid to the owner in exchange for the right-of-way.

Eminent domain’s condemnation power is still an effective tool for the industry, said Dave Messersmith of the Penn State Cooperative Extension Marcellus Education Team in Wayne County. “If they are doing a project from point A to point B and one or two property owners in the way are not willing to negotiate right-of-way, that really makes that project one that isn’t very viable,” he said.

Peregrine would need 50 feet of right-of-way to dig its pipelines and bar property owners from building or planting deep-rooted trees on a 30-foot-wide strip of land once it was laid.

“If there is one tree in the backyard that their grandkids swing on, we talk to landowners to accommodate avoiding things like that,” said Mr. Fuller. “It’s a business decision with condemnation. Instead of allocating for those legal proceedings, we’d much rather pay the landowner” upfront, he said.

Peregrine says 90 percent of the pipeline construction’s costs would be funneled through local supplies and labor, benefiting the local economy.

Veronica Coptis, a community organizer for Fayette County’s Mountain Watershed Association, counters that the fight is really about the bottom line for the powerful industry, using the privately held resources of Pennsylvanians.

“This is stepping on private property rights, whether people want these [pipelines] on their property or not,” she said. “Where do we draw the line? What is the greater good? … We’re shading the black and white areas and making them more gray.”

2. How many water supplies have been impacted by gas drilling? Pa. doesn’t keep count

http://thetimes-tribune.com/news/how-many-water-supplies-have-been-impacted-by-gas-drilling-pa-doesn-t-keep-count-1.1063683

By Laura Legere (Staff Writer)
Published: November 14, 2010

Strengthened oil and gas regulations to be considered by a state review board this week will help answer an increasingly urgent question in the era of Marcellus Shale exploration: how many water supplies have been impacted by drilling activities?

Right now, no one is keeping a complete count.

The Oil and Gas Act does not require drillers to notify state regulators when landowners alert them that drinking water has been harmed by the companies’ operations.

Under current law, the Department of Environmental Protection must look into cases of potential drinking water pollution only when it is asked to investigate a problem by a landowner.

The department also does not track how often gas drillers voluntarily replace drinking water supplies, either temporarily or permanently.

“Often, homeowners and drillers work out agreements without needing the department’s assistance,” DEP spokesman Tom Rathbun said. “We get involved when we are notified of a problem, but we are not made aware of every case.”

A revised Oil and Gas Act will change that. When the new regulations go into effect, likely in January if they pass all reviews, drillers will have to notify the department within 24 hours of receiving a complaint.

An earlier draft of the revisions, which gave drillers 10 days to notify the department of a complaint, was changed after commentators on the regulations argued that was not quick enough.

The change from no notification to nearly instantaneous notification signals an increasing awareness of how often drinking water complaints go uncounted at a time when everyone from farmers to the federal government is looking for more complete information on the short- and long-term impacts of gas drilling on water resources.

Without the mandatory disclosure, critics say, voluntary arrangements can take advantage of the fact that there are disincentives for landowners to ask DEP to intervene: People may feel intimidated about pushing their complaints or fear causing any disruption to the gas companies that pay them royalties.

On some occasions, gas companies, even when working side-by-side with regulators to address water complaints, have made clear efforts to keep voluntary water replacement arrangements out of the public eye.

How many problems?

There is a clear gap between the relatively small number of state orders for drillers to provide homes with replacement water and the visible proliferation of water tanks (called buffaloes), well vents, new wells, treatment systems and bottled water being delivered or installed in gas-drilling regions.

After a records search in June 2009, DEP reported there had been fewer than 80 cases of groundwater contamination caused by oil and gas drilling in the state in more than 15 years, as measured by the number of official orders the agency sent to drillers to permanently restore or replace damaged water supplies.

With 32,000 oil and gas wells drilled within that time span, that amounts to a .25 percent incident rate – a track record the industry frequently touts.

But unofficial counts put the number of disturbed water supplies much higher.

Daniel Farnham, an environmental engineer who has tested more than 2,000 water wells in Northeast and Northcentral Pennsylvania where Marcellus Shale drilling is under way, estimates as many as 50 homes in Bradford County alone are currently getting replacement water supplies provided by gas companies.

In Susquehanna County, Dimock Twp. offers a vivid example of the gap between the officially determined size of the problem and the true number of drinking water supplies that have been replaced.

DEP has ordered Cabot Oil and Gas Corp. to replace 18 water supplies – connected to 19 homes – that were tainted with methane the agency traced to faulty Cabot Marcellus Shale gas wells, a claim the company refutes.

But according to Cabot documentation provided to the department as part of the order, at least 36 Dimock residences have at some point had water supplies replaced or remediated by Cabot at least temporarily.

At the time Cabot provided DEP with its water replacement list, in June, the company had drilled 89 natural gas wells in and around Dimock – meaning Cabot remedied or replaced a water supply, on average, for more than one in every three gas wells it drilled.

Cabot spokesman George Stark said the numbers reflect Cabot’s policy of investigating all water supply complaints and “when we see the immediate need” providing replacement water during an investigation. Some complaints may turn out to be unfounded, unrelated to gas drilling, or temporary disruptions that clear up on their own, he said.

Cabot, the most active driller in Susquehanna County, has removed nine homes from the list of 36 receiving water, Mr. Stark said. The company drilled one replacement water well and reconditioned three others. Five homes accepted filtration systems that are in the process of being installed.

Chesapeake Energy, the most active driller in Bradford County, did not answer a request to disclose the number of water supplies it has replaced or remediated.

“Waiting to blow me up”

Most drillers and many landowners say voluntary arrangements for solving residential water problems are amicable, even generous.

Gary Lopez, a Dimock resident, wrote grateful letters to area newspapers thanking Cabot “for solving my water problems” by first delivering replacement water then drilling a new well after his old well “tested high for methane and barium.”

In the worst cases, though, homeowners have found gas company representatives bullying even as they appear to be helping to fix the problem.

Sherry Vargson noticed her faucets began to sputter and blow what seemed like air after Chesapeake Energy performed what workers told her was a maintenance procedure on the gas wells yards from her Granville Summit home in June.

A company contractor tested the head space in her water well and found elevated levels of methane. DEP tests a month later found the flammable gas present in her water supply at 56.3 mg/L – twice the level at which water can no longer hold the gas and releases it into the atmosphere or enclosed spaces, creating a risk of explosion.

Because pre-drilling water tests “did not find the presence of the methane gas,” DEP found that the tests indicated that gas well drilling caused the change in the water supply.

Chesapeake has provided the Vargsons with bottled water since the day in June when the company detected the gas, but despite DEP recommendations that the company install a vent stack on the well to help keep the gas from concentrating, the well is still not vented.

Instead, Chesapeake presented Mrs. Vargson with an agreement in July which required the family to release the company from all claims and liabilities related to the water up until that date in exchange for installing a vent “as a precautionary measure.”

The agreement, which the Vargsons refused to sign in its original form, also included a non-disclosure clause meant to bar the family from discussing the agreement, its terms or Chesapeake’s role in providing a vent.

In a statement, Chesapeake’s senior director for corporate development, Brian Grove, said the company does not believe its activities affected the Vargson water well, which he said was “equipped with a venting cap predating our operations” because of “pre-existing methane.” The company’s pre- and post-drilling water tests show the water “virtually unchanged,” he said – a position at odds with DEP findings reported Sept. 2.

Whenever a question is raised about any water supply, Mr. Grove said, the company “routinely provides a temporary replacement source of water as a courtesy and notifies the DEP immediately while we begin to investigate” – a process that “most often” finds that the problem is not related to drilling activity, he added.

The purpose of the legal agreements is to grant the company permission “to access the property and provide needed equipment or services” in cases where a lot of activity will be required in or near a home.

“Confidentiality clauses are common in these and many other types of agreements,” he said.

Mrs. Vargson, who now sleeps with three windows open, is frustrated that the DEP has not enforced its finding linking gas drilling to her water problems, which she is not afraid to discuss.

Last week, she held a match to the sputtering water running from her kitchen faucet and a flame ran up the stream to the spout.

“All of that is aerating in here,” she said, “pocketing in the house, waiting to blow me up.”

About 20 miles across Bradford County, near Spring Lake, two Chesapeake-provided water buffaloes sit in the yard behind the more than 100-year-old farmhouse owned by Jacqueline Place.

On April 1, nearly two weeks after the water to Ms. Place’s home turned cloudy then dark brown and her sister’s cows refused to drink it, a DEP inspector and Chesapeake contractors came to test the water. Chesapeake disconnected the well, filled the water buffaloes and plumbed them into the home – a project that took hours.

At around 10 p.m., the last Chesapeake contractor handed Ms. Place a document and told her he would not flip the switch on the system he had just installed unless she signed it. According to her sister, Roslyn Bohlander, the contractor told Ms. Place the document was “nothing” important and, when pressed, told her it was a nondisclosure agreement.

Ms. Place would not acknowledge the document or release it to The Times-Tribune.

“It was such a crisis point,” Mrs. Bohlander said. In the previous days, Ms. Place and her son had not used the water to shower, cook or clean dishes or clothes. They took sponge baths, Mrs. Bohlander said, and the cows, “they were just drinking enough to live.”

DEP and private tests have since shown elevated levels of methane and metals in the water.

“They did all they had done to make it not be a bad situation,” she said, “but then they said you can’t have this water.”

Mr. Grove said Chesapeake does not believe its operations have affected the water supply and “have not caused any reduction of quality of the water in the well.

“Repeated analyses have not detected any constituents related to natural gas drilling and production,” he said.

The company continues to provide replacement water to the Places and Bohlanders, like the Vargsons “as a courtesy,” he said, “while we work with the DEP and residents to bring closure to these matters.”

Chesapeake has told the family on three occasions, each with between 24 and 48 hours notice, that it planned to take away the buffaloes and stop the water deliveries. DEP officials have told the family they cannot stop Chesapeake from taking the water because they did not order the company to provide the water in the first place, Ms. Place said.

Mrs. Bohlander said the price of a buffalo and frequent water deliveries for the cows and the home is “unaffordable.”

“We no longer have a plan B,” she said.

Contact the writer: llegere@timesshamrock.com’60 Minutes’ in Dimock

Dimock residents will be featured on tonight’s edition of “60 minutes” in a segment called “Shaleionaires” which will address both the economic benefits and environmental concerns about shale gas drilling. The show airs on CBS at 7 p.m.

3. Gas-leasing boom leads residents to fend for themselves

http://www.vindy.com/news/2010/nov/14/land-grab/

Published: Sun, November 14, 2010 @ 12:01 a.m.


Bob Rea, a farmer in Salem Township in Columbiana County, has helped form a group of landowners who are negotiating with drilling companies for rights to natural gas on their properties.

By GRACE WYLER

gwyler@vindy.com

SALEM

The natural-gas boom sweeping the Appalachian Basin has hit Columbiana County in full force, with gas producers moving to snap up mineral-rights leases in the area’s lucrative shale formations.

But the land rush has left many property owners overwhelmed by the leasing process and concerned they might not be getting a fair deal for their hydrocarbons.

Bob Rea, a farmer who owns 40 acres south of Salem, has taken matters into his own hands. Rea and several of his neighbors have formed a land group to educate themselves on an industry that has the potential to make them overnight millionaires.

“We are trying to address the issues from the standpoint of how we can best protect ourselves,” Rea said. “These are capitalists, and they want to make money. The way you make money is you buy low and you sell high — there is nothing wrong with what they’re doing; it just feels wrong when you are on the low side.”

The group, which began as an informal collective of about 65 families from the Salem area, has exploded in both size and scope.

The Associated Landowners of the Ohio Valley, as the group is now known, represents more than 200 landowners in Columbiana County, who together own about 20,000 acres of unleased land.

“All we want to do is try to level the playing the field a little bit,” Rea said. “We want to make it so that those of us who aren’t educated in this new technology at least have a chance to defend ourselves in the negotiations to get the best that we can.”

Across Columbiana County, leasing agents have been working aggressively to persuade landowners to sign over their subsurface mineral rights.

The county recorded 556 leases in the first 10 months of 2010, compared with 196 leases signed in the same period last year, according to the Columbiana County recorder’s office.

Every day more than 20 leasing agents duke it out over the office’s two microfilm machines, said deputy recorder Diana Reiter.

“You usually can’t move back there,” Reiter said. “The companies call every day to see how many more people we can handle.”

As competition for land has escalated, so has the price companies are willing to pay.

Mineral-rights leases are now worth upwards of $2,000 per acre, up from about $750 per acre earlier this year.

“I have been in this business 37 years, and I have never quite seen the feeding frenzy that I have seen here in the past few months,” said Ben Funderberg, vice president at Ohio Valley Energy, an oil- and gas-leasing company based in Austintown. “It really is a land grab.”

MARCELLUS SHALE

Drillers were initially drawn to the region by the Marcellus Shale, a massive natural-gas formation that stretches across New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and parts of Ohio. Marcellus wells are thought to be more productive in the northeastern part of the formation, where the shale is thickest.

But leasing and drilling activity has been moving west across the Appalachian Basin, Funderberg said. While a moratorium on shale drilling in New York could play a minor role in the westward shift, geology is usually the primary decision-making factor in the oil and gas industry, he said.

Producers are likely looking at the Utica Shale, an Ordivinian formation below the Marcellus, Funderberg said. The Utica is thought to contain oil as well as natural gas.

Small, independent gas producers such as Ohio Valley Energy have been drilling conventional natural-gas wells in the Clinton sandstone for several decades, Funderberg said.

But the recent activity is driven by the biggest players in the energy industry, which have the resources to drill the more expensive and technologically advanced shale wells.

Chesapeake Energy, an Oklahoma-based gas producer, is responsible for most of the leasing in Columbiana County, Funderberg said.

The company, one of the largest operators in the Marcellus Shale, recently spent about $850 million to buy leasehold and option rights to 500,000 acres in the Appalachian Basin from Anschutz Corp.

Other major companies, including Royal Dutch Shell and ExxonMobil, have bought up gas assets in the region. Chevron acquired Atlas Energy, a Pittsburgh-based independent producer with nearly 1 million acres in the Marcellus and Utica shales.

“Everything is totally dependent on geology,” Funderberg said. “I don’t think that [gas producers] would come in here and spend this much money without drilling.”

So far, there have been relatively few shale wells drilled in Ohio. Of more than 64,000 oil and gas wells in the state, only about 30 are tapping into shale formations.

Shale drilling is not likely to have an impact on Ohio’s energy landscape in the immediate future, said Tom Tugend, deputy chief of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources’ Division of Minerals Management, which oversees oil and gas drilling. Horizontal wells have a much larger “footprint,” Tugend said, and it can take gas producers several months, if not years, to obtain all the leases required to get a permit.

“At this point, companies are in the exploratory phase,” Tugend said. “They are signing a lot of land, so we know there will be more [drilling], but how much more is hard to say.”

REGULATION

ODNR is responsible for regulating permitting and well production, Tugend said, but has “absolutely no involvement” in the leasing process.

In the absence of state oversight, landowners are left to try to defend their interests from major gas producers adept at getting what they want from a lease.

The Associated Landowners of the Ohio Valley is relying on strength in numbers. The land group voted to hire Youngstown law firm Harrington, Hoppe & Mitchell to draft an original lease that provides protection from possible environmental contamination and property damage.

Typically, landowners will make addendums to a standard company lease. But Rea is confident that the size of the land group will bring gas producers to the table and give landowners a stronger position in negotiations.

“I think that we can approach them as partners in this thing,” Rea said. “We aren’t here to be adversaries, but we have to protect people.”

More than 400 property owners gathered at Armstrong Saddlery & Trailer last Monday to view a copy of the lease. The association is asking the landowners to sign a letter of intent, committing their acres to the group.

A major provision in the lease would limit the size of horizontal drilling units to 640 acres. Drilling units are designated by the company in their permit application to denote where gas will be drawn.

Ohio, unlike other oil- and gas-drilling states such as Texas and Pennsylvania, does not put a maximum limit on unit size.

Unlimited unit sizes can dramatically curtail royalties for individual landowners, as these payments are prorated based on the amount of acreage one owns in a unit.

But the royalty checks are only part of the equation.

If a company does not own a well within the initial term of the lease, usually five years, a landowner will have the option to renew the lease for a second signing bonus. But once a well is drilled on a unit, all of the land in that unit is “held by production” — the lease is automatically renewed for as long as the well is producing gas or oil.

“They could literally control the whole region with only a few wells,” Rea said. “This has little to do with the size of the royalty checks — this is how they can control huge amounts of land.”

4. Environmentalists are torn as natural gas comes to the fore Gas could provide a rare energy compromise in the next Congress

By Andrew Restuccia
The Washington Independent
11/12/10 6:00 AM

http://washingtonindependent.com/103317/environmentalists-are-torn-as-natural-gas-comes-to-the-fore

Less than two hours after President Obama suggested in a post-midterm press conference that Republicans and Democrats could find common ground on proposals to develop the country’s natural gas resources, Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune underscored environmentalists’ love-hate relationship with the fossil fuel.

“To be clear, natural gas is not clean, but it’s cleaner than some dirty energy,” he told reporters at a separate Nov. 3 press conference on the prospects for energy and climate legislation in the new Congress.

Natural gas is shaping up to be one of a small handful of energy issues that could get significant attention in the next Congress. As a result, environmentalists are being forced to grapple with the complexities surrounding the expanded use of natural gas. On the one hand, burning natural gas produces about 40 percent less greenhouse gas emissions than coal; on the other hand, natural gas drilling presents its own set of concerns that make environmentalists cringe.

“We want to make sure natural gas is not viewed as some kind of magic bullet,” said Franz Matzner, climate legislative director at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “But we need to look at ways in which we can reduce our carbon footprint now and it’s appealing that it has a smaller footprint. It’s not a replacement for getting renewables online.”

Meanwhile, hoping to ride the momentum from Obama’s high-profile remarks last week, the natural gas industry is preparing to push next year for a number of provisions that favor natural gas. One natural gas industry official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said natural gas will be a key issue in any bipartisan energy bill next year. “There is some potential to gather bipartisan support for an energy proposal that involves promotion of natural gas,” the official said. “There can be some kind of adjustment policy that allows for the benefits that natural gas provides: stable pricing, domestic production and plentiful resources.”

The natural gas industry plans to lobby for the inclusion of natural gas as an option for meeting a renewable energy standard, which would require that a certain percentage of the country’s electricity come from renewable sources like wind and solar.

In a Nov. 5 letter to President Obama obtained by The Washington Independent, the heads of the country’s four major natural gas industry groups laid out their policy priorities. “Should Congress move forward on a renewable or clean electricity standard, natural gas generation should be included as a compliance option,” the letter said.

Environmentalists and clean energy advocates say they will oppose such an effort. “Natural gas is not a renewable energy source,” said Dan Weiss, senior fellow and the director of climate strategy at the Center for American Progress. “Therefore it does not belong in an RES.”

David Hamilton, director of global warming and energy programs at the Sierra Club, echoed Weiss’ sentiments. “We really would need to look at the details,” Hamilton said. “But we’ve traditionally been protective of what gets called clean.”

A third clean energy advocate with close ties to Congress dismissed the prospect that environmentalists would be willing to compromise on including natural gas in an RES. “We would rather have nothing than that,” the clean energy advocate said.

But Weiss suggested there is room for negotiation on the issue. He said a proposal to pass a separate low-carbon electricity standard requiring that a certain percentage of the country’s electricity come from natural gas, coal with carbon capture technology and nuclear power “is something that we’d look at seriously.”

Any proposal that would allow natural gas to compete on the same footing as wind and solar, however, would face major opposition, Weiss said. “A low-carbon standard would incent low-carbon kinds of energy, but it would not compete directly with renewables,” he explained. For example, Congress may choose to pass a 15 percent RES and then an additional low-carbon standard of 10 percent, Weiss said.

The first natural gas-related piece of legislation is slated to come up for a procedural vote next week in the lame-duck session. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has scheduled a cloture vote for Nov. 17 on the Promoting Natural Gas and Electric Vehicles Act of 2010, which would provide incentives for electric and natural gas vehicles. The proposal has bipartisan support and is likely to be the only energy-related bill to see floor action in the lame duck.

While environmentalists support the vehicles proposal, they also say that any effort to encourage natural gas production should be coupled with natural gas drilling reforms. Hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” involves injecting chemicals, sand and huge quantities of water into the earth to loosen large underground deposits of natural gas. It is currently the cheapest and most widespread method for extracting natural gas from the ground. But environmentalists say the chemicals used during fracking can contaminate groundwater and cause significant damage to the land.

Hamilton, of the Sierra Club, suggested that environmentalists and liberal Democrats would be more likely to support efforts to expand natural gas development if Congress also considers drilling reforms. “We are very much of the mind that the regulatory structure for fracking should be in place before there’s more drilling,” Hamilton said. “The quicker that regulatory structure gets in place, the less resistance they’re going to get.”

Matzner, of the NRDC, called on lawmakers to pass natural gas drilling reforms that, among other things, require companies to disclose the amount and types of chemicals that are used in fracking and tighten regulation of the practice.

“There’s space here to put policies in place to make sure that natural gas is done in a more responsible way,” Matzner said.

There are proposals on the table in the House and the Senate that would address many of these issues. The Fracturing Responsibility and Awareness of Chemicals (FRAC) Act would give the Environmental Protection Agency regulatory authority over fracking. But the EPA is currently conducting a study on fracking that won’t be completed until 2012. Some have suggested it’s best to wait to address the issue in Congress until the study is finished.

Amy Mall, senior policy analyst at NRDC, has been working on fracking issues for years. Based in Colorado, she has seen the environmental impacts of the practice firsthand. Yet she recognizes that natural gas is a necessary part of the country’s energy mix, underscoring the complicated relationships environmentalists have with the fossil fuel. She, like many environmentalists see natural gas as a “bridge fuel,” or an interim step on the way to broader reliance on renewables.

“Our country needs a lot of energy,” she said. “Our first priority should be efficiency, then conservation. In the short term, we can’t meet all of our energy needs. We support natural gas as a bridge fuel, but we don’t think it’s a silver bullet solution.”

One Response to “-2010/11/14 – Eminent Domain, Enter the Feds”

  1. sherry cottrell said

    January 19, 2012 at 12:56 pm

    PLEASE SEND ANY INFORMATION about 475 WISESGROVE

    RD BEAVER COUNTY,PA 15066.

    Reply

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