Houston (Platts)
13 Sep 2017
A joint federal-state commission on Wednesday voted to
move ahead with a rulemaking that would prohibit horizontal drilling and
hydraulic fracturing across a large swath of eastern Pennsylvania, as well as
the states of New York, Delaware and New Jersey.
In a meeting of the board of the Delaware Basin River
Commission, commissioners voted to publish for public comment a set of revised
draft regulations for drilling operations within the river basin, which
includes portions of the Marcellus Shale.
The vote was 3-1-1, with representatives of Delaware,
New York and Pennsylvania voting yes, the Army Corps of Engineers, the federal
government's representative voting no, and the New Jersey representative
abstaining, Kate Schmidt, a spokeswoman for the DRBC, said.
Since the vote was a procedural resolution, no public
hearing on it was required prior to commission consideration, Schmidt said.
About 25 people spoke during the meeting's open public
comment session, which began at the conclusion of the business meeting and
lasted one hour.
Most of the comments from those who spoke supported a
ban on gas development in the Delaware River Basin, she said.
The revised draft regulations, which have been in the
offing for about seven years, would prohibit the use of horizontal drilling and
fracking in the basin, but would provide for the "safe and protective
storage, treatment and disposal" of wastewater from horizontal drilling
and fracking operations outside of the basin.
The proposed rules would also regulate the inter-basin
transfer of fresh water and wastewater.
In the next step of the rulemaking process, the
commission will issue revised draft regulations on or before November 30. The
rulemaking process will require one or more public hearings and a written comment
period and the commissioners are expected to adopt the final rules sometime in
2018, Schmidt said.
The DRBC vote is likely to re-ignite a long-simmering
debate over whether the commission has the authority to ban fracking within the
basin.
The river basin region has been under a fracking
moratorium since 2010, when the commission launched a study on the impacts of
the commonly employed drilling completion technique.
In the meantime, horizontal drilling and fracking have
been used to great effect to unlock gas in areas just outside the Delaware
River Basin, particularly in some counties in Pennsylvania. New York, where a
statewide fracking ban already is in effect, is less likely to be affected by a
fracking ban in the Delaware River Basin.
Advocates for the gas industry were quick to decry the
commission's decision, while environmental groups argued the DRBC's proposed
regulations do not go far enough to protect the waters of the basin.
Gas industry consultant Tom Shepstone said it is
difficult to estimate how much gas will be locked up by the DRBC fracking ban.
In an interview Wednesday, he said at least three producers -- Chesapeake
Energy, Newfield and Hess -- have drilled exploratory wells in the region that
would be impacted by the proposed ban, but because that data is still
considered proprietary, "you wouldn't know what the actual production
could be."
Shepstone estimated that a 1,100 square mile region of
the upper Delaware River Basin in Pennsylvania and New York could be
prospective for gas production, with about a third of that area on the
Pennsylvania side of the state line.
In an interview, Nicole Jacobs, a spokeswoman for
industry advocacy organization Energy in Depth, said the commission's vote does
not change the fact that the DRBC should not have the authority to regulate
drilling and fracking in the first place.
She said a lawsuit pending in the federal 3rd Circuit
Court of Appeals is expected to result in a ruling on the extent of the
commission's authority over gas development.
In addition, Jacobs said there is no evidence of the
alleged harm from fracking that would warrant a ban on the practice.
"Pennsylvania is no stranger to oil and gas development," she said…
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