TPT November 2014

Global Marketplace

• has stepped up inspections, but is still not meeting its own stated goals • poorly tracks, records, and responds to citizen complaints • puts a higher premium on speedy permitting than on enforcement. (“DEP Gets Second Dour Report on Gas Well Oversight,” 11 August) Earthworks is not a lone complainant. Three weeks earlier, Pennsylvania’s auditor general, Eugene DePasquale, sharply criticised the DEP for its shale gas industry oversight, citing failure to consistently pursue citizen complaints about drinking water degradation or issue enforcement orders for regulatory violations as required by state oil and gas law. › A DEP spokesman, Eric Shirk, discounted the Earthworks charge of ineffectiveness. “I don’t think it’s valid,” the interestingly named Mr Shirk told the Post-Gazette . “It seems like it has more of a political agenda.” Steel New guard valves from an Italian company will restore to service a disused venerable system of water pipes in New York “The changing of the valves offers a chance to appreciate the foresight with which the water system was developed and the magnitude of its scale. One rarely has the chance to walk around a bronze fixture the size of a subcompact car.” The “fixture” which so impressed David W Dunlap of the New York Times is a 100-year-old, 13-foot-tall, 20,000-pound manganese bronze guard valve – one of a matched pair which helped ensure the water supply of generations of New Yorkers. Now, a project to re-connect the vast system of underground pipes to the Croton Watershed north of the city requires that the City Water Tunnel No 1 guard valves be replaced. (“Building Blocks,” 23 July) As noted by Mr Dunlap, New York City long had the largest unfiltered water system in the US, drawing on the Croton and also on the more distant, rural Catskill and Delaware Watersheds upstate. In 1993, Washington directed New York to filter Croton water, coming as it did from an area of new, intensive development. Five years later, Croton, which accounted for about ten per cent of the 1.1 billion gallons of water consumed daily in the city, was shut out, its contribution assumed by the Catskill and Delaware systems. No city resident has since drunk a drop of Croton water. The filtration plant under construction by the city Department of Environmental Protection in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, the city’s northernmost borough, has met with problems not unusual in such undertakings. “The budget has ballooned,”

industry. President Chris John of the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association (LMOGA), a former congressman, presented statistics demonstrating the benefits the industry provides to the state – to the tune of $73.8bn annually, including $20.5bn in household earnings. The sector supports more than 287,000 jobs, with oil and gas jobs and earnings found in all of the state’s 64 parishes. Wrote Mr John, “These jobs help Louisiana’s ranking as the No 2 producer of crude oil and natural gas in the country, while also having the second-highest petroleum refining capacity in the US.” ( Daily Advertiser , 8 August) The LMOGA report cited by Mr John also found that the oil and gas industry of Louisiana is one of the most significant funding sources for state and local government projects. The industry paid $1.497bn in state taxes, licenses, and fees in 2012-2013, accounting for nearly 15 per cent of all those collected. The LMOGA president also noted that an oil and gas industry worker earns nearly twice as much as the average Louisiana worker. A facts-based protest in Pennsylvania signals growing scepticism about official regulation of natural gas development “This report focuses on Pennsylvania, but it easily could have been written about Ohio or the federal Bureau of Land Management or Denton, Texas. [It] illustrates why many residents across the US have given up on the idea that regulators can manage the oil and gas boom and are working so hard to stop fracking.” The report cited by Bruce Baizel, director of an oil and gas accountability project of the Washington, DC-based environmental organisation Earthworks, is entitled “Blackout in the Gas Patch: How Pennsylvania residents are left in the dark on health and enforcement.” It is the second report from Earthworks that asserts faulty oversight and enforcement by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) of gas development in the Marcellus Shale that extends along the US East Coast and into Canada. As reviewed by Don Hopey of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Earthworks Pennsylvania initiative is rather more than a beforehand protest against potential threats to health from hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” The group reviewed and analysed DEP Marcellus Shale gas well drilling files and conducted its own air and water testing. With those inputs, its 70-page report alleges, among 25 negative findings, that the DEP: • has failed to consider cumulative health impacts from shale gas development • keeps incomplete permitting and enforcement records that make it impossible for residents to assess their exposure to air and water emissions

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N ovember 2014