Marcellus Shale: Air Quality Issues

I rarely share personal events on this blog, but because my professional life has converged with the subject matter of this blog it seems fitting. I recently moved on to a position as a staff attorney for the Clean Air Council in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I will be working remotely from New York City until the summer as leases and sig-ot's masters degrees wrap up.

I recently blogged about the basics of Marcellus Shale drilling, as well the state of affairs in New York. My work at the Council focuses on the air issues with respect to Marcellus Shale drilling in Pennsylvania. There has been a great deal of focus on the water issues but drilling can have a significant effect on air quality.

Natural gas production generates significant air emissions from venting, flaring and other releases, as well as compressors, engines, glycol dehydrators, condensate tanks and waste pits. See Earthworks "Sources of oil and gas air pollution." Air pollution can compromise the health and welfare of people who live in gas-producing areas by causing or contributing to respiratory problems, asthma, cancer and other conditions. See Earthworks, "Air Contaminants."

These issues have been described in a 2009 Report authored by Al Armendariz. While Pennsylvania has done limited air sampling which show limited emissions, the sampling is just that, limited. They do not look at the cumulative impacts of air emissions from all of the drilling operations and they are short-term and limited in scope. Further, the Barentt Shale in which Armendariz did his study, is the most active shale "play" in the country. Strong regulations need to be put in place before the air emissions pile up on us. In 2005, 4 Marcellus Shale permits were issued in Pennsylvania, 71 in 2007, 476 in 2008, 1,985 in 2009, 3,314 in 2010 and the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (PA DEP) is on track to issue over 7,000 permits in 2011.



Under the Clean Air Act (CAA) states create a State Implementation Plan (SIP), which will enforce air standards in accordance with the CAA. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) must then approve the SIP. Minor sources of air pollution in Pennsylvania must obtain a construction permit or Plan Approval and then an Operating Permit. However, for sources that meet certain conditions the two steps can be combined. For the exploration and production phase, sources can obtain a General Permit 11 or GP-11, and for the production and recovery phase, facilities can obtain a GP-5. If a source emits a certain amount of air pollutants it will be considered a major source and subject to Title V permit requirements and potentially to requirements of the New Source Review (NSR) and Prevention of Significant Deterioration (PSD) Programs, which are requirements for sources that have the potential to emit significant pollution or are going to be located in an area that is not in attainment for certain CAA pollution standards.

The CAA, itself, has multiple loopholes for the oil and gas industry. While some emissions requirements exist for individual wells, oil and gas drilling is exempted from aggregated “major source” requirements under the National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants (NESHAP). Which, in practical terms, means that if you have multiple interrelated emitters of hazardous pollution at one site, each piece of machinery or building's emissions are counted separately. Additional, Hydrogen sulfide, which is emitted from oil and gas operations, is currently exempt from regulation as a hazardous air pollutant under the CAA.



Pennsylvania also creates a number of loopholes which have allowed drilling operations to escape many of the CAA standards. Paragraph 38 of the Air Quality Permit Exemptions, exempts oil and gas exploration and production facilities from the requirements for Plan Approval or Operating Permits, except for compressor stations equal to or greater than 100 horsepower. Currently, a proposal to narrow these exemptions is pending. In order to qualify the location would have to meet limitations on NOx, VOCs and HAPs. Further, flaring during drilling would be limited to 14 days at each site.

As discussed above, when a source is determined to be major it is subject to additional programs and more stringent controls. Therefore, defining a source is a very important step under the CAA. PA DEP must determine whether operations should be considered as part of one facility or source and thus have their emissions "aggregated." The emissions, from whatever the source is determined to be, dictates whether it will be a minor source, subject to GP-11 or GP-5, or a major source, subject to Title V and NSR or PSD. In September 2009, the EPA issued a memorandum that emphasizes a case-by-case approach that looks at three criteria: 1) common ownership or control; 2) whether the operations are on contiguous or adjacent properties; and 3) whether the activities belong to the same industrial grouping.

In December of last year PA DEP issued technical guidance regarding aggregation. The memo laid out the current state of law on aggregation and concluded:

[G]as comes from the well and can only go to one compressor station, to one processing facility for finishing and to one compressor station to take the gas to market. Another example would be where gas cannot enter a market pipeline without additional processing to meet market pipeline specifications. In these situations none of the steps in the development chain can exist without the other even if there is a far distance between them. Accordingly, it would be reasonable to find that emissions from all steps in that process must be included in the permitting analysis as a single source. Such a conclusion is consistent with past EPA guidance that treated two or more facilities as one plant based on specific facts showing a functional inter-relationship between the emission points. Moreover, this approach carries out the purposes of the NSR program, which is to ensure the attainment or maintenance of the NAAQS, and aggregates pollutant-emitting activities that as a group would fit within the ordinary meaning of “building,” “structure,” “facility,” or “installation.”

However, on February 26th of this year PA DEP, under Tom Corbett's new administration, rescinded the guidance and has called for comments on whether there should be guidance and what it should be. A number of petitions and suits have been filed out of Colorado regarding the aggregation issue and my guess is the same will happen in Pennsylvania.

The Corbett administration has engaged in excessive pandering to the natural gas industry. Tom Corbett, received more than $1 million from 15 or more gas drillers during his campaign. He refuses to place a tax on the gas industry and is the only one to do so in the country. He appointed an anti-regulation coal mogul as a jobs czar and gave him the ability to streamline drilling permits. Emails recently leaked from PA DEP indicate that all Marcellus Shale related actions must be approved by the politically-appointed deputies and secretary of the DEP, even though this is not required for any other industry. Just yesterday, deposition transcripts indicated that most inspectors spend little time on Marcellus Shale issues and know little about the laws and regulations they are enforcing. It is a sad state of affairs in Pennsylvania.



The rich keep getting richer on the backs of the poor and middle class. Industry will not be paying for your kid's asthma inhaler or the cancer you get from sucking in benzene. The oil and gas industry, like many others, are not forced to internalize the cost of the burdens they place on the environment or public health and welfare. Neither industry nor Pennsylvania will even slow down to determine whether natural gas is even cleaner than coal. Corbett and his cronies are allowing the natural gas industry to steamroll Pennsylvania's environment and its citizens without taking the time to even know how much damage they are doing.

The 2nd Coolest Park in Manhattan

In most cities the Hudson River Park would be the best there was but this is Manhattan and the charm of Central Park knows no match. The Hudson River Park, however is an untapped gem in a city of zipping taxis, tourists walking forward while looking up and packed subway cars.

Last weekend I had the pleasure of discovering this park with the man who was instrumental in it's creation, Al Butzel. I discussed the Westway Fill Project on this blog last month. Mr. Butzel met us at 26th street and the Hudson River at Pier 66. There we went out on the pier where a restaurant is set up. There was a big round bar and the cases of beer sitting next to tin buckets gave me a good indication that if it wasn't 9:00 am on a Saturday this place would be hopping. The bar is surrounded by contorted steel "art pieces" and tied up to the pier is a party boat called the Frying Pan. Next trip to the park I will definitely be starting from the southern section of the park and making my way north to retire at Pier 66, beer in hand with a breathtaking view of the city. Across the street from Pier 66 you can see a massive warehouse building with a lot of windows, this is an original building where cargo was stored from the busy port.


We made our way south, meandering out one carefully manicured finger pier and down another. We wandered through Chelsea piers, where absurdly rich parents take their children for gymnastics, basketball practice and skating. The best thing about the Chelsea piers was a section where pictures of the way the piers looked at the turn of the century are blown up to twice your height along the walk. We then walked past a cement pier, that will be turned into park land soon. This is Pier 54 where the Lusitania was last docked before being torpedoed and also where the Carpathia docked discharging those that it saved from the Titanic Disaster (see below). The only remaining relic from that time is a portion of the overhead steel roadway that stands at the entrance of Pier 54. Down a block or so, across the street inland, is a reddish building on a corner with a cupola, this is the hotel where the survivors were taken.


The park is briefly interrupted by an NYC sanitation building before returning to grassy knolls, carousels, skate parks and yoga classes. It is amazing to think that these quiet parks outside a bustling city were once the notorious, rough and tumble piers depicted in "On the Waterfront." Look here for a map of the park and before and after pictures.



As a new environmental attorney it was a very inspiring morning. Against the state and city governments, environmental attorneys were able to, over the course of many years, and armed only with NEPA, a procedural act that requires no particular outcome, create a beautiful park when others meant for it to be landfill, highways and high-rises.

The Business of Recycling

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to tour the Sims Metal Management, Claremont Material Recovery Facility (MRF) in Jersey City, New Jersey. The MRF processes all of the metal, glass, plastic and a portion of the paper collected by the New York City Department of Sanitation (DSNY) through its curbside program and has done so under a 20-40 year contract signed in 2008.


The most interesting thing that I learned was how market-based recycling is. Mixed materials come in from the street and they go through a variety of filters to separate them into their various material types (aluminum cans and foil, clear and colored HDPE jugs (laundry detergent), PET bottles (soda bottles), film plastic (bags), bulky plastics (such as toys and buckets), bulky metals and mixed plastics. These materials are then baled and sold according to the market price, based on supply and demand. The bales are sold to bottle makers, steel mills, paper mills, etc. For the City it also comes down to markets: as landfill prices increase ($70/ton) and technology improves, recycling ($40/ton) is the most cost-effective way to get rid of much of the City’s garbage.

Further, pretty much every material has a market, even those containers they tell you not to recycle. Those containers are placed in a mixed plastic bale and the only time those were so undervalued that they had to be sent to the landfill was in the first couple months after the economic crash in the fall of 2008. Now they are sold, not for as much as metal or bottles, but they are sold, and many times ground into building materials or put to other creative uses. So the myth that if you include “unrecyclable” material in your recycling bin, the whole bin will be tossed into a landfill, is BUSTED. Recycle anything and everything that could potentially be recycled, if you toss it, it will definitely go to the landfill, if you recycle it, it may not. Now if everyone went by this rule of thumb recycling centers would be so overburdened as to grind to a halt. But imagine one day when there is practically a recycling ticker, your recycling bin is electronically linked to the local recycling center, you toss your yogurt cup into a slot on top of the bin and - BING - a green check appears, prices are high enough on that type of plastic and it will successfully be recycled.


The process of separating the materials is remarkable. It include operations such as:
• Bulky metal is recovered with a grapple and drum magnet
• Bags are opened and glass is removed by a trommel screening device
• Hand sorting is used to capture a portion of the film plastics and bulky rigid plastics
• Tin cans are recovered with an overband magnet
• An air system removes a portion of the paper and film plastic
• Optical sorters are used to recover PET, HDPE and mixed plastics
• An eddy current magnet is used to recover non-ferrous metals

I used to work at the Empire State Building and all trash was placed into one bin and seemingly just thrown away. I asked Thomas Outerbridge, General Manager at Sims, if he knew why an enormous building like that would just toss all that paper and he assured me that they didn’t. And this is where the recognition that recycling is a market-based building comes into play. He responded that he was sure they did not throw it all away because paper is worth too much. Most likely, he said, they sort it at the building and sell the bales themselves or at least have a deal with a recycling company to get a cut.


In 2004, Sims was selected by the DSNY to be its long term recycling partner and the City recently selected the 30th Street Pier in the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal in Sunset Park, Brooklyn as the location for a new state of the art recycling facility. Sims will construct and operate this facility, which will allow the City to further reduce truck traffic by minimizing the distance between their pick-up routes and the recycling facility. The Sunset Park facility will also allow Sims to expand its network of water-served facilities and grow its barge-based system of transporting recyclables on the water and not City streets. The facility is scheduled to open in the summer of 2012, although it was at one time also scheduled to open in 2007.



In February 2011, Sims Metal Management was named to the Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations in the World at the 2010 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland for the third year in a row and moving up ten spots in the rankings to number 63.