Six months later at a climate disaster
Remember the massive methane gas leak from a storage site in Pennsylvania last year? The one Bloomberg Green called the worst US climate disaster in 2022?
When I last wrote about it the head of the division investigating the leak from Equitrans’ Rager Mountain well told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette a “top-to-bottom” review of the Pennsylvania gas storage industry was on the table.
Months later, there’s been a shift about investigations and regulators, but there are still more questions about what, if any kind of effort might be done to prevent a similar leak. This week, I wanted to follow up on this story, and take a quick look at another climate story in Pennsylvania that has resonance elsewhere.
Rager Mountain hangover
Late last month, Pennsylvania’s DEP and Equitrans announced a settlement related to the leak that is a bit complicated:
Equitrans, which took nearly a month to appeal the order and two others dealing with environmental pollution and cleanup, argued that the DEP was overstepping its authority. The integrity of its storage fields is already regulated by the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the company said.
Earlier this month, the DEP yielded, saying it had issued the order believing that the Rager Mountain storage field in Cambria County was an intrastate, rather than an interstate, facility.
Basically, the state agency has deferred to the federal regulator on what Equitrans should do to shore up the safety of Rager Mountain. Some of those to-dos overlapped with the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration’s safety order, Anya Litvak of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette writes, but PHMSA’s order is only concerned with the Rager Mountain wells, not nine other Equitrans storage fields in Pennsylvania.
As for that top-to-bottom review of the whole sector for dangerous, climate-polluting leaks? While a spokesperson for DEP told Litvak that “avenues for potential enforcement action” on the Rager Mountain leak remain open, and agency inspectors are apparently making unannounced inspectors, that remains very unclear, especially given the settlement.
“This settlement sets a clearer precedent for how DEP regulates underground natural gas storage fields which means Pennsylvanians will have to largely rely on federal law and the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration to take effective action to prevent leaks like this and follow up enforcement action,” says David Hess, a former secretary of the DEP, on his own website.
Equitrans told investors they had spent just over $8 million last year and expect to spend as much as $15 million this year (including “potential regulatory penalties“). This quarter, the company, which operates both gas pipelines and storage fields, reported more than $300 million in revenue.
The retiring and not-so-retiring dirty dozen
Last week I shared a news story on PennEnvironment’s “dirty-dozen” report, which used EPA data to rank Pennsylvania’s most carbon polluting power plants. This is not Pennsylvania’s largest polluters overall, but a worst-in-class list.
The top two on the list, coal plants Keystone and Conemaugh, are expected to retire by 2028. This is in line with the country as a whole: plants representing a quarter of current US coal capacity are expected to retire by the end of the decade.
But emitter-heavy list also includes several large gas-fired plants. It also could be shifting for another reason. The data is from 2021, and since then a plant owned by Shell that uses fossil fuels byproduct to create plastic pellets has come online in the state. The report’s author tells the local NPR station that the plant may be towards the top of this ranking now.
More local climate action stories
- Burning scrap tires as biomass energy? Sure, says Georgia utility regulator, at first.
- Phasing out oil & gas permitting may end up on the Colorado ballot
- Will floods take over San Francisco’s newest neighborhood?
- Speaking of imminent floods
- Do new methane rules mean lots of new jobs in Texas and New Mexico?
- Quote of the Day: “It’s like giving a toddler who’s really into trucks a full-sized 18-wheeler and telling them to have fun on I-10”
- First of its kind state legislation would hold companies liable for illness from urban drilling