honor thy river Protesters voice opposition to using water for drilling
BY MATT HUGHES mhughes@timesleader.com
The Susquehanna River Basin Commission’s quarterly meeting in December started out much like any other board or authority meeting; with commissioners approving minutes, passing resolutions and hearing presentations from department managers. By its end, it looked more like an Occupy Protest. Protesters stood and chanted “honor the river; honor our lives” and “this is what democracy looks like,” interspersed with shouted accusations that board members did not speak for residents living in the river’s three-state basin and that they risked environmental catastrophe. At one point in the Dec. 15 meeting, the commissioners backed away from their dais and toward a backdoor as protesters approached. The incident prompted the Commission to vote a second time to approve permits granted in December at its next meeting, and to revise its rules for speaking at its meetings. What prompted the protesters’ ire was actually one of the more administrative duties of the commission, the approval and denial of permit applications for water withdrawals within the river basin, but the size and vigor of the crowd, which numbered nearly 100, highlights the challenges the advent of natural gas drilling has posed to the commission.
Manages withdrawals The commission is an interstate agency is responsible for managing the Susquehanna watershed and permits surface water withdrawals from within its drainage basin for a variety of uses, includ-
clark van orden/the times leader
Relative calm presides at the start of the Susquehanna River Basin Commission’s December meeting in Wilkes-Barre. It would not last. ing natural gas drilling. The advent of natural gas drilling in Pennsylvania, where most of the river basin lies, has both thrust the commission into the spotlight like never before and compelled it to greatly expand the scope and detail of its monitoring. “Due to the natural gas drilling activity the numbers of applications have gone way, way up,” said Susan Obleski, spokeswoman for SRBC. “There’s a continuous flow of applications.” In two years SRBC has added 30 employees, bringing its total staff to 67, and its annual budget for water withdrawal and water quality monitoring has gone tripled from $4 million before drilling to nearly $12 million today. It has also opened its first field office in Sayre, Bradford County and installed 51 state-of-the-art water quality monitoring stations near some of the most active drilling zones in Pennsylvania’s Northern Tier and across the border in southern New York. Though it only claims authority to regulate water use, the commission has also stepped up its supervision of water quality around drilling sites using the new monitors. Those monitors and follow-up field sample collection can identify metals and salts associated with
drilling fluids in streams, as well as high sediment levels that could result from nearby well pad or pipeline construction.
Changes prompt action When anomalies are detected in the water, the commission will notify the relevant bodies, including the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection and the state Fish and Boat Commission, but collecting and tracking water quality data also provides SRBC and other agencies to assess drillings impact en masse. “It can work both ways,” Obleski said. “It can show that conditions are changing or it can show that conditions may not be changing, because there are legitimate concerns that without the data people do not know if drilling is having an impact on streams…. “It’s providing a data source that wasn’t there before and obviously the longer they’re in, we’ll have comparative data. So if there were a pollution incident we would have enough data to know that it’s not a normal trend at this time of year,” he added. The commission was also proactive in instituting new permit fee schedules early on in the development of the Marcellus Shale play and in assessing penalties to those that violate consumptive use guidelines, which has ensured
the commission can finance its monitoring of the basin’s water resources, Obleski said. The commission has also worked to streamline the permitting process to handle the increase in withdrawal permit applications and work with the gas industry’s frantic and ever-developing work schedules. In order to ensure comprehensiveness in tracking the industry’s broad footprint, SRBC requires drillers be permitted for all consumptive water uses and surface water withdrawals taken within the river basin. It also has instituted an approval-by-right process to accelerate the permitting. Under that process, commission workers can approve most routine withdrawal permits, rather than requiring SRBC commissioners approve them by vote at quarterly meetings. The commission has also changed rules to make it easier for multiple companies to share water taken from a single pool and to transport flowback water from wells within the Susquehanna River Basin out of the basin for reuse in stimulation of other wells. “We know that it’s frack fluid being taken to another pad for reuse,” Obleski said. “We want to incentivize that, rather than having to get a new withdrawal.”
Raising opponents’ ire Though the commission contends they are only administrative in nature and that the regulations governing whether a water withdrawal permit is approved or denied has not changed, the changes in permitting procedure have also drawn the ire of opponents of hydraulic fracturing. Some oppose the commission issuing any new consumptive water use permits for drilling use. As gas drilling within the basin continues to develop and its opponents continue their coordinated efforts, the Susquehanna River Basin Commission will likely remain in the spotlight.
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