MYTHS ON METHANE AND DEP PERMIT BACKLOG
By Joseph Otis Minott, Esq.
Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) Secretary Patrick McDonnell will appear before the Senate Appropriations Committee on Wednesday, March 4 at 10:00 AM to present Governor Wolf’s 2020-21 budget request for the department.
Ahead of this hearing, we took a look at some of the claims and spin from industry-boosters during the Secretary’s appearance before the PA House Appropriations Committee last week.
Contrary to outdated rhetoric, the PA Department of Environmental Protection has nearly eliminated the permit backlog
Rep. Keith Greiner (R-Lancaster County) raised the importance of eliminating DEP’s historical well-drilling permit application backlog but cites outdated – and misleading – numbers. There was indeed a DEP permit backlog in July 2017, caused in part by deficient permit applications filed by industry consultants. The good news is that, today, the backlog has been all but eliminated.
After DEP publicly committed itself to reducing the permit backlog, the number of backlogged permits has been cut from 8,715 down to 512 by December 2019. That is a backlog reduction of 94%. Considering that there are often questions and issues that arise in the permitting process that may lengthen the review time in order to ensure health and safety, that is tremendous progress.
DEP’s commitment to speed up permit review comes through in the numbers:
- The percentage of well drilling permits processed on time has gone from 24% in 2016-17 to 97% in 2018-19
- The average number of business days to process a drilling permit has gone from 75 days in 2016-17 to 22 days in 2018-19, a 70% reduction
- In the SW region, processing time dropped from 112 days in 2016-17 to 27 days in 2018-19
As Rep. Greiner noted, “we want good numbers when we make budget decisions . . .”
Well, if you are the oil and gas industry, you should be pretty happy with those numbers.
Pennsylvania’s methane problem gets downplayed, state representative focuses on downstream emissions
Rep. Jesse Topper (R – Bedford/Franklin/Fulton) discussed what he called a 12 percent reduction in methane levels since 2005, which he stated (quoting the EPA) was “largely due to decreases in emissions from distribution, transmission and storage of natural gas.”
For a few reasons, that statement is incomplete and leads to the false conclusion that no additional action is needed to control methane emissions.
First, that statistic does not reflect methane emissions from the oil and gas upstream production, where the vast majority of emissions are produced. Consequently, Gov. Tom Wolf has proposed a rule that would cut methane emissions from the thousands of existing sources of oil and gas pollution in Pennsylvania, including well sites and compressor stations, which constitute the bulk of the methane pollution problem in the commonwealth.
Second, according to EPA estimates, methane emissions have decreased only 1 percent over the last several years. Industry is simply not getting the job done.
More importantly though, EPA estimates vastly understate methane pollution. According to a 2018 Environmental Defense Fund analysis, oil and gas-related methane emissions in Pennsylvania are estimated to be five times higher than industry-reported data, totaling a whopping 520,000 tons of methane per year. The annual climate impact of this pollution is greater than that from all of the cars in Pennsylvania combined.
The bottom line: Gov. Wolf and DEP are on the case, taking concrete action. Pennsylvania remains the second-largest natural gas producing state in the U.S. and third-largest greenhouse gas polluting state in the nation, and significant improvement is essential to reduce its role in contributing to climate change. Cherry-picking stats to mislead and misrepresent real progress does not help Pennsylvanians or anyone supporting climate action.
Joseph Otis Minott is the Executive Director and Chief Counsel of Clean Air Council.
