Clean Air Council Targets Pipeline Compressor Plants
The Clean Air Council, an anti-drilling environmental group, has set its sights on preventing new compressor stations from being built in the Marcellus Shale as one way to slow down or stop new drilling. Compressor stations remove moisture and pressurize natural gas to move it through pipelines. The two biggest concerns most people have with compressor stations are air emissions and noise—both legitimate concerns.
Compressor stations are regulated and monitored by the PA Department of Environmental Protection (DEP). The federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is also getting involved by using the federal Clean Air Act, which brings some compressor plants under their purview.
The Clean Air Council has recently begun conducting organized campaigns and training sessions to get local citizens to speak out against new compressor stations. Community outreach coordinator for the Clean Air Council, Matt Walker, held a training session in September in Susquehanna County, PA in preparation for a request by Laser Northeast Gathering to build a compressor station in the area. Some of the trainees spoke out against the Laser compressor station at a recent hearing in Montrose, PA.
At a training session at Mountain View High School in September, Mr. Walker showed residents how to participate more in the regulatory process, including by submitting letters during public comment periods that the council’s staff members alert them to online.
The training in Susquehanna County was Clean Air Council’s first. The more than 30 public comments submitted on Laser Northeast Gathering Co.’s Shields compressor station were enough to trigger the state’s first hearing.
A second training in Lycoming County alerted residents to a public comment period for an expansion of Chief Gathering’s Barto compressor station. DEP held a public meeting and hearing on that permit Thursday night. The council also is working with residents to trigger hearings on two other planned compressors in the northeast.*
According to Mr. Walker, if the Clean Air Council can’t stop a plant, at least they can make it as expensive as possible to build and operate:
"We’re not going into this thinking that a compressor station will not be built," he said, although that is a remote possibility. "We are trying to push for the absolute best available technologies to be used, not just ones that comply with regulations."*
*The Scranton Times Tribune (Dec 19, 2011) – Citizen responses spur compressor hearings for first time
Let’s be honest. The Clean air Council is an anti lung cancer and anti lung disease environmental group. Inasmuch as my mother is dying of lung disease, and it has negatively impacted her quality of life, I feel that this group is on OUR side, unlike PADEP, which steadfastly refused to take any action at all against the coal-burning power plants in our area (among the dirtiest in the nation) until Greenpeace protesters and the news media embarrassed them into it. I won’t use the word shame, since PADEP has none.
That being said, The criticism of compressor stations is completely valid. Semantics aside, they are contributing to our area’s (Southwestern PA) nationally renowned crappy, and unhealthy, air quality. Given the raw profit that industry is raking in at our expense, not unlike the coal barons of my dad’s and grandparents’ day, it won’t be financially ruinous for the shale gas industry to install pollution (and noise abatement) controls on its equipment.
The GOP likes to toss around the buzzword “certainty” when it is complaining about any form of regulation. Well, Pennsylvania residents want some “certainty” too. That our health and safety will be the first priority of state regulators, and that our rights to health and safety won’t be bulldozed by multinational corporations based in Texas and Oklahoma and, of all places, Canada.
That isn’t “anti-drilling.” That is protecting our basic human rights.