Bad Blood: Rover Pipe CEO Sends Caustic Letter to Ohio EPA, FERC

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Last week MDN brought you the news that Ohio EPA’s director, Craig Butler, has kind of tipped over into the deep end with his rantings and ravings about Rover Pipeline (see Ohio EPA’s Craig Butler Goes Nuts, Demands $2.3M from Rover Pipe). Butler held a conference call with the media where he made wild allegations. What seems to have precipitated Butler’s media bender is a decision by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) earlier in the week to allow Energy Transfer, builder of Rover, to resume horizontal directional drilling (HDD) in most Ohio locations, after banning it for several months (see FERC Lifts Rover Horizontal Drilling Ban, Pipeline Work Resumes). ET has responded to Butler’s tirade with a hard-hitting (we’d call it caustic) response. In a letter to Butler, carbon copied to FERC, Rover President & CEO Matthew Ramsey essentially says Butler and the OEPA is trying to cover its own mistakes in not requiring storm water permits for most of the project’s life–then coming along after the fact saying Rover didn’t apply for those permits (when OEPA never required them in the first place). Ramsey also said Butler “refuses to recognize the law” that FERC, and not OEPA, is in charge of this project. It gets better. Ramsey says he is “mystified by what you are trying to achieve” by requiring something (said storme water permits) Rover is now voluntarily doing–permits that OEPA itself has approved! This letter really takes the gloves off and (our words) calls Butler a lunatic. Read it for yourself and see what you think…

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