Pipeline drilling to resume at some sites following spills
The clay slurry used to ease drills beneath waterways and highways for the Mariner East 2 cross-state natural gas liquids pipeline was responsible for bringing to a wrenching halt a significant part of construction on the project last week.
Eruptions of the mixture of bentonite clay and water escaping through fractured rock now number roughly 90 over a threemonth period, according to environmental groups analyzing state Department of Environmental Protection reports.
The accumulation of incidents led a judge to halt directional drilling for Sunoco Pipeline’s $2.5 billion twin pipelines on July 25 until he holds a hearing beginning Wednesday to evaluate the groups’ challenge to pipeline permits.
The court order stopped work at 55 sites, but Sunoco persuaded the judge to gradually relax restrictions where the shutdown could damage equipment or the environment — first by lifting the ban at three sites and then, on Thursday, at 13 more.
Drilling can resume at two sites in Westmoreland County and two in Indiana County. Drilling is still not allowed at 168 sites where it had not started at
the time the judge halted drilling or at 39 other sites where it had begun, said Alex Bomstein, an attorney for the Clean Air Council, one of the groups appealing the permits.
The slurry that escaped over the past three months in southwestern Pennsylvania affected a private drinking well, burbled out of an unused well next to a home, seeped through the exposed bedrock along State Route 837 near the Monongahela River in Washington County, and emerged roughly 40 times from the ground around Loyalhanna Lake in Indiana County in the middle of the summer camping season, the documents show.
Horizontal directional drilling is used to bore beneath rivers, roads and populated areas where open trenches are impractical. While such drilling has been disrupted by the judge’s order, other construction has continued.
Documents made public as part of the court appeal detail 25 mud releases in four counties in the southwest region — Allegheny, Indiana, Washington and Westmoreland — while an updated tally by the DEP lists 31 spills in the four counties, some as small as 5 gallons and the largest 20,000 gallons.
On July 28, the DEP issued eight violation notices to Sunoco for the southwestern region spills, requiring the company to comply with its approved plan for dealing with what the industry calls “inadvertent returns” and to detail its initial response to the incidents.
The DEP also asked for more information about a private water supply complaint from a home on Bush Road near Loyalhanna Lake, where Sunoco’s boring operations intersected a troublesome patch of ground.
The well’s water turned cloudy, but the issues have been resolved in cooperation with the landowner, Sunoco spokesman Jeff Shields said. Water quality tests did not detect problems. Sunoco continues to monitor and has provided the resident with a temporary water supply.
Sunoco has already “responded to, contained, documented and fully reported” the releases detailed in the southwestern Pennsylvania violation notices, Mr. Shields said.
The bentonite mixture is not toxic, and environmental regulators have said they do not expect the spills to cause lasting effects. But, freed from its planned course, the substance can still be damaging.
“It is a fine sediment,” said James Schmid, a Media, Pa.-based ecologist who has consulted with the environmental groups in the case. “When it gets into the macro-invertebrates, it clogs their gills. It muddies the water and wrecks the habitat for fish.”
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which operates Loyalhanna Lake and Bush Recreation Area around it, expects to receive water quality test results from samples taken from the lake in a few weeks, but the effects of the boring operations on facilities, trees and the enjoyment of visitors are already apparent.
“A lot of the impacts were to the recreational users. Just noise and mess,” Kristen Hoesch, the district’s environmental compliance coordinator, said. “A lot of work that you don’t want to see when you go to a park to have a picnic.”
The fluid releases began within days of the start of drilling at the site in May, Ms. Hoesch said. There were about 40 distinct locations where the fluid came out of the ground and about 25 of those reached the water because they weren’t contained in time or overtopped the barriers contractors set up to catch them. There were no reports of fluids emerging directly from the lake bottom.
There were also impacts to a second Corps property along the Conemaugh River in Westmoreland County, where there were three releases to a wetland and stream.
Sunoco finished work for one pipeline at Loyalhanna Lake and agreed to postpone returning to bore under the lake for the second, narrower pipeline until after the recreation season ends in September.
When the company comes back, it intends to make changes to avoid the same errors, Ms. Hoesch said. “They will be deeper and further back from our property. They have redesigned this drill section, basically because of all of the issues they had with the first one.”
Mr. Shields said Sunoco is “continually evaluating our drilling plans, including Loyalhanna Lake.” He said the company “will continue to fully cooperate with the Army Corps of Engineers to address impacts to Bush Recreation Area from our construction activities.”
The hearing scheduled for Wednesday is expected to last three days. The judge will consider the environmental groups’ petition for a longer ban on directional drilling until there is a final decision in the broader case.
Sunoco Pipeline, a subsidiary of Texas-based Energy Transfer Partners, designed the twin 350-mile lines to carry an initial combined capacity of 500,000 barrels per day of propane, butane and ethane from the Marcellus and Utica shales to terminals near Philadelphia.