Justice Department starts building case around pipeline explosion
The U.S. Department of Justice has launched a criminal investigation into the 2018 natural gas pipeline explosion in Beaver County, adding to a growing list of state and federal probes into Energy Transfer’s pipeline projects in Pennsylvania.
The investigation has been going on since at least November, according to a disclosure in the Texas-based pipeline company’s financial filings. Energy Transfer said the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania “issued a federal grand jury subpoena for documents relevant to the incident,” which is also being examined by the Pennsylvania attorney general’s office.
“The scope of these investigations is not further known at this time,” Energy Transfer wrote in its annual report earlier this month.
Energy Transfer disclosed Attorney General Josh Shapiro’s investigation into the Revolution pipeline’s failure in a financial filing in August 2019.
The Revolution pipeline — a 40mile link between shale gas wells in Beaver and Butler counties and a processing plant in Washington County — slid down a steep hill one rainy September morning in 2018, bursting into flames, burning down one family’s home and prompting an early morning evacuation of the Center Township neighborhood.
The landslide and resulting blast occurred just days after Energy Transfer began moving gas through the pipeline.
Events and decisions surrounding the routing, design and construction of the Revolution pipeline already have been the subject of other investigations, such as by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. DEP stopped reviewing any new permits for Energy Transfer across the state for nearly a year and last month announced a settlement with a historic $30.6 million fine for the Revolution explosion.
DEP focused on Energy Transfer’s record of landslides and slope destabilization during the engineering and construction of the pipeline, finding that the company knew it was building in erosionprone terrain but did not take enough precautions to avoid the problem or bolster the land.
Meanwhile, the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission’s investigation into the Revolution pipeline is still ongoing, spokesman Nils Hagen-Frederiksen said. The PUC’s jurisdiction over the line, categorized as a gathering facility, revolves around enforcing federal pipeline safety regulations.
It’s not known what documents the federal Justice Department is seeking or what criminal acts are being investigated.
One aspect that could fall under federal law and hasn’t been addressed publicly by Pennsylvania regulators is the possibility that a
bad weld might have contributed to the blast.
This suspicion was highlighted in a lengthy document filed by the creditors of EdgeMarc Energy Corp. after they’d reviewed 24,000 documents and taken five depositions of Energy Transfer witnesses. EdgeMarc, a Canonsburgbased oil and gas company, filed for bankruptcy last year and claimed that the Revolution explosion cut off access for its gas to get to market.
Noting that “serious concerns have been raised (that) the pipe welding was improperly done in a manner that contributed to the break,” the creditors’ committee said “ETC has concealed from EdgeMarc the results of its investigation into the weld and if the cause of or a contributing factor to the Revolution Explosion was negligent welding of the pipeline.”
EdgeMarc and Energy Transfer inked a settlement on Monday, according to the bankruptcy docket. The driller’s assets now belong to KeyBank.
But another lawsuit against the pipeline company — this one brought by another driller that relied on the Revolution pipeline to ferry its gas — is proceeding in the Allegheny County Court of Common Pleas.
Earlier this month, Moon-based PennEnergy Resources notified the court that it planned to subpoena several Energy Transfer contractors about documents related to the construction of the pipeline.