Equitrans to pay $1.1M for storage well blowout
Equitrans Midstream Corp. has agreed to pay $1.1 million to settle violations alleged by state environmental regulators who have been investigating a massive release of gas from a troubled storage well in November 2022.
The well was one of 10 used to inject and withdraw gas stored in Equitrans’ Rager Mountain storage facility — an underground reservoir in Jackson Township, Cambria County.
On Nov. 6, the well began to vent high volumes of natural gas and it took the company and its contractors nearly two weeks to finally bring it under control. During that time, more than a billion cubic feet of gas escaped into the air.
The agreements that Equitrans negotiated with the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection spell out the environmental and climate damage of the well’s malfunction. The blowout released 106 tons of volatile organic compounds, a category of chemicals that includes some hazardous air pollutants. VOCs also include compounds that cause the formation of ozone.
At 106 tons, the storage well made it into the top 25 emitters of VOCs in the state in 2022, according to DEP data. It was also the highest-emitting facility in the oil and gas sector that year.
For perspective, the VOC emissions from the storage well during those two weeks amount to about a fifth of what the Shell petrochemical complex in Beaver County is permitted to emit in a year.
The well incident also released 223 tons of carbon dioxide and a whopping 27,040 tons of methane, which the state calculated was about 10% of all methane emitted in the state in 2022.
Air emissions yielded a penalty of $350,000 in the settlement.
The remaining $764,000 in penalties stemmed from ground pollution that resulted from trying to control and plug the well, and its aftermath.
The DEP said that between 50 and 100 barrels of heavy brine made its way onto the ground, with some ending up in conveyance channels and wetlands. The brine was weighed down with salts and pumped into the well in order to overpower the pressure of the gas
trying to come up from the well.
But as multiple efforts to plug the well failed, the brine also sprayed out of the well and onto the ground. In surveying the area during inspections after the release, DEP noted radioactivity readings in the soil that required remediation.
According to the agreement, Equitrans is working with the DEP in its ongoing remediation of the site.
The Rager Mountain incident is also still under active investigation by federal pipeline authorities.
Equitrans, a Canonsburgbased midstream company that spun out of EQT Corp. in 2018 and has that announced plans to rejoin its former parent in a deal valued at $5.45 billion, has already spent more than $18 million on the Rager Mountain well fallout.
It restarted injecting gas into the field in the fall, the blown-out well and two others excluded.