DEP wades into ambiguous area of noise regulation
Pennsylvania environmental regulators, who generally prefer the familiar matters of soil, air and water, are tackling the vagaries of noise from oil and gas development and finding that rules for sound are best left loose.
The Department of Environmental Protection is proposing to require companies drilling and fracking in the Marcellus and other gas-rich shales to make and follow site-specific plans to mitigate noise from well pads.
The draft rules do not set limits for how loud operations can be at certain times or distances. Instead, they tell companies to evaluate the normal noise in an area before drilling begins and take steps to minimize noise reaching nearby residents during the temporary but cacophonous work up until the point when a well starts sending gas to a pipeline.
DEP officials say they have taken a lesson from other states and regions that have a long history of regulating noise from oil and gas operations, particularly the Canadian province of Alberta, and stayed away from establishing firm decibel limits that can seem unambiguous but are in practice difficult or unfair to enforce.
“It necessarily has to be flexible enough for the site-specific characteristics,” said Scott Perry, DEP’s deputy secretary for oil and gas management, during a recent discussion of the proposal at an oil and gas advisory board meeting in Harrisburg.
When it comes to rules, though, people like a clear standard.
Critics of the proposal, who include members of the gas industry as well as environmental and public health groups who broadly embrace the idea of noise regulation, say the rules would be toothless or too difficult to follow without hard benchmarks.
Others wonder whether DEP has the data, authority or expertise to wade into noise regulation right now.
“It seems like it’s fraught with peril at this point to make any kind of regulation,” W. Michael Griffin, a Carnegie Mellon University professor who is a non-voting adviser on the board, said at a recent meeting. Acceptable levels of noise vary from person to person, environment to environment, he said.
“Don’t get me wrong — a nuisance like this is really
important to understand and, if it’s required, to do something about,” he said. “What I worry about is it’s so nebulous.”
Even seasoned professionals who track down and minimize annoying sounds for a living liken the work to chasing ghosts.
Matt Oeler, president of the noise and vibration control company Oeler Industries, Inc. in Whitehall, said a 5-degree shift in wind direction can change a sound reading by 20 A-weighted decibels, while a field of corn might act differently as a noise buffer between a well site and a home depending on whether it is frozen or wet.
“You can have a noise source from half a mile away that comes to your house and interfaces or combines with maybe the vibration of your refrigerator and it creates a different harmonic that shows up in your bedroom,” he said. “It really is sort of chasing ghosts.”
Drilling companies can and do take steps to diminish noise from their operations. Oeler Industries, for example, manufactures and rents temporary acoustic barriers that surround well sites, as well as smaller shrouds and enclosures that smother sounds from specific pieces of equipment.
The company also offers continuous noise monitoring systems around well sites that can record audio clips when sounds rise above threshold levels so operators can track down the source.
“Most if not all of the companies who are either developing well sites or compressor station sites all seem to be very concerned about noise and their impact on the neighborhood,” Mr. Oeler said. “Our experience is that most of the companies have been very, very concerned about being good neighbors.”
Some residents who live near busy well sites say there is nothing vague about the racket that disrupts their sleep or makes it hard to hold a conversation in their homes. They point out that well development activities may be temporary, but they can last for months or years on a pad with multiple wells.
“There are clangs, bangs, horns, beeps, roars, revving and more,” the Wyoming County community organization Connection for Oil, Gas and the Environment in the Northern Tier wrote in comments on the proposal. “Many folks who deal with these intolerable noise levels in non-zoned municipalities feel helpless.”
DEP officials said the proposed rules were designed to sketch broad requirements and establish the agency’s basic authority to regulate noise and suspend operations if they are too loud. The details of standards, exemptions and DEP’s response protocols will be filled in later with guidance documents that will be based on Alberta’s rules and drafted with input from industry, academic researchers and other experts.
Operators of well sites in remote areas, like state forests, may not need to mitigate anything to comply with the regulations, DEP officials said, while operators of sites in densely populated areas of southwestern Pennsylvania likely will need to take extra measures.
Industry critics of the proposal charge that the department is overreaching into an area it has no need or authority to regulate and instituting subjective and unpredictable standards.
In comments on the draft regulations, the North Fayette-based Marcellus Shale Coalition, whose members include most of the unconventional oil and gas operators in the state, protested that the proposal’s language is “so vague and arbitrary that it fails as a regulatory standard.”
The trade group said the entire noise section should be eliminated from the current regulatory package and, if the department insists on regulating noise, it should start the rule making process over from the beginning.
DEP officials have said they are very interested in hearing suggestions for shaping the noise rules, but they will not eliminate them.
“We do have an obligation to abate public nuisances,” Mr. Perry said at an oil and gas advisory board meeting. “This is really about protecting public health.”