Loud compressor stations create ‘silent’ businesses
HOUSTON, Pa. — Atop a hill above a barn lies a facility alongside Brigich Road with a set of churning machines as loud as helicopters.
The culprits are engines and fans that power the compressors that pressurize natural gas to push it through pipelines on its journey away from well pads.
But the noise reaching the barn at the bottom of the hill is virtually nonexistent, thanks to the structure housing the engines. The humming that escapes is no louder than two people talking at the MarkWest facility’s fence line, the result of work by engineers from Steel Nation, Inc. in Washington, Pa.
The company has found work in dampening the noise from natural gas compressor stations, including the one on Brigich Road in Houston owned by midstream company MarkWest Energy Partners out of Denver.
Mark Caskey, president of Steel Nation, began to notice the natural gas industry’s
presence in 2005, a year after Fort Worth, Texas-based Range Resources drilled the first Marcellus Shale well near MarkWest’s station. At that time, Steel Nation primarily worked with the coal industry.
“It was really hush-hush at first, but by [2008], this industry was taking off like crazy,” Mr. Caskey said. “When the gas industry came around, I started knocking on everybody’s doors.”
The first client to answer was Atlas Energy Inc., another Houston, Pa., company, in 2007. That year, Steel Nation constructed 10 buildings for Atlas, each of which had one natural gas compressor inside.
“That really kicked off Steel Nation,” Mr. Caskey said.
He applied what he knew about reducing noise at coal facilities to compressor stations. Steel Nation created buildings of thick metal, fitted with perforated liner panels, mineral wool and batt insulation often used in homes to control vibrations. It also installed insulated doors, fan silencers and acoustically-treated louvers, a type of slatted window.
Rules for acceptable noise levels at stations attached to intrastate pipelines differ from those linked up to interstate pipelines. Interstate pipelines are regulated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The rules for pipelines within a state’s borders are left up to municipalities to decide.
For interstate pipeline stations, noise can be no louder than 55 A-weighted decibels (dBA) — about conversation level — by the time it reaches inhabited places, such as homes, schools and stores.
Steel Nation said it does not allow noise to exceed 50 dBA at its customers’ fence lines.
The company, which continues to build coal processing plants and other facilities such as offices and warehouses, said it works on about 50 compressor stations each year and has completed about 400 stations to date. The majority of those are in Pennsylvania, although Steel Nation is now seeing more business in Ohio’s Utica Shale.
The structure at MarkWest’s station was retrofitted by Steel Nation at the turn of the decade and includes a 20-foot-tall mufflerlike structure, called a vent blowdown silencer, which cuts noise when pressurized gas must be released into the atmosphere from the facility.
Altogether, MarkWest poured about $1 million into suppressing sound at the site, according to company spokesman Robert McHale. MarkWest owns 16 compressor stations in Washington County and three in Butler County.
Steel Nation is not the only company offering noise suppression services in the Marcellus and Utica shale plays.
Noise Solutions of Alberta, Canada more than doubled its total manufacturing space in 2013 with a 55,000-square-foot plant in Sharon. About three-quarters of the company’s U.S. business, a majority in Pennsylvania, comes from compressor stations.
The only compressor station in Allegheny County connected to a horizontal well, operated by Superior Appalachian Pipelines, LLC, in Canonsburg, lies about 15 miles from the Pittsburgh Mills Mall in Frazer Township.
“We had [noise] questions before we approved the construction, and those concerns were addressed in the construction to reduce or eliminate the noise,” said Lori Ziencik, township secretary-treasurer and a board supervisor.
The station, which has been operating for about 18 months, sits on a 17-acre lot, of which five acres have been developed. The undeveloped acres act as a buffer zone. The company does not allow noise levels to reach more than 60 decibels at the property line.
Ms. Ziencik said the township has never received noise complaints.
“We barely know it’s there now,” she said.