Will Republicans Again Try To Kill DEP Conventional Drilling Regs, Short-Circuit PA’s Clean Power Plan In Stopgap Budget Bill?

Gov. Wolf vetoed a Fiscal Code budget bill in July that included a provision added by Republicans invalidating DEP’s proposed regulations ensuring conventional oil and gas well drillers protect the environment.

This provision was never voted on by either the full Senate or House before it was inserted at the last minute in the Fiscal Code bill in June.

Will Senate and House Republicans repeat this shortcut again when drafting a stopgap budget bill this week?  

Based on statements made by Republicans after the Governor’s veto, the answer is yes.

Conventional well drillers have been lobbying vigorously against DEP’s regulation changes and have threatening to sue DEP over the updated regulations since June.

Conventional drillers are promoting the myth that their form of drilling is benign, but the truth is much different.

DEP has documented through hundreds of photographs and its most recent Oil and Gas Annual Report how conventional oil and gas drillers have at least 3 times the violations of unconventional (Marcellus Shale) drillers over the years.

This is the same romantic notion that has left Pennsylvania’s landscape littered with more than 325,000 abandoned oil and gas wells, easy pathways to polluting groundwater, since the first wells were drilled in the Commonwealth in 1859.

This myth is exactly that, a myth.  The facts are--

1. Conventional wells cause water loss and contamination just like unconventional wells;

2. Conventional wells have more violations than unconventional wells;

3. Both kinds of wells use fracking;

4. Conventional wells are drilled through the same sensitive aquifers;

5. Conventional wells create a bigger footprint on the land; and

6. Smaller companies with fewer resources to deal with problems drill conventional wells.

Clean Power Climate Plan

Another possible amendment could involve further Republican initiatives to hobble Pennsylvania’s efforts to develop a plan to meet EPA’s Clean Power climate rule.

Republicans signed into law Act 175 in 2014 that provided yet another layer of review and approval on an already complicated process for developing a Pennsylvania plan to meet EPA’s Clean Power rule opposed by Pennsylvania’s coal industry and the business community generally.

Will Republicans again short-circuit the legislative process and put additional restrictions on a Pennsylvania plan in the Fiscal Code?

What extraneous provisions like these will be added into the stopgap budget package?

We’ll have to wait and see.