PA Environment Digest Blog: Bay Journal: Shale Gas Drilling, Development Yields Both Fears, Funding For Pennsylvania Public Lands

In 2008, former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell opened 2.2 million acres of state forests to the new, profitable — and controversial — use of hydraulic fracturing to access natural gas in rock formations thousands of feet underground.

The Pennsylvania Game Commission, which controls another 1.4 million acres of predominantly wooded land that is open to the public, also jumped on the gas-leasing bandwagon.

Together, 255,000 acres among some of the state’s last vast forests have been leased to private industry to extract natural gas by fracking. The contracts have brought in well over $1 billion in revenue for the state and $812 million for the Game Commission.

Both say the money has led to benefits for the public and conservation.

But others say that clearings for drilling rigs, wastewater holding tanks and hundreds of miles of new access roads and pipelines have fragmented the forests, harmed wildlife and altered the wild character of beloved forests.

The debate over benefits and drawbacks won’t end soon, especially as a new state bill aims to lift a moratorium on additional leases in forests managed by the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources.

Meanwhile, about half of the existing leases haven’t become active yet.

According to David Callahan, president of the Marcellus Shale Coalition, a gas industry group based in Pittsburgh, drilling on those lands will come.

DCNR State Forests

About 1.5 million acres of the DCNR-managed forests lie atop the Marcellus Shale gas formation, which covers about three-fifths of the state.

By 2010, two years after Rendell opened the gates for fracking on state land, 35 leases were in place for about 139,000 of those acres.

As a result, about 1,900 acres of state forest have been converted to shale gas infrastructure, according to DCNR. That includes 171 well pads, many containing multiple wells.

About 172 miles of pipelines have been built through the forests to connect the wells and move gas to markets.

Trees were cleared to create approximately 46 miles of access roads, and another 186 miles of existing dirt roads have been widened or had their surfaces hardened with gravel and other fortifying methods.

The leases have earned the state $1.3 billion as of 2021, much of it used to fill budget gaps. [Read more here about unconstitutional transfers of royalties, payments.]

But that is set to change, as the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled in 2021 that drilling revenue must stay within DCNR and be used for conservation.

Game Commission

The other main public caretaker of Pennsylvania’s large forests is the Pennsylvania Game Commission.

To date, the commission has signed 72 leases on 116,000 acres. All but three are still producing gas. But 48 of the 72 only allow drilling underground from adjacent private properties and do not result in surface disturbance on game lands.

Even so, about 1,200 acres have seen trees cut or the landscape altered at 98 fracking sites.

So far, the leases have brought in more than $812 million to the Game Commission, an independent state agency that had been facing a fiscal crisis as sales of hunting licenses steadily declined.

“We’re not very far away from a time when we were laying people off because of our financial situation. That’s all turned around,” spokesman Travis Lau said.

With the invasion of Ukraine, the value of and demand for natural gas has exploded.

During the last fiscal year, gas revenue from the commission’s royalties rose 57%.

Approximately 69% of the agency’s $266 million in revenue for the year came from the sales of natural resources, most of it from gas leases.

The welcome mat is still out. The commission doesn’t receive taxpayer money and is not bound by the moratorium impacting DCNR-managed forests.

The agency hopes for future gas leases that could double the amount of game land leased since 2008.

State game lands and state forests in the northeast corner of the state in the Delaware River watershed have not been fracked because the Delaware River Basin Commission has banned it, despite outrage from some landowners and many in the Pennsylvania legislature.

[Note: Leaking conventional gas wells, abandoned pipelines and brine tanks are not unusual on State Game Land. Read more here.]

Allegheny National Forest

The 500,000-acre Allegheny National Forest, Pennsylvania’s only national forest, is home to more than 12,000 oil and gas wells, more than any other national forest. But they are conventional shallow-drilled wells going back 100 years, not more recent fracking wells.

The Pennsylvania Fish & Boat Commission has five leases that allow natural gas to be extracted from under about 1,000 acres of its land. No surface disturbance is allowed on its properties.

[Note: Conventional gas wells vent an estimated 6 billion cubic feet of natural gas a year in Allegheny National Forest. Read more here.]

Moratorium challenged

When Democratic Gov. Rendell opened the door to fracked gas leases on state forests, he said doing so would “demonstrate that good stewardship of natural resources is compatible with responsible fiscal policies. We should not subscribe to the false choice some insist we must make between the environment and the economy.”

Yet, only two years later, Rendell issued an executive order halting any further leasing in state forests, citing the surge of industrialization on public lands.

“We need to protect our unleased public lands from this rush because they are the most significant tracts of undisturbed forest remaining in the state,” he said in 2010.

The moratorium remained until Republican Gov. Tom Corbett lifted it briefly in 2014.

Two years later, his Democratic successor, Gov. Tom Wolf, reinstated the ban.

The Republican-controlled state legislature in recent years has passed measures to subsidize and give tax breaks for natural gas production. And some legislators hope that even more gas can be extracted if Pennsylvania becomes a hub for producing hydrogen fuel from natural gas.

Republican State Senators Gene Yaw and Joe Pittman sponsored the current bill in the legislature that would lift the moratorium on new leases in state forests. Yaw says there are about 600,000 additional acres that could be leased.

But about half of the original fracking leases in DCNR-managed forests — on approximately 50,000 acres — remain undeveloped.

In a 2022 state senate hearing, DCNR Secretary Cindy Adams Dunn responded to the proposal to lift the moratorium by saying, “The companies aren’t choosing to do what they could do today.”

“It would be silly to open more to leasing when they haven’t developed what was considered prime leasable land back in 2008,” said Dave Hess, a former secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection and author of the Pennsylvania Environment Digest blog.

[Note: During the 2023 Senate budget hearing Acting Secretary Dunn said in response to Sen. Yaw’s statement urging more drilling on State Forest Land-- “The lottery ticket for us is the recreation economy-- it’s bigger than gas, it’s bigger than a lot of other industries combined and it helps attract young people to live, work and play in Pennsylvania and helps retain and bring people back.” Read more here.

Ecosystem impacts

In September 2020, a Pennsylvania grand jury convened by the state’s attorney general concluded that the state’s environment and public health have suffered because of fracking. [Read more here.]

The DCNR website notes that natural gas development “affects a variety of forest resources and values, such as recreational opportunities, the forest’s wild character and scenic beauty, plant and wildlife habitat.” [Read more here]

In an annual report on the impacts, Dunn noted that “invasive species continue to be the biggest issue we face with shale gas development.” Openings in forest from well pads, access roads and pipeline construction allow nonnative invasive plants to thrive, choking out other species important to local ecosystems. [Read more here.]

One Penn State study found that slicing contiguous forests into smaller fragments and open areas adversely affects migratory birds that depend on deep forests to breed. [Read more here.]

The newly created open spaces allow sun and wind to change the soil and micro-climates. This results in fewer insects, and the migratory birds that would have eaten them avoid the areas, said Lillie Langlois, a Penn State graduate student researcher.

Also, the ease of travel created by roads and pipeline routes bring more predators into forested areas to prey on ground nests.

A 2014 study funded by the National Science Foundation and Carnegie Mellon University concluded that increased forest fragmentation from fracking “poses a risk to Pennsylvania’s rich biodiversity.” [Read more here]

Concerns also have been raised about wells leaking methane, a potent global-warming gas; leaks of brine and chemicals from the fracking process into groundwater; and impacts from the copious amounts of water the industry withdraws from streams and rivers.

There are alleged health effects, too.

A 2022 study by the Yale School of Public Health raised concerns about health impacts on children living near fracking sites. [Read more here.] A study by the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, released the same year, found increased risks for seniors. [Read more here]

Nevertheless, the growing demand for Pennsylvania’s natural gas is expected to continue. And technological advances, along with more accurate geological information, have driven up the estimates of gas available in Marcellus Shale states.

During the last 20 years, projections by the U.S. Geological Survey have risen from 2 trillion cubic feet to 97 trillion.

“There’s plenty more there. There are generations of supply of clean, reliable and affordable natural gas,” said Callahan of the Marcellus Shale Coalition.

Conservation revenue

The Game Commission makes no apologies for the drilling taking place on and under its land.

The revenue from leases and production royalties have provided benefits for wildlife, hunters and other users of the natural lands that would never have been possible otherwise, officials say.

“You can do a lot of things when you have money versus not having money,” said Michael DiMatteo, chief of the commission’s Oil, Gas and Mineral Development Section.

The money has enabled the purchase of 32,500 acres of game lands, including a famous hawk watch site venerated by birdwatchers.

It has also supported new shooting ranges, improved access roads, renovated buildings, helped to control tree-killing spongy (gypsy) moths, created more wildlife food plots, improved forest habitat and funded research projects on turkeys, deer, grouse and ducks.

Most areas disturbed by gas extraction will eventually grow back into a forest or serve as a food plot or other form of wildlife habitat, DiMatteo said. Some spots may become a new vista or remain open for hunters to use as deer blinds.

While acknowledging the negative impacts, DCNR also says fracking on public land has benefited state forests and parks.

“DCNR has used the funds to conserve additional lands and to more sustainably manage existing state park and forest lands to the benefit of the public and the environment, including wildlife,” the agency said in a statement.

But Ralph Kisberg of the Responsible Decarbonization Alliance said the state should be growing trees to create carbon sinks, not cutting them down to extract gas. He is saddened by the fracking-related changes in Pennsylvania’s remaining vast forests.

“We’re a big population state. We need these places,” he said. “They have ecological value, including just knowing that they are there.”

(Photo: Shale gas drill pad in Loyalsock State Forest, Lycoming County.)

(Reprinted from Chesapeake Bay Journal.)

NewsClips:

-- Responsible Decarbonization Alliance: Happy Earth Day! DCNR Acting Secretary Reminds Us Of The Economic Value Of Outdoor Recreation, Public Lands - ‘It’s Bigger Than Gas’

-- The Center Square - Anthony Hennen: PA Outdoor Recreation Economic Potential ‘Bigger’ Than Natural Gas, DCNR Secretary Says

-- Centre Daily Times: Outdoor Recreation Is The Future Of Economic Development, Purple Lizard Guides The Way

-- PA Supreme Court Again Declares Transfers From DCNR Oil & Gas Fund Unconstitutional Under Environmental Rights Amendment [PaEN]

-- EDF: Conventional Gas Wells In Allegheny National Forest Leaked Over 6 Billion Cubic Feet Of Natural Gas In 2019; Conventional Operators Seek To Block Methane Limits [PaEN]

-- Citizen Complaints Result In DEP Issuing PA General Energy More Violations At Loyalsock Creek Gas Pipeline/Water Withdrawal Construction Site In Loyalsock State Forest, Lycoming County [PaEN]

-- New State Health Plan Identifies Health Issues Related To Natural Resource Extraction, Climate Change In Top 5 Threats To Health Outcomes; No Update On University Of Pittsburgh Oil & Gas Health Impacts Study [PaEN]

-- Inside Climate News: Gov. Shapiro Provides Fresh Support To Key Changes Recommended In 2020 Grand Jury Report To Tighten Regulation Of The Natural Gas Drilling Industry To Better Protect Public Health, Environment [PaEN]