PITTSBURGH (TNS) — For years, Pennsylvania regulators have been concerned that if something like the massive gas leak that raged in Cambria County last month occurred in a more urban area, the consequences would be devastating.
The Keystone State is second only to Michigan in the number of gas storage fields it hosts — large, underground reservoirs that hold and dispense gas used to heat homes and cook food.
Within the 49 active storage fields are more than 1,770 wells used to inject and withdraw gas from storage, and monitor conditions underground. They dot large chunks of land in Allegheny, Westmoreland, Washington and Greene counties, and many carry an elevated risk from failure because of their age, construction and location.
The George L. Reade 1 well in the Rager Mountain storage field in Cambria County, operated by Canonsburg-based Equitrans Midstream Corp., was one of those high-risk wells.
In the coming years, its name might become a kind of shorthand for how the state overhauls its oversight of the natural gas storage industry. Kurt Klapkowski, acting deputy secretary for oil and gas management at the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, said he would like to model the agency’s investigation of the Equitrans well on what is considered to have been the largest well leak ever recorded.
The Aliso Canyon storage field in California was the biggest wake-up call so far in the underground gas storage industry. There, a well that was later found to have been severely corroded ruptured one day in October 2015. It vented uncontrolled for nearly four months, displacing thousands of people and spurring a slew of investigations, federal legislation, and new safety regulations and practices.
”There’s nothing that’s not on the table,” he said during a meeting of the Oil and Gas Technical Advisory Board on Dec. 1.
”Everything is on the table for consideration in terms of making sure this industry is regulated appropriately and the public is protected and environment is protected from potential incidents like this happening again.”
The DEP is starting with Equitrans.
By Friday, it had issued three orders to the Canonsburg-based company, a host of violations, and a subpoena for records ranging from well testing data to texts and phone calls between Equitrans and the emergency contractor brought in to kill the George L. Reade 1 well over several days in November.
The Cambria County gas venting, which roared like a jet engine over the nearby area and wafted malodors over its hills and valleys, was detected Nov. 6.
By the time the well was plugged Nov. 19, it had leaked an estimated 1.29 billion cubic feet of gas into the air, according to the DEP. That’s more than a quarter of what was released at Aliso Canyon between 2015 and 2016.
DEP orders
The problems at Rager Mountain stretched beyond that one leaking well, the state found. There are 11 other wells at the Equitrans storage field. Regulators said they found gas leaking from all but one of them.
Equitrans had set temporary plugs in one early last week. On Thursday, it discovered a problem with another and began plans to temporarily plug that one as well.
The DEP’s orders didn’t mince words.
”Equitrans has failed to properly maintain and operate the wells, and its continuing failure to minimize the potential for well control emergencies constitutes an ongoing threat to the environment and to human health and safety,” the agency wrote.
The DEP charged that the company was fumbling things on the surface as well.
Its inspectors said Equitrans didn’t do enough to prevent soil and water pollution around the leaking George L Reade 1 well.
Between 50 and 100 barrels of brine — heavy liquid packed with salts — were spilled as Equitrains’ contractor tried to pump the brine down the leaking well to suppress the flow. With each failed attempt, the well spit out the brine, drenching the ground around it and causing some trees to turn black.
Equitrans spokeswoman Natalie Cox said the company is in the process of remediating and has begun “a complete environmental assessment at and around the facility.”Equitrans also launched a review of all the storage wells at Rager Mountain, she noted, “which includes the requirements outlined in DEP’s administrative order.”
But the agency’s order went further still. DEP said it is looking into all of the storage fields that Equitrans operates in Pennsylvania — it has nine of them, all in the western part of the state. The agency gave the company 30 days to hire a contractor to audit all of its underground gas storage operations, which include more than 150 operating and monitoring wells.
Although neither the agency nor Equitrans has speculated about the cause of the well failure, Mr. Klapkowski highlighted the fact that the George L. Reade 1 well was a “single-point-of-failure” well.
That means there are parts of it that have only one layer of protection between pressurized gas in the wellbore and the soil around it. If that layer fails, so does the well. According to DEP records, there are 239 such storage wells across the state.
