What?: DEP has released for Public Comment a Draft Technical Guidance giving its policies for writing Notices of Violation, pursuing enforcements, and resolving violations for Oil & Gas wells.

Deadline: November 18, 2014. (Extended from the original deadline, which was November 3, 2014.)

Why Does It Matter?: Regulations are only as good as the enforcement that backs them up. This is your chance to tell the DEP what you think about how they should be doing this. The number of issues here is truly staggering. Among the many, many problems regarding DEP’s policies and practices for violations & enforcements are:

• A huge variety of problems for which no Notice of Violation (NOV) is written when it should be, inlcuding leaking wells and cementing failures. Many of these problems are written up as Comments in Inspection Reports, even though there should be an NOV.
  
  
• Spills that the operator reports and have supposedly been cleaned up by the time the inspector arrives are listed in compliance reports as“In Compliance With Policy” — no NOV! (Anyone searching for violations only will come up empty on these cases.)
  
  
• Only inspection reports with an NOV show up on the main DEP site for records, called eFACTS.
  
  
• CACP documents (Consent Assessment of Civil Penalty) are not published on the DEP’s web site. These are important public documents, and should be available on-line to the public!
  
  
• The Bureau of Oil & Gas Management needs to coordinate with the Bureau of Air Quality over who verifies (and how!) that a well operator is in compliance with the new EPA Air Quality Rules for Oil & Gas wells. (The DEP’s notorious Exemption 38 allows a well operator to be exempt from needing an Air Quality permit, even though it is subject to the EPA rules.)
  
  
• Notifications by a well operator of change in status to a well (e.g. cementing, pressure tests, fracking, completion etc.) should be published on a DEP web site.
  
  
• This Technical Guidance must include strong standards for what kind of tests DEP should do on a water supply and all test results must be disclosed. The tests should include everything in:
  
  • EPA’s drinking water standards!
  • DEP’s own studies of produced water (“Suite Code 944”)!
  • What the drillers are testing for in their own pre-drilling (rebuttable presumption of liability) tests
  • Testing standards for waste management (Form U, Form 26R)
  • Chemicals listed on fracfocus.org
    
  (As drafted, the Technical Guidance doesn’t include any water testing standards whatsoever.) This was one of the issues discussed in the Auditor General’s performance audit of the DEP.
  
  
• When DEP determines that a water supply has been contaminated, it should issue an order to restore quality water in every case. It is not good enough if the well operator claims to have taken care of the problem.
  

How?:

Background: For those wanting to dig into the documents: