What?: DEP has opened public comment on 3 hugely important documents as one public comment opportunity. The first is the text of the Air Quality General Permit regulating most compressor stations, known as GP-5. The second is a brand new Air Quality General Permit which will be required for all new Marcellus Shale gas wells, known as GP-5a. This is the first time DEP is requiring any form of air quality permitting for Oil & Gas wells; until now all Oil & Gas wells have been exempt from air quality permitting! The 3rd document is the list of exemptions from air quality permitting; the notorious Exemption 38 applied to Oil & Gas wells.

Deadline: 6/5/2017

Why Does It Matter?: Compressor stations are permanent facilities that spew out copious amounts of air pollution, 24 x 7. Most of these pollutants are odorless and invisible to the naked eye. Most compressor stations qualify for what is known as a General Permit. This is a standardized “canned” permit written in advance of any actual applications. (General Permits are supposed to be only used for facilities or pieces of equipment that are “standardized”.) Once the text of a General Permit has been promulgated, there is no public comment on specific applications to use that permit for specific compressor stations. We do get public comment on the text of the General Permit itself, whenever it is modified (which only happens once every few years). So it’s extremely important to participate when we get the chance. There are a number of specific issues with this draft of GP-5, which are laid out below.

Historically, Oil & Gas wells were completely exempted from all air pollution permitting requirements — Exemption 38 in DEP’s list of air quality permit exemptions — in spite of many years of public comment asking them to rescind this exemption. When EPA promulgated its Oil & Gas Air Rule, DEP did amend Exemption 38 to “remind” operators of Marcellus gas wells that they were subject to the EPA rule. But they left Exemption 38 in place, and provided no mechanism for inspection or enforcement of the EPA rule. DEP has now finally done the right thing, putting forward a new air quality General Permit for unconventional Oil & Gas wells and removing new unconventional Oil & Gas wells from Exemption 38. It is extremely important that we comment to DEP in support of this. We have been asking DEP to do this for years.

Things to Support:

• Removal of new unconventional wells from the air pollution permit exemption list

• Requiring an air quality permit for new unconventional wells

• Circumvention provisions under Prohibited Use of GP-5, GP-5a (Section A5(d)),

Serious Problem Areas:

• No public comment on minor source determination

Major sources are not eligible for GP-5. Instead, major sources require a full “Plan Approval”. This is a permit drafted specifically for the facility (i.e. a “custom” permit) on which DEP requires public comment. In the past, such public comment periods have disputed whether a source is correctly designated a Minor Source. In Washington County, one compressor station operator was forced to withdraw from the proposed facility one compression engine as the result of such a dispute. Under the current rules, there is no way for such a dispute to occur: the operator can assert a facility is minor source and the public has no say on this. This issue has brought condemnation from EPA, which DEP has ignored:

“EPA has consistently stated that to be federally enforceable, two criteria must be met: (1) the limitations must be contained in a permit that is federally enforceable and has undergone public participation and (2) the limitation must be enforceable as a practical matter. Since the application for authorization does not undergo any public review EPA does not believe that it would be federally enforceable.”

DEP must allow public comment on individual GP-5 applications in general, and certainly on minor source determination.

• Seriously deficient handling of Synthetic Minor Sources

A Synthetic Minor Source (as opposed to a Natural Minor Source) is a facility which would be designated as a Major Source (and thereby ineligible for GP-5) except for special provisions in the operation of the facility. GP-5 makes no distinction between synthetic and natural minor sources. An application for GP-5 must be required to declare whether or not it is a synthetic or natural minor source. In the case of a synthetic minor source, the operator should be required to declare the list of potentials to emit (PTE) if the special measures were not taken, and to indicate in detail what the operating provisions will be to insure that minor source PTEs happen. It is worth noting that since a declaration in detail of what provisions will insure that a synthetic minor source does not cross major source thresholds is likely to be specific to the facility, applicability of a so-called “standard” (i.e. General) permit to a Synthetic Minor Source is highly questionable.

• Lack of requirement to forecast the risk of exposure to toxic doses of hazardous chemicals

An applicant is required to submit Potentials To Emit (PTEs) measured in tons per year, and is only held accountable for one year rolling average actual release amounts. Meanwhile, agencies such as OSHA and ATSDR formulate safety amounts for acute exposure to many of these same pollutants measured as e.g. parts per million over a given number of hours. There is no simple way to convert emissions measured in tons per year to a probability of toxic exposure as measured the way health agencies do it. A dispersion study can help, but applicants for DEP air quality permits (including full Plan Approvals) are not required to do this. There is no requirement for applicants for air quality permits to consider topographic or meteorological conditions which might enhance exposure to pollutants. Consequently: DEP air quality permits are entirely administered on the basis of standards which have only marginal relation to health, particularly as regards acute exposures.

• Dehydrator emissions are modeled based on unrealistic Gas Analysis assumptions

As explained in the DEP Technical Support Document published in conjunction with this comment period, a dehydrator creates a direct pathway to the atmosphere for any hydrocarbons captured by the glycol when the water is boiled off from the wet glycol. Emissions from this pathway are modeled, not measured, by means of a software program known as GRI-GlyCalc. Emission amounts output by this software are only as reliable as the gas analysis amounts that are provided as input. PTE numbers for a dehydrator are estimated before the compressor station is even built. That means gas analysis figures are simply assumed to be constant over a geographic region and over time. There is no scientific basis for this assumption.

• Municipal notification requirements do not provide sufficient basis for local governments to determine impact

There is no requirement for PTE amounts to be listed in municipal (Act 14) notifications, and in our experience in Fayette County, none are provided. Act 14 requires provision of municipal/county comment periods, and 25 PA code § 127.43a includes this language:

“The notice shall state that there is a 30-day comment period which begins upon receipt of the notice by the municipality and county”.

In our experience in Fayette County, this language is missing from Act 14 notifications for GP-5 applications. DEP must incorporate this language into the text of GP-5 (and GP-5A).

• LDAR has been redrawn too narrowly

The treatment of LDAR (Leak Detection And Repair) in the currently in force GP-5 is one of the few bright spots in an otherwise very bleak GP-5 picture. Alas, DEP has significantly degraded the position of LDAR in the new draft. Whereas currently the requirement to do LDAR applies to the permit as a whole, in the new draft version it only applies to “Fugitive Emission Components”. Second, the definition of “leak” has been so severely narrowed as to practically eliminate all health-related emissions. In particular, emissions into the atmosphere from any form of vent or exhaust of substances that are not supposed to be emitted that way are no longer counted as “leaks”. Thus an emission of VOC from a dehydrator vent that is “supposed to” emit only steam and water vapor is not considered a “leak”. Finally the requirement that the plan to provide Optical Gas Imaging (OGI) insures sufficient thermal background will make ground-based OGI significantly harder to do.

• Reporting requirements must include a list of all connected wells and relevant emissions information from each well

As noted above, dehydrator emissions calculations are dependent upon gas analysis figures for the input stream. This cannot be reliably verified without knowing which wells are connected and having reliable gas analysis figures for each connected well.

How?:

Background: The actual documents are available here:

DRAFT Air Quality Permit Exemptions.pdf:
<http://www.elibrary.dep.state.pa.us/dsweb/Get/Document-116051/275-2101-003.pdf>
DRAFT GP-5 - Natural Gas Compression Stations, Processing Plants, and Transmission Stations.pdf:
<http://www.elibrary.dep.state.pa.us/dsweb/Get/Document-116053/2700-PM-BAQ0267_GP-5%20.pdf>
DRAFT GP-5A - Unconventional Natural Gas Well Site Operations and Remote Pigging Stations.pdf:
<http://www.elibrary.dep.state.pa.us/dsweb/Get/Document-116054/2700-PM-BAQ0268_GP-5A.pdf>
Technical Support Document for GP-5 and GP-5A.pdf:
<http://www.elibrary.dep.state.pa.us/dsweb/Get/Document-116052/Technical%20Support%20Document%20GP-5%20and%205A.pdf>