With a New Pennsylvania Governor, Lawmakers Push to Move Drilling Sites From Communities

Democratic legislators in Pennsylvania are once again attempting to secure a 2,500-foot protective buffer zone, or setback, for residents who live near prospective natural gas sites. After years of industry pushback on other proposed setback increases, the bill’s fate is uncertain.

On April 3, Rep. Danielle Friel Otten (D-155) introduced HB 170, a bill that would restrict natural gas operators from siting new fracking wells fewer than 2,500 feet from an existing building or water well.
 

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The bill acts upon a recommendation of a June 2020 grand jury report published by the office of Josh Shapiro — then the state’s attorney general, now governor — which found that regulators had failed to protect residents of the commonwealth from the dangers of fracking. The report made eight recommendations, including setbacks, along with a list of other regulatory reforms, such as ending the practice of allowing oil and gas operators to conceal info on the fracking chemicals they use and prohibiting Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) staff from working in the oil and gas industry after leaving a public service role.

This work was informed by a growing body of evidence linking proximity to fracking-related air and water pollution to respiratory, cardiovascular, reproductive and nervous system damage, stemming from exposure to carcinogenic air pollutants and radioactive chemicals that seep into waterways.

This evidence has informed similar setback rules in states such as California and Colorado.

“Our government has a duty to set, and enforce, ground rules that protect public health and safety,” Shapiro said in a press release in 2020. “We are the referees; we are here to prevent big corporations and the powerful industries from harming our communities or running over the rights of citizens.”

“I agree with his statement,” Otten said in a co-sponsorship memorandum published on March 30, as she quoted Shapiro. “I believe that as legislators, we must do all we can to protect the residents of our commonwealth and our constitutional right to clean air and pure water.”

This is not the first time a Pennsylvania state lawmaker has pushed to extend the distance at which oil and gas developers must locate their operations from water wells, homes, schools, churches, commercial centers and the like. That distance is currently 500 feet — a buffer zone that was expanded from 200 feet in 2012 with the passage of Act 13, a bill better known for establishing an impact fee for the development of unconventional, or fracking, wells. “When it comes to the safe development of job-creating shale gas, Pennsylvania continues to lead by example, including regulations related to setbacks,” natural gas trade group the Marcellus Shale Coalition wrote of the law a few years after it was passed.

That distance has since been found to have been ineffective, based not just on a litany of academic studies that pinpoint the health consequences of exposure to air and water pollution from fracking but also on a loophole written into the law that allowed landowners to offer their consent to waive the mandatory setback distance.

“Act 13 did not significantly alter how wells were sited in relation to nearby buildings,” a 2021 report in the peer-reviewed journal Energy Policy reads. One out of every 13.7 fracking wells drilled in the Act’s aftermath was exempted from the 500-foot rule. 

“These regulations are only as strong as these exemptions allow,” said Drew Michanowicz, co-author of the paper and senior scientist at PSE Healthy Energy, an energy policy research institute.

HB 170 also includes a provision for homeowner exemptions. Lois Bower-Bjornson, southwestern Pennsylvania field organizer with Clean Air Council, who is supportive of the bill, says she does not agree with this clause.

In the years since Act 13’s passage, as fracking steadily gripped the state, a range of environmental groups have called for a wider buffer between drilling sites and communities. Meanwhile, the Marcellus Shale Coalition, a powerful industry group, called for the opposite. Five days after the publication of the AG grand jury report, David Spigelmyer, president of the natural gas trade group, sent the General Assembly a letter that clearly outlined the industry’s opposition to a 2,500-foot setback. “It would essentially make much of the shale play in the Commonwealth undevelopable,” the letter reads. (The Marcellus Shale Coalition spent $1.3 million on lobbying between 2020 and 2021.)

Back in 2021, in the aftermath of Shapiro’s grand jury report, a group of Democratic state senators and representatives — including Rep. Otten — introduced a pair of 2,500-foot setback bills, SB 650 and HB 1465, to a Republican-dominated Legislature. Neither bill moved past its respective chamber’s Environmental Resources and Energy Committee.

But with the very person who recommended the reform now at the helm of the executive branch and a slim Democratic majority in the House, could the second-largest natural gas drilling state in the country finally be ready to place protective buffers on fracking?

“I have no hope that this is going to go anywhere,” says Ned Ketyer, president at Physicians for Social Responsibility-Pennsylvania, which co-authors an annual literature review of academic research on the health risks of fracking — the current edition is nearly 600 pages long. A new addition to that growing body of research came out of the University of Chicago in March — a study published in peer-reviewed journal The Lancet Planetary Health compared more than a decade of Medicare claims from residents in Pennsylvania’s prolific oil and gas drilling regions in the northern parts of the state to those in neighboring New York, where fracking is banned. The researchers found higher risk of cardiovascular diseases in Pennsylvania communities where fracking has taken hold.

Ketyer is supportive of the bill and grateful for its introduction, but maintains that setbacks will not be as effective for protecting human health or the environment as a full-fledged halt on the practice.

“It’s never been done safely, and it won’t be done safely,” Ketyer says. “You can set back things if you want. The fact is that this has to stop.”

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