Pennsylvania Senator Andy Dinniman has called for a halt to all construction on Sunoco’s Mariner East 2 natural gas liquids pipeline after a release of drilling mud contaminated several private water supplies in West Whiteland Township, Chester County.
According to the Pottstown Mercury and Delco Times who reported it, a letter to Patrick McDonnell, Secretary of the Department of Environmental Protection, “outlined a number of concerns associated with the identification and notification requirements contained in Sunoco Pipeline L.P.’s (Sunoco) Water Obstruction and Encroachment Permit approved in February of this year. Specifically, Dinniman highlighted notification requirements for those citizens in the path of the pipeline who rely on private well water.”
“The bottom line is, Sunoco submitted an application using bad data, DEP approved it and it is the citizens that are suffering the consequences,” said Dinniman. “I will continue to work to ensure that our groundwater is protected and I urge DEP officials to do the same.”
Residents of West Whiteland started noticing their well water was discolored and cloudy around the July 4th weekend. Some residents lost their water. Sunoco had made no attempt to notify residents when they punctured the aquifer on June 22. The company eventually provided cases of bottled water for affected residents and paid for hotel rooms where they could stay or, at least, shower.
Drilling activity was suspended for a few days, but started again last Saturday even though no test results had been received. The company insists that the mud is a non-toxic combination of bentonite clay and water. Bentonite clay is used in cat litter.
On Thursday night, at a special public meeting organized by the township to discuss Sunoco’s plans to connect the affected residents to public water provided by Aqua America, most of the residents reported that they’d learned about the situation from a neighbor, not from the company or the state.
Prior to the release in West Whiteland Township, residents of Brookhaven in Delaware County spotted a similar release of drilling mud. Christina and Nick Johnson had no idea that Brookhaven was on the path of the pipeline when they started seeing activity in their area they believed was sewer work. When Nick Johnson began to think it might be something else because he spotted a drill, he called the Sunoco hotline to get some answers about what was going on near his home. The public relations firm representative who responded to his call told him that it wasn’t a drill, that it couldn’t be because they weren’t drilling in Brookhaven. He looked up the model number he could see in a photo he’d taken of the equipment and found that it was, indeed, a drill. Christina called the hotline when she spotted activity after the release had occurred and was told by the same PR firm that what she was witnessing was “lawn service activity”. She’d called the township, but local officials had no knowledge of the release.
When the DEP eventually inspected the scene after the company admitted that it was, indeed, drilling in the area and that a leak had occurred, the inspector referred to a release of 500 gallons of the mud in his report, but told colleagues in an email that, “They lost 20,000 gallons of fluid over the past few days so who knows where that went.”
The proposed Mariner East 2 pipelines (two pipelines were proposed as one project) would carry the same propane, butane, and ethane that the Mariner East 1 pipeline is already moving from western Pennsylvania to Marcus Hook where it is put on ships and exported to customers in Scotland and elsewhere. On April 20th, 630 gallons of a propane and ethane mixture leaked from the 80-year old refurbished pipeline on Morgantown Road in Berks County. Natural gas liquid leaks are particularly dangerous because, unlike leaks of methane from natural gas pipelines, the liquid gases can hug the ground for a great distance and can explode if they come in contact with an ignition source like a car, cell phone, or even a doorbell.
After learning of the Berks County leak from area residents, a representative of the Middletown Coalition for Community Safety, one of the community groups fighting the pipeline, found the incident on a spreadsheet on the Coast Guard National Response Center’s website. The listing mentioned that DEP and other regulators had been informed.
Although references to Sunoco are still common, the company no longer exists. In April, it became Energy Transfer Partners. The company had been acquired by a parent entity called Energy Transfer Equity a couple of years ago, but was officially merged with ETP this spring. Anyone familiar with the Dakota Access Pipeline battle that made national headlines last year has heard about ETP. A lesser known project of theirs is the Rover pipeline that was approved in February by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on the Chairman Norman Bay’s last day on the job. The Commission hastily approved 4 pipelines that day knowing it would no longer have a quorum until a replacement was named by Trump and approved by the Senate.
The Commission has taken the rare step of halting construction activity on the Rover pipeline after releases of drilling mud on that line that contaminated Tuscarawas River wetlands in April left behind petroleum hydrocarbons that would not be present in the drilling mud the company described.
Drilling activity on the Mariner East 2 pipeline was suspended for a few days, but started again last Saturday even though no test results had been received. The company insists that the mud is a non-toxic combination of bentonite clay and water, the same thing the company said was released in Ohio. Bentonite clay is used in cat litter. It contains no petroleum hydrocarbons.
Communities fighting the Mariner East pipelines saw this day coming for years. The company had been attempting to get the water permits from the DEP for more than two years when the regulator issued 17 letters of deficiency containing hundreds of unresolved issues last September. The company responded at the end of the year with a labyrinth of folders and files said to contain all of the answers, but community groups and environmental advocacy organizations reviewing them were finding remaining deficiencies. The Middletown Coalition met with DEP chief Patrick McDonnell to request more time and another public comment period, but their request was rejected and the permits were granted days later. It’s unlikely that even the DEP was able to get through Sunoco’s response when it issued the permits. Senator Dinniman correctly points to one remaining deficiency the DEP overlooked. It may well be the tip of the iceberg.