Sunday, November 16, 2014

ET Rover Pipeline through Adrian is up for Puplic Comment on December 1

Reblogged from a post of the Sierraclub Michigan that can be found here

 Southeast Michigan's Natural Gas and Oil Pipeline Boom:

What's happening and How to have your Say
Enbridge Line 6B oil pipeline construction, photo by Ron Kar
Proposed natural gas pipelines in SE Michigan will cause
as many local impacts as the replacement of the Enbridge
Line 6B oil pipeline (above) and keep pushing fossil fuels,
instead of clean energy alternatives. Photo by Ron Kardos

Southeastern Michigan communities have been confronting at least three proposed new or expanded massive natural gas pipelines designed to move Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio fracked natural gas into and through Michigan to Ontario. Sierra Club opposes the massive ramp up in natural gas development around the nation through fracking that is one driver of these new pipeline proposals because the drilling, extraction and leakage in delivering this fossil fuel falls far short of being the "clean energy" the industry wants you to think it is. In addition, the construction of massive pipelines like these cause significant local environmental impacts as well.

Sierra Club leaders in the Michigan Chapter's Huron Valley, Crossroads, Nepessing and Southeast Michigan Groups are stepping up to the plate to fight pipelines and they encourage your engagement as well. Scroll down to find contacts for each of these four Groups who can help connect you with the fight in your area.  We also encourage you to sign up below so that we can follow up with you as each project develops.  These proposals are moving fairly fast, but there is time to weigh in now on at least one of the projects.
Three Natural Gas Pipelines Proposed:

Imagine a swoosh like the Nike logo aound the western end of Lake Erie and you'll have an idea of the maps showing three different proposed natural gas pipelines.  The proposed pipelines are the ET Rover Pipeline, the Nexus Pipeline (a partnership of DTE Energy, Enbridge Inc. and Spectra Energy) and the Utopia Project.  Each pipeline would start in eastern Ohio, western Pennsylvania or West Virginia, cross Ohio and Michigan before crossing the international border to enter Ontario, Canada.  Each project provides information on the links provided above including maps of the intended path.  But as has already been seen with the ET Rover project, the proposed location of the pipeline may be changed.  There are several critical hurdles for any additional construction of these pipelines, which include: acquisition of rights of way from private or public landowners; local permitting approvals if warranted; and approval by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which must follow the federal National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), in particular by provide for a public environmental review process.
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Public Input Opportunities on the ET Rover Pipeline
calltoaction.jpg

Currently, attention is focused on the ET Rover Pipeline which wants to build a new pipeline up to 42 inches in diameter from Defiance, Ohio, through Michigan to Sarnia, Ontario.  The company is seeking approval from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which must prepare an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) to weigh whether there are better alternatives to this proposal and whether the environmental impacts are too great to authorize the requested permits.

The first step in the EIS process for ET Rover is for FERC to take public comment under the Scoping Process.  Scoping is an initial step in the EIS in which the public needs to raise questions, concerns, provide information and other knowledge that ensures that the agency considers all the questions that need to be addressed.  The comments can be broad, such as this EIS needs to fully consider impacts of climate change related to the increased use of natural gas connected to increasing delivery of natural gas to Michigan and Ontario.  Or these comments can be very localized, for example indentifying sensitive ecosystems or raising specific, local health concerns. Most important is for ALL concerns or questions to be raised now, or they may not be considered in the EIS.  You don't need to be an expert to offer input, and asking questions about issues that concern you as part of your comments is just as valid as providing specific information in the Scoping Process.
Four Public Meetings in Michigan on ET Rover Scoping Process:

FERC has announced four public meetings to take public input on the Scoping process in Michigan (Google maps linked on the addresses):

November 20, 2014 at 6 p.m.
George Prinzing Auditorium
500 Washington Street
Chelsea, MI 48118

December 1, 2014 at 6 p.m.
Adrian High School Auditorium
785 Riverside Avenue
Adrian, MI  49221

December 10, 2014 at 6 p.m.
Holiday Inn Gateway Center
5353 Gateway Centre
Flint, MI  48507

December 11, 2014 at 6 p.m.
Maniaci Banquet
69227 North Main Street
Richmond, MI  48062


Written Comments on ET Rover Scoping Process:

 The public can also provide written public comments by December 18th through FERC's online comment system or through regular mail. Below are instructions on how to file a comment on the proposed ET Rover Pipeline with FERC. Filing just a written comment as an individual does not require you to register as a user.

                Go to the FERC eComment website. (www.ferc.gov/docs-filing/ecomment.asp)
                Click on the eComment button, which takes you to an authorization page.
                Enter your name and email address, and type in the “authorization” letters / numbers that appear.
                Click on authorize.
                FERC will send you an email. Click on the link in the email.
                You should be taken to a page on the FERC website with your name and email filled in.
                In the field for “Enter Docket Number” type PF14-14 (no spaces)
                Click on the Search button.
                Click on the blue cross in the far right column under the heading labelled “Select”
                Enter up to 6000 characters in the box for editing a comment.

Provide written public comments by US Mail by sending your letter and 14 copies to arrive before December 18th to:

Kimberly D. Bose, Secretary
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission
888 First Street, N.E. Washington 20426
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Sierra Club Contacts:

Below you'll find Sierra Club volunteer leaders in each of the four regional Michigan Chapter Groups that are already tracking and working to stop the massive natural gas pipeline proposals coming through southeastern Michigan.  In addition and if you are outside of these Groups but wish to help, please provide us your information by linking below the contact info.  We'll do our best to keep you apprised of the new developments.

Nepessing Group (Genessee County, Lapeer County and Northwestern Oakland County)
Ellen Waara (ellenwaara (at) gmail.com) 

Southeast Michigan Group (St. Clair County, Macomb County, part of Oakland and Wayne Counties)
Jean Gramlich (jeangramlich (at) msn.com)

Crossroads Group (Livingston County and western Oakland County)
Ron Kardos  (rmichael (at) sbcglobal.net)

Huron Valley Group (Washtenaw, Lenawee, and Monroe Counties)
Nancy Shiffler




PLEASE USE THE LINK BELOW TO SIGN UP FOR UPDATES ON THESE PIPELINE PROPOSALS

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Sunday, November 2, 2014

Forum on the Dangers of Oil and Gas Operations, Industrial Agriculture and the Enabling Political System

CHANGE: Due to scheduling problems, only Prof. Kauffman will present!
I invite all readers of this blog to an event at the University of Michigan, Dearborn Campus, College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters (CASL) building, room 1030.on Tuesday, November 18, 4:30-6pm.



View Larger Map
Program:

C. W. Kauffman, Retired, Professor, Retired, Department of Aerospace Engineering, University of Michigan
"Fire and Explosion Hazards for Hydrocarbons" and a few words about "The Current Corrupt Political Environment".


Victoria Powell. Retired Pediatrician, "Health Risks Associated with the Fracking Process".

Thomas Wassmer, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Biology, Siena Heights University, “Risks for Water, Soil and Air Integrity Caused by Oil and Gas Extraction from Deep Shale.”

Pam Taylor, retired high school teacher, International Baccalaureate program, business, and math teacher, "CAFOs – concentrated animal feeding operations".
 

And a representative of the Adrian Dominican Sisters on Ethical Issues of the Oil and Gas Extraction from Deep Shale.

Thursday, October 2, 2014

Oil Pump in Heritage and Flare in Witt Farm Cause Still Stink

Despite repeated comments by the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality that neither oil pumps nor the flare on Witt Farm should smell as this would indicate that something is not working properly, operations just go on as normal, and without any demands or repercussions for Savoy Energy - neither from the Michigan DEQ nor the EPA.

This confirms what I thought all along: There are no legal instruments to regulate this industry - they can basically do as they please.

Unfortunately, oil and gas operations are not the only effectively unregulated industries. The same is true for water pollution e.g. of the River Raisin. In 2008, the EPA found that most of the South Branch River Raisin has highly elevated coliform bacteria levels - way above the standards for safe partial body exposure (as in walking the river in protective waders). The law only required the river to be "flagged" for this dangerous condition - without anybody needing to come up with a solution or any steps towards fixing the problem.
Guess what? The problem does NOT vanish on its own with mega diary CAFO farms upstream and broken sewage systems everywhere. With my students I repeatedly measured more than 70,000 colony-forming-units of coliform bacteria two years in a row. That is more than 100x the safe levels for partial body exposure. Again, there are no legal instruments to pinpoint the culprits and fix the issue. Let us just wait until some flesh-eating strain of E. coli appear and somebody gets killed...

Does it really take that for people to wake up and realize that there is nobody to take care of you and rescue you if you do not take matters into your own hand??? It should be different - there should be laws protecting our health before commercial interest - but there aren't any - unless people demand them!

We would not have an EPA, a Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act today if there had not been massive protest in the 1970s. Since then, people went asleep - thinking all is fine now. Unfortunately, the EPA became an almost broken and powerless institution and the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act were watered down and many exemptions were created. We are slowly in more need of a massive protest movement than in the 1970s but it seems people became more oblivious and delusional and it will probably take more than burning rivers and lakes to get them away from the latest sitcoms and newest sport scores and realize what happens every day. For heaven's sake, if not even the breakdown of Toledo's drinking water supply for several days due to agricultural wastes wakes up the masses - what does it take to wake people from this slumber?

Sunday, August 31, 2014

New pipeline from Witt Farm to Wells off Spielman Rd Under Way

Savoy seems committed to use up the maximum of 10 wells permitted to be processed on Witt Farm and builds a new pipeline crossing M52 and going below Beaver Creek by horizontal drilling. There are currently 7 wells connected to Witt Farm and most of the natural gas is still flared off...

Sunday, July 27, 2014

Flaring of the Majority of Natural Gas Continues on Witt Farm

I need to come back to this part of my comments of the EPA findings posted earlier as this matter might have gone under the findings of leaks.

On page 3, paragraph 4, is stated that in contrary to earlier statements, only propane, which is only 20% of the natural gas produced from 7 or 8 wells is captured and used (Savoy's own gas analysis reported here). The report further states: "Methane and ethane are pulled off the propane tank and used as fuel gas for various pieces of equipment at the facility." Methane and ethane together contribute to 47% of the natural gas harvested in the 7 or 8 wells connected to the central processing facility on Witt Farm. I doubt very much that all of this gas is put to good use - how much machinery needs to be powered day and night? I suspect that either machinery is running just to consume these gas components - constituting a waste of energy and unnecessary carbon dioxide production (global warming!). Alternatively, methane and ethane are still flared off quantitatively. This is the more likely scenario as the hidden flare still shows a lit of flickering and shimmering air showing a lot of heat production at all times.

The more than likely still ongoing flaring of almost half of the natural gas of 7 to 8 attached wells is a massive waste of energy and absolutely unnecessary production of  greenhouse gases increasing Adrian's impact on global warming! I hope we can trust the glycol dehydrator equipped with a condenser to trap VOCs (volatile organic compounds) especially BTEX (benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene), which are especially poisonous and cancerous and had driven my concerns in previous posts about the flaring on Witt Farm leading to a meeting of city and county officials, the DEQ, and concerned citizens on February 21 2014 reported here.
Even with these health threats being gone or reduced, the DEQ should not allow the ongoing waste of perfectly usable natural gas! I will especially inform Kristie Shimko about these concerns.

Reference:

According to CAUSE 18-2007, a order of the DEQ Supervisor of Wells, the allowable amounts and duration of flaring within the Trenton and Black River formations are specified. These procedures were agreed upon in a discussion between the DEQ and the following oil and gas companies: Continental Resources, Inc.; West Bay Group; Savoy Energy LP; Trendwell Energy Corp.; Matrix Exploration & Development, LLC and Titan Energy, LLC.
“Gas that is not reasonably marketable may be flared. The volume of gas flared is restricted to 100 MCFGPD (100,000 cft gas per day) for a 40-acre drilling unit or 50 MCFGPD for a 20-acre drilling unit, which shall be the net volume of gas flared not including gas used for reasonable and necessary lease fuel purposes. The permittee of a well that is flaring gas shall, within 30 days of a letter of request from the Supervisor, submit to the Supervisor data necessary to determine whether the well can economically market gas. If data is not timely submitted to the Supervisor, the Supervisor may require the permittee to cease the flaring of gas. Based upon the data supplied by the permittee and other information available to the Supervisor, and after meeting with the permittee as necessary, the Supervisor or his authorized representative shall determine whether gas from the well can be economically marketed and shall inform the permittee in writing of that determination. Within 90 days of a determination in the affirmative, or at such later date as the Supervisor may specify, the permittee shall cease the flaring of gas from the well. If the permittee disputes the Supervisor's determination, the permittee may file a petition and request a hearing; but the filing of such petition shall not stay the effectiveness of the determination. If the Supervisor determines that gas from the well cannot be economically marketed*, the permittee shall be allowed to continue flaring gas at the rate specified above. Permission to flare does not grant an exception to any other required permits or approvals.
*Marketing of gas be deemed not economic when an operator provides reasonable evidence to the Supervisor that the cost to connect a well to a pipeline or facility for the transportation and processing of gas will take in excess of two years to pay out based upon the average monthly natural gas production sales.
Get the full PDF-document here.

Friday, July 25, 2014

Results of EPA Findings Not Reported by the Daily Telegram and Toledo Blade

Despite my efforts to share the news-worthy information about leaks on Witt Farm with the two local news outlets Daily Telegram and Adrian Today, which should be of considerable public interest, nothing was reported to the public yet. I guess the City of Adrian's appearance in the light of development projects as the large assisted living complex on Witt Farm and the fear of declining property values are more important than health and environmental concerns. I wonder if this "Looking Away" strategy will continue when the findings will be openly and officially called violations of the Clean Air Act, adding Adrian and Savoy Energy to a short list of illustrious environmental violations.

Edit: Adrian Today reported about this topic on July 25: http://adriantoday.com/2014/07/25/epa-report-inspectors-found-vapor-leaks-at-adrian-oil-plant/1039
I also informed the Toledo Blade about the EPA findings and had a brief email exchange with their reporter Tom Henry but there is still no report about this in the Toledo Blade as well.

Monday, July 21, 2014

ARD Final Response

Today I received the below email from Natalie Topinka from the EPA in response to my email sent on 7/18 published at the bottom of my post: http://adrianoil.blogspot.de/2014/07/infra-red-videos-taken-by-epa-show.html


Tom,


Glad you received the report and were able to view the IR camera videos just fine.


To clarify, the inspection of Savoy Energy's Adrian 25 facility on 4/28/14 is one part in EPA's Clean Air Act enforcement process in which we gather information to assess a facility's compliance. Typically, after an inspection, the EPA inspector writes a report to document facts and observations gathered during the inspection. Within this report, a compliance determination (that is, a finding as to whether or not the facility is in compliance with or in violation of Clean Air Act requirements) is not made. We may gather more information through written requests to the company (to which the company is required to fully respond), conduct independent research, and review potentially applicable regulations. Then we compare our observations and information to the applicable regulatory requirements and determine if the company is violating any applicable regulatory provision. If so, we will write up the specific violations in a Notice or Finding of Violation and notify the company, then make the notice publicly available at: http://yosemite.epa.gov/r5/r5ard.nsf/fa120e741359b6cf8625759a00455537!OpenView.


For Savoy Energy, the case is presently in the information-gathering stage. Therefore, it would be inaccurate at this point to say "EPA found violations," since no such determination has been made. You'll note that this is contrary to a statement made by one of our FOIA officers in an e-mail to you. Your FOIA request asked for a "report on violations of the clean-air act," and I wanted the officer to clarify to you that because EPA had not yet made a compliance determination, technically there was no such report responsive to your request. However, I knew you were referring to the inspection report and videos so I produced those documents to be sent to you. Unfortunately, the FOIA officer (who is not involved in any way with enforcement investigations but simply helps to organize documents to be released under FOIA) misunderstood me and wrote, "[Even though EPA found violations at the site] a compliance determination has not yet been made, so there is no report on violations of the CAA." The part in brackets (my emphasis) is simply a clerical error. I apologize for the confusion.


At this time, we can't speculate or comment on possible future actions, as all investigations are considered enforcement confidential, but we are keeping up with your blog and are hearing your concerns loud and clear. Please feel free to give me a call any time if you have further questions.


Thanks,


Natalie

----------------------

Natalie M. Topinka

Environmental Scientist

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Region 5

Air Enforcement and Compliance Assurance Branch

77 West Jackson Boulevard (AE-17J)

Chicago, IL 60604

ph: (312) 886-3853

fax: (312) 692-2410


Protecting the environment is everyone's responsibility. Help EPA fight pollution by reporting possible harmful environmental activity. To do so, visit EPA's website at http://www.epa.gov/compliance/complaints/index.html