Apr 15, 2020 4 min read

In 2017, Washington County unveiled a new trail in Cross Creek County Park. County officials credited a partnership with Range Resources, which had nine well pads in the park at the time, for the trail and other recent improvements there.

The state Department of Environmental Protection said Tuesday the shale gas driller had agreed to pay a $198,920 fine for violations of the state clean-air law at one of those sites and at another well pad in Mt. Pleasant Township.

The events that gave rise to the fine occurred between 2013 and 2015, when Range operated the well pads without obtaining an air-quality permit known as a Title V for either site. It emerged in 2015 that the sites’ emissions were high enough to require the permit. DEP officials said Range addressed that discrepancy by installing new equipment at the sites without obtaining regulators’ permission to do so beforehand.

One of the sites is known as Cross Creek County Park well pad and located in the township of the same name. The one in Mt. Pleasant is known as the Costanzo pad.

The sites had storage tanks and other likely pollution sources. They qualified for an exemption from Title V requirements if their potential emissions of gases known as volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, were less than 50 tons per year for each of them.

In August 2015, the company informed the DEP it had recalculated emissions during a “self-audit.” The formula the company used for these new calculations was more conservative than the one it had used previously used, the DEP said.

Under the new calculations, the Costanzo site met the Title V threshold in 2013 and 2014. The Cross Creek site did so in 2014, according to the consent assessment, which Range and DEP officials signed April 9.

The document says Range went on to install equipment at the sites’ storage tanks that reduced their emissions below the 50-ton cutoff for potential emissions, meaning the sites qualified for the Title V exemption, however, Range failed to follow state law by not receiving authorization from the DEP to do so.

DEP spokesperson Lauren Fraley said the underlying problems had been corrected by the time the agency learned of them.

“While corrected violations are no less serious, DEP used this opportunity to focus its efforts on information gathering to determine if this was isolated to these specific sites or more widespread,” she wrote in an email. “The department gained more information from Range Resources including, for example, the operator’s methodology to calculate emissions and data on other well sites and determined that this was not a pervasive issue.”

Both calculations relied on “generally accepted” formulas, the DEP said. Still, the results varied by as much as several tens of tons of VOCs per year, depending on which equation was used.

In 2014, the VOC emissions for the pad in Cross Creek were determined to have been 40.91 tons under the first formula and 61.9 tons under the second, more conservative one.

Range said it was confident in the methods it uses to calculate emissions at its sites as part of a commitment to “responsibly developing natural gas.”

“That commitment includes being accountable and transparent, which is why we have always taken the approach of self-reporting,” spokesperson Mark Windle said in an email. “Range’s Environmental Compliance team discovered the exceedance through an internal audit and immediately reported to regulators.”

Windle said the company “proactively redesigned and installed emission reduction equipment to attain compliance and improve the emissions performance on the well sites.”

Cross Creek and Mt. Pleasant townships will be eligible to receive grants toward certain projects, including outdoor recreation, from the fine money. For Cross Creek, that amount is $20,744. For Mt. Pleasant, it’s $21,293.