EDITORIAL: Drilling ban literally hot topic

Republican & Herald, Pottsville, Pa.
Thu, December 15, 2022

Dec. 15—Anyone wondering why the Delaware River Basin Commission doesn't trust the natural gas industry to drill safely need look no further than the adjacent Susquehanna River watershed.

Pennsylvania's government long has been outmaneuvered by the industry. Many members of the state Legislature have been lap dogs for industry interests for more than 15 years. And that has been reflected in the state Department of Environmental Protection's accommodating oversight of drilling.

The DRBC regulates water distribution and exercises some environmental oversight for the Delaware River watershed, which provides water for about 13 million people. Its members are the governments of Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey and Delaware and the federal government.

The agency has precluded drilling in the watershed, and recently voted to preclude drillers from dumping drilling and fracking wastewater anywhere in the watershed, while making it more difficult for drillers to extract water for fracking operations.

All of those restrictions have drawn howls of protest from the industry, and some landowners have protested that they cannot extract value from their land through drilling leases.

Meanwhile, the DEP makes it hard to argue with the Delaware commission's decisions.

The agency was woefully ineffective in the early days of the industry's arrival. After residents of the tiny crossroads of Dimock, Susquehanna County, filmed themselves lighting their tap water on fire soon after Cabot Oil & Gas Corp. began drilling, the agency finally placed a moratorium on drilling around the village.

The state attorney general's office did not criminally charge Cabot until 2020. Recently, Cabot's successor, Coterra Energy Inc., pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor violation of the Clean Streams Law for the migration of methane into Dimock's residential wells. It agreed to pay $16 million for a municipal water system and to pay residents' water bills for 75 years.

Now, remarkably, the DEP has lifted the moratorium on horizontal drilling for gas under Dimock, while insisting that the decision was not related to the plea deal.

Attorney General Josh Shapiro, the governor-elect, was critical of the DEP during his gubernatorial campaign. Reinstating the moratorium would be a good place for him to start making the agency an aggressive guardian of the public interest.