'Us vs. Them' in Pa. Gaslands
Third in a four-part series.
DALLAS TOWNSHIP, Pa. - The solicitor's voice shook as he tried to explain to a hostile crowd that natural gas pipelines are perfectly legal.
"If we have to have this," Tom Brennan said, "let's at least try to control it and have it on our own terms."
With that, to scattered applause and more groans, the township supervisors here decided to end a war over natural gas pipes that bitterly divided this town, a gateway to the rich Marcellus Shale region.
The compromise was a new, custom-tailored ordinance that banned high-pressure pipelines in residential neighborhoods, but permitted them in areas zoned for farms or factories.
Now, it appears the township's painstaking effort to craft a compromise between warring factions added up to nothing.
In what is shaping up as a key victory for the shale-gas industry, Gov. Corbett and the legislature appear close to stripping municipalities of the power to impose tough local restrictions on wells and pipelines. Under a pending measure, wells and pipelines would be permitted in every zoning district - even residential ones - statewide.
And the industry isn't stopping there.
Two pipeline companies are seeking the clout of eminent domain. While the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission has yet to rule, it signaled this year that it was leaning toward giving firms condemnation power to gain rights-of-way for their pipelines.
Dallas Township - an affluent suburb outside Wilkes-Barre in the Endless Mountains - is just one battlefield in a war that has flared in more and more Pennsylvania towns. The increasingly contentious conflict centers on proliferation of the new, large-diameter, high-pressure pipelines that carry Marcellus Shale gas to market.
In part, the war over pipelines is a proxy struggle over "fracking" itself.
As one Dallas Township opponent wrote in a Facebook message: "It is all one package. You cannot have a well without a pipeline, compressor and metering station, or vice versa. Stop just one, and stop all."
Political hardball
In its pursuit of its high-stakes agenda, the industry has been more than willing to play hardball, unleashing its lawyers and lobbyists.
Perhaps the most aggressive move came here in Dallas Township, in Luzerne County, when a Texas pipeline firm, Chief Gathering L.L.C., filed a lawsuit this fall threatening three of its opponents with potentially millions of dollars in damages. The suit said its opposition had subjected the firm to "public hatred, contempt, and ridicule in the community."
As evidence, Chief attached 22 pages of critical postings on Facebook.
In another instance, Chesapeake Energy - the biggest driller in Pennsylvania - sent off a mass letter this summer to leaseholders in five counties, asking them to write Congress and complain about the Army Corps of Engineers, which must approve many pipelines that cross streams.
The "Dear Mineral Owner" letter warned that a corps review of gas pipeline projects was unduly holding up production - and delaying "royalty payments to you."
David J. Spigelmyer, Chesapeake's vice president and in-house lobbyist and the letter's author, said in an interview that the firm simply wanted its leaseholders to know who was to blame; the corps denies creating serious delays.
"At the time we had over 100 wells waiting on pipelines," said Spigelmyer, also the new chairman of the Marcellus Shale Coalition, the leading industry trade group.
"I believe we had an obligation to communicate with those leaseholders who had royalties withheld until we could get pipelines built to those locations."
In Westmoreland County, near Pittsburgh, Range Resources successfully filed suit to strike down the drilling and pipelines ordinance in Salem Township.
The court case, said Township Solicitor Gary Falatovich, "did a really good job of dismantling every modest control that the township was trying to impose. What can I tell you?"
Then there was the epic battle waged for more than a year over the Marc 1 - for Marcellus - a 39-mile, $257 million project that would open a new swath of Bradford, Lycoming, and Sullivan Counties to gas development.
The Marc 1 is not a gathering line running directly from wellheads, like most of the new pipeline construction in the state. It is a giant "hub" line of 30-inch-diameter steel pipe connecting two major interstate lines. Opponents fear many new clusters of wells will be drilled along the line and tie into it.