Source: https://eem.jacksonkelly.com/2014/08/index.html
Timestamp: 2019-04-26 12:27:10+00:00

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The West Virginia legislature passed S.B. 373 requiring that all aboveground storage tanks (ASTs) be registered, and if required by code or rule, permitted as well. There has been discussion by several industry associations about holding a special legislative session to modify the deadlines, but as of yet, the governor has not called for a special session. Unless there is modification by the legislature to the new statute, there are four major deadlines for compliance within the new law that must be met before the end of this year: (1) registration of ASTs; (2) submission of Spill Prevention and Response Plans; (3) annual inspection and certification of ASTs; and (4) holders of an NPDES general permit must apply for an NPDES individual permit if the permit holder has an AST within a public water system’s zone of critical concern. The following article contains basic compliance facts and deadlines as well as WVDEP links to additional AST information and the AST registration database.
The WVDEP Secretary is required to compile a list of all aboveground storage tanks in the state whether the ASTs are operational or nonoperational. All ASTs must be registered by October 1, 2014. After that date, it is unlawful to own or operate an unregistered AST.
Who has to register and what is a tank? According to the new law, an aboveground storage tank (AST) is “a device made to contain an accumulation of more than 1320 gallons of fluids that are liquids at standard temperature and pressure” that has more than 90% of its capacity aboveground. The AST is constructed of “primarily non-carbon materials, including wood, concrete, steel, plastic or fiberglass reinforced plastic” and includes “all ancillary aboveground pipes and dispensing systems up to the first point of isolation and all ancillary underground pipes and dispensing systems connected to the aboveground containers to the first point of isolation.” All mobile devices that remain in one location continuously for 60 or more days, and which otherwise meet the definition criteria, are also AST.
An AST does not include a process vessel, which is defined as “tanks, containers or other vessels utilized in a facility in the manufacturing process through which there is a steady, variable, recurring or intermittent flow of materials.” Shipping containers and railroad freight cars, as long as these vessels are regulated under the Federal Railroad Safety Act, federal law governing the transportation of hazardous materials, or federal law governing barges or boats under the United States Coast Guard or United States Department of Homeland Security, and swimming pools are excluded.
An owner or an operator may register an AST. Each AST will be assigned a unique number. Accordingly, the owner or the operator may register, but only one entity is required to do so.
Each AST is required to have a Spill Prevention Response Plan (SPRP), and the owner or operator of the AST must submit the SPRP to the WVDEP by December 3, 2014. Each SPRP is to be developed in consultation with emergency management and the Bureau for Public Health, be site specific and be updated at least every three years.
Provide a preventative maintenance program that includes monitoring and inspection procedures, identification of stress points, employee training programs and security systems.
Provide contact information for the county and municipal emergency management agencies and nearest downstream public water supply intake and designate the person or persons to be notified in the event of a release of fluids.
An updated or modified SPRP shall be submitted if an AST is added or removed, or there is a modification or design, construction, operation or maintenance of an AST or any circumstance that increases the potential for fire, explosion or release of fluids, or if there is a substantial modification of emergency equipment of change in response protocols or if the plan fails or other circumstances occur as identified by the WVDEP.
Every owner or operator of an AST shall have an annual inspection performed by a qualified, registered professional engineer or someone working under supervision of one; by an individual certified by the American Petroleum Institute to perform inspections; or by an individual certified under another program approved by the secretary. The inspection form shall certify that each AST that each tank, associated equipment, leak detection system, and secondary containment system meets the minimum standards established in the law or by the WVDEP in legislative rule. As of right now, the WVDEP has not filed legislative rules, but interim guidance is available on its website: http://www.dep.wv.gov/WWE/abovegroundstoragetanks/Pages/TankCertificationRequirements.aspx.
There are eight general categories covered in the interim guidance: (1) determination that the AST continues to meet design standards; (2) AST construction and installation; (3) general maintenance and testing of AST system; (4) corrosion protection and maintenance; (5) release detection method and procedures; (6) release prevention methods and procedures; (7) secondary containment structures; and (8) record keeping for leak detection, corrosion protection, and general operation and maintenance.
If an entity with an NPDES general permit also has an AST located within a public water system’s zone of critical concern, then the permitted entity must have applied for an NPDES individual permit under the West Virginia Water Pollution Control Act by September 1, 2014.
There are two key definitions in determining whether or not this requirement applies to the holder of an NPDES general permit. First, a public water system is “[a]ny water supply or system which regularly supplies or offers to supply water for human consumption through pipes or other constructed conveyances, if serving at least an average of twenty-five individuals per day for at least sixty days per year, or which has at least fifteen service connections and . . . include[s] any collection, treatment, storage and distribution facilities under the control of the owner or operator of the system and used primarily in connection with the system; and [a]ny collection or pretreatment facilities not under such control which are used primarily in connection with the system.” W.Va. Code § 22-31-3(2). However, if a system meets these four criteria, then it is not a public water system: (1) the system consists “only of distribution and storage facilities and does not have any collection and treatment facilities; (2) the system obtains all of its water from, but is not owned or operated by a public water system; (3) the system does not sell its water to any person; and (4) the system is not a carrier conveying passengers in interstate commerce. Id.
Second, a zone of critical concern is “a corridor along streams within a watershed that warrants more detailed scrutiny due to its proximity to the surface water intake. . . and is determined using a mathematical model that accounts for stream flows, gradient and area topography.” The length of a zone of critical concern is “based on a five-hour time of travel of water in the streams to the water intake, plus an additional ¼ mile below the water intake.” The width of the zone is “1,000 feet measured horizontally from each bank of the principal stream and 500 feet measured horizontally from each bank of the tributaries draining into the principle stream. W.Va. Code § 22-31-3(7).
Once a tank is registered and the latitude and longitude of the of the AST is provided in the registration as required, the WVDEP will include the identity of and distance to the nearest groundwater or surface water public intake from the AST in the correspondence to the registrant that provides the AST number assigned to the AST registered. This information should be sufficient to determine whether or not an AST is within a public water system’s zone of critical concern.
This article was authored by Kelley M. Goes, Jackson Kelly PLLC. For more information on the author, see here.
The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia has upheld the Army Corps of Engineers’ issuance of a Clean Water Act § 404 permit to Raven Crest Contracting, LLC, a subsidiary of Xinergy Ltd.
On August 10, 2012, the Corps issued a § 404 “dredge and fill permit” to Raven Crest for its Boone North No. 5 Surface Mine in Boone County, West Virginia. The Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, West Virginia Highlands Conservancy, Coal River Mountain Watch, and Sierra Club subsequently filed suit, claiming that the Corps had violated the Clean Water Act and NEPA by not considering a series of studies allegedly linking mining to adverse health impacts. The anti-mining groups also claimed that the compensatory mitigation plan approved by the Corps violated the Clean Water Act, although they would later withdraw those claims.
On August 18, 2014, the district court issued an order rejecting the groups’ claims.
The district court likewise held that the Corps did not violate the Clean Water Act by deciding not to consider the health studies. The Court noted that the scope of the Corps’ Clean Water Act review was also limited to the effects from discharges of dredged or fill material, and again focused on the fact that none of the health studies identified any alleged adverse health effects from those discrete discharges.
Furthermore, the Court additionally found that the Corps had indeed considered the “known potential human health effects” of its permit decision by analyzing possible effects on water quality and municipal water supplies.
This decision follows a similar ruling in a nearly identical case brought in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Kentucky (Kentuckians for the Commonwealth v. United States Army Corps of Eng’rs, 963 F. Sup.. 2d. 670 (W.D. Ky. 2013)), which was recently affirmed by the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals (Kentuckians for the Commonwealth v. United States Army Corps of Eng’rs, 746 F.3d 698 (6th Cir. 2014)).
This article was authored by Douglas J. Crouse, Jackson Kelly PLLC. For more information on the author, click here.
Every day in the United States, oil and gas wells generate approximately 2 billion gallons of waste water that is eventually returned to the earth through thousands of underground injection wells. Because of the importance of these injection wells to the oil and gas industry, it comes as little surprise that environmental activist groups have begun to scrutinize and try to disrupt this practice.
For example, on August 14, 2014, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the West Virginia Surface Owner’s Rights Organization sent a letter to the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) claiming that the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (WVDEP) is failing to properly administer the disposal of oil and gas waste in underground injection disposal wells. The letter claims that the operator of two underground injection wells injected oil and gas waste after their underground injection control (UIC) permits had expired, and alleges that WVDEP improperly renewed these UIC permits months later and retroactively authorized the injections that took place without a permit.
West Virginia, like many states, operates its own UIC program under the Safe Drinking Water Act pursuant to authorization the state received from EPA. The NRDC letter encourages EPA to “identify deficiencies” in West Virginia’s administration of its UIC program and withdraw federal approval of the program if WVDEP fails to correct those deficiencies. The letter cites a recent report released by the U.S. Government Accountability Office that calls for stricter EPA supervision of state UIC programs.
While it is unlikely that this letter will lead EPA to withdraw its approval of West Virginia’s UIC program, it is a reminder that environmental groups will continue to make the disposal of oil and gas waste a focal point in their opposition to the shale revolution.
This article was authored by Aaron S. Heishman, Jackson Kelly PLLC. For more information on the author, click here.
The six weeks since mid-June have brought some unexpected clarity to EPA’s goal of saving the world, aka “addressing climate change.” The agency announced on June 18 its proposal to reduce GHG emissions from existing coal-fired power plants, and five days later the Supreme Court imposed some significant restrictions on how it could achieve that objective (UARG v. EPA). A report from four authors at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory indicated that life cycle GHG emissions (actually methane) from shale are probably no worse than emissions from conventional natural gas formations, notwithstanding some hysterical predictions made in 2011 by some professors from Cornell and since trumpeted by the environmental community. The good news from the report is tarnished a bit, however, by a July 25 report of EPA’s Inspector General who has concluded that while methane leaks do exist across the vast infrastructure of the natural gas pipeline system, it is not the production system that is the problem. Rather, it is the local distribution companies, the gas utilities, which purchase gas from the transmission system and send it to residential and commercial customers.
Where does this leave EPA? Bluntly, in a mess. Set aside for a moment whether GHG emissions represent the problem that EPA has propagandized for the last five years. Methane is the second largest source of GHG after carbon dioxide (not carbon notwithstanding the EPA propagandists who purposefully confuse the two). By consensus, it is 21 to 25 times more reactive in the atmosphere than CO2 and much longer lived. Most important, methane is energy, and is useful. It is essentially the natural gas that we use to heat water and furnaces, or utilize as the essential ingredient in petrochemical production. Because it is something that producers want to get paid for, and consumers must pay for, it has value which should not be wasted.
Much to EPA’s regret, it will have few options available to reduce these emissions. It cannot require an air quality permit for natural gas production, transmission or distribution as none of these activities routinely emit any of the criteria pollutants for which such permits are needed. Even if those pollutants were present, no single activity in natural gas production emits a pollutant in the threshold quantity that requires a permit, and EPA’s fairly transparent attempt to aggregate activities for the purpose of requiring a permit was not treated favorably by the first appellate court to review the attempt in the case of Summit Petroleum v. EPA .
To add to the regulatory hurdles, the primary source of leakage that EPA’s Inspector General found is with local gas distribution companies. As explained in the report, local gas utilities have little or no economic incentive to repair or replace leaking gas lines, many of which are made of decades old cast or wrought iron, or unprotected steel. Compare this to the exploration and production companies, or those in the transmission business, who economic benefits are enhanced by minimizing leakage from pipelines. Not surprisingly, under the voluntary program that EPA commenced in 2012, over 98 percent of the methane leakage reductions have come from those two sectors.
Although EPA displays a near addiction to control by regulation, it could profit from the approach taken by Department of Energy (DOE) on the issue of methane leakage. On July 29, DOE hosted a roundtable of various natural gas interests – trade unions, transmission companies, local distribution companies (LDC’s), gas producers, utility regulators, academics, environmentalists – to discuss the means and value in reducing leakage. While the summary of the event is self-congratulatory, buried in the verbiage is the hard truth that while everyone agrees that reducing methane emissions is admirable, there is little in the way of ideas for how to pay for the infrastructure improvements necessary to achieve this goal. Particularly for the regulated portion of the gas industry (the LDC’s), which is the source of a disproportionate percentage of leaks and which cannot automatically recover those costs, this is the critical issue. This issue is further complicated by the fact that those companies are regulated by state utility commissions and not by any federal authority. Nevertheless, DOE is more likely to promote reductions in methane emissions by the best practices and voluntary initiatives found in its summary than EPA will.
One final aspect of the Inspector General’s report is noteworthy. On page two it states, “By the time natural gas reaches the distribution sector, almost all pollutants and impurities have been removed. At this point, it is almost 100 percent pure methane.” Memo to Inspector General: under your agency’s ideology of pollution, the methane is the pollutant because it is a GHG and the agency has so declared it.
I am betting that we will see a different nomenclature the next time this is discussed within EPA.
This article was authored by Blair M. Gardner, Jackson Kelly PLLC. For more information on the author, see here.

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