Earlier this month, a representative from the largest gas and oil well owner in the country asked West Virginia lawmakers to roll back water protections enacted in response to the 2014 Elk River chemical spill, saying the regulations have increased costs and delays.
Todd Tetrick, senior vice president of upstream operations for the Diversified Energy Company, asked state lawmakers to exempt oil and gas tanks from regulations under the Aboveground Storage Tank Act.
During his Sept. 7 testimony, he told lawmakers that while it was a “very well intentioned effort to protect public water systems,” the implementation of the law “has created significant operational and compliance burdens” for companies in the oil and gas sector.
Diversified was asked to speak to the Joint Committee on Energy and Public Works about their experiences under the law and its impact on the company’s business, according to a company spokesperson.
The Aboveground Storage Tank Act unanimously passed in 2014 in response to the Elk River chemical spill earlier that year. The chemical leak at Freedom Industries near Charleston left 300,000 people without clean drinking water for days after a tank containing MCHM, a chemical used to clean coal, leaked into the Elk and contaminated the public water supply.
The law originally required the roughly 42,000 aboveground tanks in West Virginia to be registered with the state, meet strict safety standards and be subject to inspections by the state Department of Environmental Protection.
However, in both 2015 and 2017, the legislature passed industry-backed bills that rolled back protections implemented in the original measure and exempted thousands of tanks from the safety law.
Today, the act only regulates about 11%, or 4,500, tanks in the state.
Last week, Tetrick told the committee that despite being located far away from public water intakes and posing little environmental risk, many tanks “still are subject to costly third party inspections, redundant certifications and complex registration requirements.”
Except most of the remaining tanks still regulated by the law are located near public drinking water sources. These tanks are more at risk of contaminating drinking water if they have a leak or spill given their proximity to the water intake.
Tetrick also told lawmakers the company believes that regulations should “differentiate clearly between high risk and low risk tanks based on location, contents and proximity to water resources.”
Under the Aboveground Storage Tank Act, tanks are classified as either a level 1 or level 2 based on their distance to water intakes, contents and size. Tanks classified as level 1 are subject to more stringent inspection and reporting requirements than level 2 tanks.
“So, you’re asking for regulatory relief for the level 1 tank?” Del. Evan Hansen, D-Monongalia, asked during the meeting, later clarifying that those are the ones closest to the public water intakes.
“Yes,” Tetrick replied.
A similar effort was attempted during this past legislative session, but failed to pass into law.
That bill would have exempted more than 1,000 oil, gas and coal tanks from required evaluations and inspections. More than 800 of those would have been located in the zones of critical concern, which are the areas along waterways that are closest to surface water intakes.
The tanks that would have been exempted also accounted for 38% of confirmed leaks over the last three years.