This article by Jon Hurdle appeared on State Impact Pennsylvania’s website on March 27, 2020.
Advocates for increased local control over Pennsylvania’s oil and gas industry welcomed a decision by environmental regulators to revoke their own permit for an injection well to be built in a rural township, on the grounds that the well would violate the town’s home rule charter.
The Department of Environmental Protection rescinded a 2017 permit granted to Pennsylvania General Energy to build the Yanity well that would allow wastewater to be taken from hydraulically fracked natural gas wells and injected into a disused gas shaft beneath Grant Township in Indiana County. The township is about 80 miles west of State College.
Residents of the municipality, with a population of about 700, all have private water wells that they fear would be contaminated with frack waste delivered by a procession of trucks coming from gas wells elsewhere in the Marcellus Shale. Critics also note that injection wells have been linked to high levels of radioactivity and earthquakes in some places.
In a letter to the company on March 19, the DEP said that allowing the well would violate the charter, which among other things asserts citizens’ right to be free from fossil fuel production, and specifically bans the injection of oil and gas waste fluids.
“Operation of the Yanity well as an oil and gas waste fluid injection well would violate that applicable law,” the DEP said.
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