Pennsylvania gas driller CNX says its operations pose no health risks, but activists disagree

CNX Resources Corporation, a major natural gas producer in Pennsylvania, has recorded hundreds of air quality violations and three years ago pleaded not guilty to criminal charges for evading state pollution laws for years by misreporting air emissions at one of its plants.

The case against CNX was brought by Josh Shapiro, then the state’s attorney general and now its governor. Shapiro’s office called CNX’s behavior “fraudulent” at the time.

Currently, CNX is doing everything it can to resurrect itself as the white knight of the fossil fuel trade, and to prove it, it has an industry-written study that it claims shows that fracking operations pose “no risk to public health.” The study was born out of a partnership CNX formed last year with its old nemesis Shapiro.

The study, dubbed “Radical Transparency” by the natural gas operator, angered climate activists who dismissed it as pseudoscience at odds with peer-reviewed research as well as a 2020 grand jury report that found children and adults who lived near fracking sites were prone to intense nosebleeds, ulcers and rashes. Drinking water near fracking sites was found to sometimes be rust-colored or filled with sediment. And the chemicals floating in the air burned the throats of residents and irritated their skin. This last effect has even gained a nickname among locals: “fissure rash”.

“First of all, we allowed the looting of wood in our Republic. Then there was our coal. Now it’s slate. Other industries will surely come to us, looking for new natural resources to exploit. It’s time to draw a lesson for the future: who will bear the inevitable risks? “We believe it should be those who exploit the resources, not those who live among them,” the grand jury report said.

The CNX study, which was released to investors in August, comes as the energy giant tries to curry favor with the governor by presenting itself as an environmental justice leader and winning federal funding for hydrogen production under the Inflation Reduction Act, signed by President Biden, legislation aimed at to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels. Billions of dollars are at stake.

Indeed, CNX’s ongoing Radical Transparency project has already been added to the list of energy producer initiatives that could receive a portion of the $30 million in public funding earmarked for a future Appalachian hydrogen center. These funds are provided through Biden’s Justice40 initiative, which aims to ensure that clean energy efforts – such as the proposed Appalachian hydrogen hub – benefit low-income communities already burdened by pollution.

A group of 40 environmental organizations and state senator Katie Muth submitted a letter to the U.S. Department of Energy expressing their opposition to including CNX’s Radical Transparency project on the list of projects seeking federal funding.

“Radical Transparency is a cynical attempt to disempower those harmed by fracking by discrediting thousands of peer-reviewed articles, government reports and media investigations that have demonstrated the serious harm fracking poses to health, safety, the environment and the climate,” the letter says.

Shapiro ran for office on the promise of a “low-carbon future,” but has since struggled to balance the wishes of climate activists with the state’s powerful fossil fuel interests. He hasn’t taken a firm stance, but has made clear he believes there is a place for the oil and gas industry in the so-called coming hydrogen revolution. Hydrogen is a powerful source of energy, but it is only considered carbon-free when it is produced using renewable energy such as solar and wind energy. CNX intends to use coal extracted from its wells to produce hydrogen.

But if “radical transparency” was intended to win over doubters, it failed to impress climate activists, who asked Shapiro to renounce it.

“CNX’s radically dishonest and irresponsible fracking report fails basic tests of scientific integrity,” Alex Bomstein, executive director of the Clean Air Council, wrote in a press release. “The Shapiro administration should immediately deny the report and distance itself from this propaganda.”

The Shapiro administration did not respond to Capital & Main’s inquiries.

In its report to investors, CNX said it monitored selected fracking sites and tested emissions of five chemicals that have been linked to respiratory disease, neurological damage and cancer, including particulate matter, benzene, toluene, xylene and ethylbenzene.

The data, made available in real time to both residents and government officials, was compared to several indicators, including national ambient air quality standards, minimum risk levels for hazardous substances, and pollutant concentrations in Pittsburgh’s urban district.

“Preliminary results and ongoing monitoring of our Radical Transparency program indicate that natural gas production conducted through CNX is safe and inherently good for the communities in which we operate,” CNX President and CEO Nick Deiuliis wrote in the report.

CNX said its monitoring project provided “hundreds of thousands of additional data points.” However, the report focuses on only two wells: NV110, which has seven natural gas wells, and MOR9, which has 10. The company worked with a third party, environmental consulting firm Clean Air Engineering, to install two monitors each air in each place – one against the wind, the other with the wind. CNX committed to monitoring each site for at least six months.

David Hess, former secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection and author of the daily PA Environment Digest blog, said the very setup of the test project gave him pause.

“You only get a very narrow slice of what comes out of each of these facilities,” Hess said. “If someone wanted to create a very robust monitoring program, they would equip the entire facility with monitors.”

Hess said a thorough emissions study would have collected more data and the study would have taken much longer before any conclusions were announced. He said the study should last at least a full year because each season “has an impact on what happens to pollutants and where they fall.”

“I think this initiative was oversold from the beginning,” Hess said.

Some health officials say CNX cannot reasonably draw such sweeping conclusions without examining the health of people living near pollutants.

“The correct conclusion is that they failed to detect the five chemicals they were looking for at very high concentrations,” said Dr. Ned Ketyer, president of Physicians for Social Responsibility Pennsylvania, a nonprofit advocacy group. “That’s the only conclusion they can draw. They cannot say that fracking is safe.”

One of the two sites under investigation for the project did not come to the attention of government officials until March, when Department of Environmental Protection inspectors visited the site after receiving complaints from a resident about suspected water pollution – a category of pollution that CNX had committed to investigating but was not included in the “Radical transparency.” The state Department of Environmental Protection has not issued a notice of violation, but a spokesman told Capital & Main that the resident’s complaint met “the conditions to create a rebuttable presumption that the well operator is responsible for water contamination.” CNX disputed this claim. Following the inspection, CNX was ordered to install an alternative water source for the resident while the investigation was ongoing.

“Their idea of ​​‘radical transparency’ is actually not transparent at all,” Ketyer said.

Ketyer said he believed the upbeat CNX report was released not as a bona fide effort to advance science, but to reassure investors ahead of a downgrade of investment bank Piper Sandler that came a day after the CNX release.

Dr. Kathleen Nolan, co-author of a compendium on the dangers of fracking and co-founder of Concerned Health Professionals of New York, said the CNX report did not indicate whether a third-party review was conducted, which is standard for scientific articles. While the emissions data may have averaged to an acceptable level, they tended to spike in ways that Nolan said would be worth investigating. It is unclear whether CNX did so, and the gas producer did not respond to Capital & Main’s requests for comment.

“Using continuous, real-time readings is essential if you’re going to monitor particulate matter,” she said. However, the CNX study simply “documents something but does not necessarily intervene in a way that provides protection.”

Shapiro’s office sought to ensure Pennsylvanians are protected from pollution by asking CNX in 2023 for “final” emissions measurements and strengthened chemical disclosures at select wells. As part of the partnership, CNX also agreed to a series of concessions that mimic eight recommendations made in a 2020 grand jury report that found state regulators had failed to protect residents from the fracking boom. CNX agreed to move its fracking infrastructure an additional 100 feet beyond the legally required distance of 500 feet from homes and 2,500 feet from hospitals and schools. The grand jury also recommended that oil and gas operators be required to identify all chemicals used in their operations. CNX and other operators typically have the right to redact the names of chemicals they consider “trade secrets.”

Environmentalists urged Shapiro’s office to reject the CNX project and instead adopt the grand jury’s recommendations.

“It completely ignores the residents near the CNX site,” said Shannon Smith, executive director of the environmental nonprofit FracTracker Alliance. “He knows damn well what the health risks and effects are. He expressed it in many words, many times as attorney general.