---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Fred Heutte <phred@sunlightdata.com>
Date: Tue, Dec 10, 2013 at 12:20 PM
Subject: InsideClimate News: Gas Pipeline Boom Fragmenting Pennsylvania's Forests
To: CONS-AWL-RESILIENT-HABITATS@lists.sierraclub.org


http://insideclimatenews.org/news/20131210/gas-pipeline-boom-fragmenting-pennsylvanias-
forests

Gas Pipeline Boom Fragmenting Pennsylvania's Forests

Many of the pipelines to serve fracking are being built deep in the
state's 16 million acres of forest. 'The scale of this thing is off the
charts.'

By Naveena Sadasivam, InsideClimate News

Dec 10, 2013

Jerry Skinner stands in his garden, looking into the distance at the
edge of a forested mountain. Amid the lush shades of green, a muddy
brown strip of earth stands out. It's the telltale sign of a buried
pipeline.

"The pipelines are all around this property," Skinner said. "When I
came here, the county had an allure that it doesn't have anymore. I'm
not sure I want to live here anymore."

Skinner is the resident naturalist at the Woodbourne Forest and
Wildlife Preserve, a 650-acre forestland that runs through parts of
northeastern Pennsylvania that are experiencing intensive gas drilling
because of a hotly contested method called hydraulic fracturing, or
fracking. Around his house, in the town of Dimock, gas wells have
sprung up and a vast network of interconnected pipelines transports the
gas underground. Skinner worries that as drilling activity heads deeper
into forests and pipelines chop up large blocks of land, rare species
native to Pennsylvania will be driven out.

In recent years, Pennsylvania has become ground zero for fracking,
along with neighboring states that sit atop a large shale reserve known
as the Marcellus Formation. Pennsylvania has more than 6,000 active gas
wells, and Marcellus-related production has soared to 12 billion cubic
feet per day, six times the production rate in 2009.

Gas drilling has long raised concerns about water contamination and air
pollution. But until recently, little public attention has been paid to
the pipelines that must be built to carry the gas. In Pennsylvania,
concerns about these pipelines are growing because many of them are
being built in the state's 16 million acres of forest, which include
some of the largest contiguous blocks of forestland east of the
Mississippi River. Nearly 700,000 acres of forestland already have been
leased for drilling, allowing companies to cut paths through pristine
stretches of trees, fragment forests, decrease biodiversity and
introduce invasive species.

"In Pennsylvania, the gas companies are working in essentially the most
ecologically sensitive area of the commonwealth," said John Quigley,
who served as secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation
and Natural Resources for two years under former Democratic Gov. Ed
Rendell. "The scale of this thing is off the charts. It's
unprecedented."

Of particular concern are gathering lines, the pipes that carry gas
from wells to long-distance transmission lines. Although they are often
the same size as transmission lines and operate at the same pressure
levels, about 90 percent of the nation's gathering lines aren't
regulated by state or federal authorities.

In fact, regulators don't even know where many gathering lines are
located, even though they sometimes run close to homes and businesses.

Gathering lines are likely to generate even more controversy in the
years ahead. The Interstate Natural Gas Association of America, an
industry group, estimated two years ago that more than 400,000 new
miles of gathering lines will be installed by 2035.

Concerns about forest fragmentation due to industrial activity are not
unique to Pennsylvania. In Alberta, Canada, for instance, recent oil
and gas projects have reduced core forest area, including habitats for
Woodland Caribou. As pipelines, roads and well pads slash across
forests in Alberta, the Woodland Caribou, which tends to avoid forest
edges, has been driven close to extinction.

Biologists and other forestry experts said curtailing or reversing the
trend in Pennsylvania would be difficult because Pennsylvania's land
management system is so fragmented. Although the state oversees 16
million acres of forest, it does not own mineral rights for about 2.2
million of them, leaving those areas open to drilling.

The Nature Conservancy released a report three years ago projecting
that under a medium-growth scenario, a minimum of 6,000 well pads with
60,000 wells will be drilled in Pennsylvania by 2030—and that two-
thirds of them will be in forest areas.

In 2011, in testimony before the Maryland House Environmental Committee
as an independent environmental consultant, Quigley warned that the
cumulative effect of gas drilling "will dwarf all of Pennsylvania's
previous waves of resource extraction combined," and that Maryland must
avoid the mistakes that Pennsylvania has made.

Industry Dismisses Fears

On average, each well pad requires 8.8 acres to be cleared, according
to The Nature Conservancy. About three of these acres are for the well
pad itself, while the rest are needed for infrastructure such as roads,
pipelines and water impoundments.

In total, the conservancy estimated that 61,000 forest acres in
Pennsylvania will be cleared by 2030. The group believes this
deforestation will affect an additional 91,000 to 220,000 acres of
interior forestland near the developed areas.

The gas industry disagrees with conservationists about the impact of
pipeline corridors on wildlife habitats. Right-of-ways with "widths
typical of single natural gas pipeline facilities are not likely to
present major problems," said Catherine Landry, communications director
for the Interstate Natural Gas Association of America.

John Stoody, director of governmental and public relations for the
Association of Oil Pipe Lines, said: "Wildlife is invited to cross our
rights-of-way happily and safely anytime they like."

He also pointed out the tradeoff in using pipelines: When compared to
trains and trucks, Stoody said, pipelines are a safer means of
transportation with lower greenhouse-gas emissions.

The American Gas Association similarly denied that pipeline corridors
cause forest fragmentation. In fact, they "can actually enhance habitat
by serving to connect fragmented forest, allowing pathways for wildlife
and creating forest edge meadowlands," said Christina Nyquist, a
spokeswoman for the organization. She cited alternate detrimental
factors, contending that roadways, urbanization, agriculture and other
human activities are the more likely culprits.

For decades now, ecologists and conservationists have been studying how
human activities have disrupted forest ecosystems, including how far
the impact extends from the actual site of a pipeline right-of-way.
They have confirmed that the reverberations go deep into woodlands.

Recently, for example, researchers in Wyoming concluded that energy
development in the state was leading to excessive habitat alteration
and accelerating the decline of songbirds.

Scientists abroad have also examined the relationship between forest
fragmentation and habitat loss.

Researchers in Australia analyzed several forest areas in India, South
America and Indonesia and found that linear clearings like those linked
to road and pipeline construction block the movement of some native
animals and serve as pathways for invasive species.

"Pipelines are going in and dissecting forest habitats and creating
corridors within (them)," said Margaret Brittingham, an ecologist at
Penn State University who has been studying the impact of gas drilling
on forest habitats, concentrating on songbirds in Pennsylvania.

She and others have discovered that right-of-ways enable larger animals
to move into parts of the interior forest they had not explored. As a
result, interior species become exposed to new predators.

Brittingham and her colleagues predict that as more forest territory is
chopped up into smaller pieces, habitat for specialists—species that
require a specific set of conditions for survival—will decrease, which
may in turn lead to their extinction. Those include the scarlet
tanager, the blue-headed vireo and the hooded warbler.

In contrast, animals that tend to do well around people will likely
increase in number. Raccoons, deer, crows and blue jays are among them.

"It's a shift in the competitive advantages that you give species,"
Brittingham said. "It's biotic homogenization."

Fighting for Rights

In their fight to preserve forests and biodiversity, conservationists
and other wildlife advocates in Pennsylvania have confronted another
adversary – the state's property-rights system.

In Pennsylvania, surface and mineral rights are sold separately. That
means while the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources
oversees 16 million acres of forest, it owns only 85 percent of the
mineral rights in that area. The remaining 15 percent is still
controlled by people who once owned parcels of the land—even though
they have sold their parcels to the state. Those people can negotiate
individual contracts for mineral-exploration leases, including
fracking.

In a study of land-usage patterns in Pennsylvania's interior forests,
Brittingham and her colleagues found that development is greater on
properties with private ownership of mineral rights. They said the
split in private and public management of land will complicate the
preservation efforts by agencies and nonprofit groups.

A major test case involves the Allegheny National Forest in
Pennsylvania.

In 1923, the federal government purchased that forest, piece by piece,
but landowners were given the option to sell surface rights or both
surface and mineral rights. As a result, 93 percent of the mineral
rights in the 510,000-acre forest are now held by a vast number of
private owners.

Citing this surface-mineral rights bifurcation, the gas industry argues
that the U.S. Forest Service cannot regulate drilling in the Allegheny
because it does not own most of the mineral rights there. Environmental
groups such as the Sierra Club and the Allegheny Defense Project insist
the Forest Service has such authority as part of its overall mission to
protect the forest.

In October, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the
gas industry.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania's Department of Conservation and Natural
Resources has logged a mixed record in its forestry-management efforts.

In 2010, the agency released a 48-page presentation on the state's
forestland, mapping ecologically sensitive regions, areas with gas
leases and forest patches that had been severely fragmented. The
department concluded that it could not lease out any more land for gas
drilling without causing significant damage to forest habitats.

A few months before the study was released, the state issued two gas-
drilling leases totaling more than 64,000 forest acres. The sale
brought in $250 million and has led to approval for construction of 438
shale gas well pads.

After those leases were issued, the administration of Gov. Ed Rendell
imposed a moratorium on the leasing of forestland. That measure remains
in effect.

However, the current version of the 2010 presentation, which has been
revised under the administration of Gov. Tom Corbett, a Republican who
strongly supports the drilling industry, is only 12 pages long and no
longer contains the strongly worded conclusion that any further leasing
would be severely detrimental to forest ecosystems.

"Since the 2010 analysis, many things have changed—including our
understanding of the development patterns and impacts, and technology
related to horizontal drilling," said Christina Novak, press secretary
for the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources.

Novak also said the agency continues to maintain that the regions
referenced in the 2010 presentation "are important areas to protect and
consider if additional drilling is contemplated."

Corbett once declared that he wanted to "make Pennsylvania the Texas of
the natural gas boom."

A month after taking office in 2011, he repealed a policy meant to
minimize environmental damage to state parks. The architect of that
repeal, Corbett's former environmental protection commissioner, Michael
Krancer, now works at a law firm with clients in the gas industry.

Last year, Corbett signed Act 13, which requires oil and gas companies
to pay an impact fee for their projects. In 2012, the state distributed
60 percent of the more than $200 million it collected through that law
to counties and municipalities. The money was spent on reducing taxes
and repairing roads and stormwater drains.

The remaining 40 percent of the impact fee was divided among various
state agencies, including the Department of Environmental Protection,
Public Utility Commission and Marcellus Legacy Fund, which distributed
funds for environmental and infrastructure projects.

Act 13 also requires the state to study the placement of natural gas
gathering lines and investigate their environmental impact. The study,
conducted last year, recommended that pipeline operators consult with
experts to restore vegetation in right-of-ways and identify better ways
to assess the environmental footprint of their activities.

The Business Case

Since activists and state regulators have little legal leverage over
where gas wells are dug and pipelines laid in Pennsylvania, some
environmental groups are looking for other strategies.

Working with the University of Tennessee, the Nature Conservancy has
produced Development by Design, a software tool that allows pipeline
companies to find routes that minimize ecological damage while also
being cost-effective.

"Making the business case for these kinds of sustainability issues is
absolutely key," said Quigley, the former Pennsylvania environmental
commissioner.

The conservancy is testing a beta version with four companies.
Currently the software can analyze habitat fragmentation, provide
information to minimize sediment loss and help evaluate the effect of
pipeline crossings on rivers.

"Some companies seem to be very interested, others less so," said Nels
Johnson, the conservancy's deputy state director for Pennsylvania. "The
real question is whether [the companies will] use it in a way that
fundamentally changes the way they do planning."

For residents of Pennsylvania, the software will likely come too late.

One of those residents, Emily Krafjack, is president of the grassroots
group Connection for Oil, Gas & Environment in the Northern Tier. Since
2010, she has been providing property owners with information about
pipelines in an effort to balance gas-industry exploration with
safeguarding landowners' rights, the environment and the region's
traditional way of life.

She said the rampant development—the rumbling of construction trucks,
the ever-greater intrusion into forests—has caused Pennsylvania to lose
its charm.

On a recent drive around some of the forestlands, Krafjack pointed to
the pipeline right-of-ways that periodically sliced through the forest.
She said she sometimes struggles to recognize her hometown. "I'm over
50 now," Krafjack said, "and I just can’t catch my breath."

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