CHARLESTON — By trade, Sen. Doug Facemire earns his livelihood as a grocer.

If you run down the list of House and Senate members serving on a select Marcellus shale committee toiling on a regulatory bill, not one has any ties to the oil and gas industry.

And to Facemire, that is a major plus for the 10-member panel piecing together legislation aimed at satisfying the industry, property owners and environmental forces.

“Here’s been our objective from the very beginning,” the Senate chairman of the committee said.

“We want to see this industry thrive, because our state needs the revenue, and we need the jobs. But prosperity at the expense of the environment or the citizens is not good, either.”

In back-to-back special sessions, the Marcellus shale work was eclipsed by the divisive redistricting legislation, especially in the House of Delegates.

Marcellus shale erupted into a major issue last winter, as West Virginia officials began to relish the prospects of a major economic windfall and decided standards need to be drawn up so that citizens can be assured protection and industry leaders know what to expect before opening their operations.

Quietly, behind the scenes, however, the select panel managed to deal with eight amendments, and Facemire says it is prepared to consider 13 more when lawmakers return Sept. 12 for next month’s interims meetings.

“I’m confident we can probably finish this up in our September interims and have it ready to go back to our respective bodies and see if we can sell it to them,” Facemire, D-Braxton, said.

“Within two, two-hour meetings, surely we can cover the 13 amendments.”

In his estimation, a bill could be ready for debate in a special session in November or even could be put off until the 2012 regular one commences in January.

On the environmental side, the panel already has agreed to increase the number of inspectors, and to raise the permit fee to pay for them.

Facemire said the committee came to terms on another matter — dovetailing the Department of Environmental Protection Agency’s water withdrawal standards.

“The DEP has a map that is somehow GPS-generated and shows different water levels at different times,” Facemire explained.

“In a creek, at certain times, you can take water out, and certain times of the year, you can’t.”

Moving to give surface owners a higher comfort zone, the committee wants to lengthen the space between a well and a house from the existing 200 feet. Facemire expects the new buffer zone to lie between 700 and 1,000 feet.

“Like I told someone, just to give you an idea, 700 feet would be two football fields, plus 100 feet,” Facemire said.

Before the final product is ready, Facemire anticipates additional safeguards for property owners.

“This has been a complicated thing, especially given the consideration that none of us are oil and gas people,” the co-chairman said.

“As these different things come up, we could have just thrown them together and come up with a law. But we just didn’t think that was the fair thing to do for the citizens as well as the industry. At times, it has been somewhat painstaking, but we’ve moved along fairly well. And I think that we’re going to have a product that looks after the environment, tries to give surface owners considerable more protection than they have now and allows the industry to go to work.”

Certified engineers must be hired to build ponds for any pads in excess of three acres and to handle reclamation work that must be accompanied by plans turned into the DEP.

“It’s a fairly long process here, but in the scope of things, we just feel we will have better pads if an engineer designs them, than just going out there and saying to the dozer man, ‘Make me a pad there,’” Facemire said.

Facemire emphasized that any special session call is up to acting Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin, but even if the bill is drafted in September interims, it still must be taken to the entire Legislature, with public scrutiny in the process.

“If I was going to call a special session, I’d at least wait until November,” Facemire said.

Until that occurs, he pointed out that Tomblin has imposed some emergency rules on an interim basis. Going back to last winter, Facemire said SB424 — the starting blocks for the select committee — was “good” legislation. It died in the waning hours of the session in the House.

“House people are saying we’re dragging our feet in this committee, but I’m not sure it’s not their guilty consciences,” he said.

“I thought it was a decent piece of legislation as a starting point. Like any other thing, this is an evolving industry, an evolving business. We’re going to have to change laws as we go along with it. This is so important to our state. I don’t want to rush through just for the sake of saying we have a bill.”

— E-mail: mannix@register-herald.com