A West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection official says he is confident there will be no major harm done by waiting another year for regulation of the Marcellus shale.

DEP Secretary Randy Huffman said his agency was trying to get ahead of the game on the Marcellus shale development, and he believes they will still be ahead, even if regulations don’t pass until next year.

“What we were doing was not a mad rush to fix this problem because it was out of control,” Huffman said. “We recognize that we are going to be regulating horizontal drilling for the next 20 or 30 years or maybe longer, and we needed to get out ahead of the game.”

Last week, 20 delegates gathered in support of a moratorium on Marcellus development after their colleagues failed to pass legislation that would have regulated the Marcellus shale. A bill developed by the DEP and another developed by an interim committee both failed to pass either house unchanged.

Huffman said he does not support a moratorium as there is no environmental or business reason to do so.

“If I ever felt the industry was so far out in front of our ability to properly regulate it, then I would consider such a thing,” Huffman said. “I just don’t think we are there at this point.”

Modified versions of the DEP and interim bill worked through the House and Senate, and the Senate managed to pass a form of the regulation to the House, where it died on the final day of the session.

However, Huffman said, it is “not the end of the world” just because of the lack of specific regulation for the Marcellus shale. The Marcellus gas reserve has received special consideration because of techniques such as hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, not traditionally utilized in West Virginia. 

“We can regulate the industry well enough — not perfectly, but well enough to get by in the near term,” Huffman said. “What we really needed from that legislation was to be able to get more of a presence out there on the ground.”

Now, without a bill, and more recently, without the $2 million in funding acting Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin requested from a House and Senate conference committee on the budget, the DEP is facing a budget shortfall. Huffman said it will be difficult to continue funding the inspector positions he is already allowed, let alone hire additional inspectors.

“I realize it was late in the game, but I also thought they understood the situation well enough to know that not only do we need to put more inspectors on the ground, in the short term, we don’t have enough money to keep the people working that we have right now,” Huffman said. “That’s the part that’s lost in all this. Revenue has been declining significantly for the past 18 months.”

For now, Huffman said, the DEP will look at how current laws, designed for vertical gas wells, can be applied to horizontal drilling. Additionally, they are looking at the potential need for emergency rules, but Huffman said he is not sure if any emergency rules would be necessary.

Huffman said the additional inspectors, about double the current number of 17, will be needed, but without them, the agency will not be incapable of protecting the environment. He said many took his request and other statements and comments out of context for their own gain.

“If the legislative process that I just went through in the past 60 days is any indication, they really weren’t too concerned about what I had to say,” Huffman said.

The DEP, Huffman said, approached the issue from a purely environmental perspective. However, it didn’t take long before others chipped in with their own interests.

“There were a lot of other things not directly related to our environmental concerns that got plugged into this bill and it made it something totally different than what we intended it to be in the beginning,” Huffman said. “I’m not sure that the bill the House ultimately let die — that bill didn’t look anything like the bill we worked on for nine months.”

Huffman said after working nine months and coming out with a “good bill,” the DEP attempt was ultimately bogged down by other interests.

“Everybody knew there was a growing momentum to pass a regulatory bill and I think a lot of people thought that our bill had legs and was going to make it,” Huffman said. “So what you had was a lot of ancillary issues that people tagged on to and latched onto our bill because they felt like our bill was the horse that was going to cross the finish line. What happened was that, in my personal opinion, I feel that horse got weighted down to the point that it couldn’t run anymore.”

— E-mail: tkuykendall@register-herald.com