When Small is Strategic: tactical delays in shale gas pipeline expansion
Without question, the 2016 Dakota Access Pipeline protest movement, also known by the hashtag #NoDAPL, set a new precedent for the scale, scope and intensity of the fossil fuel opposition movement in the United States. Generalized anger over corporate overreach coupled with growing awareness of pipeline impacts ranging from global greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) to the smallest, most vulnerable, endangered species caught in harm’s way, underscores the varied yet expanding dimension of the movement. But just as this fervor of pipeline activism goes mainstream, so too the ‘Trump Pipeline Boom’, as detailed in a recent Mother Jones piece by Alexander Sammon:
With a glut of oil and gas discoveries in the Marcellus, Barnett, and Bakken shale formations, an increase in American large-scale fossil fuel production has long been in the works and is expected to flourish in the coming years.
However, when industry insiders talk amongst themselves, exuberance is checked by the fear that the ‘Trump Boom’ may not be fully commensurate with public outrage determined to delay, reroute and outright kill pipeline projects. As stated in a recent Desmog piece by Sharon Kelly :
…And for the pipeline industry, experts at the Marcellus conference warned, public opposition can slow down projects enough to throw timetables off schedule. That problem is especially worrisome for the natural gas industry, which is in the precarious position of keeping drillers squeezed by low prices from going broke — while at the same time convincing utilities to make long-term commitments to buying natural gas instead of investing in renewable energy.
Underscoring this worry, the oil & gas industry has a growing image problem as the public witnesses first-hand repercussions of its building practices and accident-prone network. As seen in the map timeline below of the Pipeline and Hazardous Material Safety Administration (PHMSA) pipeline accident dataset - contrary to industry assurances - the public has reason to worry over an ever-expanding pipeline network.
While pipelines are not a new feature in the American landscape- the first pipelines date back to the 1830’s - a massive increase in the number, extent and rate of deployment occurred this past decade, largely due to shale gas drilling known as ‘fracking’. With this ‘fracking rush’ comes an infrastructure buildout of pipelines, compressor stations, metering stations, above and underground gas storage facilities, turning once pristine forested landscapes and rural communities into highly industrialized ‘sacrifice zones’.
Below, both oil and gas pipelines are mapped against woodlands and forests across the United States. Unlike vast swaths of the midwest region, the expanding network in the northeast region inevitably bisects high canopy forests, culminating in profound global and local impacts.
As of 2008, 25,000 miles of pipelines snaked across the northeast region -approximately 8% of the national pipeline infrastructure network. In the intervening years, certainly many more miles have been added, largely due to the fracking boom in the Marcellus Shale. Mapped atop the purple Marcellus Shale extent below, the yellow northeast pipeline network is predominately devoted to transporting fracked shale gas to coastal urban markets, gas-fired power plants and liquefied natural gas ports (LNG).
Mapped at this scale, its clearly evident that this is a ‘mature’ infrastructure network, yet as of May 2017, the gas industry is determined to install yet more pipelines- at least 16 major new regional projects & upgrades. Deemed by local opposition movements as ‘overbuild’ with severe global climate and local environmental impacts, an outright war now rages in the backyards of thousands of northeast residents caught in the impending paths of proposed projects.
As the opposition movement continues to gain momentum, most viscerally across rural communities throughout the northeast, contempt and fear of the gas industry grows but so to creative, legal and technical strategies of resistance. More and more, communities are proactively using legal and political mechanisms to engage regulators at federal, state and local levels.
A longstanding, particular frustration for local opposition movements is the invariable Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) ‘Finding of No Significant Impact’ (FONSI) statement needed to ‘rubber stamp’ shale gas pipeline projects. Proffered repeatedly by the gas industry as ‘proof’ their pipeline projects are benign, only ‘serving the public good’, communities are beginning to adopt technical and data-driving tactics to push back against blanket FONSI statements in order to delay, reroute and/or outright halt shale gas infrastructure projects.
As part of the 2016 Tishman Evironment and Design Center TEDC faculty grant program at The New School, New York, adjunct faculty member Stephen Metts was awarded support for Mobilizing Maps for Sustainable Communities - a project designed to assist environmental advocates in their opposition to shale gas infrastructure. Developed over the course of a year in partnership with the Delaware Riverkeeper Network (DRN), the final result is the Habitat Impact Mapper, a browser-based mapping tool for locating and cataloging potential adverse pipeline impacts.
Working with DRN, the project sought to develop both a digital map and database tailored specifically to the PennEast Pipeline, one of the largest proposals in the northeast, running 120 miles across multiple states and counties west of New York City. The PennEast proposed alignment featured below in yellow would intersect not only with high canopy forests but known contiguous waterway and wetland features shown in red:
The overarching goal of the Habitat Impact Mapper is to locate and log potential adverse impacts prior to the permitting of a pipeline by regulatory agencies. Even as the PennEast project secures its certificate at the federal level through the FERC, the project still requires a state 401 water certification permit, and therein lies both the problem and the opportunity: the application at the state level is presently premature. As noted by Tom Gilbert, campaign director for Rethink Energy NJ and the New Jersey Conservation Foundation, the following fact is unavoidable:
They [PennEast] have little or no data… They only have data for one-third of the route.
As Habitat Impact Mapper is deployed in partnership with community volunteers with extensive local knowledge of the project impact areas, PennEast’s dearth of data is supplanted by actual ground-truth methods cataloging specific adverse environmental impacts. In this way, the power equation is tipped slightly less in the favor of the gas industry in their ongoing campaign to diminish environmental impacts while overemphasizing economic benefits.
Certainly there are ‘off-the-shelf’ applications and platforms available to conduct field monitoring that could do some of the work of the Habitat Impact Mapper - specifically the Fulcrum platform and FrackTracker’s new mobile app. In the case of Fulcrum, the cost of multiple-user deployment quickly becomes prohibitive for local opposition groups with little infrastructure and funding mechanisms. While the FracTracker app targets the same infrastructure as Habitat Impact Mapper, it is largely devoted to crowdsourcing the effects of gas drilling and infrastructure after, not prior, to pipeline installations.
In order to deliver a tailored field tool, development of the Habitat Impact Mapper focused on three key features:
- Run as an application in a native browser with full access to the device GPS chip in order to capture and log a volunteer’s precise location.
- Deliver a simple yet effective map interface allowing volunteers to easily plot their exact location relative to a proposed but as of yet, physically nonexistent pipeline alignment.
- An easy data intake form that can be submitted after field monitoring to a cloud database, easily accessed and administered further by DRN.
The Habitat Impact Mapper development phase was largely completed over the 2016 summer, and field tested this past fall. The project looks forward to full deployment through 2017 as the PennEast project proceeds through state permitting and actual, verified ground-truth data becomes invaluable to larger oppositional legal and political strategies. Looking beyond the present PennEast project deployment, the technical achievements of the Habitat Impact Mapper - its ability to ‘see’ yet nonexistent pipeline alignments in rough, wild, forested terrain while allowing volunteers to log likely impacted environmental features - can serve opposition groups in their battles with the other 15 proposed gas infrastructure projects threatening critical forested habitats of the northeast region.
