Individuals and organizations are invited to sign the letter below. It will be delivered to Governor-Elect Shapiro and his environmental transition team on December 12, the same day the Better Path Coalition releases the most recent update of the Moratorium Morass brief. The date is also the anniversary of the brief's release and it falls three days before the next meeting of the conventional drillers' advisory group that has been pushing hard to allow road spreading to continue.
PLEASE SIGN BY Sunday 12/11 at 5 p.m.
The brief is still in draft form, but you can review it here. No substantive changes are planned. It will be appended to the August update that was appended to the original report.
Current update: https://docs.google.com/document/d/11KBkCIYGqM2PyoXJ15mCaTM78hV9dtpV/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=116242530925212984618&rtpof=true&sd=true
August update/original brief: https://www.betterpathcoalition.org/_files/ugd/4825d0_1bacbf4df0d1475092f43e7a76b5e59b.pdf
Dear Governor-Elect Shapiro,
We, the undersigned, call on you to make a ban on road spreading of conventional drilling waste one of your first priorities when you take office.
We have attached the latest update of Moratorium Morass, a brief by the Better Path Coalition that was first published a year ago. The report describes a loophole in the Bureau of Waste Management’s Coproduct Determination program that conventional drillers used to continue spreading produced water on unpaved roads as a dust suppressant after the Office of Oil & Gas Management put a moratorium on the practice in 2018. The brief provides analyses of documents obtained via Right-to-Know requests submitted to the DEP’s Bureau of Waste Management as well as the Office of Oil & Gas Management’s waste reports.
The records obtained via the initial RTK revealed that conventional gas drillers spread 54,327 barrels or 2,281,747 gallons of toxic, radioactive drilling wastewater on Pennsylvania roads between 2018, when the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) declared the moratorium, and the end of 2020. The Coalition found that several companies continued road spreading waste in 2021, including eight companies that spread it for the first time since 2017, resulting in an additional 23,277.89 barrels or 977,671.38 gallons of waste spread on roads last year.
The documents obtained by the Coalition reveal that not one company has submitted a Coproduct Determination that meets regulatory requirements and that significant gaps in reporting requirements make it impossible to track how much waste has actually been spread or when, where and even by whom it has been spread.
In the year since the Coalition first wrote about road spreading of toxic, radioactive waste, Penn State has published studies that demonstrate that drilling waste is harmful to human health and the environment while being no more effective at suppressing dust than wetting roads with rainwater. “While we must be willing to accept the trade-offs between the benefits of dust suppression and the drawback of environmental impacts, this research has found that oil and wastewaters only provide drawbacks,” said William Burgos, a professor of environmental engineering at Penn State University and one of the lead authors of the stud[ies].”
We urge you to review the information in Better Path’s brief and Penn State’s studies. The data are compelling. Road spreading of drilling waste of any kind is not safe and should be banned.
Respectfully,
Better Path Coalition
Organizational, Institutional, Business Signers as of December 10
350 BucksCounty.org
350 Pittsburgh
Advocates for Behavioral Change
Allegheny County Clean Air Now (ACCAN)
alliance for sustainable communities LV
Beaver County Marcellus Awareness Community (BCMAC)
Berks Gas Truth
Better Path Coalition
Between the Waters
Breathe Easy Susquehanna County
Breathe Project
Bucks Environmental Action
Camp White Pine
Center for Coalfield Justice
Citizens Audit Broward/ Oakland Park Wilton Manors Democratic Club
Clean Air Council
Clean Water Action
Climate Reality Project: Susquehanna Valley PA Chapter
Concerned Health Professionals of Pennsylvania
DCS
Delaware Riverkeeper Network
Duquesne University
Earth Images Gallery
Edgmont Community Safety
Environmental Health Project
Food & Water Watch
FracTracker Alliance
Freshwater Accountability Project
Grassroots Environmental Education
Izaac Walton League Allegheny County Chapter
Law Firm of Rudolph Houck
League of Women Voters Pennsylvania
LEPOCO Peace Center (Lehigh-Pocono Committee of Concern)
Lycoming County Progressives
Merchant Services Group
Mountain Watershed Association
Move Past Plastic
Nittany Valley Environmental Coalition
North Braddock Residents For Our Future
PCWEA
Pennsylvania Alliance for Clean Water and Air
Pennsylvania Council of Churches
Pennsylvania Interfaith Power & Light
Physicians for Social Responsibility Pennsylvania
Pittsburghers Against Single-Use Plastic
Project CoffeeHouse
Protect Franklin Park
Protect PT
Putting Down Roots
Quittapahilla Watershed Association
resolution media
Responsible Decarbonization Alliance - RDA
SAVE CARBON COUNTY
Sierra Club Moshannon Group
Sierra Club Pennsylvania Chapter
The HUB for Progress
Three Rivers Waterkeeper
WaSEPA
Waterspirit
Women for a Healthy Environment
