By ANYA LITVAK, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, April 11, 2024
The well was one of 10 used to inject and withdraw gas stored in Equitrans’ Rager Mountain storage facility — an underground reservoir in Jackson Township, Cambria County.
On Nov. 6, the well began to vent high volumes of natural gas and it took the company and its contractors nearly two weeks to finally bring it under control. During that time, more than a billion cubic feet of gas escaped into the air.
The agreements that Equitrans negotiated with the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection spell out the environmental and climate damage of the well’s malfunction. The blowout released 106 tons of volatile organic compounds, a category of chemicals that includes some hazardous air pollutants. VOCs also include compounds that cause the formation of ozone.
At 106 tons, the storage well made it into the top 25 emitters of VOCs in the state in 2022, according to DEP data. It was also the highest-emitting facility in the oil and gas sector that year.
For perspective, the VOC emissions from the storage well during those two weeks amount to about a fifth of what the Shell petrochemical complex in Beaver County is permitted to emit in a year.
The well incident also released 223 tons of carbon dioxide and a whopping 27,040 tons of methane, which the state calculated was about 10% of all methane emitted in the state in 2022.
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