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OEPA Consults States on Midstream Operations
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YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio -- The oil and gas industry has been active in Ohio better than a century, but the emergence of the Utica and Marcellus plays in recent years required the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency to consult with “sister agencies” in neighboring states and elsewhere, says Scott Nally, agency director.
“It was new for a lot of my teammates to see,” Nally remarked.
What was new for Ohio, despite its history of oil and gas drilling, were the midstream operations setting up shop in the state to capitalize on the plays. Nally and members of his staff visited one such plant Nov. 5, the Utica East Ohio Buckeye cryogenic processing plant in Kensington. The plant takes in the hydrocarbons extracted from nearby horizontal wells and separates the component compounds for use as fuel or for additional processing.
The plant processes 200 million cubic feet of gas per day with the tower, or “cryo train,” that is now operating. A second train is expected to be commissioned within a month and a third is planned for the site, plant supervisor Grant Hammer says. A fourth tower under consideration, if needed, would bring daily processing capacity to 800 million cubic feet at the complex.
The cryogenic plant is “one of the first of its kind” in Ohio that “fits into the pieces of the puzzle of natural gas” in the state, Nally said.
Gov. John Kasich “said very early on that gas is a game changer for the state of Ohio and this is another component that needed to come online so we can keep the whole process within the state,” Nally said.
Ohio EPA worked with its sister agencies in Pennsylvania and West Virginia as well as in Oklahoma, Texas, North Dakota and Wyoming to learn what they experienced when they granted permits for complexes like the UEO Buckeye cryogenic plant, “what we might miss, what are lessons learned,” he remarked. West Virginia and Pennsylvania “are about 18 months ahead of us … so we camped out with those guys and learned how to permit so when [midstream operations] came here, it wasn’t a surprise to us,” he said.
Representatives of the agencies in other states “were very helpful in training my folks,” Nally added.
“The director wanted to make sure he was able to find out from other states the regulatory ups and downs of getting these facilities permitted,” said Ohio EPA spokesman Mike Settles. Nally and staff from Ohio EPA’s air pollution control, surface water and other divisions participated in getting their educations, he reported.
Air permitting was likely to represent the biggest challenge “because you get a lot of gas being pumped through a lot of valves and through a lot of piping,” Nally said. “Since we hadn’t seen anything like this in Ohio, we had to make sure that we understood what we were looking at in permitting. So spending some time in Pennsylvania and West Virginia helped us mature, to get to where we could actually permit this and not miss something.”
At the Kensington plant, gas monitors are in place in areas in the field where there might be any kind of discharges, and the entire piping system is checked at a minimum of at least twice its working pressure to ensure no leaks, said Baron John, construction coordinator. “We don’t discharge anything into the air. Anything that discharges goes to our flare and is burnt off in a controlled manner,” he said. “It’s all about control.”
Since construction is taking place alongside a “live plant,” procedures must be followed before engaging in any activity that involves an open flame, John added. “Basically we have to control everything very tightly to make sure we don’t have a mixture of flammable [materials] and a flame,” he remarked.
Nally said OEPA was not under any kind of time pressure to issue the UEO Kensington permit, although “obviously everybody wanted it yesterday,” he allowed. Regulators in neighboring states informed Nally of the steps to come, such as compression stations and fractionation lines, leading to an ethane cracker in one of the three states.
“That’s the final step -- close the loop within the region so we don’t have to ship it out,” he said. The goal is to pull the minerals from the ground and use all of the components. “You want to use all of the pieces of it, not just the methane, not just the propane [but] also the ethane and plastics.”
Editor's Note: First published in the MidNovember edition of The Business Journal.
Copyright 2013 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
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