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Say for the moment you own property in Illinois under which there’s oil or gas you could access using the process of high volume hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. What stands between you and the start of your fracking operation? A two-page application and a $100 fee, payable to the Illinois Department of Natural Resources (IDNR).
A bill recently introduced in the Illinois House, HB 2615, would change that. The bill was crafted over the past eight months by a team of house members led by John Bradley, a Democrat from Carbondale, and including Naomi Jakobsson of Urbana. Also involved in the crafting of the bill were representatives of the oil and gas industry, as well as four statewide environmental groups.
According to those groups, the regulatory
framework that would be established by the bill is stricter than that in any
other state.
I spoke recently with Brian Sauder, who is a
policy director with Faith in Place, a not-for-profit that organizes religious
congregations on environmental issues, and one of the four environmental representatives
who worked on the legislation. He called attention to some of the key
protections offered by the bill.
First among these are protections for water and
air. The house bill requires that all of the flowback from fracking be stored
in closed tanks rather than open pits, which is the norm now in states without
such regulations. This drastically reduces the risks of spills, overflows and
floodwater contamination, as well as other issues associated with the open
storage of water mixed with hazardous substances.
The bill also protects against the pollution of
water sources by stipulating practices in the construction and maintenance of
gas wells, and it establishes a monitoring regime to verify that wells perform
properly. Under this regime, nearby water sources are sampled on a before and
after basis. If new contamination is detected in post-fracking tests, the
fracking company is presumed to be liable for it.
Sauder was also especially pleased with the bill’s
provisions for public participation in the permitting process. It enables
anyone who may be affected by a fracking operation to request a public hearing
on a permit, and it stipulates that those are “contested case” hearings. In such
hearings, parties are allowed to present evidence and cross-examine witnesses,
and the proceedings are documented so they can be cited in legal appeals.
Sauder noted that much of the controversy around
fracking elsewhere in the U.S. has arisen where oil and gas companies are able
to keep secret what chemicals they are injecting into the ground in the process
of fracking.
HB 2615 would require companies to disclose to IDNR
a list of all substances used in fracking fluids, the formulas for those fluids
and their processes. This material would then be subject to Freedom of
Information Act (FOIA) requests. In such cases, the bill provides that IDNR
determines which parts of this information are proprietary, not the operators,
as is the case in other states.
Of course, there’s more to these regulations than
I’ve presented here, from setback requirements that keep wells a certain
distance from homes, schools and hospitals, to reclamation standards that
establish conditions for sites after wells are taken out of operation. Brian Sauder suggested that people who want to
follow up start at the Website of Faith in Place, which is faithinplace.org.
