American Oil and Gas Reporter - August 2015 - 151

Liaison Committee

Pre-Emption, Species Lead Discussion
By Bill Campbell

SANTA FE, N.M.-Anti-oil-and-gas activists who continue to push for local bans
in the face of court rulings upholding state
pre-emption may be angling for a broader attack, reason some members of the Liaison Committee of Cooperating Oil &
Gas Associations.
Municipal regulation, along with endangered species issues and induced seismicity, was a primary topic of discussion
for the Liaison Committee meeting held
June 24 in Santa Fe in conjunction with the
Independent Petroleum Association of
America's midyear meeting. Liaison participants discussed these and other issues
during their own meeting as well as during the IPAA cooperating associations
meeting that immediately preceded the Liaison session.
Ohio Oil & Gas Association Counsel
W. Jonathan Airey, a partner with attorneys Vorys, Sater, Seymour and Pease
LLP in Columbus, Oh., opened the discussion on state pre-emption by calling attention to key court decisions for Ohio producers.
He noted that in February, the Ohio
Supreme Court upheld the state's 2004 oil
and gas law, which grants sole authority
to regulate the permitting, location and
spacing of oil and gas wells to the Ohio
Department of Natural Resources. The
court overturned ordinances adopted by the
city of Monroe Falls. A month later, he
said, the Cuyahoga County, Oh., Court of
Common Pleas overturned a drilling ban
enacted by the city of Broadview Heights,
citing the Supreme Court's Monroe Falls
decision.
"We think we are in pretty good shape,
legally, even though we have about seven more of these local initiatives that are
in the process this year," Airey remarked.

OOGA Executive Vice President
Shawn Bennett commented that the local
ordinances were being promoted as "community bills of rights" by the anti-oil-andgas group Community Environmental
Legal Defense Fund. "I think everybody
has seen these pop up. They are very popular in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Colorado," he said. "They put in a lot of feelgood language-the right to clean water,
clean air, apple pie and everything under
the sun-to confuse people into banning oil
and gas in their communities."
Lou D'Amico, president of the Pennsylvania Independent Oil & Gas Association, confirmed that CELDF was "creating a lot of headaches for us," too. "These
things are popping up all over Pennsylvania as well as across the country," he said.
"We are going to win, but there are costs
associated. CELDF has never won a case,
but it is a matter of cost and investment."
Noting the amount of behind-the-pipe
natural gas in Pennsylvania that lacks market access, D'Amico added that CELDF
had begun to attack infrastructure projects
as well as upstream operations. "We are
seeing every effort throughout the state,
and particularly in southeastern Pennsylvania, to block any kind of pipeline activity," he reported.
Bennett commented that many of the
CELDF ordinances even claimed to supersede federal and state constitutions.
Induced Seismicity
On another subject, Bennett went on,
Ohio has a rather complicated situation regarding induced seismicity.
Before that, Liaison Secretary-Treasurer Edward Cross, who is president of the
Kansas Independent Oil & Gas Association, mentioned that Kansas had adopted
a seismic action plan that created a "score"
based on such variables as the frequency

Ohio Oil & Gas Association
Counsel W. Jonathan Airey
(left) and Executive Vice President Shawn Bennett update
Liaison Committee participants on legal developments
related to municipal ordinances during the Liaison
session held June 24 in Santa Fe, N.M.

and magnitude of seismic events. "A
score of 17 or higher requires the Kansas
Corporation Commission to look for
Class II injection wells within a six-mile
radius of the epicenter of a seismic event
of 3.0 magnitude or higher," he reported,
adding that the KCC's authorized responses ranged from modifying an injections well's permit to shutting it in.
He said the KCC issued its first such
order in March, when 72 wells in two
south-central Kansas counties were required to gradually reduce their injection
rates over 90-day intervals, then monitor
seismic activity in the area for 180 days
to discern any changes associated with
modifying the injection volumes.
"Kansas' plan doesn't say seismic activity is caused by disposal wells, but it initiates this regulatory protocol to see
whether it has any impact," Cross emphasized.
Ohio operators are not so lucky, Bennett rued. "We have the rare honor of having regulators tie (seismic activity) to fracturing," he observed.
He explained that following some
seismic events in 2014 in Mahoning
County, Oh., the ODNR had adopted a rule
requiring any operator drilling within
three miles of a known fault or in an area
that had experienced a seismic event of 2.0
magnitude or greater to install seismic
monitors. If the monitors detect any seismic activity in excess of 1.0 magnitude,
the operator must stop operations while the
cause is investigated, he added.
Bennett noted that the chief of ODNR's
Division of Oil and Gas Resources Management also headed the Interstate Oil &
Gas Compact Commission's induced
seismicity work group, and OOGA was
hopeful the state might adopt more reasonable regulations based on IOGCC recommendations. He said OOGA had retained
an expert on induced seismicity to advise
the process. "We are trying to dig ourselves out of a hole and move toward some
common-sense regulation," Bennett said.
In Illinois, "The one thing we got
right in the high-volume hydraulic fracturing regulatory act (adopted in 2013) was
the seismicity aspect," offered Illinois Oil
& Gas Association Executive Vice President Brad Richards.
He said Illinois had adopted a "traffic
light" system under which varying thresholds of seismic activity triggered different
degrees of regulatory response.
Richards mentioned IOGA "had a
great ally" in the Illinois State Geological

AUGUST 2015 151

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