Pennsylvania regulators ordered the owner of a natural gas liquids pipeline to suspend service on its existing pipeline and stop work on two proposed pipelines along the same route in Chester County, Pennsylvania where sinkholes appeared earlier this year.
An administrative law judge at the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission (PUC) issued her emergency order on Thursday in response to a petition filed by state Sen. Andrew Dinniman (D), who requested a halt to work on the pipeline project in West Whiteland Township, Pennsylvania, a part of Chester County that he represents.
Sunoco Pipeline LP, a subsidiary of Energy Transfer Partners, owns the existing Mariner East pipeline, an eight-inch-diameter pipeline built in the 1930s. The company also is building two additional natural gas liquids pipelines located along the same route. Mariner East 2 is a proposed 20-inch-diameter pipeline and Mariner East 2X is a proposed 16-inch-diameter pipeline.
The natural gas industry is finding the Marcellus and Utica shales in southwestern Pennsylvania rich with natural gas liquids. Wider-diameter pipelines are needed to get all of the natural gas liquids to terminals where they can then be shipped to overseas petrochemical plants.
“Sunoco has made deliberate managerial decisions to proceed in what appears to be a rushed manner in an apparent prioritization of profit over the best engineering practices available in our time that might best ensure public safety,” PUC Judge Elizabeth Barnes wrote in her order.
Given the accident history of construction on the two new Mariner East pipelines, such as sinkholes and spills, “there is a grave risk of rupture” on the existing Mariner East pipeline,” Barnes ruled. She also noted that water supplies have already been damaged in West Whiteland Township.
Controversy has also surrounded Sunoco’s hiring of a private security firm to conduct surveillance of landowners opposed to the pipeline crossing their land. Energy Transfer Partners’ other projects, most notably the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota, have drawn similar scrutiny from regulators and pipeline opponents.
Last November, Energy Transfer Partners also faced a separate lawsuit from the State of Ohio against Rover Pipeline, operated and majority-owned by the pipeline company, for allegedly polluting state waterways as it constructs a 713-mile pipeline that would transport natural gas from southwest Pennsylvania across Ohio and into Michigan and Ontario, Canada.
The Mariner East pipeline shutdown comes less than a month after the PUC lifted an emergency order and allowed Sunoco to restart operations on the pipeline. The pipeline was shutdown in January after sinkholes appeared in Chester County, exposing the pipe’s bare steel. When it allowed operations to resume in early May, the PUC said construction of the two new pipelines posed no threat to the integrity of the existing Mariner East pipeline and that it was safe to resume operations.
Sunoco had not responded to a request for comment from ThinkProgress on the PUC’s order at the time this article was published.
Craig Stevens, a spokesman for the Grow America’s Infrastructure Now Coalition, a coalition of businesses, trade associations, and labor groups, said “this activist judge’s decision flies in the face of the extensive testing and review overseen by the Pennsylvania Utility Commission which led to the Commission’s unanimous decision to allow operations of Mariner East 1 to resume just three weeks ago.”
The “shocking development” further erodes regulatory certainty in Pennsylvania and risks the loss of billions of dollars in investment for new upstream, downstream, and midstream projects, Stevens said Thursday in a statement.
The judge’s order requires Sunoco to assess the condition of its old and new Mariner East pipelines, including the integrity of the pipe-wall thickness and welds on the old Mariner East pipeline.
The emergency order will remain in place until the conditions detailed in the order are met or until the PUC takes other action, commission spokesperson Nils Hagen-Frederiksen said in an email to ThinkProgress.
Parties wishing to dispute the order have seven days from the issuance of the order to file briefs with the PUC, and the commission has 30 days from the date of the order to act, Frederiksen said.
The order “provides much needed protection for the public from the dangers Sunoco has inflicted upon communities in Chester County and beyond,” Joseph Otis Minott, executive director and chief counsel of the Clean Air Council, a Philadelphia-based environmental group, said Thursday in a statement.
Minott said his group worked with Sen. Dinniman to secure “this great victory” on behalf of his constituents.
Dinniman, who lives about two miles from the pipeline construction, is a member of the Senate Environmental Resources and Energy Committee and the Joint Legislative Air and Water Pollution Control and Conservation Committee
In his petition, Dinniman said the construction of the two new pipelines through the township will continue to endanger private and public drinking water supplies and continue to risk sinkholes and other subsidence’s endangering homes.
The existing Mariner East pipeline delivers natural gas liquids extracted in the Marcellus Shale to the Marcus Hook terminal near Philadelphia. From the terminal, the natural gas liquids are exported by ship to a petrochemical plant in Norway.