Tag Archives: Marcellus Shale
Posted in Alternative Energy | Architecture | Communication | Marketing | Social Media
This chart is the author’s personal opinion on who people choose to trust for news and truth, and who has the most ethical, moral, and/or legal responsibility to be accurate.
I’ve been working long enough that young people think I’m wise. Secretly, I think they mean old and just want to be nice about it. But these are gifted people, with a bright future and we have some interesting discussions. Broad but predictable range of topics – religion, environment, healthcare, politics, and the list goes on.
Over the holidays, I had a couple of interesting discussions on news, truth, and trust. These chats matched up with some free time that let me look at the relationship of news, truth, and trust a bit differently.
The primary role of media is news not truth. They mark the date of an event, and that establishes chronology. You hear on television and radio. “At 11:00 this morning…”. A book or published research attempts to offer truth, by reaching for cause and effect after the event happened. You read it. “We found measurable amounts of…”. Trust, I feel, is established by where you are and what you’re surrounded by.
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Posted in Alternative Energy | Communities | Current Events | Economic Development | Education | Natural Gas | Networking | Site Design & Land Development | Transportation
Recently, I had the opportunity to join members of the CNG Focus Group for a Tour of CATA’s (Centre Area Transportation Authority) facility in State College. I was able to get quite a few nice photos from this event and thought I would use this blog post as an opportunity to share the experience.
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Posted in Alternative Energy | Current Events | Innovative Solutions | Marcellus Shale | Natural Gas | Water/Wastewater
Part of my job at Larson Design Group (LDG) involves TerrAqua Resource Management (TARM). This subsidiary of Larson Design Group is the first enterprise in PA that recycles water generated from Marcellus development under a permit from PADEP. You can learn more about TARM here: www.tarmsolutions.com.
TARM is a high compliance success story. Our company doesn’t discharge any water. Clients bring us flowback and produced waters, we run it through our treatment system, and the clients take the water back and reuse it in drilling operations again. TARM’s approach protects the environment in many ways. This best practice leads to a sustainable future for Marcellus. TARM has processed and recycled more than 38 million gallons of water in just over 11 months. Recently, TARM and LDG received a national award for engineering excellence.
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Posted in Communities | Current Events | Marcellus Shale | Natural Gas | Politics | Transportation | Water/Wastewater
Our region will always try to define the Marcellus experience. Some think it’s good; some see an irreversible threat; some think of it as both. What we need is a commitment to make Marcellus development better and safer. While not everyone may be on board, there is a clear swing towards improving operations and technology to make development better and safer. I thought I would share two recent items.
Last week, I was involved in a conversation with some folks that weren’t convinced any improvements or progress are being made to reduce the impact of Marcellus Shale development. I thought I would share how this conversation went.
“There are still problems with gas companies destroying local roads. How are taxpayers going to handle that?”
No doubt that development activity is hammering local roads. There are lots of heavy trucks traveling on roads that were never built to handle the use. But there is a change underway to make this work better. This summer PennDOT issued guidelines primarily for the gas industry, but also for other heavy haulers. These guidelines included mandatory roadway maintenance and repair strategies. These strategies have to be submitted to PennDOT within 24 hours of a report of critical road condition. The strategies outline the contractor to be used, what materials will be used to repair to road, if the material will be replaced prior to June 30 following the winter, and so on. All actions relating to the strategies will be paid for by the gas companies. An article by John Beauge in the September edition of Northeast Pennsylvania Business Journal describes how Chesapeake Energy has spent $15 million since spring repairing roads in Lycoming, Sullivan, Bradford, and Tioga counties and their plan is to spend another $15 million before the end of 2010. The inconvenience of a damaged road isn’t avoided; but the cost is being passed from the tax payer to the gas company. A good and necessary step I think.
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