CNX Pioneers with Transparency and Provides A Powerful Example of How to Fight Back with Simple Facts

Guest Post by Jim Willis at Marcellus Drilling News.

CNX Resources released its first Radical Transparency™ assessment report in August (see Independent Monitoring of CNX Ops Shows No Public Health Threat). The initial results of nine months of continuous air emissions monitoring at natural gas well sites and compressor stations in southwestern Pennsylvania indicate that CNX natural gas development poses no public health risk. Period.

The data is collected and disseminated to the public by an independent third-party contractor. This is objective you-can’t-argue-with-it data that shows CNX is not causing any kind of public health hazard. Big Green is apoplectic that their lying narratives are now countered by objective (truthful) data and is attempting to smear CNX and its objective data (see Leftists Rattled by CNX’s Real Science and Radical Transparency).

Apparently, CNX is taking some heat from the shale industry because at yesterday’s Shale Insight event in Erie, PA, CNX’s Chief Risk Officer, Hayley Scott, defended her company’s participation in the ongoing monitoring study they call Radical Transparency.

Scott had this warning for participants—fellow members of the shale industry: “If the natural gas industry continues to employ the same safe playbook, the first thing that dies is truth, facts and logic. Once those die, the industry itself won’t be far behind.” She’s referring to being transparent with the public in all things in order to keep our social license to operate.

Scott also said, “It’s hard for us to understand how everyone in the industry could not be a part of this,” referring to the Radical Transparency initiative. Her talk seemed (to us) to be part “Come on in the water’s warm” (carrot) and part “You darned well better get in, or else” (stick).

We think she has a point. Although we maintain our industry is superb and excels at good environmental and public health standards and safety and doesn’t need to “prove” anything, we must admit we play in a game that has a stacked deck…an uneven playing field…with one arm tied behind our backs.

It’s not fair, but that’s the reality. The public’s view of O&G and shale energy has been so distorted by the lies of the environmental left aided and abetted by Big Media that we now must hew to a much higher standard. We think that’s what Scott is driving at.

We know that we (in the O&G industry) aren’t making people sick with drilling and fracking and pipelines. So, let’s go ahead and prove it, even if the wackos on the left refuse to accept hard science as evidence. In the end, we’ll win in the court of public opinion because we are radically transparent, and the public will see it. Free speech wins when it’s allowed to exist.

The Pittsburgh Business Times reports:

An executive of CNX Resources Corp. on Wednesday defended the company’s participation in a joint study with the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania on the impacts of natural gas drilling, and urged the natural gas industry to join the program to strengthen the public’s trust.

“If the natural gas industry continues to employ the same safe playbook, the first thing that dies is truth, facts and logic,” said Hayley Scott, chief risk officer of Canonsburg-based CNX (NYSE: CNX) during a session Wednesday at the first day of the Marcellus Shale Coalition’s Shale Insight conference. “Once those die, the industry itself won’t be far behind. Let’s be honest with ourselves: We have this massive overhang tied to public health, and it’s not going to go away on its own.”

CNX and its CEO, Nick DeIuliis, reached a deal with Gov. Josh Shapiro last November to begin a joint industry/governmental monitoring of air and water quality around CNX’s drilling sites in southwestern Pennsylvania. The collaboration provided what has long been sought: Buy-in from a natural gas producer into the environmental impacts of natural gas drilling in real time. CNX’s efforts have drawn mostly silence from the rest of the natural gas industry in Pennsylvania.

“Ten months since we began this program, it’s hard for us to understand how everyone in the industry could not be a part of this,” Scott told the industry audience at Shale Insight. “We have to set ideology, personal political preferences, short-term political goals, personal agendas … to the side and see the existential threat and our moral obligation for what it is.”

Environmental advocates have been critical of the health costs of drilling in Washington County and elsewhere. Previous studies, including a University of Pittsburgh one into the incidence of childhood cancers and asthma, left no one satisfied.

CNX’s position then and now is that natural gas production is done safely in Appalachia and that public health protections and drilling can happen at the same time. CNX’s data, Scott said, proved little particulate matter was released into the air even 500 feet from the well bore. It’s monitoring 11 drilling sites during the production phase and then six months afterward and is also disclosing chemicals used during hydraulic fracturing, whether trade secrets or not, and also gotten its service providers to do so as well.

An initial report of data in June led to criticism from environmental groups. Scott urged environmental groups to engage with CNX.

“If you have ideas to make the program better and help provide residents the answers they deserve, we’re all ears,” Scott said. “Shutting down the program is not an option, so let’s bootstrap it and make it better. We want to arrive at the truth, whatever that may be.”

To the industry audience at Shale Insight, Scott warned that the rest of the industry should also commit to the monitoring of air and water quality and methane and other emissions at the well site and nearby and providing the data in real time and with transparency. Some other studies, including ones funded by natural gas companies, have taken months and years to be completed. Scott said that without the transparency, which she acknowledged was a change from previous industry practice, it wouldn’t be trusted as much.

“This is critical: We can’t continue to hold our data in a black box and release it on our terms to a limited audience,” Scott said.

Scott said its radical transparency — DeIuliis’ term for it — would benefit the industry and should become standard practice.

“If it isn’t, it will be a failure to everyone in this room and a missed opportunity with potentially catastrophic consequences for all stakeholders,” Scott said.

Scott also alluded to two of the region’s environmental challenges, the cases of rare childhood cancers in and around Canonsburg and Cecil, plus higher asthma rates in urban disadvantaged communities. She pointed to the human cost and said the families deserve answers, no matter where that road will take them.

“If people and communities are getting sick, it is incumbent on the U.S. and state government, academia and environmental groups to get to the bottom of it and provide affected families with real answers,” she said. “Simply blaming it on the natural gas industry may be the easy political answer. But don’t those individuals and families deserve more from all of us?”

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