The West Virginia House of Delegates was set to vote late Friday or Saturday on a bill to change the state’s regulation of Marcellus Shale drilling.

If approved by the full House, the Natural Gas Horizontal Well Control Act (SB 424) still needed to be reconciled with a bill previously approved by the Senate (see NGI, March 7) by Saturday, when the legislature’s 60-day session was scheduled to end.

The bill is different from that originally proposed by the state’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) (see NGI, Feb. 14) and less stringent than a bill approved by the Senate. In an effort to fund a larger staff and more oil and gas inspectors, DEP had proposed increasing horizontal drilling permit fees to $10,000 from the current $650 that all drillers pay. The Senate version of the bill calls for $5,000 horizontal drilling permit fees, while the final House version postpones fee-setting until later in the legislative process.

More personnel are needed because of the growing number of horizontal well sites in the state, according to DEP Secretary Randy Huffman, who told the committee that horizontal drilling sites are “significantly larger” than conventional well sites.

“I believe in the short term we can get by” with the current number of inspectors, Huffman said. Enlarging DEP staff is “not something that could be done overnight; it’s something that would have to be done over time.”

DEP has also asked legislators to increase to 66 the number of oil and gas inspectors and permits handlers on its payroll from the current 32, who are tasked with covering approximately 59,000 wells — about 750 of them active — across the state.

SB 424 would require drillers to give surface owners advance notice of any seismic activity on or near their property; prohibit oil and gas wells from being drilled within 100 feet of water wells and other “water courses” and within 1,000 feet of homes without permission of property owners; and require drillers to submit detailed water management plans and lists of chemicals to be used in hydraulic fracturing. Language that would have allowed forced pooling was previously removed from the bill, and other bills which included forced pooling were set aside by the legislature.

Another bill (SB 465), which would redirect $2 million of the oil and gas severance tax revenue already collected by the state to a fund to be administered by the DEP, was also expected to be voted on, officials said Friday. SB 465 had previously been moved from the House’s special calendar to the regular House calendar, which typically indicates that it a bill not be voted on by the full House, but it was moved back to the special calendar Friday.

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