A bipartisan panel of 10 West Virginia lawmakers is using legislation that failed to clear both chambers of the legislature earlier this year as the starting point for trying to reach a consensus over Marcellus Shale regulatory reform.

The Joint Select Committee on Marcellus Shale (JSCMS) met Aug. 1 through Aug. 4 and has been using the Natural Gas Horizontal Well Control Act, also known as SB 424, as the basis for a new bill.

“We have knocked out some of the easy issues,” Sen. Douglas Facemire (D-Braxton), one of the committee’s co-chairs, told NGI. “We will not be calling a special session [of the legislature]. This joint committee will get together to see if we can come up with a bill, take it back to our respective houses, and try to get it passed in our January session when we convene.”

SB 424 passed the Senate by a unanimous vote on March 2, and a different version of the bill was approved by the House of Delegates on March 10. But legislators could not pass a reconciled version of the bill before the legislature convened for the 2011 season (see NGI, March 21; March 14; Feb. 28).

Facemire said several amendments have been suggested to SB 424, including one that would require the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) to suspend an operator’s drilling permit if they run afoul of a road maintenance agreement with the state Division of Highways. Another amendment would require operators to submit their employment information to the state Division of Labor, including data on contractors and subcontractors.

Other amendments call for:

Another amendment that was proposed, but has not yet been attached to the bill, calls for eliminating the Oil and Gas Examining Board (OGEB).

“The DEP would like to have them eliminated,” Facemire said of the OGEB. “[The DEP] feels like they can do it themselves and it would save them money. I disagree with that. All that board does is qualify inspectors; it doesn’t hire or fire anybody. They make an oral and a written test, they administer the test and then they rank the applicants to get on the roster to be hired. I don’t see where that encumbers anything.”

Facemire said the committee will meet again in September. Although he sounded optimistic that lawmakers would eventually come to an agreement on Marcellus Shale regulatory reform, he said several major issues — including permit fees and a possible 60-day public comment period before drilling begins at a well — remain to be resolved.

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