Pennsylvania gas driller: Our operations pose no health risk. You can’t be serious, activists respond.

CNX Resources Corp., a major Pennsylvania natural gas producer, has racked up air quality violations by the hundreds and three years ago pleaded no contest to criminal charges of skirting state pollution laws for years by misreporting air emissions at one of its facilities.

The case against CNX was brought by Josh Shapiro, then the state’s attorney general and now its governor. At the time, Shapiro’s office called CNX’s behavior “fraudulent.”

Now, CNX is doing its best to resurrect itself as a white knight in the fossil fuel trade, and as proof offering up an industry-written study it says demonstrates its fracking operations pose “no public health risks.” The study was born from a partnership that CNX inked last year with its old nemesis — Shapiro.

The study, nicknamed “Radical Transparency” by the natural gas operator, has struck a nerve with climate activists who dismissed it as pseudoscience that flies in the face of peer-reviewed research as well as a 2020 grand jury report that found children and adults who lived near fracking sites were prone to intense nose bleeds, ulcers, and rashes. Drinking water near the fracking sites was sometimes rust-colored or filled with sediment, it said. And airborne chemicals burned the throats of residents and irritated their skin. The latter effect even earned a nickname among residents: “frack rash.”

“First, we allowed the timber in our Commonwealth to be plundered. Then it was our coal. Now it’s shale. Other industries will certainly come our way, for some new natural resource to exploit. This is the time to learn our lesson for the future: Who will bear the inevitable risks? We say it should be those who exploit the resources, not those who live among them,” the grand jury report said.

CNX’s study, which was released to investors in August, comes as the energy giant is trying to curry favor with the governor by pitching itself as an environmental justice leader and win federal funds for the production of hydrogen from the Inflation Reduction Act, President Joe Biden’s signature legislation to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels. Billions of dollars are in play.

Indeed, CNX’s ongoing “Radical Transparency” project has already been added to a list of energy producer initiatives that stand to receive a portion of $30 million in public funds allocated to a forthcoming hydrogen hub in Appalachia. These funds are being doled out by Biden’s Justice40 initiative, which is aimed at ensuring clean energy efforts — such as an envisioned Appalachian hydrogen hub — benefit low-income communities already overburdened by pollution.

A group of 40 environmental organizations, as well as State Sen. Katie Muth, have submitted a letter to the U.S. Department of Energy in which they express their opposition to the inclusion of CNX’s “Radical Transparency” on the list of projects vying for the federal funds.

“The ‘Radical Transparency’ program is a cynical attempt to undermine those harmed by fracking by discrediting the thousands of peer-reviewed papers, government reports and media investigations that have demonstrated grave harms fracking poses to health, safety, the environment and climate,” the letter says.

Shapiro ran for office on the promise of “a low carbon future” but has since tried to walk a fine line between the wishes of climate activists and the state’s powerful fossil fuel interests. He has not taken a firm stand but has indicated he believes there’s room for the oil and gas industry in what’s billed as the coming hydrogen revolution. Hydrogen is a powerful source of energy but is only considered emission-free if it’s produced with renewable energy, such as solar and wind. CNX intends to use the carbon captured from its wells to produce hydrogen.

But if “Radical Transparency” was intended to win over doubters, it has not impressed climate activists, who have asked Shapiro to renounce it.

“CNX’s radically dishonest and irresponsible fracking report fails the fundamental tests of scientific integrity,” Alex Bomstein, executive director of Clean Air Council, wrote in a news release. “The Shapiro administration should immediately disavow the report and distance itself from this propaganda.”

The Shapiro administration did not respond to inquiries from Capital & Main.

In its report to investors, CNX said it had monitored a selection of fracking sites and tested for emissions from five chemicals that have been linked to respiratory illness, neurological damage, and cancer, including particulate matter, benzene, toluene, xylene, and ethylbenzene.

The data, which are shared in real time with residents and government officials alike, were compared to several metrics, including National Ambient Air Quality Standards, Minimum Risk Levels for hazardous substances, and pollution concentrations in an urban neighborhood in Pittsburgh.

“The initial results and ongoing monitoring from our Radical Transparency program indicate that natural gas development done the CNX way is safe and inherently good for the communities where we operate,” CNX president and CEO Nick Deiuliis wrote in the report.

CNX said its monitoring project has provided “hundreds of thousands of additional data points.” But the report focuses on just two well pads: NV110, which houses seven natural gas wells, and MOR9, which houses 10. The company worked with a third party, the environmental consulting firm Clean Air Engineering, to install two air monitors at each site — one upwind and the other downwind. CNX has committed to monitoring each site for at least six months.

David Hess, former secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection and author of the daily PA Environment Digest blog, said the setup of the testing project alone gives him pause.

“You only get a very narrow slice of what’s coming off any of those facilities,” Hess said. “If you wanted to do a very robust monitoring program, you would ring the entire site with monitors.”

Hess said a robust emissions study would have collected more data, and the testing would have lasted far longer before the announcement of any conclusions. He said the study should have lasted at least a full year, since each season “has an impact on what happens to pollutants and where they fall.”

“I think from the beginning, this initiative was oversold,” Hess said.

Some health-care professionals said CNX can’t reasonably make such sweeping conclusions without studying the health conditions of people living near the pollutants.

“The correct conclusion is that they failed to detect the five chemicals that they were looking for in very high concentrations,” said Ned Ketyer, president of Physicians for Social Responsibility Pennsylvania, a nonprofit advocacy group. “That’s the only thing that they can conclude. They can’t conclude that fracking is safe.”

One of the two sites surveyed in the project drew the attention of government officials as recently as March, when Department of Environmental Protection inspectors visited the site after receiving complaints from a resident about suspected water contamination — a category of pollution that CNX has committed to studying but did not account for in “Radical Transparency.” The state’s Department of Environmental Protection has not issued a notice of violation, but a spokesperson told Capital & Main that the resident’s complaint met “the conditions for creating a rebuttable presumption that a well operator is responsible for water pollution.” CNX disputed the claim. After the inspection, CNX was ordered to install an alternate water source for the resident while the investigation continues.

“Their ‘radical transparency’ idea is really not at all transparent,” Ketyer said.

Ketyer said he believes CNX’s rosy report was issued not as a good-faith effort to advance science, but to appease investors ahead of a ratings downgrade from investment bank Piper Sandler, which came the day after CNX issued its release.

Kathleen Nolan, coauthor of the compendium on the risks of fracking and cofounder of Concerned Health Professionals of New York, said CNX’s report does not note whether there was a third-party review, which is standard for scientific papers. Though the emissions data may have averaged out to an acceptable level, they tended to spike in ways that Nolan believes would have been worth investigating. It is unclear whether CNX did that, and the gas producer did not respond to Capital & Main’s requests for comment.

“Using real-time continuous readout is essential if you’re going to monitor particulate matter,” she said. But CNX’s study is simply “documenting something, but not necessarily intervening in a way to be protective.”

Protection from pollution is what Shapiro’s office sought to provide Pennsylvania residents when it enlisted CNX in 2023 to “definitively” measure emissions and strengthen chemical disclosures at a selection of its wells. As part of the partnership, CNX also agreed to a suite of concessions that mimicked the eight recommendations in the 2020 grand jury report, which found that state regulators had failed to protect residents from the fracking boom. CNX agreed to move its fracking infrastructure an additional 100 feet beyond the legally mandated 500-foot distance from homes and 2,500-foot distance from hospitals and schools. The grand jury also recommended that oil and gas operators be required to identify all the chemicals used in their operations. CNX and other operators are generally allowed to redact the names of chemicals they consider to be “trade secrets.”

Environmentalists have urged Shapiro’s office to reject the CNX project and adopt the grand jury recommendations instead.

“He’s completely ignoring residents near these CNX sites,” said Shannon Smith, executive director of the nonprofit environmental group FracTracker Alliance. “He knows damn well what the health risks and the impacts are. He’s articulated it in many words, many times as attorney general.”