More Questions than Answers:
The Anadarko Development Plan

                                                                        By ANN PINCA

It took over nine months for delivery, but after a Right to Know Law request, an appeal, and several rounds of legal arguments and mediation, the Office of Open Records ordered the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR) to disclose Anadarko Petroleum Corporation's (Anadarko) development plans for the Loyalsock State Forest.

The point of the Right to Know Law request, made by PennFuture, was to learn what development is planned for the hotly contested Clarence Moore lands in the state forest. Unfortunately, the document delivered on October 15 offers less information than was given at the June 3 DCNR public meeting in Williamsport, since the DCNR was permitted to redact - i.e., to censor - any details identified by Anadarko as confidential proprietary information.  

A heavily redacted page from the plan released by DCNR.

Like a joke without a punch line, the redacted 2012 document is mostly irrelevant. And there is nothing humorous about the nine-month stand-off to obtain it and the ridiculously endless blacked-out pages it contains. Those factors seem to indicate the unwillingness of Anadarko and the DCNR to allow the citizens of Pennsylvania to understand what is planned for the popular state forest they own and enjoy.

In a Sun-Gazette article, Mary Wolf, Anadarko's Government Relations Advisor, claimed that the redacted material dealt mainly with seismology matters and mineral levels and depths, but many pages in the plan are heavily blacked out, some completely.  These include sometimes bewildering redacted areas on almost all topics: road construction, well pads, water impoundments, pipelines, and communications infrastructure.  A conceptual development timeline chart is completely blackened, as are seven entire pages in a row in Appendix A. Noticeably absent from the entire document are maps, locations and many specific numbers.

The redaction of so much material in the report only raises more questions. In the State Forest Environmental Review prepared by Anadarko, why choose to mysteriously cover up a few choice sentences just when the discussion turns to water withdrawals and recycling? What does it mean when an entire large block of black appears in the Recreation Sites and Opportunities section after the narrative brings up on-location security?  Why black out the entire table of anticipated disturbances that includes numbers of well pads, compressors, impoundments, new roads, and pipelines when this information was given by the DCNR at the June meeting; does it imply that the numbers are different?

Another page from the report.

The entire Surface Use Agreement is left almost completely unmarked, with the notable exception of one large blackened box that eliminates the entire discussion of the "Slush Pit," defined in the Texas Administrative Code as a "pit used in conjunction with drilling rig for collecting spent drilling fluids; cuttings, sands, and silts; and wash water used for cleaning drill pipe and other equipment at the well site."  Why can we know everything else about the surface use agreement except for this most environmentally important question?

While the DCNR and Anadarko may have expected concerned environmental groups to "see red" over the highly redacted report, those groups instead may now conjure even darker shades of doubt in terms of transparency with the actual plans for the Clarence Moore lands.

In a State Impact report, DCNR spokeswoman Christina Novak stated that the disclosed plan does not represent a final agreement with Anadarko and has not been formally revised since its submission.  Novak said that the DCNR has promised to keep "stakeholder groups" informed of "what happens next" with the Loyalsock State Forest.

We insist that the DCNR includes the public as stakeholders in future communications - and that next time, real information is presented without another nine-month fight to get it.