An Oklahoma-based natural gas producer that was fined $1.9 million in 2021 for damaging wetlands and streams at 76 drilling sites in Pennsylvania has had more than a dozen of those sites added to a list of projects that have been ordered fast-tracked by the Trump administration to address what he calls the nation’s “energy emergency.”
In addition to the fine, Chesapeake Energy, now Expand Energy, was required to restore 55 acres of wetlands and nearly 4,500 linear feet of streams. Wetlands are considered environmentally critical, sometimes referred to as “earth’s kidneys,” because they improve water quality and filter pollutants; they also help reduce erosion and prevent flooding. Chesapeake has a history dating back to 2013 of improperly filling in wetlands by discharging drilling fluids, sand, dirt and rocks.
Chesapeake applied for retroactive federal permits to come into legal compliance on 17 of its fracking projects in Pennsylvania. Now, the firm’s wait may be nearly over.
Chesapeake’s fracking operations are among more than 600 projects across the country that have been earmarked by the Trump administration as energy emergencies. The list includes a pipeline to be bored under Lake Michigan, a deepwater crude oil export port off the coast of Louisiana and a controversial plan by Chevron to build a housing development atop one of its old oil fields in northern Orange County, California.
The projects were added to the Army Corps of Engineers’ standing list of jobs that are considered priorities — typically those impacted by natural disasters such as hurricanes, tropical storms and floods. Such emergency work is prompted by “dire” situations that “require short cutting the normal permitting,” said David Bookbinder, director of law and policy at the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project.
The list, which the Trump administration posted without announcement and later said would be refined, was made up of projects that do not appear to be impacted by major weather events, and includes everyday proposals for pipelines, gas-powered power plants, solar projects and even a gold mine. After the Environmental Integrity Project published the list in February, it was removed from the Army Corps of Engineers website and was not online at the time of publication.
For any project that touches navigable waters in the U.S. a permit must be obtained from the Army Corps of Engineers on top of permits from state or other federal regulators such as the federal Environmental Protection Agency.
It isn’t clear yet exactly how permits for these projects will be expedited. But Bookbinder and his colleagues at the Environmental Integrity Project are concerned that projects receiving emergency treatment under Trump’s executive order might end up rubber-stamped without room for public comment or true scrutiny of their environmental consequences.
Bookbinder said he is primarily concerned about large projects receiving individualized permits under the National Environmental Policy Act that typically require months of environmental review.
Chesapeake’s applications in Pennsylvania are for fracking sites that would receive a more streamlined general permit, which Bookbinder says doesn’t often include a public comment period.
“How can they make this incredibly short and not very rigorous process shorter and even less rigorous?” Bookbinder said.
It is not immediately clear how Chesapeake’s projects ended up on a list for fast-tracking, nor is the timeline in which the company applied for federal permits after having been cited for wrongly filling wetlands at many of them.
Chesapeake did not respond to Capital & Main’s repeated requests for comment.
All 17 of Chesapeake’s Pennsylvania projects awaiting these expedited permits appear to have been the subject of the 2021 lawsuit and subsequent settlement between the company and the U.S. Department of Justice and Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. Many are also home to active wells, according to a Department of Environmental Protection oil and gas well database. Some, like wells in Bradford County in north central Pennsylvania, were drilled more than 10 years ago — yet the well pads on which they sit still lack federal permits.
“The Consent Decree with EPA does not prohibit Chesapeake Energy from drilling and operating the wells in question,” a spokesperson for the Department of Environmental Protection wrote to Capital & Main in an email. “The purpose of the Consent Decree is to correct damages caused to wetlands and streams. In most cases, the wells were permitted and drilled years ago, prior to the discovery of unauthorized wetland and stream impacts.
“Under the terms of the Consent Decree, the operator is now seeking federal and state authorizations to retroactively address those wetland and stream impacts,” they said.
The spokesperson said Chesapeake self-reported potential wetland violations identified through an audit. The state, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the EPA later visited relevant sites to confirm Chesapeake’s disclosures as part of the negotiation of the consent decree signed for the 2021 settlement.
The decree stipulates the company must seek “after-the-fact permits” for certain sites.
The permits function as a rubber stamp for bringing Chesapeake into compliance for past mistakes, Bookbinder said. This trajectory underscores flaws in the permitting process, and the premise of President Donald Trump’s energy emergency, he said.
“It is literally impossible to see how such permits meet the Executive Order’s goal of addressing the bogus energy emergency by making it easier to produce energy, since these wells are already in operation,” Bookbinder wrote to Capital & Main in an email.
Bookbinder said he believes the permits Chesapeake needed from the Army Corps of Engineers would have been easy enough to obtain originally and that proceeding on a project without them may have been the result of a clerical error.
Alex Bomstein, executive director of the nonprofit Clean Air Council, disagrees.
“It’s hard to imagine filling in three-and-a-half acres of wetlands and not realizing that you need some sort of approval for that,” he said. “We’re talking about deliberate, illegal actions here. And, in this instance, 70-some of them.”
“There is an incentive to violate the law here,” Bomstein said. “It’s just easier and cheaper to go ahead and not worry about getting those permits.”
Bomstein’s predecessor, Joseph O. Minott, authored a 2021 op-ed on the Chesapeake settlement, calling the $1.9 million fine “too little, too late.”
“Given the scale of unlawful behavior, Chesapeake should be shut down for good,” Minott wrote in the op-ed.
Bomstein and Bookbinder — along with environmentalists, academics and economists — both disagree with Trump’s assertion that the U.S. is in the midst of an energy emergency. Rather, oil and gas production broke production records under President Joe Biden and, many pointed out, most renewable sources of energy were excluded from the list that Trump’s executive order is designed to prioritize.
“The reason [fossil fuel companies are] not producing more is not regulatory red tape,” said Emma Bast, staff attorney at the environmental nonprofit PennFuture.
Bast foresees that an expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure at the expense of wetlands will have compounding effects on Pennsylvania residents. Functioning as natural sponges, wetlands improve water quality, reduce erosion and help prevent flooding, instances of which are expected to surge in Pennsylvania with the onset of the climate crisis.
“Most people in the state now have seen an area flood that they’ve never seen flood before,” Bast said. “If we lose our buffers for some of that flooding, that will continue to impact the people who live up and downstream of that.”
