The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection confirmed Tuesday, Jan. 16, that it had collected a large fine due to violations at well sites, a majority of which are located in Greene County.

The Energy Corporation of America was fined $1.7 million for violations in Greene and Clearfield County.

The violations included failure to properly contain fluids in on-site pits, unauthorized discharges of industrial waste into the groundwater, unauthorized disposal of residual waste, failure to restore the pits and well-sites, operating solid waste storage treatment and transfer facilities without permits.

According to Lauren Fraley, community relations coordinator and spokesperson for the DEP, this matter had been investigated for quite some time.

“Our investigation was a two-year investigation from the point where we uncovered the incidents of leaking pits,” Fraley said. “These are all significant records that were requested and subpoenaed from the operator, as well as our compliance efforts.”

The fine is classified as a consent order and agreement penalty that was a civil matter, not a criminal matter.

According to Fraley, the effect that the violations had on both counties were not unalike.

“All of these drill sites were unconventional drilling, as opposed to conventional gas drilling,” Fraley said. “What people know as fracking was taking place at all of these sites. The affect for both Greene and Clearfield County is similar.”

While Fraley said that the counties were effected in the short-term, she does not expect there to be much of a long-term impact from the violations.

“Overall, there’s obviously the spills at the site, which the operator is required to remediate,” Fraley said. “So there are the 17 well-sites through both Greene and Clearfield county, and the company is required to restore those sites to state standards. So there are some interim affects that there were contaminations, but they ultimately will have to be restored. So the lasting impact should be minimal, if any.”

Although the DEP collected the civil penalty in November of 2017, it wasn’t notified that it had received payment until December 2017.

Per the consent order of agreement between the DEP and the ECA, rather than wait to pay and risk a larger fine, the ECA elected to pay its penalty in a timely manner.

“If [the ECA] were to pay it in installments and stretch that payment over a longer period of time, the final penalty would have been much higher,” Fraley said. “They elected to pay it early and pay a [lower] amount.”

Even though the fine could have been larger for the ECA, according to Fraley, $1.7 million is still a big penalty to drillers.

“For a driller, that is a significant amount,” Fraley said. “It is on the larger side, we don’t really rank them in that manner, but it is a significant penalty.”

Fraley said that both the DEP and ECA were present in working out the sum of the penalty.

“When our compliance sees a problem on a site, we will issue violations, request additional information,” she said. “In this case, it was a subpoena for additional information, and then pursue enforcement actions as they are warranted and they were in this case. Both DEP and ECA were at the table to negotiate this settlement.”