Audio

Pipeline Building Boom Raises Safety Concerns

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On the morning of April 29, a natural gas transmission line exploded in a field in Salem Township in western Pennsylvania. The blast was so powerful it ripped a 12-foot crater into the landscape, burned a section of the field with a quarter-mile radius and threw a 25-foot section of the 30-inch steel pipeline 100 feet away. At the time of the explosion, a 26-year-old man was in his house, a few hundred feet away. He was badly burned, and his home destroyed. When local fire chief Bob Rosatti arrived at the scene, the flames were so hot, he had to stay in his truck. “They were massive—I would say 300 feet at the least,” Rosatti says. “That was the biggest fireball I’d ever seen in my life.

Audio

On The Hunt For Methane Leaks

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Burning natural gas for electricity is much cleaner than coal. But there’s a problem – leaking methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Nearly 2 years ago Colorado implemented rules to try to limit methane leaks from natural gas infrastructure. Now the EPA is proposing to model federal rules on Colorado’s. Still finding and plugging leaks remains a challenge nationwide. In Pennsylvania, where thousands of gas wells and pipelines are working the Marcellus Shale, researchers are trying to figure out how much is leaking. For our Inside Energy project, The Allegheny Front’s Reid Frazier tagged along.

Coal

Coal-Fired Power Plants Clean Up Their Act

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The bulk of this region’s electricity is still supplied by coal-fired power plants. Even before the new Clean Power Plan is implemented, those plants must comply with earlier EPA regulations that require dangerous air pollutants to be scrubbed from emissions. Its an expensive and challenging retrofit.

Audio

Legacy of Coal: Prairies From Kentucky Mountains

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Coal is in a long decline in Central Appalachia. Even though coal mining jobs are disappearing there-the imprint of coal on the landscape is everywhere. More than a million acres of strip-mined land — an area the size of Rhode Island — are now deforested. As part of a reporting project from The Allegheny Front on the future of coal, Reid Frazier went to Eastern Kentucky to see what will happen to the land once coal is gone.