Palimpsest: Natural Gas and the Layers of Pennsylvania’s Energy Landscape

The state of Pennsylvania has been ground zero for American fossil fuel extraction for the last 150 years. Pennsylvania coal powered nineteenth-century industrial development, the first oil well was drilled in the state, and the Marcellus shale natural gas boom affected energy markets on a global scale. These successive phases of energy extraction are written on the landscape of Pennsylvania, and the Pittsburgh region is an especially rich part of that text. The coal, petroleum, and natural gas industries overlapped in time and space, as each continued to affect subsequent energy-related activity. The current importance of the natural gas industry makes it a most appropriate focus for the study of Pennsylvania’s energy landscape.¹

The abundant energy sources concentrated under the hills of middle Appalachia had a fundamental impact on the settlement and development of southwestern Pennsylvania. The wealth of energy was a primary factor in the industrial development that drew hundreds of thousands of people to the region. The legacies of resource extraction, especially coal mines and natural gas wells, are therefore interlayered with rural and urban settlement, forming a palimpsest. Geographers have repurposed that term, “palimpsest,” which originally meant a piece of reused writing material, on which the current text overlays older, partially obliterated script. According to geographer Jasper Knight, “Palimpsest landscapes are multidimensional expressions of physical and human processes, which is one reason why they are so interesting to study.” The effect of multiple layers of extraction, especially in close proximity to other rural and urban land uses, continues to complicate the production of energy, as well as the business of living generally. The problems of the aging infrastructure and abandoned workings of the natural gas industry, often in conjunction with the legacy of coal, made life more dangerous for western Pennsylvanians. Nevertheless, people in the region became accustomed to living around, above, and near fossil fuels.²

A recent dramatic and catastrophic event illustrates the realities of this palimpsest, and especially the dangers associated with the proximity of the natural gas industry to rural residents in western Pennsylvania. On April 29, 2016, a fireball exploded along Route 22 in Westmoreland County, just east of Pittsburgh. One man was badly burned while trying to escape the fire, and the explosion destroyed one house and damaged several others. The road next to the intense fire buckled and melted, but luckily no passing vehicles were caught in the blast. A leak in an underground natural gas pipeline, probably from one or more corroded welds in the pipe, caused the explosion. This major failure occurred despite regularly scheduled inspections; however, the last one was in 2012. The rural area in the vicinity of the explosion contains a lot of natural gas infrastructure, including a compressor station to process gas, a thirty-nine–square-mile subterranean storage field with about one hundred injection and monitoring wells, and at least four other pipelines. Some older residents of the neighborhood had long worried about the potential dangers of living so near a major gas supply, and luckily precautionary measures to prevent the spread of the fire were successful. The pipeline involved in the explosion is a large interstate line, owned by the Texas Eastern Corporation, built in 1981. It carried a significant amount of gas—enough that the explosion and interruption in service had a noticeable impact on national gas trading and prices. Yet, Westmoreland is not unique among Pennsylvania counties in the amount of natural gas infrastructure built in and under it, especially since the 1950s. Texas Eastern alone owns about nine thousand miles of pipeline, two thousand of it in Pennsylvania.³

Damage from natural gas explosion along Route 22 in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, April 29, 2016.

Copyright ©, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 2016, all rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

Natural gas in Pennsylvania has been a high-profile topic during the last ten years, due to the recent Marcellus shale gas boom and the controversy surrounding fracking, the drilling technology that made the boom possible. Fracking in the Marcellus formation may be new, but...