Rep. Otten voices opposition to Senate Bill 831
Rep. Danielle Friel Otten July 16, 2024 | 6:24 PM
Last Thursday, minutes after we voted on the state budget, I spoke on the House floor in opposition to Senate Bill 831. The stated purpose of this bill is to establish a legal and regulatory framework for potential carbon dioxide capture, utilization, and sequestration (“carbon capture,” or CCUS).
Carbon capture is an expensive, unproven technology that has shown no real evidence of reducing the negative environmental or public health impacts of the fossil fuel industry and conversely has the potential to do more harm.
This legislation declares CCUS to be “in the public interests,” which allows for the corporate use of eminent domain to infringe upon the rights of private property owners. Under this bill, a private corporation could utilize your land for carbon sequestration, without your consent, if they can get 75% of your neighbors to agree. They could then carry out an experimental industrial practice with a history of causing earthquakes and asphyxiation on your land, injecting carbon dioxide -- the polluting byproduct of their fracked gas production -- into the ground below your property.
This bill also would weaken property owners’ ability to take action against corporations for damages they cause to private property by limiting corporate accountability and liability for any negative consequences. In doing so, the bill would socialize all the risks and costs of these operations, which would fall to the property owner or to the taxpayers of Pennsylvania collectively, as the language transfers liability to the state after 50 years “or an otherwise agreed to period of time.”
We have been down this road before, and I will not stand by and watch it happen again without resistance. Right here in our community, the residents of Lisa Drive in West Whiteland Township, just outside my legislative district, lost their homes when Mariner pipeline construction caused sinkholes that destabilized their houses and made their neighborhood uninhabitable. Multiple other households in West Whiteland Township, adjacent to where I live in Marchwood, lost their private wells when horizontal directional drilling operations impacted their aquifer on Fourth of July weekend in 2017. Several neighbors in Upper Uwchlan Township lost septic systems, with one house condemned and deemed uninhabitable due to irreparable impacts to their septic system and property.
Here in my district, three years after the completion of Mariner East pipeline construction, we still have residents who have not recovered from its impacts. One of my neighbors is still fighting to recover the cost of their pool that collapsed due to HDD drilling. Two of my constituents who live along the Mariner easement across from Marsh Creek State Park, where Sunoco dumped 20,000 gallons of drilling fluid into the lake in August 2020, are still fighting for reimbursement after construction destroyed their well, leaving them no choice but to spend nearly $30,000 on a new well, filtration system, and associated repairs to their property.
Despite my best efforts to share our community’s story and ”No” votes from me and several of my House colleagues in Chester County, along with state Sens. Katie Muth and Carolyn Comitta in their chamber, this legislation passed with a disappointing bipartisan coalition of Democrats and Republicans.
The bill was sent to Gov. Shapiro on July 11, but it has not yet been signed into law. If you are concerned about the impacts of this harmful legislation, I encourage you to contact Gov. Shapiro’s office and urge him to veto S.B. 831.
The fight for private property rights, corporate accountability, and stronger regulatory oversight of environmentally harmful industry is what first brought me to Harrisburg, and as long as I’m in office, I will continue to prioritize the interests, safety, and wellbeing of my constituents over the profits of polluters and special interests in every vote I take.