November 10, 2015 marked the debut of the first draft of Pennsylvania Governor Wolf’s Pipeline Infrastructure Task Force (“PITF”) Report. A 30-day public comment period on the report opened on Saturday, November 14, and will close on Wednesday, December 16. The report will be discussed at the next PITF meeting scheduled for November 18 at 1:00 p.m. at the DEP South-central Regional Office in Harrisburg.

The Governor’s task force will discuss the 184 recommendations proposed by 12 different volunteer workgroups tasked with addressing pipeline development in relation to their individual areas of concern ranging from agriculture, emergency preparedness and environmental protection to workforce/economic development.

In general, the recommendations involved concern:

• the level of communication between stakeholders;
• the comprehensiveness of pipeline informational resources (e.g., GIS, creation of a “pipeline information library,” etc.) and public access to the same;
• mitigation strategies for loss of public use of public lands and potential impacts to water sources planning, specifically with regard to implementing landscape level planning, and;
• establishing additional task forces or committees to address larger pipeline development issues (e.g., siting/routing of intrastate transmission lines, multi-region pipeline applications, conflicting construction requirements, practices and standards for production lines beyond the well pad and gathering lines in Class 1 locations, etc.).

The Pennsylvania PITF’s draft report is available here.