Most of the groundwater monitoring plans submitted to the state under a new law regulating hydraulic fracturing that kicked in at the start of the year don’t sit well with the state Water Resources Control Board, the board’s executive director said Feb. 26. The monitoring plans submitted under the law, SB 4, are inadequate, Thomas Howard, Water Board executive director, told a joint hearing of the state Senate Natural Resources, and Water & Environmental committees. SB 4 by Sen. Fran Pavley (D-Agoura Hills) requires oil and gas companies to apply for a permit from the Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources to conduct fracking. They are to monitor groundwater and air quality, publicly disclose the fracking chemicals used, and notify area residents and businesses before drilling, among other things. An interim set of regulations, released last fall, went into effect Jan. 1. During this week’s joint hearing, Howard said that the five monitoring plans submitted since the start of the year fall short of expectations. They are “basically a survey of groundwater data in the area of the wells and they’re not really proposing to sink any monitoring wells into the appropriate zones to determine whether or not there are any impacts,” he said. The Water Resources Control Board anticipates requiring monitoring well installations. “At present, in the interim regulations, there’s no requirement for these groundwater management plans to actually be approved by us,” he said. “However, once we develop criteria, these types of management plans wouldn’t be approved by us, I assure you.” The management plans appear to be one of the snags in the implementation, according to others who addressed the committee. Among them was California Department of Conservation chief deputy director Jason Marshall, who said the full regulations are expected to go into effect Jan. 1, 2015. Conservation, which oversees the state’s Division of Oil & Gas, and is principally charged with carrying out SB 4, received over 150,000 comments regarding the law. Marshall said his agency is reviewing the comments and figuring out what changes to make in the permanent regulations.
