A key factor in the CNX Sustainable Business Model is community engagement. Successful engagement starts with understanding how we can better collaborate with our stakeholders through transparency, dialogue, and active listening. Through this process, we work together to solve community issues, promote economic opportunities, and build relationships to help our region thrive. We have heard our communities and concerned residents asking for data related to human health, and we have seen them left confused and empty handed from the results of flawed studies and inflammatory media headlines. We stand ready to respond.
We begin with a firm belief that the natural gas industry is essential, responsible, and inherently good for society at large.
The natural gas industry has a history of placing the safety of the community and workers as top priorities. For generations in Appalachia, the community is and has been the energy industry, and vice versa. Workers and leaders in the natural gas industry live in local communities, often near industry sites and facilities.Their children drink the same water as other children, and we all breathe the same air.
CNX will provide facts and data to all stakeholders and create mutual trust, which will serve as the basis for cooperation and real environmental and economic progress. Transparency is good for resident health, the industry worker, economic development, energy security, the environment, and community investments. We aim to lead the industry into a new era of responsible domestic energy development, and this effort begins that process. We call this our Radical Transparency program.
The website, and the comprehensive Radical Transparency program that underpins it, is our effort to ensure our families, neighbors, and the public at large have a full understanding of the natural gas industry and its critical role in the environment and economy.
We believe that the Radical Transparency program will definitively confirm for all stakeholders that there are no human health problems related to natural gas development. We also believe that CNX will learn things through this data that will enable us to enhance our operating practices to make things even better.
The specific components of the Radical Transparency program are the most comprehensive of any other program in the country and can be categorized in the arenas of air quality monitoring, additive disclosure, water quality monitoring, and radiation protection.
Through CNX and the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection’s (DEP) groundbreaking collaboration, DEP will be provided unabridged data collected by and reviewed for quality assurance by a third party. DEP will be able to conduct the most intensive independent study of unconventional natural gas wells in the nation. CNX will also provide DEP with unprecedented access to two future CNX well sites, allowing for in-depth independent monitoring of the air emissions at both locations before, during and after development of the new wells. This will make it possible for communities to understand the facts about natural gas development with more transparency than ever before.