welcome to oil
explore how the oil industry's greed and desire for profit is destroying the world
apr 20, 2018
If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being
regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those
woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and
enterprising citizen.
Henry David Thoreau
*articles*
*Exclusive: US official appeared to delay protections for endangered species at behest of oil group(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Massive oil spill ‘welcome boost’ to economy, says BP
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Shell foresaw climate dangers in 1988 and understood Big Oil’s big role
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Exclusive: EPA gives giant refiner a ‘hardship’ waiver from regulation
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*EPA’s Pruitt Clears The Way For Power Plants To Further Pollute Our Water
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*'Extreme' fossil fuel investments have surged under Donald Trump, report reveals
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Texas sinkholes: oil and gas drilling increases threat, scientists warn
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Hurricane Harvey’s toxic impact deeper than public told
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*OIL GIANT BEGINS TRANSITION TO RENEWABLES, SCRUBS ‘OIL’ FROM ITS NAME
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*“There is no evidence that fracking can operate without threatening public health”
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*INDUSTRY GROUP DRAWS SCRUTINY OVER BARRAGE OF FRAUDULENT EMAILS IN SOUTH CAROLINA
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*The dark side of America's rise to oil superpower(ARTICLE BELOW)
*ROVER PIPELINE SPILLS ANOTHER 150,000 GALLONS OF DRILLING FLUID INTO OHIO WETLANDS
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Exposed: Chevron Has a Secretive Drilling Site in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
(Excerpt BELOW)
*PENNSYLVANIA STOPS ENERGY TRANSFER PARTNERS PIPELINE PROJECT AFTER LIST OF VIOLATIONS GROWS TOO LONG(ARTICLE BELOW)
*ON ITS HUNDREDTH BIRTHDAY IN 1959, EDWARD TELLER WARNED THE OIL INDUSTRY ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING(article below)
*VEHICLES ARE NOW AMERICA'S BIGGEST CO2 SOURCE BUT EPA IS TEARING UP REGULATIONS(ARTICLE BELOW)
Exclusive: US official appeared to delay protections for endangered species at behest of oil group
The energy friendly agenda inside Trump’s interior department is revealed in records obtained by the Guardian and the watchdog groups Documented and the Western Values Project
Jimmy Tobias
the guardian
Fri 20 Apr 2018 06.00 EDT
The Texas hornshell is a sleek green-grey mussel that once thrived in the Rio Grande watershed, its habitat stretching from southern New Mexico down into the arid Texas borderlands. Some of its habitat happens to overlap with rich deposits of oil and gas.
Amid a long-term decline in its range, the Obama administration in 2016 proposed to declare the mussel an endangered species. Upon taking office, however, the Trump administration changed tack.
A top interior department official, Vincent DeVito, appears to take credit for helping to delay federal protections for the species at the behest of fossil-fuel industry groups, one of several examples of his willingness to prioritize the needs of extractive industries with business before the government, according to public records obtained by the Guardian and Pacific Standard as well as Documented and the Western Values Project, both watchdog groups.
DeVito, a Boston energy lawyer and the former co-chair of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in Massachusetts, is a little-known figure in the US government. He is one of a host of political appointees hired by Ryan Zinke, the interior secretary whose department oversees well over 400m acres of public land and can determine the fate of species that inhabit them.
Yet DeVito is now emerging as a critical player. At a speech last summer to Americans for Prosperity, a political advocacy group backed by the Koch brothers, DeVito described his role at the department as “the office of energy dominance”. Officially, there is no such office, though “energy dominance” has become a slogan for the interior department’s fossil-fuel-first policy agenda.
“The war on American energy is over,” DeVito told the activists, according to a recording of the speech obtained by the Guardian. “And, matter-of-fact, if there is a war, we’re going to win it and we’re going full bore,” he said, before adding that the administration’s approach would be a “responsible” one.
Matters for the Texas hornshell case came to a head in June 2017, when the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA), an industry trade group, met with interior department officials, including both Zinke and DeVito. Two weeks later an IPAA staffer emailed DeVito to ask that the species listing be delayed for six months, citing industry opposition.
“We really hope that you can intervene before this species gets listed next month,” Samantha McDonald, the IPAA’s government relations director, wrote to DeVito. In his reply, DeVito asked that McDonald keep him apprised of “what you may be hearing as this unfolds”.
Less than a month later, in August, the US Fish and Wildlife Service granted the delay that IPAA sought. McDonald again wrote DeVito, as well as the acting director of the fish and wildlife service, in an email with the subject line “THANK YOU!”
“On behalf of my members, I wanted to thank you for the 6-month delay on the Texas Hornshell,” she wrote, adding that it was “a good call”.
DeVito responded to McDonald that same day. “No problem,” he wrote.
Although the mussel was eventually granted protections in February 2018, former officials at the Department of the Interior (DoI) officials with knowledge of the department’s rules and procedures say DeVito’s apparent involvement in the listing process raises both ethical and legal questions.
“Listing decisions under the Endangered Species Act are meant to be entirely science- based decisions that result from – in some cases – years of review by experts in the field, not political appointees,” says Elizabeth Klein, a former associate deputy secretary at the DoI during the Obama years and now the deputy director of New York University’s state energy and environmental impact center.
“A delay in and of itself might not be the end of the world – but then again it very well could be for an imperiled species.”
Charles Randklev, a research scientist at Texas A&M’s Natural Resources Institute who has closely studied the hornshell, said the species is “standing on the brink”.
“We were all taken by surprise,” he said of the listing delay.
In a statement, the interior department press secretary, Heather Swift, said that DeVito “disagrees with [The Guardian’s] analysis of the emails”.
DeVito “maintains that he simply responded with an acknowledgement of receipt on the mussel email and maintains he had no role whatsoever in the listing”, Swift said.
Referencing comments by Zinke, she noted: “Political appointees are not at the department to manipulate data, they are here to make informed decisions and policy.”
DeVito’s penchant for “energy dominance” has played out in other ways as well. As chairman of the interior department’s royalty policy committee, he helps determine the royalty rates that energy companies must pay to drill and mine on federal lands and waters, effectively encouraging or disincentivizing them.
At his Americans for Prosperity speech, Devito described how he consulted closely with fossil fuel groups before recommending to Zinke in February that the interior department reduce royalty rates on offshore oil and gas drillers by a third, from 18.75% to 12.5%.
Ultimately, Zinke rejected that proposed reduction, but DeVito’s committee and its affiliated working groups labored to deliver on other industry desires as well, including drafting proposals to roll back regulations.
DeVito’s energy agenda also took him to West Virginia last year, where he helped coal interests obtain federal approval for a new mine near the habitat of Appalachia’s imperiled Big Sandy crayfish.
“Mining is the single biggest factor that has eliminated this species from a lot of its range,” said Roger Thoma, a senior research associate at the Midwest Biodiversity Institute who has surveyed the crayfish extensively.
In 2016, the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) listed the Big Sandy crayfish as threatened, meaning new coal mines are required to consult with FWS before initiating projects that might prove harmful. One such project was the Berwind mine, an underground coal operation in the southern West Virginia owned by the company Ramaco Resources, several of whose board members are major Trump campaign contributors.
As the Fish and Wildlife Service deliberated through 2016 and early 2017 over how best Berwind and other mines might mitigate potential harm to the crayfish, the industry chafed at the wait. “That is a long time to have multi-million dollar mine project investments that would employ hundreds pending” due to uncertainty around crayfish protection standards, said West Virginia Coal Association vice-president Jason Bostic.
On June 14 and 15 last year, DeVito traveled to West Virginia and came to the industry’s aid. According to records, his trip was planned in part by the West Virginia Coal Association itself, which submitted a trip schedule to one of DeVito’s colleagues. The schedule included meetings with the coal association as well as both state and FWS regulators overseeing crayfish conservation in the region.
Four days after DeVito’s trip, the Fish and Wildlife service approved the Berwind mine’s protection plan for the crayfish. In his speech to Americans for Prosperity, DeVito highlighted his role in enabling the mine’s approval.
He loved fixing “small problems the best”, he told the crowd, “because if I go out to West Virginia and I rescue a coal project from bureaucratic entanglement, and then you see two days later the company in the field with guys going back to work, that is pretty rewarding.”
Conservationists, however, say the DoI’s decision to approve the Berwind mine’s crayfish protection plan was deeply flawed.
Such plans “are supposed to be these very thorough documents … about how mining operators will protect the species,” said Tierra Curry, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity, which sued in 2012 to have the Big Sandy crayfish listed under the Endangered Species Act. “This one is short, and doesn’t go into detail. It is woefully inadequate.”
Later DeVito went even further, and added his signature in red pen to a plan thatguides regulatory scrutiny of future mines operating in or near crayfish habitat. Former interior department officials familiar with FWS rules and regulations say that a lawyer and political appointee like DeVito has neither the scientific expertise nor the authority to approve such a science-based guidance.
“It a scientific integrity violation for a political appointee to essentially leapfrog the Fish and Wildlife Service’s process when you have an Endangered Species Act listing involved,” says Joel Clement, a long-time interior department scientist and now whistleblower who left the department after being pushed out of his post.
“It is absolutely inappropriate. As a senior advisor [DeVito] has no authority of position – so essentially that guidance was not worth the paper it was written on.” Nevertheless, the guidance DeVito signed appeared to remain in effect for nine months, until state and federal regulators updated and approved a more stringent version in late March.
In the end, DeVito’s trip to West Virginia helped feed a broader narrative that Donald Trump has promoted.
Less than two months after the trip, Trump arrived in West Virginia too, where he held a boisterous political rally.
“As president,” Trump said to his adoring crowd, “we are putting our coal miners back to work.”
Amid a long-term decline in its range, the Obama administration in 2016 proposed to declare the mussel an endangered species. Upon taking office, however, the Trump administration changed tack.
A top interior department official, Vincent DeVito, appears to take credit for helping to delay federal protections for the species at the behest of fossil-fuel industry groups, one of several examples of his willingness to prioritize the needs of extractive industries with business before the government, according to public records obtained by the Guardian and Pacific Standard as well as Documented and the Western Values Project, both watchdog groups.
DeVito, a Boston energy lawyer and the former co-chair of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in Massachusetts, is a little-known figure in the US government. He is one of a host of political appointees hired by Ryan Zinke, the interior secretary whose department oversees well over 400m acres of public land and can determine the fate of species that inhabit them.
Yet DeVito is now emerging as a critical player. At a speech last summer to Americans for Prosperity, a political advocacy group backed by the Koch brothers, DeVito described his role at the department as “the office of energy dominance”. Officially, there is no such office, though “energy dominance” has become a slogan for the interior department’s fossil-fuel-first policy agenda.
“The war on American energy is over,” DeVito told the activists, according to a recording of the speech obtained by the Guardian. “And, matter-of-fact, if there is a war, we’re going to win it and we’re going full bore,” he said, before adding that the administration’s approach would be a “responsible” one.
Matters for the Texas hornshell case came to a head in June 2017, when the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA), an industry trade group, met with interior department officials, including both Zinke and DeVito. Two weeks later an IPAA staffer emailed DeVito to ask that the species listing be delayed for six months, citing industry opposition.
“We really hope that you can intervene before this species gets listed next month,” Samantha McDonald, the IPAA’s government relations director, wrote to DeVito. In his reply, DeVito asked that McDonald keep him apprised of “what you may be hearing as this unfolds”.
Less than a month later, in August, the US Fish and Wildlife Service granted the delay that IPAA sought. McDonald again wrote DeVito, as well as the acting director of the fish and wildlife service, in an email with the subject line “THANK YOU!”
“On behalf of my members, I wanted to thank you for the 6-month delay on the Texas Hornshell,” she wrote, adding that it was “a good call”.
DeVito responded to McDonald that same day. “No problem,” he wrote.
Although the mussel was eventually granted protections in February 2018, former officials at the Department of the Interior (DoI) officials with knowledge of the department’s rules and procedures say DeVito’s apparent involvement in the listing process raises both ethical and legal questions.
“Listing decisions under the Endangered Species Act are meant to be entirely science- based decisions that result from – in some cases – years of review by experts in the field, not political appointees,” says Elizabeth Klein, a former associate deputy secretary at the DoI during the Obama years and now the deputy director of New York University’s state energy and environmental impact center.
“A delay in and of itself might not be the end of the world – but then again it very well could be for an imperiled species.”
Charles Randklev, a research scientist at Texas A&M’s Natural Resources Institute who has closely studied the hornshell, said the species is “standing on the brink”.
“We were all taken by surprise,” he said of the listing delay.
In a statement, the interior department press secretary, Heather Swift, said that DeVito “disagrees with [The Guardian’s] analysis of the emails”.
DeVito “maintains that he simply responded with an acknowledgement of receipt on the mussel email and maintains he had no role whatsoever in the listing”, Swift said.
Referencing comments by Zinke, she noted: “Political appointees are not at the department to manipulate data, they are here to make informed decisions and policy.”
DeVito’s penchant for “energy dominance” has played out in other ways as well. As chairman of the interior department’s royalty policy committee, he helps determine the royalty rates that energy companies must pay to drill and mine on federal lands and waters, effectively encouraging or disincentivizing them.
At his Americans for Prosperity speech, Devito described how he consulted closely with fossil fuel groups before recommending to Zinke in February that the interior department reduce royalty rates on offshore oil and gas drillers by a third, from 18.75% to 12.5%.
Ultimately, Zinke rejected that proposed reduction, but DeVito’s committee and its affiliated working groups labored to deliver on other industry desires as well, including drafting proposals to roll back regulations.
DeVito’s energy agenda also took him to West Virginia last year, where he helped coal interests obtain federal approval for a new mine near the habitat of Appalachia’s imperiled Big Sandy crayfish.
“Mining is the single biggest factor that has eliminated this species from a lot of its range,” said Roger Thoma, a senior research associate at the Midwest Biodiversity Institute who has surveyed the crayfish extensively.
In 2016, the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) listed the Big Sandy crayfish as threatened, meaning new coal mines are required to consult with FWS before initiating projects that might prove harmful. One such project was the Berwind mine, an underground coal operation in the southern West Virginia owned by the company Ramaco Resources, several of whose board members are major Trump campaign contributors.
As the Fish and Wildlife Service deliberated through 2016 and early 2017 over how best Berwind and other mines might mitigate potential harm to the crayfish, the industry chafed at the wait. “That is a long time to have multi-million dollar mine project investments that would employ hundreds pending” due to uncertainty around crayfish protection standards, said West Virginia Coal Association vice-president Jason Bostic.
On June 14 and 15 last year, DeVito traveled to West Virginia and came to the industry’s aid. According to records, his trip was planned in part by the West Virginia Coal Association itself, which submitted a trip schedule to one of DeVito’s colleagues. The schedule included meetings with the coal association as well as both state and FWS regulators overseeing crayfish conservation in the region.
Four days after DeVito’s trip, the Fish and Wildlife service approved the Berwind mine’s protection plan for the crayfish. In his speech to Americans for Prosperity, DeVito highlighted his role in enabling the mine’s approval.
He loved fixing “small problems the best”, he told the crowd, “because if I go out to West Virginia and I rescue a coal project from bureaucratic entanglement, and then you see two days later the company in the field with guys going back to work, that is pretty rewarding.”
Conservationists, however, say the DoI’s decision to approve the Berwind mine’s crayfish protection plan was deeply flawed.
Such plans “are supposed to be these very thorough documents … about how mining operators will protect the species,” said Tierra Curry, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity, which sued in 2012 to have the Big Sandy crayfish listed under the Endangered Species Act. “This one is short, and doesn’t go into detail. It is woefully inadequate.”
Later DeVito went even further, and added his signature in red pen to a plan thatguides regulatory scrutiny of future mines operating in or near crayfish habitat. Former interior department officials familiar with FWS rules and regulations say that a lawyer and political appointee like DeVito has neither the scientific expertise nor the authority to approve such a science-based guidance.
“It a scientific integrity violation for a political appointee to essentially leapfrog the Fish and Wildlife Service’s process when you have an Endangered Species Act listing involved,” says Joel Clement, a long-time interior department scientist and now whistleblower who left the department after being pushed out of his post.
“It is absolutely inappropriate. As a senior advisor [DeVito] has no authority of position – so essentially that guidance was not worth the paper it was written on.” Nevertheless, the guidance DeVito signed appeared to remain in effect for nine months, until state and federal regulators updated and approved a more stringent version in late March.
In the end, DeVito’s trip to West Virginia helped feed a broader narrative that Donald Trump has promoted.
Less than two months after the trip, Trump arrived in West Virginia too, where he held a boisterous political rally.
“As president,” Trump said to his adoring crowd, “we are putting our coal miners back to work.”
Massive oil spill ‘welcome boost’ to economy, says BP
Newsweek - raw story
06 APR 2018 AT 08:33 ET
Coastal towns would enjoy an economic boon from a massive oil spill in the Great Australian Bight, BP claimed in newly revealed documents from a 2016 drilling bid.
The oil giant said any cleanup operation following a huge spill would bring a “welcome boost to local economies.” The claim was uncovered via a freedom of information request by the U.K.-based Climate Home News website.
Though it has since withdrawn the controversial plan to drill for oil in the Bight, BP also told the Australian regulatory authority that a diesel spill would be considered “socially acceptable” because “there are no unresolved stakeholder concerns.”
Opponents of the plan feared a repeat of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Eleven people were killed and up to 68,000 square miles of coastline affected when a well failure sent 210,000,000 gallons of oil spewing into the gulf. The disaster devastated the area’s marine ecosystem, and scientists are still discovering high rates of toxicity, birth defects and population reduction in local marine life.
Australia’s National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority identified a range of flaws in BP’s plan and returned the proposal demanding evidence to supporting the company's claims. The authority suggested BP remove its argument that “in most instances, the increased activity associated with cleanup operations will be a welcome boost to local economies.”
The documents detailed BP’s worst-case spill scenario, which it estimated would impact around 400 miles of coastline at 125 days post-slick, increasing to around 465 miles after 300 days.
The authority said there could be detrimental impacts to recreation, tourism and the fishing industry if the plan was allowed to go ahead. The proposal needed “significant modification” to comply with environmental laws, the authority concluded, arguing that BP “may underestimate the level of impact to large local and regional populations.”
The coastal town of Ceduna would be one such coastal town to benefit from the supposed economic boost following a huge oil spill. Mayor Allan Suter told ABC Newsthat BP’s theory was “an incredibly stupid thing to say—it certainly wouldn't have been a welcomed boost the local economy, we could have done very nicely thank you very much without it.”
A BP spokesperson claimed that “this material doesn’t represent the final views of BP or the regulator.” The spokesperson also said BP had no intention of reviving its interest in the area .
BP jettisoned its drilling plans in October 2016 after deciding the “plan would not be competitive for capital investment in the foreseeable future.” BP transferred two of its four leases to Norwegian energy company Statoil, which is still planning a project in the Bight. The company’s Australian manager, Jacques-Etienne Michel, told Climate Home News that Statoil “will only undertake drilling activity if we can do it safely.”
But Nathaniel Pelle, a senior campaigner at Greenpeace, said: “There is no way to drill for oil safely in the Bight.” She added that a spill could release over 10 million gallons of toxic material along a 465-mile stretch of coastline
The oil giant said any cleanup operation following a huge spill would bring a “welcome boost to local economies.” The claim was uncovered via a freedom of information request by the U.K.-based Climate Home News website.
Though it has since withdrawn the controversial plan to drill for oil in the Bight, BP also told the Australian regulatory authority that a diesel spill would be considered “socially acceptable” because “there are no unresolved stakeholder concerns.”
Opponents of the plan feared a repeat of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Eleven people were killed and up to 68,000 square miles of coastline affected when a well failure sent 210,000,000 gallons of oil spewing into the gulf. The disaster devastated the area’s marine ecosystem, and scientists are still discovering high rates of toxicity, birth defects and population reduction in local marine life.
Australia’s National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority identified a range of flaws in BP’s plan and returned the proposal demanding evidence to supporting the company's claims. The authority suggested BP remove its argument that “in most instances, the increased activity associated with cleanup operations will be a welcome boost to local economies.”
The documents detailed BP’s worst-case spill scenario, which it estimated would impact around 400 miles of coastline at 125 days post-slick, increasing to around 465 miles after 300 days.
The authority said there could be detrimental impacts to recreation, tourism and the fishing industry if the plan was allowed to go ahead. The proposal needed “significant modification” to comply with environmental laws, the authority concluded, arguing that BP “may underestimate the level of impact to large local and regional populations.”
The coastal town of Ceduna would be one such coastal town to benefit from the supposed economic boost following a huge oil spill. Mayor Allan Suter told ABC Newsthat BP’s theory was “an incredibly stupid thing to say—it certainly wouldn't have been a welcomed boost the local economy, we could have done very nicely thank you very much without it.”
A BP spokesperson claimed that “this material doesn’t represent the final views of BP or the regulator.” The spokesperson also said BP had no intention of reviving its interest in the area .
BP jettisoned its drilling plans in October 2016 after deciding the “plan would not be competitive for capital investment in the foreseeable future.” BP transferred two of its four leases to Norwegian energy company Statoil, which is still planning a project in the Bight. The company’s Australian manager, Jacques-Etienne Michel, told Climate Home News that Statoil “will only undertake drilling activity if we can do it safely.”
But Nathaniel Pelle, a senior campaigner at Greenpeace, said: “There is no way to drill for oil safely in the Bight.” She added that a spill could release over 10 million gallons of toxic material along a 465-mile stretch of coastline
Shell foresaw climate dangers in 1988 and understood Big Oil’s big role
By Steven Mufson and Chris Mooney - waashington post
April 5 at 4:28 PM
A Dutch journalist has uncovered Royal Dutch Shell documents as old as 1988 that showed the oil company understood the gravity of climate change, the company’s large contribution to it and how hard it would be to stop it.
The 1988 report titled “The Greenhouse Effect” calculated that the Shell group alone was contributing 4 percent of global carbon-dioxide emissions through its oil, natural gas and coal products. “By the time global warming becomes detectable it could be too late to take effective countermeasures to reduce the effects or even to stabilize the situation,” the report warned.
The report, written by members of Shell’s Greenhouse Effect Working Group, said that scientists believed that the effects would become detectable late in the 20th or early 21st century.
It was based on a 1986 study, although the document reveals that Shell had commissioned “greenhouse effect” reports as early as 1981.
The documents were found by Jelmer Mommers, a reporter with De Correspondent. They were posted on the Climate Files website, which is sponsored by the Climate Investigations Center, an environmental activist group.
Shell’s working group knew three decades ago that climate change was real and formidable, warning that it would affect living standards and food supplies and have social, economic and political consequences.
The working group also warned that rising sea levels could impair offshore installations, coastal facilities, harbors, refineries and depots.
The documents contrast with Shell’s public stance on climate change during the 1990s, when the company was a member of the Global Climate Coalition. The industry group raised doubts about the science of climate change and opposed the Kyoto Protocol, the global agreement reached in 1997 to fight climate change.
Shell withdrew from the industry group in 1998, with then-President Mark Moody-Stuart saying: “We recently met them, and it was concluded our differences of opinion were irreconcilable. We will not renew our subscription,” according to a contemporary press report.
The 1988 report estimated that in 1981, 44 percent of carbon-dioxide emissions came from oil, 38 percent from coal and 17 percent from natural gas.
“With fossil fuel combustion being a major source of CO2 in the atmosphere, a forward looking approach by the energy industry is clearly desirable, seeking to play its part with governments and others in the development of appropriate measures to tackle the problem,” the report said.
At the same time, however, the report said that “the likely time scale of possible change does not necessitate immediate remedial action.”
On Thursday, Shell issued a statement in response to the publication of the report.
“The Shell Group’s position on climate change has been a matter of public record for decades. We strongly support the Paris Agreement [on climate change] and the need for society to transition to a lower carbon future, while also extending the economic and social benefits of energy to everyone,” the company said. “Successfully navigating this dual challenge requires sound government policy and cultural change to drive low-carbon choices for businesses and consumers. It requires cooperation between all segments of society.”
The 1988 report titled “The Greenhouse Effect” calculated that the Shell group alone was contributing 4 percent of global carbon-dioxide emissions through its oil, natural gas and coal products. “By the time global warming becomes detectable it could be too late to take effective countermeasures to reduce the effects or even to stabilize the situation,” the report warned.
The report, written by members of Shell’s Greenhouse Effect Working Group, said that scientists believed that the effects would become detectable late in the 20th or early 21st century.
It was based on a 1986 study, although the document reveals that Shell had commissioned “greenhouse effect” reports as early as 1981.
The documents were found by Jelmer Mommers, a reporter with De Correspondent. They were posted on the Climate Files website, which is sponsored by the Climate Investigations Center, an environmental activist group.
Shell’s working group knew three decades ago that climate change was real and formidable, warning that it would affect living standards and food supplies and have social, economic and political consequences.
The working group also warned that rising sea levels could impair offshore installations, coastal facilities, harbors, refineries and depots.
The documents contrast with Shell’s public stance on climate change during the 1990s, when the company was a member of the Global Climate Coalition. The industry group raised doubts about the science of climate change and opposed the Kyoto Protocol, the global agreement reached in 1997 to fight climate change.
Shell withdrew from the industry group in 1998, with then-President Mark Moody-Stuart saying: “We recently met them, and it was concluded our differences of opinion were irreconcilable. We will not renew our subscription,” according to a contemporary press report.
The 1988 report estimated that in 1981, 44 percent of carbon-dioxide emissions came from oil, 38 percent from coal and 17 percent from natural gas.
“With fossil fuel combustion being a major source of CO2 in the atmosphere, a forward looking approach by the energy industry is clearly desirable, seeking to play its part with governments and others in the development of appropriate measures to tackle the problem,” the report said.
At the same time, however, the report said that “the likely time scale of possible change does not necessitate immediate remedial action.”
On Thursday, Shell issued a statement in response to the publication of the report.
“The Shell Group’s position on climate change has been a matter of public record for decades. We strongly support the Paris Agreement [on climate change] and the need for society to transition to a lower carbon future, while also extending the economic and social benefits of energy to everyone,” the company said. “Successfully navigating this dual challenge requires sound government policy and cultural change to drive low-carbon choices for businesses and consumers. It requires cooperation between all segments of society.”
Exclusive: EPA gives giant refiner a ‘hardship’ waiver from regulation
TUE, APR 3RD, 2018
By Jarrett Renshaw and Chris Prentice
REUTERS - politicus usa
NEW YORK (Reuters) – The Environmental Protection Agency has exempted one of the nation’s largest oil refining companies, Andeavor , from complying with U.S. biofuels regulations – a waiver historically reserved for tiny operations in danger of going belly up, two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.
The exemption, which applies to the three smallest of Andeavor’s ten refineries, marks the first evidence of the EPA freeing a highly profitable multi-billion dollar company from the costly mandates of the U.S. Renewable Fuel Standard. The law requires refiners to blend biofuels such as ethanol into gasoline or purchase credits from those who do such blending.
The decision, which has not been previously reported, raises the question of whether other big and profitable oil firms with small refineries – such as Exxon Mobil Corp , Chevron Corp and Phillips 66 – also have or could receive the waivers, which are granted by the EPA in secret.
Such waivers were designed for refineries producing less than 75,000 barrels per day that can demonstrate that they suffer a “disproportionate economic hardship” from the costs of RFS compliance.
The EPA exemption, granted about a month ago, could reduce Andeavor’s regulatory costs by more than $50 million this year, based on the number of biofuels credits that two brokers say the refiner recently sold into the market, along with previous disclosures by firms that own refineries of a similar size.
Biofuels credit prices tied to ethanol dropped by 6 cents, to 38 cents each, after Reuters reported Andeavor’s exemption, traders said. Andeavor shares jumped by more than 1 percent on the news, hitting a session high of $102.78.
The exemption releases the firm of its obligation to provide the EPA with biofuels credits proving compliance at the three refineries – two located in North Dakota and one in Utah – for the year 2016, which would have come due this year, the sources said. Andeavor is also asking EPA for a waiver for its 2017 obligations for the same refineries, but has not yet received a decision, the sources said.
Andeavor spokeswoman Destin Singleton declined to comment. EPA spokeswoman Liz Bowman did not immediately comment in response to Reuters inquiries on Monday and Tuesday.
As a matter of policy, the agency refuses to release any information on the waivers, or to name their recipients, citing concerns over disclosing private business information. The EPA denied a Freedom of Information Act request from Reuters seeking information on companies receiving the waivers.
Exxon Mobil, Chevron and Phillips 66 also own refineries small enough to meet the barrel-per-day standard, as does billionaire investor and Trump ally Carl Icahn – whose efforts last year to overhaul the biofuels program drew scrutiny from federal investigators.
Icahn, majority owner of refiner CVR Energy , had served as an advisor to Trump on regulatory issues during his push to reform biofuels regulations early last year, but he resigned amid allegations that the role gave him a conflict of interest.
Spokespeople for all four companies declined to comment on whether they had applied for or received any exemptions.
The lucrative waivers are typically only reported if a publicly-traded firm considers them to be material to their financial or operational performance, in which case they must disclose the information through Securities and Exchange Commission filings.
The RFS has long been a lightning rod of conflict between the corn lobby, which supports the policy as an engine for demand, and refiners who say it costs them a fortune.
The White House has sought to broker a deal between two of its key political constituencies in a series of meetings, but the effort has failed to yield policy changes acceptable to both sides.
Ethanol industry advocates argue exemptions for refiners undermine the intent of the law, originally designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, reduce dependence on foreign oil and boost farm economies.
While the EPA’s motives in providing hardship waivers are unclear, the exemptions are one of the tools at the administration’s disposal to ease financial pressure on refiners without undertaking a reform of the RFS policy.
EPA chief Scott Pruitt, appointed by Trump, has repeatedly said the RFS is too costly to oil refiners and should be overhauled. But Trump’s Secretary of Agriculture, Sonny Perdue, told an agriculture conference in February that Trump “stands with corn farmers, biofuels farmers and the RFS,” according to a recording heard by Reuters.
White House spokeswoman Kelly Love did not respond to a question about whether the administration was expanding the use of the RFS waivers to help refiners. Bowman, of the EPA, also did not comment on the question.
LAWSUIT OVER ‘HARDSHIP’ STANDARD
Andeavor’s waiver follows a successful lawsuit by another refiner, Sinclair Oil, last year challenging the strict standard the EPA has used under past administrations for determining financial hardship.
“The EPA’s interpretation takes the statutory language too far,” wrote Chief Judge Timothy Tymkovich of the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver. “A ‘hardship’ is something that makes one’s life hard or difficult – not just something that makes continued existence impossible.”
The lawsuit – along with a perception that the Trump administration might be more sympathetic to refiners – has sparked a big increase in applications from refining firms for he exemptions this year. More than 30 refineries have sought the waivers, according to sources familiar with the matter.
In a typical year, the EPA would receive about 12 to 15 requests for hardship exemptions and would grant about half of them, a former official familiar with the program told Reuters.
EXEMPTIONS SAVE REFINERS BIG BUCKS
Andeavor sold some 100 million of those credits to its competitors in recent weeks, according to two brokers in the biofuels credit market. The company otherwise would have needed to provide those credits to the EPA to prove compliance with the RFS.
Those credits would be worth about $58 million based on a Reuters calculation of average renewable fuel RIN prices this year.
In the past, other companies have said the exemptions they were granted saved them tens of millions of dollars, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings.
Last year, for example, HollyFrontier disclosed a reduction of almost $58 million in its costs of credits for two refineries for 2016.
Such windfalls for oil firms come at the expense of the corn and ethanol industries, said Renewable Fuels Association Executive Vice President Geoff Cooper.
Refiners granted exemptions win in two ways: They no longer have to blend biofuels or buy credits to comply with the law, and they can sell any credits they had previously purchased to use for compliance.
The waivers, Cooper said in a post on the RFA web site, “are destroying demand for ethanol and corn.”
The exemption, which applies to the three smallest of Andeavor’s ten refineries, marks the first evidence of the EPA freeing a highly profitable multi-billion dollar company from the costly mandates of the U.S. Renewable Fuel Standard. The law requires refiners to blend biofuels such as ethanol into gasoline or purchase credits from those who do such blending.
The decision, which has not been previously reported, raises the question of whether other big and profitable oil firms with small refineries – such as Exxon Mobil Corp , Chevron Corp and Phillips 66 – also have or could receive the waivers, which are granted by the EPA in secret.
Such waivers were designed for refineries producing less than 75,000 barrels per day that can demonstrate that they suffer a “disproportionate economic hardship” from the costs of RFS compliance.
The EPA exemption, granted about a month ago, could reduce Andeavor’s regulatory costs by more than $50 million this year, based on the number of biofuels credits that two brokers say the refiner recently sold into the market, along with previous disclosures by firms that own refineries of a similar size.
Biofuels credit prices tied to ethanol dropped by 6 cents, to 38 cents each, after Reuters reported Andeavor’s exemption, traders said. Andeavor shares jumped by more than 1 percent on the news, hitting a session high of $102.78.
The exemption releases the firm of its obligation to provide the EPA with biofuels credits proving compliance at the three refineries – two located in North Dakota and one in Utah – for the year 2016, which would have come due this year, the sources said. Andeavor is also asking EPA for a waiver for its 2017 obligations for the same refineries, but has not yet received a decision, the sources said.
Andeavor spokeswoman Destin Singleton declined to comment. EPA spokeswoman Liz Bowman did not immediately comment in response to Reuters inquiries on Monday and Tuesday.
As a matter of policy, the agency refuses to release any information on the waivers, or to name their recipients, citing concerns over disclosing private business information. The EPA denied a Freedom of Information Act request from Reuters seeking information on companies receiving the waivers.
Exxon Mobil, Chevron and Phillips 66 also own refineries small enough to meet the barrel-per-day standard, as does billionaire investor and Trump ally Carl Icahn – whose efforts last year to overhaul the biofuels program drew scrutiny from federal investigators.
Icahn, majority owner of refiner CVR Energy , had served as an advisor to Trump on regulatory issues during his push to reform biofuels regulations early last year, but he resigned amid allegations that the role gave him a conflict of interest.
Spokespeople for all four companies declined to comment on whether they had applied for or received any exemptions.
The lucrative waivers are typically only reported if a publicly-traded firm considers them to be material to their financial or operational performance, in which case they must disclose the information through Securities and Exchange Commission filings.
The RFS has long been a lightning rod of conflict between the corn lobby, which supports the policy as an engine for demand, and refiners who say it costs them a fortune.
The White House has sought to broker a deal between two of its key political constituencies in a series of meetings, but the effort has failed to yield policy changes acceptable to both sides.
Ethanol industry advocates argue exemptions for refiners undermine the intent of the law, originally designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, reduce dependence on foreign oil and boost farm economies.
While the EPA’s motives in providing hardship waivers are unclear, the exemptions are one of the tools at the administration’s disposal to ease financial pressure on refiners without undertaking a reform of the RFS policy.
EPA chief Scott Pruitt, appointed by Trump, has repeatedly said the RFS is too costly to oil refiners and should be overhauled. But Trump’s Secretary of Agriculture, Sonny Perdue, told an agriculture conference in February that Trump “stands with corn farmers, biofuels farmers and the RFS,” according to a recording heard by Reuters.
White House spokeswoman Kelly Love did not respond to a question about whether the administration was expanding the use of the RFS waivers to help refiners. Bowman, of the EPA, also did not comment on the question.
LAWSUIT OVER ‘HARDSHIP’ STANDARD
Andeavor’s waiver follows a successful lawsuit by another refiner, Sinclair Oil, last year challenging the strict standard the EPA has used under past administrations for determining financial hardship.
“The EPA’s interpretation takes the statutory language too far,” wrote Chief Judge Timothy Tymkovich of the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver. “A ‘hardship’ is something that makes one’s life hard or difficult – not just something that makes continued existence impossible.”
The lawsuit – along with a perception that the Trump administration might be more sympathetic to refiners – has sparked a big increase in applications from refining firms for he exemptions this year. More than 30 refineries have sought the waivers, according to sources familiar with the matter.
In a typical year, the EPA would receive about 12 to 15 requests for hardship exemptions and would grant about half of them, a former official familiar with the program told Reuters.
EXEMPTIONS SAVE REFINERS BIG BUCKS
Andeavor sold some 100 million of those credits to its competitors in recent weeks, according to two brokers in the biofuels credit market. The company otherwise would have needed to provide those credits to the EPA to prove compliance with the RFS.
Those credits would be worth about $58 million based on a Reuters calculation of average renewable fuel RIN prices this year.
In the past, other companies have said the exemptions they were granted saved them tens of millions of dollars, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings.
Last year, for example, HollyFrontier disclosed a reduction of almost $58 million in its costs of credits for two refineries for 2016.
Such windfalls for oil firms come at the expense of the corn and ethanol industries, said Renewable Fuels Association Executive Vice President Geoff Cooper.
Refiners granted exemptions win in two ways: They no longer have to blend biofuels or buy credits to comply with the law, and they can sell any credits they had previously purchased to use for compliance.
The waivers, Cooper said in a post on the RFA web site, “are destroying demand for ethanol and corn.”
EPA’s Pruitt Clears The Way For Power Plants To Further Pollute Our Water
Plans to Drop Requirement that Companies Monitor Coal Ash Effects on Groundwater
By Sarah Okeson - dc report
3/30/18
Coal ash, the toxic remnants of burning coal, was not classified as hazardous waste by government regulators after a long pushback by politically powerful utilities, and EPA administrator Scott Pruitt wants to water down those regulations even further.
Pruitt’s proposal could allow groundwater monitoring requirements to be suspended. He announced the proposed changes March 1, a day before the deadline for power plant operators to release information about groundwater contamination that showed contamination near more than 70 coal-fired power plants and ash dumps from Alaska to Virginia.
“The EPA is choosing to side with polluters over the public,” said Lisa Evans of Earthjustice.
U.S. power plants produce more than 110 million tons of coal ash a year. The ash contains arsenic, lead and mercury and has typically been dumped into unlined pits or ponds, often near rivers. At least 414 coal plants that have disgorged hundreds of millions of tons of waste would be affected by the changes.
In Indiana, levels of arsenic more than 45 times the U.S. Safe Drinking Water Act standard were found at an Indianapolis Power & Light plant. In Illinois, orange and purple muck is leaching into the Vermilion River, the state’s only national scenic river, near coal-ash pits from Dynegy Inc. In North Carolina, high levels of radioactivity were found in groundwater at 11 Duke Energy plants.
Pruitt’s proposal said groundwater monitoring requirements could be suspended “if a no migration demonstration can be made.” Federal regulation requires companies to inspect coal-ash pits for leaks and to monitor the surrounding area for contamination.
Frank Holleman, an attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, said groundwater almost always migrates.
“The loophole will inject an opportunity for utilities to tie up the process and delay action while they try to make a supposed ‘no migration’ demonstration,” Holleman said.
The Utility Solid Waste Activities Group, which represents about 80 utilities, sued the EPA over its coal-ash rule, enacted in 2015 under former President Barack Obama. The group said the rule was causing “adverse impacts on coal-fired generation”because of “the excessive costs of compliance.”
Pruitt said his proposed rule could save utilities $25 million to $76 million a year. He is trying to rush through the proposed changes by giving people only 45 days to comment and a single public hearing in the Washington area.
Public interest groups are asking for four more public hearings on the proposed rule and a longer comment period.
Pruitt’s proposal could allow groundwater monitoring requirements to be suspended. He announced the proposed changes March 1, a day before the deadline for power plant operators to release information about groundwater contamination that showed contamination near more than 70 coal-fired power plants and ash dumps from Alaska to Virginia.
“The EPA is choosing to side with polluters over the public,” said Lisa Evans of Earthjustice.
U.S. power plants produce more than 110 million tons of coal ash a year. The ash contains arsenic, lead and mercury and has typically been dumped into unlined pits or ponds, often near rivers. At least 414 coal plants that have disgorged hundreds of millions of tons of waste would be affected by the changes.
In Indiana, levels of arsenic more than 45 times the U.S. Safe Drinking Water Act standard were found at an Indianapolis Power & Light plant. In Illinois, orange and purple muck is leaching into the Vermilion River, the state’s only national scenic river, near coal-ash pits from Dynegy Inc. In North Carolina, high levels of radioactivity were found in groundwater at 11 Duke Energy plants.
Pruitt’s proposal said groundwater monitoring requirements could be suspended “if a no migration demonstration can be made.” Federal regulation requires companies to inspect coal-ash pits for leaks and to monitor the surrounding area for contamination.
Frank Holleman, an attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, said groundwater almost always migrates.
“The loophole will inject an opportunity for utilities to tie up the process and delay action while they try to make a supposed ‘no migration’ demonstration,” Holleman said.
The Utility Solid Waste Activities Group, which represents about 80 utilities, sued the EPA over its coal-ash rule, enacted in 2015 under former President Barack Obama. The group said the rule was causing “adverse impacts on coal-fired generation”because of “the excessive costs of compliance.”
Pruitt said his proposed rule could save utilities $25 million to $76 million a year. He is trying to rush through the proposed changes by giving people only 45 days to comment and a single public hearing in the Washington area.
Public interest groups are asking for four more public hearings on the proposed rule and a longer comment period.
'Extreme' fossil fuel investments have surged under Donald Trump, report reveals
Sharp rise globally in the dirtiest fossil fuel investments reverses progress made after the Paris agreement, with tar sands holdings more than doubling in Trump’s first year in office
Arthur Neslen
the guardian
Wed 28 Mar 2018 00.00 EDT
Bank holdings in “extreme” fossil fuels skyrocketed globally to $115bn during Donald Trump’s first year as US president, with holdings in tar sands oil more than doubling, a new report has found.
A sharp flight from fossil fuels investments after the Paris agreement was reversed last year with a return to energy sources dubbed “extreme” because of their contribution to global emissions. This included an 11% hike in funding for carbon-heavy tar sands, as well as Arctic and ultra-deepwater oil and coal.
US and Canadian banks led a race back into the unconventional energy sector following Trump’s promise to withdraw from Paris, with JPMorgan Chase increasing its coal funding by a factor of 21, and quadrupling its tar sands assets.
Chase’s $5.6bn surge in tar sands holdings added to nearly $47bn of gains for the industry last year, according to the report by NGOs including BankTrack, the Sierra Club and Rainforest Action Network (RAN).
RAN spokeswoman, Alison Kirsch, accused banks such as JPMorgan Chase of “moving backwards in lockstep with their wrongheaded political leaders”.
“If we are to have any chance of halting catastrophic climate change, there must be an end of expansion and complete phase-out of these dangerous energy sources,” she said. “Banks need to be accountable and implement policies guarding against extreme fossil fuel funding.”
JPMorgan Chase has asked the US securities and exchanges commission for support in its bid to block a shareholder resolution calling for a bank report on financial and climate risks associated with tar sands projects.
Royal Bank of Canada and Toronto Dominion remain the biggest tar sands backers, with $38bn of holdings between them.
Kelly Martin, a campaign director at Sierra Club, said: “Tar sands and other fossil fuel projects threaten our climate, public health, and communities, and until they stop supporting them financially, major banks … are complicit in this destruction.”
The bulk of new “extreme” investments came in a doubling of loans and bonds to Canada’s government-backed tar sands industry, even though its success would be disastrous for climate mitigation efforts, according to the former Nasa chief James Hansen.
Bank funding for tar sands production and pipelines more than doubled last year – compared to the 2015-16 period, when then-US president Barack Obama nixed the Keystone pipeline project, which Trump subsequently reapproved.
Support for coal among the 36 banks surveyed was also up by 6% in 2017 after a 38% plunge in 2016. Large Chinese banks actually reduced these investments last year and in Europe, BNP Paribas and ING moved to limit their exposure to fossil fuel assets.
However, 14 European banks collectively increased their coal financing by more than $2bn last year, with HSBC the worst performer by far.
“Europe’s top banks have got to stop their coal-focused assault on the Paris agreement,” said Johan Frijns, the director of BankTrack. “It is now vital that they move to stamp out their financial support for companies developing new coal-fired power plants around the world.”
A sharp flight from fossil fuels investments after the Paris agreement was reversed last year with a return to energy sources dubbed “extreme” because of their contribution to global emissions. This included an 11% hike in funding for carbon-heavy tar sands, as well as Arctic and ultra-deepwater oil and coal.
US and Canadian banks led a race back into the unconventional energy sector following Trump’s promise to withdraw from Paris, with JPMorgan Chase increasing its coal funding by a factor of 21, and quadrupling its tar sands assets.
Chase’s $5.6bn surge in tar sands holdings added to nearly $47bn of gains for the industry last year, according to the report by NGOs including BankTrack, the Sierra Club and Rainforest Action Network (RAN).
RAN spokeswoman, Alison Kirsch, accused banks such as JPMorgan Chase of “moving backwards in lockstep with their wrongheaded political leaders”.
“If we are to have any chance of halting catastrophic climate change, there must be an end of expansion and complete phase-out of these dangerous energy sources,” she said. “Banks need to be accountable and implement policies guarding against extreme fossil fuel funding.”
JPMorgan Chase has asked the US securities and exchanges commission for support in its bid to block a shareholder resolution calling for a bank report on financial and climate risks associated with tar sands projects.
Royal Bank of Canada and Toronto Dominion remain the biggest tar sands backers, with $38bn of holdings between them.
Kelly Martin, a campaign director at Sierra Club, said: “Tar sands and other fossil fuel projects threaten our climate, public health, and communities, and until they stop supporting them financially, major banks … are complicit in this destruction.”
The bulk of new “extreme” investments came in a doubling of loans and bonds to Canada’s government-backed tar sands industry, even though its success would be disastrous for climate mitigation efforts, according to the former Nasa chief James Hansen.
Bank funding for tar sands production and pipelines more than doubled last year – compared to the 2015-16 period, when then-US president Barack Obama nixed the Keystone pipeline project, which Trump subsequently reapproved.
Support for coal among the 36 banks surveyed was also up by 6% in 2017 after a 38% plunge in 2016. Large Chinese banks actually reduced these investments last year and in Europe, BNP Paribas and ING moved to limit their exposure to fossil fuel assets.
However, 14 European banks collectively increased their coal financing by more than $2bn last year, with HSBC the worst performer by far.
“Europe’s top banks have got to stop their coal-focused assault on the Paris agreement,” said Johan Frijns, the director of BankTrack. “It is now vital that they move to stamp out their financial support for companies developing new coal-fired power plants around the world.”
Texas sinkholes: oil and gas drilling increases threat, scientists warn
Ground rising and falling in region that has been ‘punctured like a pin cushion’ since the 1940s, new study finds
Tom Dart in Houston
the guardian
Tue 27 Mar 2018 07.37 EDT
A sinkhole in Rosenberg. There were nearly 297,000 oil wells in Texas as of last month, according to the state regulator. Photograph: AP
Oil and gas activity is contributing to alarming land movements and a rising threat of sinkholes across a huge swath of west Texas, a new study suggests.
According to geophysicists from Southern Methodist University, the ground is rising and falling in a region that has been “punctured like a pin cushion with oil wells and injection wells since the 1940s”.
There were nearly 297,000 oil wells in Texas as of last month, according to the state regulator. Many are in the Permian Basin, described in a Bloomberg article last September as the “world’s hottest oil patch”.
But the Southern Methodist report warns of unstable land and the threat of sinkholes.
“These hazards represent a danger to residents, roads, railroads, levees, dams, and oil and gas pipelines, as well as potential pollution of ground water,” Zhong Lu, a professor, said in a statement.
Wink – a tiny town 400 miles west of Dallas best known as the childhood home of the singer Roy Orbison – attracted national headlines in 2016 when the same scientists warned that the land between two expanding sinkholes a mile apart was deteriorating, risking the formation of more sinkholes or even the creation of a colossal single hole.
Injection of wastewater and carbon dioxide increases pore pressure in rocks, a likely cause of uplift. Lu told the Guardian cracks and corrosion from ageing wells may help explain the sinking.
A “subsidence bowl” near one of the Wink sinkholes has sunk at a rate of more than 15.5in a year, probably as a result of water leaks through abandoned wells causing salt layers to dissolve, the report found. Elsewhere, a lake formed after 2003 as a result of sinking ground and rising water.
Another Southern Methodist University study last year indicated that wastewater injection, often a byproduct of fracking, is a likely cause of recent earthquakes in Texas – with the Dallas-Fort Worth area, one of the most populous in the country, a hotspot.
Seismic activity in previously quiet and sparsely-populated parts of west Texas has soared in the past couple of years as the energy industry has expanded its attention beyond the Midland-Odessa area towards a mountainous and tourist-centric region near the border with Mexico.
For the shifting land study, the scientists analysed medium-resolution satellite radar imagery from four counties in the west Texas oil patch taken between November 2014 and April 2017. The area they examined, 4,000 sq miles, is about half the size of Wales. Now the team is studying a far wider region, from Texas to Florida, and expects to find more evidence of ground movement.
“It’s crazy and just one more clear sign that we need to get off of oil as fast as possible,” said Luke Metzger, executive director of Environment Texas, an advocacy group.
While Texas remains the dominant oil-and-gas producing state, renewable energy is booming: last year the state’s wind power capacity grew to exceed its capacity for generating electricity from coal-powered plants.
According to geophysicists from Southern Methodist University, the ground is rising and falling in a region that has been “punctured like a pin cushion with oil wells and injection wells since the 1940s”.
There were nearly 297,000 oil wells in Texas as of last month, according to the state regulator. Many are in the Permian Basin, described in a Bloomberg article last September as the “world’s hottest oil patch”.
But the Southern Methodist report warns of unstable land and the threat of sinkholes.
“These hazards represent a danger to residents, roads, railroads, levees, dams, and oil and gas pipelines, as well as potential pollution of ground water,” Zhong Lu, a professor, said in a statement.
Wink – a tiny town 400 miles west of Dallas best known as the childhood home of the singer Roy Orbison – attracted national headlines in 2016 when the same scientists warned that the land between two expanding sinkholes a mile apart was deteriorating, risking the formation of more sinkholes or even the creation of a colossal single hole.
Injection of wastewater and carbon dioxide increases pore pressure in rocks, a likely cause of uplift. Lu told the Guardian cracks and corrosion from ageing wells may help explain the sinking.
A “subsidence bowl” near one of the Wink sinkholes has sunk at a rate of more than 15.5in a year, probably as a result of water leaks through abandoned wells causing salt layers to dissolve, the report found. Elsewhere, a lake formed after 2003 as a result of sinking ground and rising water.
Another Southern Methodist University study last year indicated that wastewater injection, often a byproduct of fracking, is a likely cause of recent earthquakes in Texas – with the Dallas-Fort Worth area, one of the most populous in the country, a hotspot.
Seismic activity in previously quiet and sparsely-populated parts of west Texas has soared in the past couple of years as the energy industry has expanded its attention beyond the Midland-Odessa area towards a mountainous and tourist-centric region near the border with Mexico.
For the shifting land study, the scientists analysed medium-resolution satellite radar imagery from four counties in the west Texas oil patch taken between November 2014 and April 2017. The area they examined, 4,000 sq miles, is about half the size of Wales. Now the team is studying a far wider region, from Texas to Florida, and expects to find more evidence of ground movement.
“It’s crazy and just one more clear sign that we need to get off of oil as fast as possible,” said Luke Metzger, executive director of Environment Texas, an advocacy group.
While Texas remains the dominant oil-and-gas producing state, renewable energy is booming: last year the state’s wind power capacity grew to exceed its capacity for generating electricity from coal-powered plants.
Hurricane Harvey’s toxic impact deeper than public told
By FRANK BAJAK of THE ASSOCIATED PRESS and LISE OLSEN of the HOUSTON CHRONICLE
3/22/18
HOUSTON (AP) — A toxic onslaught from the nation’s petrochemical hub was largely overshadowed by the record-shattering deluge of Hurricane Harvey as residents and first responders struggled to save lives and property.
More than a half-year after floodwaters swamped America’s fourth-largest city, the extent of this environmental assault is beginning to surface, while questions about the long-term consequences for human health remain unanswered.
County, state and federal records pieced together by The Associated Press and The Houston Chronicle reveal a far more widespread toxic impact than authorities publicly reported after the storm slammed into the Texas coast in late August and then stalled over the Houston area.
Some 500 chemical plants, 10 refineries and more than 6,670 miles of intertwined oil, gas and chemical pipelines line the nation’s largest energy corridor.
Nearly half a billion gallons of industrial wastewater mixed with storm water surged out of just one chemical plant in Baytown, east of Houston on the upper shores of Galveston Bay.
Benzene, vinyl chloride, butadiene and other known human carcinogens were among the dozens of tons of industrial toxins released into surrounding neighborhoods and waterways following Harvey’s torrential rains.
In all, reporters catalogued more than 100 Harvey-related toxic releases — on land, in water and in the air. Most were never publicized, and in the case of two of the biggest ones, the extent or potential toxicity of the releases was initially understated.
Only a handful of the industrial spills have been investigated by federal regulators, reporters found.
Texas regulators say they have investigated 89 incidents, but have yet to announce any enforcement actions.
Testing by state and federal regulators of soil and water for contaminants was largely limited to Superfund toxic waste sites.
Based on widespread air monitoring, including flyovers, officials repeatedly assured the public that post-Harvey air pollution posed no health threat. But the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency official in charge now says these general assessments did not necessarily reflect local “hotspots” with potential risk to people.
Regulators alerted the public to dangers from just two, well-publicized toxic disasters: the Arkema chemical plant northeast of Houston that exploded and burned for days, and a nearby dioxin-laden federal Superfund site whose protective cap was damaged by the raging San Jacinto River.
Samuel Coleman, who was the EPA’s acting regional administrator during Harvey, said the priority in the immediate aftermath was “addressing any environmental harms as quickly as possible as opposed to making announcements about what the problem was.”
In hindsight, he said, it might not have been a bad idea to inform the public about the worst of “dozens of spills.”
Local officials say the state’s industry-friendly approach has weakened efforts by the city of Houston and surrounding Harris County to build cases against and force cleanup by the companies, many of them repeat environmental offenders.
“The public will probably never know the extent of what happened to the environment after Harvey. But the individual companies of course know,” said Rock Owens, supervising environmental attorney for Harris County, home to Houston and 4.7 million residents.
The chairman of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, Bryan Shaw, declined when asked by lawmakers in January to identify the worst spills and their locations. He told a legislative subcommittee hearing he could not publicly discuss spills until his staff completed a review.
The amount of post-Harvey government testing contrasts sharply with what happened after two other major Gulf Coast hurricanes. After Hurricane Ike hit Texas in 2008, state regulators collected 85 sediment samples to measure the contamination; more than a dozen violations were identified and cleanups were carried out, according to a state review.
In Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina’s floodwaters ravaged New Orleans in 2005, the EPA and Louisiana officials examined about 1,800 soil samples over 10 months, EPA records showed.
“Now the response is completely different,” said Scott Frickel, an environmental sociologist formerly at Tulane University in New Orleans.
Frickel, now at Brown University, called the Harvey response “unconscionable” given Houston’s exponentially larger industrial footprint.
Reporters covered some environmental crises as they happened, such as AP’s exclusive on the flooding of toxic waste sites and the Chronicle’s Arkema warnings before fires broke out. But the sheer quantity of spills was impossible to document in real time.
Academic researchers are now trying to fill in the gaps in environmental monitoring, helped by grants from the National Science Foundation and National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. One project, a Harvey-related public health registry for Houston, was funded just this month but is not yet underway.
“People are left in a state of limbo of not knowing if they were exposed or not — or if they were, what the implications are for their health,” said Dr. Nicole Lurie, who oversaw federal public health responses to the Superstorm Sandy and Deepwater Horizon disasters while at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Scientists say the paucity of data also could hamstring efforts to prepare for and mitigate damage from future violent weather events that climatologists predict will happen with increasing frequency.
___
‘NOTHING SHORT OF CATASTROPHIC’
When it meets moisture, hydrogen chloride gas becomes hydrochloric acid, which can burn, suffocate and kill.
Between lulls in Harvey’s pounding torrents on Aug. 28, an 18-inch pipeline leak at Williams Midstream Services Inc. unleashed a plume of the chemical near the intersection of two major highways in La Porte, southeast of Houston, where the San Jacinto River meets the 50-mile ship channel. It’s the petrochemical corridor’s main artery that empties into Galveston Bay.
A toxic cloud spread about a quarter-mile in an industrial sector as firefighters and police rushed to shut down roads, blared neighborhood sirens and robo-dispatched phone and text messages warning people to stay indoors.
Two hours ticked by before a county hazardous materials response unit — lucky to find a road not under water — arrived and ended the danger with the help of a crew from a nearby plant.
The spill was among dozens barely noticed at the time, records show. A county pollution control inspector, Johnathan Martin, wrote in his report that he could not safely monitor the toxic plume but believed it did not reach homes less than a mile away. There were no reports of injuries.
On land, the deluge — five feet of rain in some spots — appears to have scoured the top soil, according to separate testing efforts by scientists from Texas A&M and Rice universities.
The Texas A&M collection of 24 samples — taken in September from lawns mainly in a neighborhood near Valero Energy Corp.’s refinery — turned up only low traces of petroleum and petrochemical-related compounds.
“As expected the rains washed most things out,” said Texas A&M research leader Anthony Knap.
Rice researchers tested soil at a school and park in Baytown, east across Upper Galveston Bay, where residents said floodwaters rushed in from the 3,400-acre ExxonMobil refinery and chemical plant. They also sampled in Galena Park, a community of 11,000 hemmed in by heavy industry along the ship channel, just east of downtown.
Only one of the nine samples collected by Rice researchers showed elevated levels of petroleum-related toxins, according to an independent chemical analysis funded by the AP-Chronicle collaboration. Collected in Galena Park, it showed the presence of benzo(a)pyrene, a known carcinogen, at levels just above what the EPA deems a cancer risk.
Jessica Chastain lives a block away.
During Harvey’s three-day downpour, the nearby Panther Creek swallowed Chastain’s home, forcing the 36-year-old mother and four of her children to swim across the street to the safety of her parents’ two-story house, through slimy brownish-black water that smelled like a “rotten sewer,” said Chastain. “It had a coat of film over it. I’m not sure what it was. It was probably oil.”
Her children — 15, 11, 9 and 6 — all developed skin infections and strep throat, she said.
---
VAPOR CLOUD
Residents of the tidy, mostly Latino neighborhood off Old Industrial Road in Galena Park are accustomed to the foul odors that wind shifts can bring.
But no one told them about the gasoline spill at the Magellan terminal a mile away — one of more than a dozen Harvey-related releases in a two-mile radius. The release was initially reported to the Coast Guard at 42,000 gallons — and residents would only learn of it a week later through news reports. Not until 11 days after the spill did Magellan report that it was actually more than 10 times bigger.
Asked about the discrepancy, Magellan spokesman Bruce Heine said floodwaters prevented the company from accessing the ruptured tanks until Sept. 5. He said the company later removed 15 dump trucks of tainted soil.
The spill was reported to the Coast Guard on Thursday, Aug. 31 at 11:35 p.m. — six days after Harvey made landfall.
An explosion risk prompted workers to evacuate upwind as the nearly half-million gallons of gasoline gushed out failed storage tanks, state environmental and Coast Guard records show. The spill ranked as Texas’ largest reported Harvey-related venting of air pollutants, at 1,143 tons.
The local fire department put down foam to suppress the fumes, records revealed, and a police report described “a vapor cloud.”
Claudia Mendez, a 42-year-old housewife, said she later saw foam by the side of the road and wondered about its origin.
The fumes were so strong, Mendez said, “I thought my husband had brought the lawnmower gas can inside.”
Magellan has been cited for 11 environmental violations since 2002 by Texas regulators and fined more than $190,000, more than half in August 2012 for a single violation of air quality standards.
Its spill is among at least three post-Harvey releases about which Harris County officials have withheld information, saying they remain under investigation.
The second involves W&P Development Corp., owner of an industrial park where about 100,000 gallons of oily wastewater were reported to have spilled into the San Jacinto from Aug. 29 to Aug. 31. The site was formerly Champion Paper Mill and a landfill there received wastes including turpentine- and lead-contaminated soil and mercury until 2008. For most of 2015 and 2016, the property was in violation of federal anti-pollution laws, EPA records show.
A spokesman for W&P Development, Dennis Winkler, said the company later determined that a smaller amount — 30,000 gallons — had escaped from a water treatment plant when the river overtopped a berm.
The third site is Channel Biorefinery & Terminals, where some 80,000 gallons of methanol spilled from a tank rupture into Greens Bayou, which enters the ship channel just downstream of the Magellan terminal. Highly flammable and explosive, methanol can cause brain lesions and other disorders.
The property, once the site of the nation’s largest biofuels refinery, was in violation of federal hazardous waste-management rules the first half of 2017. Texas cited the property’s owners for failing to prove they could manage licensed wastes, including oily sludge and petroleum distillates, records show.
Dennis Frost, the on-site manager for Gulf Coast Energy, the tenant of Channel Biorefinery, said he and co-workers did their best to prevent the spills.
“They were impossible to contain,” he said. “The water here down by our facility was up over 20 feet.”
___
INDUSTRY: NO DANGER
Companies are required under federal law to report spills to the state and federal government but not to counties, which are the first line of defense against industrial pollution.
Harris County pollution control investigators queried more than 150 plants on Harvey-related spills, but many did not provide estimates.
“Spill information is provided as a courtesy,” said Latrice Babin, deputy director of the county’s pollution control office. “Likewise, there is no requirement of notification of evacuation.”
The largest spill, by far, was at ExxonMobil Corp.’s Olefins Plant in Baytown, east of the ship channel. Two days after Harvey hit, some 457 million gallons of stormwater mixed with untreated wastewater, including oil and grease, surged into an adjacent creek.
The spill was not reported to the public. In a water quality report filed with the county and obtained through an open records request, ExxonMobil said “available information does not indicate any potential danger to human health or safety or the environment.”
It did not include results of third-party water testing that the company said had been done. The plant has a history of federal air pollution violations and reported emitting 228 tons of airborne pollutants during Harvey.
Other large spills found in official records include:
— More than 3,000 pounds of benzene from Royal Dutch Shell PLC’s Deer Park complex on the ship channel’s south bank. Initially, the company reported a half ton of phenol, which can burn skin and be potentially fatal, was spilled. It later revised that downward to just two pounds.
—About 34,000 pounds of sodium hydroxide, or lye, which can cause severe chemical burns, and unpermitted airborne emissions, including 28,000 pounds of benzene, from the Chevron Phillips Chemical Co. plant in Baytown, near where thousands of residents live along Cedar Bayou. A spokesman, Bryce Hallowell, said a containment pond kept about 38 percent of the lye from escaping the facility.
— About 60,000 tons of what Dow Chemical Co. called “non-hazardous biosolids” at the company’s plant in Deer Park. The company now says that roughly 50 tons of that consisted of biosolids and that the rest was “primarily” stormwater.
Yvette Arellano of the advocacy group Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services surveyed the area by helicopter on Sept. 4.
She reported seeing flooded tank farms, fluorescent liquid streaming from Exxon’s outfalls, and refineries and chemical plants flaring gas intensely like giant candles.
“The entire skyscape looked like a birthday cake,” Arellano said.
___
“HOT SPOTS”
As Harvey bore down on Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott’s administration decreed that storm-related pollution would be forgiven as “acts of God.” Days later, he suspended many environmental regulations.
On Sept. 1, just as residents in some areas of Houston started dragging soggy belongings to the curb, the city experienced Texas’ worst ozone pollution of the year.
A top city health official emailed the EPA on Sept. 1 with a request marked “urgent,” asking for help in determining whether spills and leaks at industrial and Superfund sites threatened the public. Three days later, after getting no response, she emailed again, records obtained in a public information act request show.
“We are finding alarming levels of benzene in the neighborhood next to Valero . Should EPA evacuate the residents?”
There was no record of an EPA email response, though the agency did send a mobile air-monitoring van on Sept. 5.
By then, Houston had done its own air monitoring, recording a high benzene level of 324 parts per billion — more than three times the level at which federal worker safety guidelines recommend special breathing equipment. The city was aided by the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund, which dispatched a mobile van from California to track the toxic benzene plume.
On Sept. 7, state investigators took air samples near Valero and reported suffering headaches and dizziness, though they said they found pollutants “below levels of short-term health and/or welfare concern,” according to a state report.
The EPA said it also conducted 28 flights over 12 days beginning Aug. 31 using a plane equipped to evaluate “unreported or undetected” chemical releases. It flew over nearly 700 industrial sites, municipal wastewater treatment plants and other facilities, and EPA said it found no pollution exceeding state-permitted levels.
In at least seven “status reports” the EPA and TCEQ posted online from Sept. 3 and Oct. 6, they said all measurements “were well below levels of health concern.”
Coleman, who retired in January after 29 years with EPA, said he was comfortable with the advisories, saying they were general assessments. “Were there hotspots? Absolutely,” he said in a recent interview. “But on any given day, within some isolated area, there could be a problem.”
AP and Chronicle reporters asked the EPA and state regulators for a detailed accounting of any soil and water testing they did after Harvey, along with any investigations or sanctions.
The responses mostly cited online bulletins, in which the EPA said it had assessed all 43 Superfund cleanup sites in the hurricane-affected area and cleared all but one — the San Jacinto River Waste Pits, which was leaking dioxins. An examination of the 17 state Superfund sites found “no major issues,” regulators said.
State officials said they didn’t test any sediment that may have been deposited elsewhere by floodwaters. The EPA tested water at an unspecified number of industrial sites but did not disclose results.
Without elaborating, the state said it had a number of open investigations. The EPA refused to discuss whom it might be investigating, beyond Valero and Arkema.
With a few exceptions, companies with spills did not call local emergency responders, meaning the public was not informed in real time. Instead, the companies handled the spills in-house, the Chronicle and AP found in surveying local and county fire officials.
The Harris County Sheriff’s Office, which handles countywide emergency response and routinely dispatches a special investigator to major spills, said it was not alerted to 22 of 23 spills that reporters asked about, based on size and potential toxicity.
The Arkema plant was the exception. Impossible to go unnoticed, its containers of liquid organic peroxides exploded after floodwaters disabled backup generators. Sickened first responders have filed suit, as have Harris and Liberty counties, which claim the company violated numerous environmental and safety regulations.
Bob Royall, emergency operations chief for the county’s Fire Marshal office, said his agency was alerted to Arkema and the Williams’ hydrochloric acid leak but no one informed it at the time of the nearly half-million-gallon Magellan spill.
Like spills on land, unpermitted releases of air toxins are self-reported in Texas — a state that has long been friendly to heavy industry. As attorney general, prior to being elected governor, Abbott had sued the federal government more than a dozen times to challenge environmental regulations that he deemed over-reaching.
The governor’s Harvey disaster declaration suspended environmental reporting and record-keeping rules as well as liability for unauthorized emissions for the duration of the disaster declaration, which was most recently renewed on March 16. A spokesman for the state environmental agency said the suspensions only apply when rules would hinder disaster response.
An attorney for the nonprofit Austin-based Environmental Integrity Project said that while federal environmental laws remained in effect, the governor’s action essentially put state regulators on the sidelines and made it more difficult to hold polluters accountable. “The state tied its own hands before it knew the scope or the magnitude or any of the effects of the storm,” said attorney Ilan Levin.
The TCEQ itself has a long track record of industry tolerance. State auditors in 2003 found it was late in ordering and collecting fines, giving polluters $25 million a year in discounts. A study by Levin’s group found the agency penalized only 3 percent of air pollution incidents reported by all companies statewide from 2011 to 2016.
Two Texas laws enacted since mid-2015 have weakened counties’ ability to police polluters. The first caps at $2.15 million what they can collect from polluters in lawsuits. The rest must go to the state. The second law took effect Sept. 1. It obliges counties to give the state right of first refusal on any pollution enforcement cases, which local officials say could mean less punitive action.
“Every time we’ve been able to make something — you get a large judgment against one of these companies, get some significant process-changing injunctive relief — they come back around behind us to the legislature,” said Owens. “And they have clipped our wings.”
More than a half-year after floodwaters swamped America’s fourth-largest city, the extent of this environmental assault is beginning to surface, while questions about the long-term consequences for human health remain unanswered.
County, state and federal records pieced together by The Associated Press and The Houston Chronicle reveal a far more widespread toxic impact than authorities publicly reported after the storm slammed into the Texas coast in late August and then stalled over the Houston area.
Some 500 chemical plants, 10 refineries and more than 6,670 miles of intertwined oil, gas and chemical pipelines line the nation’s largest energy corridor.
Nearly half a billion gallons of industrial wastewater mixed with storm water surged out of just one chemical plant in Baytown, east of Houston on the upper shores of Galveston Bay.
Benzene, vinyl chloride, butadiene and other known human carcinogens were among the dozens of tons of industrial toxins released into surrounding neighborhoods and waterways following Harvey’s torrential rains.
In all, reporters catalogued more than 100 Harvey-related toxic releases — on land, in water and in the air. Most were never publicized, and in the case of two of the biggest ones, the extent or potential toxicity of the releases was initially understated.
Only a handful of the industrial spills have been investigated by federal regulators, reporters found.
Texas regulators say they have investigated 89 incidents, but have yet to announce any enforcement actions.
Testing by state and federal regulators of soil and water for contaminants was largely limited to Superfund toxic waste sites.
Based on widespread air monitoring, including flyovers, officials repeatedly assured the public that post-Harvey air pollution posed no health threat. But the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency official in charge now says these general assessments did not necessarily reflect local “hotspots” with potential risk to people.
Regulators alerted the public to dangers from just two, well-publicized toxic disasters: the Arkema chemical plant northeast of Houston that exploded and burned for days, and a nearby dioxin-laden federal Superfund site whose protective cap was damaged by the raging San Jacinto River.
Samuel Coleman, who was the EPA’s acting regional administrator during Harvey, said the priority in the immediate aftermath was “addressing any environmental harms as quickly as possible as opposed to making announcements about what the problem was.”
In hindsight, he said, it might not have been a bad idea to inform the public about the worst of “dozens of spills.”
Local officials say the state’s industry-friendly approach has weakened efforts by the city of Houston and surrounding Harris County to build cases against and force cleanup by the companies, many of them repeat environmental offenders.
“The public will probably never know the extent of what happened to the environment after Harvey. But the individual companies of course know,” said Rock Owens, supervising environmental attorney for Harris County, home to Houston and 4.7 million residents.
The chairman of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, Bryan Shaw, declined when asked by lawmakers in January to identify the worst spills and their locations. He told a legislative subcommittee hearing he could not publicly discuss spills until his staff completed a review.
The amount of post-Harvey government testing contrasts sharply with what happened after two other major Gulf Coast hurricanes. After Hurricane Ike hit Texas in 2008, state regulators collected 85 sediment samples to measure the contamination; more than a dozen violations were identified and cleanups were carried out, according to a state review.
In Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina’s floodwaters ravaged New Orleans in 2005, the EPA and Louisiana officials examined about 1,800 soil samples over 10 months, EPA records showed.
“Now the response is completely different,” said Scott Frickel, an environmental sociologist formerly at Tulane University in New Orleans.
Frickel, now at Brown University, called the Harvey response “unconscionable” given Houston’s exponentially larger industrial footprint.
Reporters covered some environmental crises as they happened, such as AP’s exclusive on the flooding of toxic waste sites and the Chronicle’s Arkema warnings before fires broke out. But the sheer quantity of spills was impossible to document in real time.
Academic researchers are now trying to fill in the gaps in environmental monitoring, helped by grants from the National Science Foundation and National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. One project, a Harvey-related public health registry for Houston, was funded just this month but is not yet underway.
“People are left in a state of limbo of not knowing if they were exposed or not — or if they were, what the implications are for their health,” said Dr. Nicole Lurie, who oversaw federal public health responses to the Superstorm Sandy and Deepwater Horizon disasters while at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Scientists say the paucity of data also could hamstring efforts to prepare for and mitigate damage from future violent weather events that climatologists predict will happen with increasing frequency.
___
‘NOTHING SHORT OF CATASTROPHIC’
When it meets moisture, hydrogen chloride gas becomes hydrochloric acid, which can burn, suffocate and kill.
Between lulls in Harvey’s pounding torrents on Aug. 28, an 18-inch pipeline leak at Williams Midstream Services Inc. unleashed a plume of the chemical near the intersection of two major highways in La Porte, southeast of Houston, where the San Jacinto River meets the 50-mile ship channel. It’s the petrochemical corridor’s main artery that empties into Galveston Bay.
A toxic cloud spread about a quarter-mile in an industrial sector as firefighters and police rushed to shut down roads, blared neighborhood sirens and robo-dispatched phone and text messages warning people to stay indoors.
Two hours ticked by before a county hazardous materials response unit — lucky to find a road not under water — arrived and ended the danger with the help of a crew from a nearby plant.
The spill was among dozens barely noticed at the time, records show. A county pollution control inspector, Johnathan Martin, wrote in his report that he could not safely monitor the toxic plume but believed it did not reach homes less than a mile away. There were no reports of injuries.
On land, the deluge — five feet of rain in some spots — appears to have scoured the top soil, according to separate testing efforts by scientists from Texas A&M and Rice universities.
The Texas A&M collection of 24 samples — taken in September from lawns mainly in a neighborhood near Valero Energy Corp.’s refinery — turned up only low traces of petroleum and petrochemical-related compounds.
“As expected the rains washed most things out,” said Texas A&M research leader Anthony Knap.
Rice researchers tested soil at a school and park in Baytown, east across Upper Galveston Bay, where residents said floodwaters rushed in from the 3,400-acre ExxonMobil refinery and chemical plant. They also sampled in Galena Park, a community of 11,000 hemmed in by heavy industry along the ship channel, just east of downtown.
Only one of the nine samples collected by Rice researchers showed elevated levels of petroleum-related toxins, according to an independent chemical analysis funded by the AP-Chronicle collaboration. Collected in Galena Park, it showed the presence of benzo(a)pyrene, a known carcinogen, at levels just above what the EPA deems a cancer risk.
Jessica Chastain lives a block away.
During Harvey’s three-day downpour, the nearby Panther Creek swallowed Chastain’s home, forcing the 36-year-old mother and four of her children to swim across the street to the safety of her parents’ two-story house, through slimy brownish-black water that smelled like a “rotten sewer,” said Chastain. “It had a coat of film over it. I’m not sure what it was. It was probably oil.”
Her children — 15, 11, 9 and 6 — all developed skin infections and strep throat, she said.
---
VAPOR CLOUD
Residents of the tidy, mostly Latino neighborhood off Old Industrial Road in Galena Park are accustomed to the foul odors that wind shifts can bring.
But no one told them about the gasoline spill at the Magellan terminal a mile away — one of more than a dozen Harvey-related releases in a two-mile radius. The release was initially reported to the Coast Guard at 42,000 gallons — and residents would only learn of it a week later through news reports. Not until 11 days after the spill did Magellan report that it was actually more than 10 times bigger.
Asked about the discrepancy, Magellan spokesman Bruce Heine said floodwaters prevented the company from accessing the ruptured tanks until Sept. 5. He said the company later removed 15 dump trucks of tainted soil.
The spill was reported to the Coast Guard on Thursday, Aug. 31 at 11:35 p.m. — six days after Harvey made landfall.
An explosion risk prompted workers to evacuate upwind as the nearly half-million gallons of gasoline gushed out failed storage tanks, state environmental and Coast Guard records show. The spill ranked as Texas’ largest reported Harvey-related venting of air pollutants, at 1,143 tons.
The local fire department put down foam to suppress the fumes, records revealed, and a police report described “a vapor cloud.”
Claudia Mendez, a 42-year-old housewife, said she later saw foam by the side of the road and wondered about its origin.
The fumes were so strong, Mendez said, “I thought my husband had brought the lawnmower gas can inside.”
Magellan has been cited for 11 environmental violations since 2002 by Texas regulators and fined more than $190,000, more than half in August 2012 for a single violation of air quality standards.
Its spill is among at least three post-Harvey releases about which Harris County officials have withheld information, saying they remain under investigation.
The second involves W&P Development Corp., owner of an industrial park where about 100,000 gallons of oily wastewater were reported to have spilled into the San Jacinto from Aug. 29 to Aug. 31. The site was formerly Champion Paper Mill and a landfill there received wastes including turpentine- and lead-contaminated soil and mercury until 2008. For most of 2015 and 2016, the property was in violation of federal anti-pollution laws, EPA records show.
A spokesman for W&P Development, Dennis Winkler, said the company later determined that a smaller amount — 30,000 gallons — had escaped from a water treatment plant when the river overtopped a berm.
The third site is Channel Biorefinery & Terminals, where some 80,000 gallons of methanol spilled from a tank rupture into Greens Bayou, which enters the ship channel just downstream of the Magellan terminal. Highly flammable and explosive, methanol can cause brain lesions and other disorders.
The property, once the site of the nation’s largest biofuels refinery, was in violation of federal hazardous waste-management rules the first half of 2017. Texas cited the property’s owners for failing to prove they could manage licensed wastes, including oily sludge and petroleum distillates, records show.
Dennis Frost, the on-site manager for Gulf Coast Energy, the tenant of Channel Biorefinery, said he and co-workers did their best to prevent the spills.
“They were impossible to contain,” he said. “The water here down by our facility was up over 20 feet.”
___
INDUSTRY: NO DANGER
Companies are required under federal law to report spills to the state and federal government but not to counties, which are the first line of defense against industrial pollution.
Harris County pollution control investigators queried more than 150 plants on Harvey-related spills, but many did not provide estimates.
“Spill information is provided as a courtesy,” said Latrice Babin, deputy director of the county’s pollution control office. “Likewise, there is no requirement of notification of evacuation.”
The largest spill, by far, was at ExxonMobil Corp.’s Olefins Plant in Baytown, east of the ship channel. Two days after Harvey hit, some 457 million gallons of stormwater mixed with untreated wastewater, including oil and grease, surged into an adjacent creek.
The spill was not reported to the public. In a water quality report filed with the county and obtained through an open records request, ExxonMobil said “available information does not indicate any potential danger to human health or safety or the environment.”
It did not include results of third-party water testing that the company said had been done. The plant has a history of federal air pollution violations and reported emitting 228 tons of airborne pollutants during Harvey.
Other large spills found in official records include:
— More than 3,000 pounds of benzene from Royal Dutch Shell PLC’s Deer Park complex on the ship channel’s south bank. Initially, the company reported a half ton of phenol, which can burn skin and be potentially fatal, was spilled. It later revised that downward to just two pounds.
—About 34,000 pounds of sodium hydroxide, or lye, which can cause severe chemical burns, and unpermitted airborne emissions, including 28,000 pounds of benzene, from the Chevron Phillips Chemical Co. plant in Baytown, near where thousands of residents live along Cedar Bayou. A spokesman, Bryce Hallowell, said a containment pond kept about 38 percent of the lye from escaping the facility.
— About 60,000 tons of what Dow Chemical Co. called “non-hazardous biosolids” at the company’s plant in Deer Park. The company now says that roughly 50 tons of that consisted of biosolids and that the rest was “primarily” stormwater.
Yvette Arellano of the advocacy group Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services surveyed the area by helicopter on Sept. 4.
She reported seeing flooded tank farms, fluorescent liquid streaming from Exxon’s outfalls, and refineries and chemical plants flaring gas intensely like giant candles.
“The entire skyscape looked like a birthday cake,” Arellano said.
___
“HOT SPOTS”
As Harvey bore down on Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott’s administration decreed that storm-related pollution would be forgiven as “acts of God.” Days later, he suspended many environmental regulations.
On Sept. 1, just as residents in some areas of Houston started dragging soggy belongings to the curb, the city experienced Texas’ worst ozone pollution of the year.
A top city health official emailed the EPA on Sept. 1 with a request marked “urgent,” asking for help in determining whether spills and leaks at industrial and Superfund sites threatened the public. Three days later, after getting no response, she emailed again, records obtained in a public information act request show.
“We are finding alarming levels of benzene in the neighborhood next to Valero . Should EPA evacuate the residents?”
There was no record of an EPA email response, though the agency did send a mobile air-monitoring van on Sept. 5.
By then, Houston had done its own air monitoring, recording a high benzene level of 324 parts per billion — more than three times the level at which federal worker safety guidelines recommend special breathing equipment. The city was aided by the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund, which dispatched a mobile van from California to track the toxic benzene plume.
On Sept. 7, state investigators took air samples near Valero and reported suffering headaches and dizziness, though they said they found pollutants “below levels of short-term health and/or welfare concern,” according to a state report.
The EPA said it also conducted 28 flights over 12 days beginning Aug. 31 using a plane equipped to evaluate “unreported or undetected” chemical releases. It flew over nearly 700 industrial sites, municipal wastewater treatment plants and other facilities, and EPA said it found no pollution exceeding state-permitted levels.
In at least seven “status reports” the EPA and TCEQ posted online from Sept. 3 and Oct. 6, they said all measurements “were well below levels of health concern.”
Coleman, who retired in January after 29 years with EPA, said he was comfortable with the advisories, saying they were general assessments. “Were there hotspots? Absolutely,” he said in a recent interview. “But on any given day, within some isolated area, there could be a problem.”
AP and Chronicle reporters asked the EPA and state regulators for a detailed accounting of any soil and water testing they did after Harvey, along with any investigations or sanctions.
The responses mostly cited online bulletins, in which the EPA said it had assessed all 43 Superfund cleanup sites in the hurricane-affected area and cleared all but one — the San Jacinto River Waste Pits, which was leaking dioxins. An examination of the 17 state Superfund sites found “no major issues,” regulators said.
State officials said they didn’t test any sediment that may have been deposited elsewhere by floodwaters. The EPA tested water at an unspecified number of industrial sites but did not disclose results.
Without elaborating, the state said it had a number of open investigations. The EPA refused to discuss whom it might be investigating, beyond Valero and Arkema.
With a few exceptions, companies with spills did not call local emergency responders, meaning the public was not informed in real time. Instead, the companies handled the spills in-house, the Chronicle and AP found in surveying local and county fire officials.
The Harris County Sheriff’s Office, which handles countywide emergency response and routinely dispatches a special investigator to major spills, said it was not alerted to 22 of 23 spills that reporters asked about, based on size and potential toxicity.
The Arkema plant was the exception. Impossible to go unnoticed, its containers of liquid organic peroxides exploded after floodwaters disabled backup generators. Sickened first responders have filed suit, as have Harris and Liberty counties, which claim the company violated numerous environmental and safety regulations.
Bob Royall, emergency operations chief for the county’s Fire Marshal office, said his agency was alerted to Arkema and the Williams’ hydrochloric acid leak but no one informed it at the time of the nearly half-million-gallon Magellan spill.
Like spills on land, unpermitted releases of air toxins are self-reported in Texas — a state that has long been friendly to heavy industry. As attorney general, prior to being elected governor, Abbott had sued the federal government more than a dozen times to challenge environmental regulations that he deemed over-reaching.
The governor’s Harvey disaster declaration suspended environmental reporting and record-keeping rules as well as liability for unauthorized emissions for the duration of the disaster declaration, which was most recently renewed on March 16. A spokesman for the state environmental agency said the suspensions only apply when rules would hinder disaster response.
An attorney for the nonprofit Austin-based Environmental Integrity Project said that while federal environmental laws remained in effect, the governor’s action essentially put state regulators on the sidelines and made it more difficult to hold polluters accountable. “The state tied its own hands before it knew the scope or the magnitude or any of the effects of the storm,” said attorney Ilan Levin.
The TCEQ itself has a long track record of industry tolerance. State auditors in 2003 found it was late in ordering and collecting fines, giving polluters $25 million a year in discounts. A study by Levin’s group found the agency penalized only 3 percent of air pollution incidents reported by all companies statewide from 2011 to 2016.
Two Texas laws enacted since mid-2015 have weakened counties’ ability to police polluters. The first caps at $2.15 million what they can collect from polluters in lawsuits. The rest must go to the state. The second law took effect Sept. 1. It obliges counties to give the state right of first refusal on any pollution enforcement cases, which local officials say could mean less punitive action.
“Every time we’ve been able to make something — you get a large judgment against one of these companies, get some significant process-changing injunctive relief — they come back around behind us to the legislature,” said Owens. “And they have clipped our wings.”
Oil giant begins transition to renewables, scrubs ‘oil’ from its name
Statoil admits "the world is changing," rebrands as "Equinor."
JOE ROMM - think progress
MAR 15, 2018, 1:04 PM
One of the world’s largest oil companies, Statoil, is scrubbing the word “oil” from its name to reflect a growing focus on renewable energy. The new name will be Equinor.
“The world is changing, and so is Statoil,” said Board Chair Jon Reinhardsen in a Thursday morning statement. “The biggest transition our modern-day energy systems have ever seen is underway, and we aim to be at the forefront of this development.”
The new name combines “equi,” the starting point for words like equality and equilibrium, and “nor,” reflecting its Norwegian origin, the company explained. Reinhardsen added that this new name supports the “high value and low carbon strategy we outlined last year.”
Norway’s state-controlled oil company had announced it would triple or quadruple investment in clean energy by 2030. It already operates the worlds first floating offshore wind farm off the coast of Scotland.
Norway is also the country shifting the fasted toward electric vehicles. Last year its parliament established a non-binding target that all new cars should be electric by 2025, and its $1 trillion sovereign-wealth fund is considering divesting from oil and gas stocks.
Statoil CEO Eldar Saetre acknowledged in 2017 that “a peak in oil demand” is coming, probably between the mid-2020s and the mid-2030s, and eventually oil “will be a shrinking business.”
The company’s new name will be put to a shareholder vote in May. But since the company is two-thirds owned by the state, and the Norwegian government has already okayed the rebranding, the new name would appear to be a done deal.
Statoil’s name change follows on the heels of last year’s rebranding of Denmark’s state-owned Dong Energy as Ørsted. That move erased any link to the original name — Danish Oil and Natural Gas — as the company sells off its fossil fuel businesses to become a clean energy leader. Ørsted is the world’s largest provider of offshore wind farms; it won a German power auction last year without needing any subsidies.
Equinor will no doubt become an offshore wind powerhouse. But “the Norwegian continental shelf will remain the backbone of our company,” explained CEO Saetre, “and we will use our Norwegian heritage in our positioning as we continue growing internationally within both oil, gas and renewable energy.”
“The world is changing, and so is Statoil,” said Board Chair Jon Reinhardsen in a Thursday morning statement. “The biggest transition our modern-day energy systems have ever seen is underway, and we aim to be at the forefront of this development.”
The new name combines “equi,” the starting point for words like equality and equilibrium, and “nor,” reflecting its Norwegian origin, the company explained. Reinhardsen added that this new name supports the “high value and low carbon strategy we outlined last year.”
Norway’s state-controlled oil company had announced it would triple or quadruple investment in clean energy by 2030. It already operates the worlds first floating offshore wind farm off the coast of Scotland.
Norway is also the country shifting the fasted toward electric vehicles. Last year its parliament established a non-binding target that all new cars should be electric by 2025, and its $1 trillion sovereign-wealth fund is considering divesting from oil and gas stocks.
Statoil CEO Eldar Saetre acknowledged in 2017 that “a peak in oil demand” is coming, probably between the mid-2020s and the mid-2030s, and eventually oil “will be a shrinking business.”
The company’s new name will be put to a shareholder vote in May. But since the company is two-thirds owned by the state, and the Norwegian government has already okayed the rebranding, the new name would appear to be a done deal.
Statoil’s name change follows on the heels of last year’s rebranding of Denmark’s state-owned Dong Energy as Ørsted. That move erased any link to the original name — Danish Oil and Natural Gas — as the company sells off its fossil fuel businesses to become a clean energy leader. Ørsted is the world’s largest provider of offshore wind farms; it won a German power auction last year without needing any subsidies.
Equinor will no doubt become an offshore wind powerhouse. But “the Norwegian continental shelf will remain the backbone of our company,” explained CEO Saetre, “and we will use our Norwegian heritage in our positioning as we continue growing internationally within both oil, gas and renewable energy.”
“There is no evidence that fracking can operate without threatening public health”
Andy Rowell - oil change int.
March 14, 2018
The conclusion is damning. “All together, findings to date from scientific, medical, and journalistic investigations combine to demonstrate that fracking poses significant threats to air, water, health, public safety, climate stability, seismic stability, community cohesion, and long-term economic vitality.”
“Emerging data from a rapidly expanding body of evidence continue to reveal a plethora of recurring problems and harms that cannot be sufficiently averted through regulatory frameworks.
“There is no evidence that fracking can operate without threatening public health directly or without imperiling climate stability upon which public health depends.”
So concludes a must-read 266-page report published yesterday by the Concerned Health Professionals of New York and the Nobel Peace Prize-winning group, Physicians for Social Responsibility.
The report examines over 1,200 peer-reviewed research articles as well as Government reports and news articles. The hard-hitting report argues that: “the evidence to date indicates that fracking operations pose severe threats to health, both from water contamination and from air pollution.”
Take water pollution and the vast amounts of toxic waste-water dumped daily underground. “In the United States, more than two billion gallons of water and fracking fluids are injected daily under high pressure into the earth for the purpose of enabling oil and gas extraction via fracking or, after the fracking is finished, to flush the extracted wastewater down any of the 187,570 disposal wells across the country that accept oil and gas waste.”
All of the two billion daily gallons of fluid is “toxic, and it passes through our nation’s groundwater aquifers on its way to the deep geological strata below where it demonstrably raises the risk for earthquakes.”
Air quality does not fair better, either. “In the air around drilling and fracking operations and their attendant infrastructure, researchers have measured strikingly high levels of toxic pollutants, including the potent carcinogen benzene and the chemical precursors of ground-level ozone (smog).”
The report adds: “In some cases, concentrations of fracking-related air pollutants in communities where people live and work exceed federal safety standards. Research shows that air emissions from fracking can drift and pollute the air hundreds of miles downwind.”
I have repeatedly blogged that the science was taking time to catch up with fracking. But there is increasing evidence of harm which cannot now be ignored. The science has caught up.
Dr. Sandra Steingraber, one of the report’s eight co-authors, tells Rolling Stone magazine, which has covered the release of the report:”With fracking, we had six peer reviewed articles in 2009 pointing to possible public health risks. By 2011 we had 42. Now there are more than 1200.”
Steingraber adds: “Fracking is the worst thing I’ve ever seen. Those of us in the public health sector started to realize years ago that there were potential risks, then the industry rolled out faster than we could do our science.”
“Now we see those risks have turned into human harms and people are getting sick,” Steingraber continues. “And we in this field have a moral imperative to raise the alarm.”
One of the main areas of concern is for vulnerable groups of people at risk from air pollution such as children and pregnant women.
“Pregnant women have a major risk, not only themselves but they’re carrying a fetus whose cells are multiplying continuously,” Dr. Lynn Ringenberg, a retired Army colonel and the president-elect of Physicians for Social Responsibility told Rolling Stone. “If those cells get hit by some toxic chemical from fracking, it may not manifest itself for years.”
Dr. Kathleen Nolan, a pediatrician and bioethicist who has worked with one Pennsylvania family near the shale gas fields. “They would see a yellow fog, kind of like a chemical mist coming from the compressor station,” Nolan told the magazine. “Their two youngest children, nine and 11, started having tics where their muscles would go into spasms, those spasms would persist even when they were asleep.”
There is also increasing evidence of harm to shale gas workers “These are killing jobs,” says report co-author Dr. Sandra Steingraber. “We have actually detected benzene in the urine of workers at levels known to raise the risks of leukemia.”
The report concludes with Maryland physician Judy Stone, who says: “Fracking profits go to private industry but the public—families and communities—bear the costs of the many health complications from the drilling.”
She adds: “There is growing evidence of a variety of health problems being associated with fracking. Common sense dictates that drinking and breathing cancer-causing agents will take their toll. The correlation is too strong to ignore, especially when we have other, cleaner energy options.”
“Emerging data from a rapidly expanding body of evidence continue to reveal a plethora of recurring problems and harms that cannot be sufficiently averted through regulatory frameworks.
“There is no evidence that fracking can operate without threatening public health directly or without imperiling climate stability upon which public health depends.”
So concludes a must-read 266-page report published yesterday by the Concerned Health Professionals of New York and the Nobel Peace Prize-winning group, Physicians for Social Responsibility.
The report examines over 1,200 peer-reviewed research articles as well as Government reports and news articles. The hard-hitting report argues that: “the evidence to date indicates that fracking operations pose severe threats to health, both from water contamination and from air pollution.”
Take water pollution and the vast amounts of toxic waste-water dumped daily underground. “In the United States, more than two billion gallons of water and fracking fluids are injected daily under high pressure into the earth for the purpose of enabling oil and gas extraction via fracking or, after the fracking is finished, to flush the extracted wastewater down any of the 187,570 disposal wells across the country that accept oil and gas waste.”
All of the two billion daily gallons of fluid is “toxic, and it passes through our nation’s groundwater aquifers on its way to the deep geological strata below where it demonstrably raises the risk for earthquakes.”
Air quality does not fair better, either. “In the air around drilling and fracking operations and their attendant infrastructure, researchers have measured strikingly high levels of toxic pollutants, including the potent carcinogen benzene and the chemical precursors of ground-level ozone (smog).”
The report adds: “In some cases, concentrations of fracking-related air pollutants in communities where people live and work exceed federal safety standards. Research shows that air emissions from fracking can drift and pollute the air hundreds of miles downwind.”
I have repeatedly blogged that the science was taking time to catch up with fracking. But there is increasing evidence of harm which cannot now be ignored. The science has caught up.
Dr. Sandra Steingraber, one of the report’s eight co-authors, tells Rolling Stone magazine, which has covered the release of the report:”With fracking, we had six peer reviewed articles in 2009 pointing to possible public health risks. By 2011 we had 42. Now there are more than 1200.”
Steingraber adds: “Fracking is the worst thing I’ve ever seen. Those of us in the public health sector started to realize years ago that there were potential risks, then the industry rolled out faster than we could do our science.”
“Now we see those risks have turned into human harms and people are getting sick,” Steingraber continues. “And we in this field have a moral imperative to raise the alarm.”
One of the main areas of concern is for vulnerable groups of people at risk from air pollution such as children and pregnant women.
“Pregnant women have a major risk, not only themselves but they’re carrying a fetus whose cells are multiplying continuously,” Dr. Lynn Ringenberg, a retired Army colonel and the president-elect of Physicians for Social Responsibility told Rolling Stone. “If those cells get hit by some toxic chemical from fracking, it may not manifest itself for years.”
Dr. Kathleen Nolan, a pediatrician and bioethicist who has worked with one Pennsylvania family near the shale gas fields. “They would see a yellow fog, kind of like a chemical mist coming from the compressor station,” Nolan told the magazine. “Their two youngest children, nine and 11, started having tics where their muscles would go into spasms, those spasms would persist even when they were asleep.”
There is also increasing evidence of harm to shale gas workers “These are killing jobs,” says report co-author Dr. Sandra Steingraber. “We have actually detected benzene in the urine of workers at levels known to raise the risks of leukemia.”
The report concludes with Maryland physician Judy Stone, who says: “Fracking profits go to private industry but the public—families and communities—bear the costs of the many health complications from the drilling.”
She adds: “There is growing evidence of a variety of health problems being associated with fracking. Common sense dictates that drinking and breathing cancer-causing agents will take their toll. The correlation is too strong to ignore, especially when we have other, cleaner energy options.”
Industry group draws scrutiny over barrage of fraudulent emails in South Carolina
Consumer Energy Alliance's tactics also questioned in Ohio and Wisconsin.
MARK HAND - think progress
FEB 21, 2018, 1:28 PM
South Carolina law enforcement officials have opened an investigation into emails that were sent to state lawmakers in support of a mega-merger between Dominion Energy and utility company SCANA Corp. Many of these emails — all based on the same template — used the names and addresses of people without their knowledge. The industry group that encouraged customers to tell state lawmakers they supported the merger says it had nothing to do with the falsified emails, despite a history of deceptive letter campaigns.
The Consumer Energy Alliance (CEA), a group with dozens of energy industry members including Dominion Energy, admitted the form letters in support of Dominion’s proposed acquisition of SCANA came from the group’s website. But David Holt, the president of the group, told The Post and Courier of Charleston, South Carolina, that his group was not involved with sending out the fraudulent emails.
South Carolina lawmakers received a barrage of form emails last week from constituents urging the legislators not to pass any laws that could kill the merger deal. Some of the people who supposedly sent the emails say they were impersonated. In response to a request from the South Carolina attorney general’s office, the State Law Enforcement Division on Tuesday opened an official investigation into the matter.
The CEA is an energy industry-funded advocacy group founded about a dozen years ago. In addition to major utility companies like Dominion, the group counts BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Marathon, and Shell as its members.
“It is unconscionable, if not illegal, to mislead legislators by falsifying emails from real South Carolina residents. And the state’s leaders shouldn’t have to wonder if every communication with a constituent is legitimate,” The Post and Courier, wrote in an editorial published Tuesday.
Holt, the group’s president, sent a letter to South Carolina’s attorney general explaining that the letter was part of a “grassroots campaign” conducted by the group “on behalf of electricity consumers in South Carolina.”
After Dominion announced its proposal to acquire SCANA in January, CEA contacted the company and asked if it could get involved in the public discussion about the merger in South Carolina. Dominion welcomed CEA’s offer to advocate on behalf of the deal, Dominion spokesperson Chet Wade told ThinkProgress. After CEA put together a draft of the form letter, the group provided Dominion with a copy so the company would know what would be sent to lawmakers, Wade said.
Dominion was “very discouraged and disappointed” when it learned about the fraudulent emails because it diverted attention from the policy discussions it is promoting in South Carolina about the proposed acquisition, according to Wade. “We don’t think there’s any room in public discourse for that kind of activity,” he added.
Matt Kasper, research director at the Energy & Policy Institute, told ThinkProgress that CEA cannot call its website a “grassroots vehicle” when it’s funded by corporations and associations. “It’s important public officials on the receiving end of these petitions understand it’s an astroturf campaign. A Dominion spokesperson even admitted that they have been in contact with CEA regarding the developments in South Carolina,” Kasper said.
This isn’t the first time CEA’s campaign tactics have been questioned. In 2014, the organization was caught submitting a fraudulent petition to the Public Service Commission (PSC) of Wisconsin that attacked net metering and defended utility companies’ fixed-rate increase proposals in Wisconsin. The petition claimed “changing the current rule will ensure that all ratepayers are treated fairly and electricity bills remain affordable.”
The group submitted names of 2,500 Wisconsin residents that “supported” the electric utility proposals. At the time, the Madison Capital Times revealed that certain people on the petition were in fact against the proposal. The Wisconsin PSC then dismissed the petition saying it would not be included in the record.
At the time, Robert Kelter, a senior attorney with the Environmental Law & Policy Center based in Chicago, argued that “if the only consequence from this is that the petition is thrown out, it’s certainly not a deterrent to CEA in how it handles public comments in other states and other proceedings.”
Similar to Dominion’s recent denial of knowledge of the emails in South Carolina, Madison Gas & Electric and We Energies, two utility companies opposed to net metering in Wisconsin, also denied involvement with the circulation of the misleading petition.
CEA also ran into trouble in Ohio in 2016 when a group of Ohio property owners asked the postal inspection service and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to conduct a criminal review of the group. CEA had sent 347 letters to FERC supportive of a pipeline proposed by Nexus Gas Transmission, using the names of local residents, including an Ohio man who has been dead since 1998.
Fourteen Ohio residents provided affidavits denying writing letters approving the pipeline as well as giving permission to CEA to write letters on their behalf. Spectra Energy, a partner in Nexus Gas Transmission, also is a member of CEA.
CEA works with all types of energy companies, from electric utilities to natural gas producers. Last year, the group launched a 12-state initiative called “Campaign for America’s Energy.” The campaign’s stated goal is to counter the message of anti-fracking and anti-pipeline activists.
For its South Carolina campaign, Michael Whatley, CEA’s executive vice president, said the group’s staff discovered irregularities with the email campaign last Friday. “We alerted the attorney general’s office first thing on Monday morning,” he said in a statement. “We stand behind our methodology in collecting comments — which is similar to the ways members of Congress and other advocacy groups collect comments.”
In early January, Dominion announced the agreement to acquire SCANA in a deal valued at approximately $14.6 billion. SCANA is hoping the deal is completed so it can move forward after it became mired in controversy over its decision to abandon a new nuclear plant project. Dominion’s CEO warned South Carolina officials that his company would withdraw its proposal to buy SCANA if legislators prevent it from recovering costs from customers for the failed nuclear project.
“As you consider legislation to address the failed V.C. Summer nuclear project, please work to find a solution that will allow significant upfront benefits, long-term stability, and lower rates for all South Carolina electricity users,” CEA wrote in its form letter for residents to send to legislators.
After Dominion announced the acquisition, environmental groups pointed out that the “take-it-or-leave-it deal falls far short of protecting ratepayers from absorbing the costs of the nuclear fiasco.”
The Consumer Energy Alliance (CEA), a group with dozens of energy industry members including Dominion Energy, admitted the form letters in support of Dominion’s proposed acquisition of SCANA came from the group’s website. But David Holt, the president of the group, told The Post and Courier of Charleston, South Carolina, that his group was not involved with sending out the fraudulent emails.
South Carolina lawmakers received a barrage of form emails last week from constituents urging the legislators not to pass any laws that could kill the merger deal. Some of the people who supposedly sent the emails say they were impersonated. In response to a request from the South Carolina attorney general’s office, the State Law Enforcement Division on Tuesday opened an official investigation into the matter.
The CEA is an energy industry-funded advocacy group founded about a dozen years ago. In addition to major utility companies like Dominion, the group counts BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Marathon, and Shell as its members.
“It is unconscionable, if not illegal, to mislead legislators by falsifying emails from real South Carolina residents. And the state’s leaders shouldn’t have to wonder if every communication with a constituent is legitimate,” The Post and Courier, wrote in an editorial published Tuesday.
Holt, the group’s president, sent a letter to South Carolina’s attorney general explaining that the letter was part of a “grassroots campaign” conducted by the group “on behalf of electricity consumers in South Carolina.”
After Dominion announced its proposal to acquire SCANA in January, CEA contacted the company and asked if it could get involved in the public discussion about the merger in South Carolina. Dominion welcomed CEA’s offer to advocate on behalf of the deal, Dominion spokesperson Chet Wade told ThinkProgress. After CEA put together a draft of the form letter, the group provided Dominion with a copy so the company would know what would be sent to lawmakers, Wade said.
Dominion was “very discouraged and disappointed” when it learned about the fraudulent emails because it diverted attention from the policy discussions it is promoting in South Carolina about the proposed acquisition, according to Wade. “We don’t think there’s any room in public discourse for that kind of activity,” he added.
Matt Kasper, research director at the Energy & Policy Institute, told ThinkProgress that CEA cannot call its website a “grassroots vehicle” when it’s funded by corporations and associations. “It’s important public officials on the receiving end of these petitions understand it’s an astroturf campaign. A Dominion spokesperson even admitted that they have been in contact with CEA regarding the developments in South Carolina,” Kasper said.
This isn’t the first time CEA’s campaign tactics have been questioned. In 2014, the organization was caught submitting a fraudulent petition to the Public Service Commission (PSC) of Wisconsin that attacked net metering and defended utility companies’ fixed-rate increase proposals in Wisconsin. The petition claimed “changing the current rule will ensure that all ratepayers are treated fairly and electricity bills remain affordable.”
The group submitted names of 2,500 Wisconsin residents that “supported” the electric utility proposals. At the time, the Madison Capital Times revealed that certain people on the petition were in fact against the proposal. The Wisconsin PSC then dismissed the petition saying it would not be included in the record.
At the time, Robert Kelter, a senior attorney with the Environmental Law & Policy Center based in Chicago, argued that “if the only consequence from this is that the petition is thrown out, it’s certainly not a deterrent to CEA in how it handles public comments in other states and other proceedings.”
Similar to Dominion’s recent denial of knowledge of the emails in South Carolina, Madison Gas & Electric and We Energies, two utility companies opposed to net metering in Wisconsin, also denied involvement with the circulation of the misleading petition.
CEA also ran into trouble in Ohio in 2016 when a group of Ohio property owners asked the postal inspection service and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to conduct a criminal review of the group. CEA had sent 347 letters to FERC supportive of a pipeline proposed by Nexus Gas Transmission, using the names of local residents, including an Ohio man who has been dead since 1998.
Fourteen Ohio residents provided affidavits denying writing letters approving the pipeline as well as giving permission to CEA to write letters on their behalf. Spectra Energy, a partner in Nexus Gas Transmission, also is a member of CEA.
CEA works with all types of energy companies, from electric utilities to natural gas producers. Last year, the group launched a 12-state initiative called “Campaign for America’s Energy.” The campaign’s stated goal is to counter the message of anti-fracking and anti-pipeline activists.
For its South Carolina campaign, Michael Whatley, CEA’s executive vice president, said the group’s staff discovered irregularities with the email campaign last Friday. “We alerted the attorney general’s office first thing on Monday morning,” he said in a statement. “We stand behind our methodology in collecting comments — which is similar to the ways members of Congress and other advocacy groups collect comments.”
In early January, Dominion announced the agreement to acquire SCANA in a deal valued at approximately $14.6 billion. SCANA is hoping the deal is completed so it can move forward after it became mired in controversy over its decision to abandon a new nuclear plant project. Dominion’s CEO warned South Carolina officials that his company would withdraw its proposal to buy SCANA if legislators prevent it from recovering costs from customers for the failed nuclear project.
“As you consider legislation to address the failed V.C. Summer nuclear project, please work to find a solution that will allow significant upfront benefits, long-term stability, and lower rates for all South Carolina electricity users,” CEA wrote in its form letter for residents to send to legislators.
After Dominion announced the acquisition, environmental groups pointed out that the “take-it-or-leave-it deal falls far short of protecting ratepayers from absorbing the costs of the nuclear fiasco.”
The dark side of America's rise to oil superpower
Bloomberg
Javier Blas
The last time U.S. drillers pumped 10 million barrels of crude a day, Richard Nixon was in the White House. The first oil crisis hadn’t yet scared Americans into buying Toyotas, and fracking was an experimental technique a handful of engineers were trying, with meager success, to popularize. It was 1970, and oil sold for $1.80 a barrel.
Almost five decades later, with oil hovering near $65 a barrel, daily U.S. crude output is about to hit the eight-digit mark again. It’s a significant milestone on the way to fulfilling a dream that a generation ago seemed far-fetched: By the end of the year, the U.S. may well be the world’s biggest oil producer. With that, America takes a big step toward energy independence.
The U.S. crowing from the top of a hill long occupied by Saudi Arabia or Russia would scramble geopolitics. A new world energy order could emerge. That shuffling will be good for America but not so much for the planet.
For one, the influence of one of the most powerful forces of the past half-century, the modern petrostate, would be diminished. No longer would “America First” diplomats need to tiptoe around oil-supplying nations such as Saudi Arabia. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries would find it tougher to agree on production guidelines, and lower prices could result, reopening old wounds in the cartel. That would take some muscle out of Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy, while Russia’s oligarchs would find it more difficult to maintain the lifestyles to which they’ve become accustomed.
President Donald Trump, sensing an opportunity, is looking past independence to what he calls energy dominance. His administration plans to open vast ocean acreage to offshore exploration and for the first time in 40 years allow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It may take years to tap, but the Alaska payoff alone is eye-popping—an estimated 11.8 billion barrels of technically recoverable crude.
It sounds good, but be careful what you wish for. The last three years have been the hottest since recordkeeping began in the 19th century, and there’s little room in Trump’s plan for energy sources that treat the planet kindly. Governors of coastal states have already pointed out that an offshore spill could devastate tourism—another trillion-dollar industry—not to mention wreck fragile littoral environments. Florida has already applied for a waiver from such drilling.
More supply could lower prices, in turn discouraging investments in renewables such as solar and wind. Those tend to spike when oil prices rise, so enthusiasm for nonpolluting, nonwarming energies of the future could wane.
For now, though, the petroleum train is chugging. And you can thank the resilience of the U.S. shale industry for it.
Shale’s triumph seemed impossible a few years ago. In late 2014, Saudi Arabia targeted rivals, including American drillers. Rather than cutting production to keep prices high, Saudi Arabia persuaded OPEC to open the taps, sending prices lower than $40 a barrel in December, down from more than $100 a barrel just four months previous. The Saudis were hoping to starve the shale revolution. At first, they seemed poised to succeed, like they had in the past. U.S. production fell from a peak of 9.6 million barrels a day to 8.5 million barrels a day. Bankruptcies riddled shale patches from Texas’ Permian Basin to the Bakken Formation in North Dakota, and tens of thousands of workers lost their jobs.
Rather than declare defeat, shale companies dug in, slashing costs and borrowing like crazy to keep drilling. By late 2016 the Saudis blinked. They persuaded OPEC and the Russians to cut output. Slowly, steadily, West Texas Intermediate, the oil benchmark traded in New York, rose from $26 a barrel in February 2016 to where it lingers today.
What didn’t kill shale drillers made them stronger. The survivors have transformed themselves into leaner, faster versions that can thrive even at lower oil prices. Shale isn’t any longer just about grit, sweat, and luck. Technology is key. Geologists use smartphones to direct drilling, and companies are putting in longer and longer wells. At current prices, drillers can walk and chew gum at the same time—lifting production and profits simultaneously.
Fracking—blasting water and sand deep underground to free oil from shale rock — has improved, too. It’s what many call Shale 2.0. And it’s not just the risk-taking pioneers who dominated the first phase of the revolution, such as Trump friend Harold Hamm of Continental Resources Inc., who are benefiting from the surge. Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp., and other major oil groups are joining the rush. U.S. shale is “seemingly on steroids,” says Amrita Sen, chief oil analyst at consultant Energy Aspects Ltd. in London. “The market remains enchanted by the ability of shale producers to adapt to lower prices and to continue to grow.”
The results are historic. In October, American net imports of crude and refined products dropped below 2.5 million barrels a day, the lowest since official data were first collected in 1973. A decade ago, U.S. net oil imports stood at more than 12 million barrels a day. “For the last 40 years, since the Arab oil embargo, we’ve had a mindset of energy scarcity,” says Jason Bordoff, founding director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University and a former Obama administration official. “As a result of the shale revolution, the U.S. has emerged as an energy superpower.”
For OPEC, the emergent superpower presents an unprecedented challenge. If the cartel cuts production, shale drillers can respond by boosting output, stealing market share from OPEC nations and undermining their effort to manipulate prices. The only solution for OPEC is to prolong the limits, as it’s doing now, and hope for the best. If cooperation between OPEC and Russia breaks down, it’s not impossible that OPEC breaks down, too.
If Shale 2.0 output keeps prices low, Russia would be a big loser. Moscow has used oil revenue to finance aggressive foreign intervention from Ukraine to Syria. The only solution is to continue cooperating with Saudi Arabia on keeping production low — not something the oligarchs relish.
With shale surging, U.S. imports of Saudi oil plunged to a 30-year low last year. The turnabout makes China and Japan far more dependent than the U.S. on the Middle East. It’s now possible for the U.S. to argue that other countries should help shoulder the burden of policing the shipping lanes leading to Middle Eastern and North African oil exporters.
Yet not all traffic lights are green for the U.S. It’s not immune from the ups and downs of the world market. When the price rises because of, say, political upheaval in the Middle East, it doesn’t matter where you are and how much you pump. The price rises in America, too.
There’s another problem: Shale 2.0 could hurt refiners. Shale oil is too good. For years, refiners spent billions of dollars on special equipment to process the dense, high-sulphur, low-quality crudes coming from Mexico, Venezuela, Canada and Saudi Arabia. The quality of shale oil is so high that it yields little diesel, the fuel that powers manufacturing.
Such limitations may be mere speed bumps. But U.S. dominance is far from a panacea. It won’t reverse climate change. It won’t lessen the political influence of fossil-fuel producers in Washington. Nor will it completely neutralize the political influence of erratic petrostates.
With demand rising despite the emergence of renewables and the development of electric vehicles, shale may struggle to keep pace with global consumption. There’s a chance the world will witness that rarest of market loop-de-loops — high oil prices as well as rising U.S. production.
Saudi Arabia and Russia could then remain formidable obstacles to U.S. energy independence. They would be crowing from the top of the hill even as they keep a wary eye on America’s shale drillers.
These are troubles that would have been an embarrassment of riches for Americans who had to wait in line to fill up in the 1970s, when the U.S. determining its own energy future was just a dream. Any celebration over this accomplishment ignores the evidence that such dependence on fossil fuels is no independence at all.
Almost five decades later, with oil hovering near $65 a barrel, daily U.S. crude output is about to hit the eight-digit mark again. It’s a significant milestone on the way to fulfilling a dream that a generation ago seemed far-fetched: By the end of the year, the U.S. may well be the world’s biggest oil producer. With that, America takes a big step toward energy independence.
The U.S. crowing from the top of a hill long occupied by Saudi Arabia or Russia would scramble geopolitics. A new world energy order could emerge. That shuffling will be good for America but not so much for the planet.
For one, the influence of one of the most powerful forces of the past half-century, the modern petrostate, would be diminished. No longer would “America First” diplomats need to tiptoe around oil-supplying nations such as Saudi Arabia. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries would find it tougher to agree on production guidelines, and lower prices could result, reopening old wounds in the cartel. That would take some muscle out of Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy, while Russia’s oligarchs would find it more difficult to maintain the lifestyles to which they’ve become accustomed.
President Donald Trump, sensing an opportunity, is looking past independence to what he calls energy dominance. His administration plans to open vast ocean acreage to offshore exploration and for the first time in 40 years allow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It may take years to tap, but the Alaska payoff alone is eye-popping—an estimated 11.8 billion barrels of technically recoverable crude.
It sounds good, but be careful what you wish for. The last three years have been the hottest since recordkeeping began in the 19th century, and there’s little room in Trump’s plan for energy sources that treat the planet kindly. Governors of coastal states have already pointed out that an offshore spill could devastate tourism—another trillion-dollar industry—not to mention wreck fragile littoral environments. Florida has already applied for a waiver from such drilling.
More supply could lower prices, in turn discouraging investments in renewables such as solar and wind. Those tend to spike when oil prices rise, so enthusiasm for nonpolluting, nonwarming energies of the future could wane.
For now, though, the petroleum train is chugging. And you can thank the resilience of the U.S. shale industry for it.
Shale’s triumph seemed impossible a few years ago. In late 2014, Saudi Arabia targeted rivals, including American drillers. Rather than cutting production to keep prices high, Saudi Arabia persuaded OPEC to open the taps, sending prices lower than $40 a barrel in December, down from more than $100 a barrel just four months previous. The Saudis were hoping to starve the shale revolution. At first, they seemed poised to succeed, like they had in the past. U.S. production fell from a peak of 9.6 million barrels a day to 8.5 million barrels a day. Bankruptcies riddled shale patches from Texas’ Permian Basin to the Bakken Formation in North Dakota, and tens of thousands of workers lost their jobs.
Rather than declare defeat, shale companies dug in, slashing costs and borrowing like crazy to keep drilling. By late 2016 the Saudis blinked. They persuaded OPEC and the Russians to cut output. Slowly, steadily, West Texas Intermediate, the oil benchmark traded in New York, rose from $26 a barrel in February 2016 to where it lingers today.
What didn’t kill shale drillers made them stronger. The survivors have transformed themselves into leaner, faster versions that can thrive even at lower oil prices. Shale isn’t any longer just about grit, sweat, and luck. Technology is key. Geologists use smartphones to direct drilling, and companies are putting in longer and longer wells. At current prices, drillers can walk and chew gum at the same time—lifting production and profits simultaneously.
Fracking—blasting water and sand deep underground to free oil from shale rock — has improved, too. It’s what many call Shale 2.0. And it’s not just the risk-taking pioneers who dominated the first phase of the revolution, such as Trump friend Harold Hamm of Continental Resources Inc., who are benefiting from the surge. Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp., and other major oil groups are joining the rush. U.S. shale is “seemingly on steroids,” says Amrita Sen, chief oil analyst at consultant Energy Aspects Ltd. in London. “The market remains enchanted by the ability of shale producers to adapt to lower prices and to continue to grow.”
The results are historic. In October, American net imports of crude and refined products dropped below 2.5 million barrels a day, the lowest since official data were first collected in 1973. A decade ago, U.S. net oil imports stood at more than 12 million barrels a day. “For the last 40 years, since the Arab oil embargo, we’ve had a mindset of energy scarcity,” says Jason Bordoff, founding director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University and a former Obama administration official. “As a result of the shale revolution, the U.S. has emerged as an energy superpower.”
For OPEC, the emergent superpower presents an unprecedented challenge. If the cartel cuts production, shale drillers can respond by boosting output, stealing market share from OPEC nations and undermining their effort to manipulate prices. The only solution for OPEC is to prolong the limits, as it’s doing now, and hope for the best. If cooperation between OPEC and Russia breaks down, it’s not impossible that OPEC breaks down, too.
If Shale 2.0 output keeps prices low, Russia would be a big loser. Moscow has used oil revenue to finance aggressive foreign intervention from Ukraine to Syria. The only solution is to continue cooperating with Saudi Arabia on keeping production low — not something the oligarchs relish.
With shale surging, U.S. imports of Saudi oil plunged to a 30-year low last year. The turnabout makes China and Japan far more dependent than the U.S. on the Middle East. It’s now possible for the U.S. to argue that other countries should help shoulder the burden of policing the shipping lanes leading to Middle Eastern and North African oil exporters.
Yet not all traffic lights are green for the U.S. It’s not immune from the ups and downs of the world market. When the price rises because of, say, political upheaval in the Middle East, it doesn’t matter where you are and how much you pump. The price rises in America, too.
There’s another problem: Shale 2.0 could hurt refiners. Shale oil is too good. For years, refiners spent billions of dollars on special equipment to process the dense, high-sulphur, low-quality crudes coming from Mexico, Venezuela, Canada and Saudi Arabia. The quality of shale oil is so high that it yields little diesel, the fuel that powers manufacturing.
Such limitations may be mere speed bumps. But U.S. dominance is far from a panacea. It won’t reverse climate change. It won’t lessen the political influence of fossil-fuel producers in Washington. Nor will it completely neutralize the political influence of erratic petrostates.
With demand rising despite the emergence of renewables and the development of electric vehicles, shale may struggle to keep pace with global consumption. There’s a chance the world will witness that rarest of market loop-de-loops — high oil prices as well as rising U.S. production.
Saudi Arabia and Russia could then remain formidable obstacles to U.S. energy independence. They would be crowing from the top of the hill even as they keep a wary eye on America’s shale drillers.
These are troubles that would have been an embarrassment of riches for Americans who had to wait in line to fill up in the 1970s, when the U.S. determining its own energy future was just a dream. Any celebration over this accomplishment ignores the evidence that such dependence on fossil fuels is no independence at all.
Rover Pipeline Spills Another 150,000 Gallons of Drilling Fluid Into Ohio Wetlands
Lorraine Chow - eco watch
Energy Transfer Partners' troubled $4.2 billion Rover pipeline has spilled nearly 150,000 gallons of drilling fluid into wetlands near the Tuscarawas River in Stark County, Ohio—the same site where it released 2 million gallons in April.
The 713-mile pipeline, which will carry fracked gas across Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio and Michigan and Canada, is currently under construction by the same Dallas-based company that built the controversial Dakota Access pipeline.
Horizontal directional drilling work to lay the pipe beneath highways and rivers was temporarily halted in the wake of the major April spill, but work was allowed to resume in December. Energy Transfer Partners said it is continuing to follow a plan approved by the federal government and the state EPA, WOSU reported.
According to Kallanish Energy, the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency inspected the horizontal directional drilling site on Jan. 10 and reported 146,000 gallons of drilling fluids "lost down the hole," referring to the pilot hole installation under the Tuscarawas River. Three attempts to seal the hole have failed, the state agency said. No inadvertent returns have been detected.
Energy Transfer Partners is currently flying drones around the site to monitor the situation.
The Ohio EPA said it "intends to closely monitor this situation if loss of returns continues" and pledged to work directly with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on "the next course of action."
In September, Energy Transfer Partners was fined $2.3 million for numerous water and air pollution violations across Ohio. Over the last two years, the Rover pipeline has racked up more "noncompliance incidents" than any other interstate gas pipeline.
The 713-mile pipeline, which will carry fracked gas across Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio and Michigan and Canada, is currently under construction by the same Dallas-based company that built the controversial Dakota Access pipeline.
Horizontal directional drilling work to lay the pipe beneath highways and rivers was temporarily halted in the wake of the major April spill, but work was allowed to resume in December. Energy Transfer Partners said it is continuing to follow a plan approved by the federal government and the state EPA, WOSU reported.
According to Kallanish Energy, the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency inspected the horizontal directional drilling site on Jan. 10 and reported 146,000 gallons of drilling fluids "lost down the hole," referring to the pilot hole installation under the Tuscarawas River. Three attempts to seal the hole have failed, the state agency said. No inadvertent returns have been detected.
Energy Transfer Partners is currently flying drones around the site to monitor the situation.
The Ohio EPA said it "intends to closely monitor this situation if loss of returns continues" and pledged to work directly with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on "the next course of action."
In September, Energy Transfer Partners was fined $2.3 million for numerous water and air pollution violations across Ohio. Over the last two years, the Rover pipeline has racked up more "noncompliance incidents" than any other interstate gas pipeline.
Exposed: Chevron Has a Secretive Drilling Site in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
The GOP and Big Oil are yearning to turn this pristine wilderness into an industrial profit mill.
By Jonathan Rosenblum / AlterNet January 10, 2018, 8:30 PM GMT
Chevron's KIC-1 post at the company's secretive test well. (image: Jonathan Rosenblum)
...Wedged into last month’s $1.5 billion tax cut law, which benefits mostly the 1 percent, is a provision opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to commercial oil drilling.
After decades of being denied access to the refuge, the oil companies have achieved a legislative milestone. And absent a movement of popular resistance combined with legal action, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge will join the growing list of places around the world plundered by CEOs and a political elite who put profits before people and the planet. We can and must stop them.
Approaching the post we saw that it was a solid iron column, welded with the letters, “CHEVRON USA INC.” This was the KIC-1 drilling site, the secretive test well Chevron was allowed to drill in 1986. Crews bored three miles down, at a cost of $40 million, before capping the site, dismantling the drilling platform, and going home.
Chevron executives know what the well found, but they aren’t telling. Years ago, a court gave the company the right to withhold the information from the public.
Even with Chevron’s claim to have remediated the site, half-buried construction trash surrounds the post: Metal cans and grating, cloth, wood, and glass bottles, all of it ever-so-slowly deteriorating in the cold, dry Arctic. Trash does not compost up there—it lingers on.
Compared to the surrounding permafrost marshes, which were teeming with grasses, flowers, and low shrubs, the land around the drilling site was mostly a bare brown, compacted from the weight of heavy vehicles and machinery that visited a generation earlier.
---
For comparison, you could just look 120 miles west of Tapkaurak, at the Prudhoe Bay oil fields and the 800-mile pipeline that extends from the fields to the south through Alaska. Those fields and pipeline at one point averaged 500 oil spills a year.
It’s no wonder that 70 percent of Americans, including a majority of Republicans, oppose drilling in the Arctic refuge.
The Trump administration’s Christmas gift isn’t intended for anyone but a very narrow band of one percenters—Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, who conditioned her tax bill “aye” vote to the Arctic drilling proviso, and the CEOs and major shareholders of Big Oil, who salivate at the idea of opening up the Arctic refuge to their profiteering.
Yet even with the passage of the law, resistance is not futile; indeed, it must be redoubled and join up with other fights to save the environment from oil profiteers. Two years ago, Shell Oil executives, facing a growing movement of mounting, creative protests and negative publicity, pulled their drilling operations out of the western Alaskan Chukchi Sea.
The Native American-led DefundDAPL movement has persuaded cities, organizations, tribes and individuals to withdraw more than $4 billion from Wells Fargo Bank because of its funding of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Three European banks pulled their funding for DAPL after the mass demonstrations at Standing Rock.
Now, a broad coalition of Native American and First Nation activists, including the DefundDAPL leadership, has launched a divestment campaign aimed at funders of proposed tar sands pipelines in Canada. Through direct actions, including militant bank office takeovers, the movement is building public awareness and pressing banks to withhold capital from these controversial projects.
Activist leaders recognize the need for hardball tactics.
“Big Oil, multinational corporations, and their financial backers are not persuaded by moral and environmental arguments,” explained Matt Remle, a Lakota Nation leader and co-founder of Mazaska Talks (“Mazaska” is a Lakota word for money). “They're capitalist and they are persuaded by one thing, money."
Just last month, activists pushed the Los Angeles City Council to disqualify Wells Fargo from doing business with the city.
These boycott movements, led by native peoples and environmental groups like 350.org, are just getting going.
Now, with the latest congressional action, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge joins the list of places to defend with organizing, boycotts and direct action, in addition to legal challenges.
Big Oil and their political patrons are counting on the reality that few people outside of the native Inupiat and the occasional kayak tourist will ever get a chance to stand at Tapkaurak Point and take in the splendor of the surrounding wilderness, or stand in silent awe in the burial ground of a people who lived in harmony with the arctic since before the time of King Solomon, Jesus of Nazareth, or the Prophet Mohammed. Only a handful of us will ever spy that ominous totem standing in the near distance of the Arctic plain, warning us that this all could go away in a handful of years.
But you don’t have to go there to recognize that what’s at stake is a lot more than the risk of scarred ground, ruined vistas, desecrated gravesites, and a polluted wilderness. Rather, the destruction of the Arctic refuge would stand as a totem to the triumph of the capitalist drive for profit over the humane stewardship of our planet. We must not let that happen.
After decades of being denied access to the refuge, the oil companies have achieved a legislative milestone. And absent a movement of popular resistance combined with legal action, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge will join the growing list of places around the world plundered by CEOs and a political elite who put profits before people and the planet. We can and must stop them.
Approaching the post we saw that it was a solid iron column, welded with the letters, “CHEVRON USA INC.” This was the KIC-1 drilling site, the secretive test well Chevron was allowed to drill in 1986. Crews bored three miles down, at a cost of $40 million, before capping the site, dismantling the drilling platform, and going home.
Chevron executives know what the well found, but they aren’t telling. Years ago, a court gave the company the right to withhold the information from the public.
Even with Chevron’s claim to have remediated the site, half-buried construction trash surrounds the post: Metal cans and grating, cloth, wood, and glass bottles, all of it ever-so-slowly deteriorating in the cold, dry Arctic. Trash does not compost up there—it lingers on.
Compared to the surrounding permafrost marshes, which were teeming with grasses, flowers, and low shrubs, the land around the drilling site was mostly a bare brown, compacted from the weight of heavy vehicles and machinery that visited a generation earlier.
---
For comparison, you could just look 120 miles west of Tapkaurak, at the Prudhoe Bay oil fields and the 800-mile pipeline that extends from the fields to the south through Alaska. Those fields and pipeline at one point averaged 500 oil spills a year.
It’s no wonder that 70 percent of Americans, including a majority of Republicans, oppose drilling in the Arctic refuge.
The Trump administration’s Christmas gift isn’t intended for anyone but a very narrow band of one percenters—Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, who conditioned her tax bill “aye” vote to the Arctic drilling proviso, and the CEOs and major shareholders of Big Oil, who salivate at the idea of opening up the Arctic refuge to their profiteering.
Yet even with the passage of the law, resistance is not futile; indeed, it must be redoubled and join up with other fights to save the environment from oil profiteers. Two years ago, Shell Oil executives, facing a growing movement of mounting, creative protests and negative publicity, pulled their drilling operations out of the western Alaskan Chukchi Sea.
The Native American-led DefundDAPL movement has persuaded cities, organizations, tribes and individuals to withdraw more than $4 billion from Wells Fargo Bank because of its funding of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Three European banks pulled their funding for DAPL after the mass demonstrations at Standing Rock.
Now, a broad coalition of Native American and First Nation activists, including the DefundDAPL leadership, has launched a divestment campaign aimed at funders of proposed tar sands pipelines in Canada. Through direct actions, including militant bank office takeovers, the movement is building public awareness and pressing banks to withhold capital from these controversial projects.
Activist leaders recognize the need for hardball tactics.
“Big Oil, multinational corporations, and their financial backers are not persuaded by moral and environmental arguments,” explained Matt Remle, a Lakota Nation leader and co-founder of Mazaska Talks (“Mazaska” is a Lakota word for money). “They're capitalist and they are persuaded by one thing, money."
Just last month, activists pushed the Los Angeles City Council to disqualify Wells Fargo from doing business with the city.
These boycott movements, led by native peoples and environmental groups like 350.org, are just getting going.
Now, with the latest congressional action, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge joins the list of places to defend with organizing, boycotts and direct action, in addition to legal challenges.
Big Oil and their political patrons are counting on the reality that few people outside of the native Inupiat and the occasional kayak tourist will ever get a chance to stand at Tapkaurak Point and take in the splendor of the surrounding wilderness, or stand in silent awe in the burial ground of a people who lived in harmony with the arctic since before the time of King Solomon, Jesus of Nazareth, or the Prophet Mohammed. Only a handful of us will ever spy that ominous totem standing in the near distance of the Arctic plain, warning us that this all could go away in a handful of years.
But you don’t have to go there to recognize that what’s at stake is a lot more than the risk of scarred ground, ruined vistas, desecrated gravesites, and a polluted wilderness. Rather, the destruction of the Arctic refuge would stand as a totem to the triumph of the capitalist drive for profit over the humane stewardship of our planet. We must not let that happen.
Pennsylvania stops Energy Transfer Partners pipeline project after list of violations grows too long
Suspension of pipeline construction was the only option, DEP says.
MARK HAND - think progress
JAN 3, 2018, 4:54 PM
Pennsylvania is known for a shoot-first-ask-questions-later approach to energy regulatory policy. Officials warmly welcomed companies that wanted to drill wells into the Marcellus Shale, for instance, even before health and environmental experts had a chance to examine the potential impacts of fracking across the state.
Pennsylvania lawmakers and regulators also created an industry-friendly regulatory environment for pipeline developers. Officials were forced to jettison that approach on Wednesday, however, when they ordered Energy Transfer Partners subsidiary Sunoco Pipeline LP to immediately cease construction of the Mariner East 2 pipeline due to “egregious and willful violations” of safety and environmental laws.
Controversy had plagued the Mariner East 2 project every step of the way, from numerous construction mishaps, spills, and violations to hiring a private security firm to conduct surveillance of landowners opposed to the pipeline crossing their land. Energy Transfer Partners’ other projects, most notably the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota, have drawn similar scrutiny from regulators and pipeline opponents.
In its order, DEP officials emphasized that Sunoco’s “unlawful conduct” demonstrates “a lack of ability or intention” by the company to comply with the Clean Streams Law, the Dam Safety and Encroachments Act, and other conditions in its pipeline construction permit.
From the beginning of the project, local residents along the pipeline route warned that Mariner East 2 would damage their property, cause pollution, and impact private water supplies. “DEP’s decision to suspend the permits required for construction affirms that the concerns raised by these community members were valid, and that the pipeline should never have been approved in the first place,” Sierra Club Pennsylvania Chapter Director Joanne Kilgour said in a statement Wednesday.
The DEP had given Sunoco plenty of opportunities to clean up its act. But suspension of the pipeline permit was necessary because other enforcement procedures, penalties, or remedies “would not be adequate” to get Sunoco to follow the rules, given the company’s history of noncompliance with the law, the department said.
The pipeline, costing more than $2.5 billion, is designed to carry propane, ethane, and butane some 350 miles from the Marcellus Shale of southwest Pennsylvania to an export terminal at Marcus Hook near Philadelphia. In a controversial decision, the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission (PUC) in 2014 recognized Sunoco and its Mariner Pipeline as a public utility, with the right to use eminent domain to condemn properties of landowners in Pennsylvania.
During the just-announced halt in the construction process, residents and regulators should remain vigilant because Energy Transfer Partners “has worked in secret on unauthorized portions of the project,” Elise Gerhart, whose family owns property through which the pipeline travels, said in a statement in response to the DEP’s order. Gerhart is co-founder of Camp White Pine, a group started to prevent the completion of the Mariner East 2 pipeline.
For years, the Gerhart family has been fighting the pipeline project. In September, the family filed a lawsuit against Sunoco, plus a private security firm and more than two dozen state and local police officers, for violating constitutional protections when members of the family and their supporters were arrested on the property owned by the Gerhart family in March 2016.
Energy Transfer Partners had hired TigerSwan, a private security firm, to conduct “surveillance, monitoring, social media engagement, and counter-intelligence” on the Mariner East 2 protesters, as it did with the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota in 2016.
Sunoco violated the conditions of its pipeline permit numerous times but was always allowed to proceed with construction — until now. In September, for example, the DEP said Sunoco violated a court-brokered agreement imposing new restrictions on drilling for the pipeline when it spilled drilling mud into at least three waterways. But the DEP did not tell the company to halt construction.
In October, three environmental groups — Clean Air Council, Delaware Riverkeeper Network, and the Mountain Watershed Association — filed a motion for summary judgment with the Pennsylvania Environmental Hearing Board to revoke certain permits for the pipeline on the grounds that the pipeline would violate state law by crossing “exceptional value” wetlands unnecessarily, that Sunoco violated anti-degradation law for those wetlands, and that the DEP issued permits without receiving a storm water management plan from Sunoco.
Also in October, the Pennsylvania PUC halted Sunoco’s plans to build a valve and associated equipment on private land in Chester County on the basis that the construction breached a settlement agreement between West Goshen Township, Pennsylvania, and the company. Work on the rest of the pipeline, however, was allowed to continue.
Within 10 days of the January 3 order, Sunoco must backfill all areas of pipeline trench excavation, unless it can provide sufficient justification for an extension of time. In the same period, the company also must remove drill bit and other equipment from any unpermitted horizontal directional drilling activities unless it gets DEP approval to leave the equipment in place.
Sunoco’s parent company, Energy Transfer Partners, also put in a dismal environmental performance in 2017. The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality issued a violation notice against Energy Transfer Partners in October for dumping petroleum-contaminated water into a wetland during construction of the Rover Pipeline. In November, the state of Ohio filed a lawsuit against Rover Pipeline, operated and majority-owned by Energy Transfer Partners, for allegedly polluting state waterways as it constructs a 713-mile pipeline to transport natural gas from southwest Pennsylvania across Ohio and into Michigan and Ontario, Canada.
Gerhart said the DEP’s order does not hold Energy Transfer Partners accountable for the damage it has already done to private property and the environment during the construction of Mariner East 2. “It does not bring clean water to those who have already lost it. It does not bring justice to those whose rights have been violated, including our environment,” she said. “Now is not the time to sit back and bask in a false sense of relief. It’s a time to push back with everything we have left.”
A Sunoco spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In a statement to The Inquirer, though, the company said it is confident it will soon be allowed to resume work on the project. The company also expressed its “dedication to preserving and protecting the environment in which we conduct our work.”
Pennsylvania lawmakers and regulators also created an industry-friendly regulatory environment for pipeline developers. Officials were forced to jettison that approach on Wednesday, however, when they ordered Energy Transfer Partners subsidiary Sunoco Pipeline LP to immediately cease construction of the Mariner East 2 pipeline due to “egregious and willful violations” of safety and environmental laws.
Controversy had plagued the Mariner East 2 project every step of the way, from numerous construction mishaps, spills, and violations to hiring a private security firm to conduct surveillance of landowners opposed to the pipeline crossing their land. Energy Transfer Partners’ other projects, most notably the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota, have drawn similar scrutiny from regulators and pipeline opponents.
In its order, DEP officials emphasized that Sunoco’s “unlawful conduct” demonstrates “a lack of ability or intention” by the company to comply with the Clean Streams Law, the Dam Safety and Encroachments Act, and other conditions in its pipeline construction permit.
From the beginning of the project, local residents along the pipeline route warned that Mariner East 2 would damage their property, cause pollution, and impact private water supplies. “DEP’s decision to suspend the permits required for construction affirms that the concerns raised by these community members were valid, and that the pipeline should never have been approved in the first place,” Sierra Club Pennsylvania Chapter Director Joanne Kilgour said in a statement Wednesday.
The DEP had given Sunoco plenty of opportunities to clean up its act. But suspension of the pipeline permit was necessary because other enforcement procedures, penalties, or remedies “would not be adequate” to get Sunoco to follow the rules, given the company’s history of noncompliance with the law, the department said.
The pipeline, costing more than $2.5 billion, is designed to carry propane, ethane, and butane some 350 miles from the Marcellus Shale of southwest Pennsylvania to an export terminal at Marcus Hook near Philadelphia. In a controversial decision, the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission (PUC) in 2014 recognized Sunoco and its Mariner Pipeline as a public utility, with the right to use eminent domain to condemn properties of landowners in Pennsylvania.
During the just-announced halt in the construction process, residents and regulators should remain vigilant because Energy Transfer Partners “has worked in secret on unauthorized portions of the project,” Elise Gerhart, whose family owns property through which the pipeline travels, said in a statement in response to the DEP’s order. Gerhart is co-founder of Camp White Pine, a group started to prevent the completion of the Mariner East 2 pipeline.
For years, the Gerhart family has been fighting the pipeline project. In September, the family filed a lawsuit against Sunoco, plus a private security firm and more than two dozen state and local police officers, for violating constitutional protections when members of the family and their supporters were arrested on the property owned by the Gerhart family in March 2016.
Energy Transfer Partners had hired TigerSwan, a private security firm, to conduct “surveillance, monitoring, social media engagement, and counter-intelligence” on the Mariner East 2 protesters, as it did with the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota in 2016.
Sunoco violated the conditions of its pipeline permit numerous times but was always allowed to proceed with construction — until now. In September, for example, the DEP said Sunoco violated a court-brokered agreement imposing new restrictions on drilling for the pipeline when it spilled drilling mud into at least three waterways. But the DEP did not tell the company to halt construction.
In October, three environmental groups — Clean Air Council, Delaware Riverkeeper Network, and the Mountain Watershed Association — filed a motion for summary judgment with the Pennsylvania Environmental Hearing Board to revoke certain permits for the pipeline on the grounds that the pipeline would violate state law by crossing “exceptional value” wetlands unnecessarily, that Sunoco violated anti-degradation law for those wetlands, and that the DEP issued permits without receiving a storm water management plan from Sunoco.
Also in October, the Pennsylvania PUC halted Sunoco’s plans to build a valve and associated equipment on private land in Chester County on the basis that the construction breached a settlement agreement between West Goshen Township, Pennsylvania, and the company. Work on the rest of the pipeline, however, was allowed to continue.
Within 10 days of the January 3 order, Sunoco must backfill all areas of pipeline trench excavation, unless it can provide sufficient justification for an extension of time. In the same period, the company also must remove drill bit and other equipment from any unpermitted horizontal directional drilling activities unless it gets DEP approval to leave the equipment in place.
Sunoco’s parent company, Energy Transfer Partners, also put in a dismal environmental performance in 2017. The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality issued a violation notice against Energy Transfer Partners in October for dumping petroleum-contaminated water into a wetland during construction of the Rover Pipeline. In November, the state of Ohio filed a lawsuit against Rover Pipeline, operated and majority-owned by Energy Transfer Partners, for allegedly polluting state waterways as it constructs a 713-mile pipeline to transport natural gas from southwest Pennsylvania across Ohio and into Michigan and Ontario, Canada.
Gerhart said the DEP’s order does not hold Energy Transfer Partners accountable for the damage it has already done to private property and the environment during the construction of Mariner East 2. “It does not bring clean water to those who have already lost it. It does not bring justice to those whose rights have been violated, including our environment,” she said. “Now is not the time to sit back and bask in a false sense of relief. It’s a time to push back with everything we have left.”
A Sunoco spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In a statement to The Inquirer, though, the company said it is confident it will soon be allowed to resume work on the project. The company also expressed its “dedication to preserving and protecting the environment in which we conduct our work.”
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they knew!!!
On its hundredth birthday in 1959, Edward Teller warned the oil industry about global warming
Somebody cut the cake – new documents reveal that American oil writ large was warned of global warming at its 100th birthday party.
Benjamin Franta
the guardian
Mon 1 Jan ‘18 06.00 EST
...The nuclear weapons physicist Edward Teller had, by 1959, become ostracized by the scientific community for betraying his colleague J. Robert Oppenheimer, but he retained the embrace of industry and government. Teller’s task that November fourth was to address the crowd on “energy patterns of the future,” and his words carried an unexpected warning:
Ladies and gentlemen, I am to talk to you about energy in the future. I will start by telling you why I believe that the energy resources of the past must be supplemented. First of all, these energy resources will run short as we use more and more of the fossil fuels. But I would [...] like to mention another reason why we probably have to look for additional fuel supplies. And this, strangely, is the question of contaminating the atmosphere. [....] Whenever you burn conventional fuel, you create carbon dioxide. [....] The carbon dioxide is invisible, it is transparent, you can’t smell it, it is not dangerous to health, so why should one worry about it?
Carbon dioxide has a strange property. It transmits visible light but it absorbs the infrared radiation which is emitted from the earth. Its presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect [....] It has been calculated that a temperature rise corresponding to a 10 per cent increase in carbon dioxide will be sufficient to melt the icecap and submerge New York. All the coastal cities would be covered, and since a considerable percentage of the human race lives in coastal regions, I think that this chemical contamination is more serious than most people tend to believe.
How, precisely, Mr. Dunlop and the rest of the audience reacted is unknown, but it’s hard to imagine this being welcome news. After his talk, Teller was asked to “summarize briefly the danger from increased carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere in this century.” The physicist, as if considering a numerical estimation problem, responded:
At present the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen by 2 per cent over normal. By 1970, it will be perhaps 4 per cent, by 1980, 8 per cent, by 1990, 16 per cent [about 360 parts per million, by Teller’s accounting], if we keep on with our exponential rise in the use of purely conventional fuels. By that time, there will be a serious additional impediment for the radiation leaving the earth. Our planet will get a little warmer. It is hard to say whether it will be 2 degrees Fahrenheit or only one or 5.
But when the temperature does rise by a few degrees over the whole globe, there is a possibility that the icecaps will start melting and the level of the oceans will begin to rise. Well, I don’t know whether they will cover the Empire State Building or not, but anyone can calculate it by looking at the map and noting that the icecaps over Greenland and over Antarctica are perhaps five thousand feet thick.
And so, at its hundredth birthday party, American oil was warned of its civilization-destroying potential.
Talk about a buzzkill.
How did the petroleum industry respond? Eight years later, on a cold, clear day in March, Robert Dunlop walked the halls of the U.S. Congress. The 1967 oil embargo was weeks away, and the Senate was investigating the potential of electric vehicles. Dunlop, testifying now as the Chairman of the Board of the American Petroleum Institute, posed the question, “tomorrow’s car: electric or gasoline powered?” His preferred answer was the latter:
We in the petroleum industry are convinced that by the time a practical electric car can be mass-produced and marketed, it will not enjoy any meaningful advantage from an air pollution standpoint. Emissions from internal-combustion engines will have long since been controlled.
Dunlop went on to describe progress in controlling carbon monoxide, nitrous oxide, and hydrocarbon emissions from automobiles. Absent from his list? The pollutant he had been warned of years before: carbon dioxide.
We might surmise that the odorless gas simply passed under Robert Dunlop’s nose unnoticed. But less than a year later, the American Petroleum Institute quietly received a report on air pollution it had commissioned from the Stanford Research Institute, and its warning on carbon dioxide was direct:
Significant temperature changes are almost certain to occur by the year 2000, and these could bring about climatic changes. [...] there seems to be no doubt that the potential damage to our environment could be severe. [...] pollutants which we generally ignore because they have little local effect, CO2 and submicron particles, may be the cause of serious world-wide environmental changes.
Thus, by 1968, American oil held in its hands yet another notice of its products’ world-altering side effects, one affirming that global warming was not just cause for research and concern, but a reality needing corrective action: “Past and present studies of CO2 are detailed,” the Stanford Research Institute advised. “What is lacking, however, is [...] work toward systems in which CO2 emissions would be brought under control.”
This early history illuminates the American petroleum industry’s long-running awareness of the planetary warming caused by its products. Teller’s warning, revealed in documentation I found while searching archives, is another brick in a growing wall of evidence.
In the closing days of those optimistic 1950s, Robert Dunlop may have been one of the first oilmen to be warned of the tragedy now looming before us. By the time he departed this world in 1995, the American Petroleum Institute he once led was denying the climate science it had been informed of decades before, attacking the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and fighting climate policies wherever they arose.
This is a history of choices made, paths not taken, and the fall from grace of one of the greatest enterprises – oil, the “prime mover” – ever to tread the earth. Whether it’s also a history of redemption, however partial, remains to be seen.
American oil’s awareness of global warming – and its conspiracy of silence, deceit, and obstruction – goes further than any one company. It extends beyond (though includes) ExxonMobil. The industry is implicated to its core by the history of its largest representative, the American Petroleum Institute.
It is now too late to stop a great deal of change to our planet’s climate and its global payload of disease, destruction, and death. But we can fight to halt climate change as quickly as possible, and we can uncover the history of how we got here. There are lessons to be learned, and there is justice to be served.
Ladies and gentlemen, I am to talk to you about energy in the future. I will start by telling you why I believe that the energy resources of the past must be supplemented. First of all, these energy resources will run short as we use more and more of the fossil fuels. But I would [...] like to mention another reason why we probably have to look for additional fuel supplies. And this, strangely, is the question of contaminating the atmosphere. [....] Whenever you burn conventional fuel, you create carbon dioxide. [....] The carbon dioxide is invisible, it is transparent, you can’t smell it, it is not dangerous to health, so why should one worry about it?
Carbon dioxide has a strange property. It transmits visible light but it absorbs the infrared radiation which is emitted from the earth. Its presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect [....] It has been calculated that a temperature rise corresponding to a 10 per cent increase in carbon dioxide will be sufficient to melt the icecap and submerge New York. All the coastal cities would be covered, and since a considerable percentage of the human race lives in coastal regions, I think that this chemical contamination is more serious than most people tend to believe.
How, precisely, Mr. Dunlop and the rest of the audience reacted is unknown, but it’s hard to imagine this being welcome news. After his talk, Teller was asked to “summarize briefly the danger from increased carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere in this century.” The physicist, as if considering a numerical estimation problem, responded:
At present the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen by 2 per cent over normal. By 1970, it will be perhaps 4 per cent, by 1980, 8 per cent, by 1990, 16 per cent [about 360 parts per million, by Teller’s accounting], if we keep on with our exponential rise in the use of purely conventional fuels. By that time, there will be a serious additional impediment for the radiation leaving the earth. Our planet will get a little warmer. It is hard to say whether it will be 2 degrees Fahrenheit or only one or 5.
But when the temperature does rise by a few degrees over the whole globe, there is a possibility that the icecaps will start melting and the level of the oceans will begin to rise. Well, I don’t know whether they will cover the Empire State Building or not, but anyone can calculate it by looking at the map and noting that the icecaps over Greenland and over Antarctica are perhaps five thousand feet thick.
And so, at its hundredth birthday party, American oil was warned of its civilization-destroying potential.
Talk about a buzzkill.
How did the petroleum industry respond? Eight years later, on a cold, clear day in March, Robert Dunlop walked the halls of the U.S. Congress. The 1967 oil embargo was weeks away, and the Senate was investigating the potential of electric vehicles. Dunlop, testifying now as the Chairman of the Board of the American Petroleum Institute, posed the question, “tomorrow’s car: electric or gasoline powered?” His preferred answer was the latter:
We in the petroleum industry are convinced that by the time a practical electric car can be mass-produced and marketed, it will not enjoy any meaningful advantage from an air pollution standpoint. Emissions from internal-combustion engines will have long since been controlled.
Dunlop went on to describe progress in controlling carbon monoxide, nitrous oxide, and hydrocarbon emissions from automobiles. Absent from his list? The pollutant he had been warned of years before: carbon dioxide.
We might surmise that the odorless gas simply passed under Robert Dunlop’s nose unnoticed. But less than a year later, the American Petroleum Institute quietly received a report on air pollution it had commissioned from the Stanford Research Institute, and its warning on carbon dioxide was direct:
Significant temperature changes are almost certain to occur by the year 2000, and these could bring about climatic changes. [...] there seems to be no doubt that the potential damage to our environment could be severe. [...] pollutants which we generally ignore because they have little local effect, CO2 and submicron particles, may be the cause of serious world-wide environmental changes.
Thus, by 1968, American oil held in its hands yet another notice of its products’ world-altering side effects, one affirming that global warming was not just cause for research and concern, but a reality needing corrective action: “Past and present studies of CO2 are detailed,” the Stanford Research Institute advised. “What is lacking, however, is [...] work toward systems in which CO2 emissions would be brought under control.”
This early history illuminates the American petroleum industry’s long-running awareness of the planetary warming caused by its products. Teller’s warning, revealed in documentation I found while searching archives, is another brick in a growing wall of evidence.
In the closing days of those optimistic 1950s, Robert Dunlop may have been one of the first oilmen to be warned of the tragedy now looming before us. By the time he departed this world in 1995, the American Petroleum Institute he once led was denying the climate science it had been informed of decades before, attacking the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and fighting climate policies wherever they arose.
This is a history of choices made, paths not taken, and the fall from grace of one of the greatest enterprises – oil, the “prime mover” – ever to tread the earth. Whether it’s also a history of redemption, however partial, remains to be seen.
American oil’s awareness of global warming – and its conspiracy of silence, deceit, and obstruction – goes further than any one company. It extends beyond (though includes) ExxonMobil. The industry is implicated to its core by the history of its largest representative, the American Petroleum Institute.
It is now too late to stop a great deal of change to our planet’s climate and its global payload of disease, destruction, and death. But we can fight to halt climate change as quickly as possible, and we can uncover the history of how we got here. There are lessons to be learned, and there is justice to be served.
Vehicles are now America's biggest CO2 source but EPA is tearing up regulations
Transport overtook power generation for climate-warming emissions in 2017 but the Trump administration is reversing curbs on auto industry pollution
Oliver Milman
the guardian
Mon 1 Jan ‘18 00.00 EST
...Emissions data has placed transport as the new king of climate-warming pollution at a time when the Trump administration is reviewing or tearing up regulations that would set tougher emissions standards for car and truck companies. Republicans in Congress are also pushing new fuel economy rules they say will lower costs for American drivers but could also weaken emissions standards.
Opponents of the administration fret this agenda will imperil public health and hinder the effort to address climate change.
“This Environmental Protection Agency doesn’t seem to have met an air regulation that it likes,” said Mary Nichols, chair of the California Air Resources Board and a former EPA assistant administrator. “I’ve not seen any evidence that this administration knows anything about the auto industry, they just seem to be against anything the Obama administration did.
“Vehicle emissions are going up, so clearly not enough is being done on that front. The Trump administration is halting further progress at a critical point when we really need to get a grip on this problem.”
The 1970 Clean Air Act, signed by Richard Nixon, set standards for a cocktail of different pollutants emitted from new vehicles. New cars and trucks, which account for more than 80% of transport emissions, now have to meet fuel efficiency standards and display this information to consumers. This approach has helped cleanse previously smog-laden American cities and tamp down greenhouse gas emissions.
But in 2016, about 1.9bn tons of carbon dioxide emissions were emitted from transportation, up nearly 2% on the previous year, according to the Energy Information Administration. This increase means that transport has overtaken power generation as the most polluting sector in the country, and it’s likely to stay that way.
Cheap gasoline prices have led to a recent uptick in vehicle emissions, despite the fuel standards, at the same time that coal is being rapidly displaced by an abundance of cheap natural gas and the steady rise of renewable energy, driving a sharp decline in CO2emissions from the power grid.
While coalminers have lost their jobs to technological advancement and environmental protesters have thrown their bodies in the path of oil pipelines, there has been far less to disrupt the basic emissions-emitting models of cars, trucks and planes.
Americans are buying larger cars and taking more flights – domestic aviation emissions grew 10% between 2012 and 2016 – and face little opposition in doing so.
“The change in power generation has been very impressive over the past 10 to 15 years,” said Brett Smith, assistant director of the Center for Automotive Research.
“In the automotive sector, there isn’t the same push. There are certainly Americans concerned about global warming but people are driving bigger and bigger vehicles each year. It’s not a priority for them. The cost of fuel is pretty cheap and at the moment there isn’t a better option out there than the internal combustion engine.”
Transport accounts for about a quarter of all US planet-warming emissions but also poses a direct health threat to about 45 million Americans who live, work or attend school within 300ft of roads that are shrouded in high air pollution levels.
This pollution can stunt lung growth, trigger asthma attacks, exacerbate heart disease and cause developmental problems. The EPA estimates 17,000 schools across the US are located next to roads with heavy traffic, with children from low-income and minority groups disproportionately put at risk. California is the only state in the US to ban the construction of a school on the cheap land found beside major highways.
---
That trajectory has been cast in doubt by the Trump presidency. In March, the EPA scrapped a deal struck between Barack Obama’s administration and automakers that would require new cars to run 54.4 miles per gallon of fuel, up from 27.5 miles per gallon, by 2025.
The White House said the new rules had been “shoved down the throats” of car makers, with the main industry lobby group pointing out that consumers overwhelmingly prioritize safety, driving performance and value for money over fuel efficiency. There are more than 70 car models on sale that achieve 40 miles per gallon and they account for just 1% of total new vehicle sales.
Then, last month, the EPA cited “regulatory overreach” by the previous administration for its decision to waive clean truck standards that would have phased out “glider” vehicles that produce 55 times more diesel soot than new trucks. Scott Pruitt, administrator of the EPA, said his predecessors had “attempted to bend the rule of law and expand the reach of the federal government in a way that threatened to put an entire industry of specialized truck manufacturers out of business”.
These rollbacks from the executive branch have dovetailed with an effort by Republicans in the Senate and the House to revamp fuel efficiency rules by replacing state and federal requirements with a single standard. Environmental groups and previous administration officials fear this will lead to a further weakening of emissions standards.
“America’s clean car standards have dramatically improved the fuel efficiency of vehicles, saving consumers billions of dollars and cutting pollution in the process,” said Carol Browner, a former administrator of the EPA.
“Instead of rolling back commonsense, successful and popular clean cars standards, we should focus on innovation and technology that will continue the auto industry’s growth and the pollution reductions we’ve achieved since these standards were first established.”
---
With federal regulation set to be pared back, technological advances in electric and gas-powered cars, as well as consumer preferences, are likely to play an increasingly important role in whether vehicle emissions are forced back down.
A flurry of recent optimistic studies have forecast that, by 2040, as much as 90%of all cars in the US will be electric. But the current conundrum is that petroleum-fueled vehicles are cheaper and seen as more reliable than their electric counterparts by most new buyers. Affordable gasoline is competing with electric recharging stations that are considered too sparse by many drivers to risk running out of puff, no matter the benefit to the environment.
“It’s a challenging position for automotive companies because they are touting electric vehicles but ultimately they have to sell more cars,” said Smith. “Consumers in the US aren’t pushing for electric vehicles to the extent they are in Europe and unless we take a very different approach as a country, that doesn’t look like it will change soon.
“You will need to see a major change in battery technology to make it viable. People are becoming more aware and concerned about global warming, but we aren’t there yet. And when you look at the vehicles being put out by the major car companies, you could argue it’s not an issue for them, either.”
Opponents of the administration fret this agenda will imperil public health and hinder the effort to address climate change.
“This Environmental Protection Agency doesn’t seem to have met an air regulation that it likes,” said Mary Nichols, chair of the California Air Resources Board and a former EPA assistant administrator. “I’ve not seen any evidence that this administration knows anything about the auto industry, they just seem to be against anything the Obama administration did.
“Vehicle emissions are going up, so clearly not enough is being done on that front. The Trump administration is halting further progress at a critical point when we really need to get a grip on this problem.”
The 1970 Clean Air Act, signed by Richard Nixon, set standards for a cocktail of different pollutants emitted from new vehicles. New cars and trucks, which account for more than 80% of transport emissions, now have to meet fuel efficiency standards and display this information to consumers. This approach has helped cleanse previously smog-laden American cities and tamp down greenhouse gas emissions.
But in 2016, about 1.9bn tons of carbon dioxide emissions were emitted from transportation, up nearly 2% on the previous year, according to the Energy Information Administration. This increase means that transport has overtaken power generation as the most polluting sector in the country, and it’s likely to stay that way.
Cheap gasoline prices have led to a recent uptick in vehicle emissions, despite the fuel standards, at the same time that coal is being rapidly displaced by an abundance of cheap natural gas and the steady rise of renewable energy, driving a sharp decline in CO2emissions from the power grid.
While coalminers have lost their jobs to technological advancement and environmental protesters have thrown their bodies in the path of oil pipelines, there has been far less to disrupt the basic emissions-emitting models of cars, trucks and planes.
Americans are buying larger cars and taking more flights – domestic aviation emissions grew 10% between 2012 and 2016 – and face little opposition in doing so.
“The change in power generation has been very impressive over the past 10 to 15 years,” said Brett Smith, assistant director of the Center for Automotive Research.
“In the automotive sector, there isn’t the same push. There are certainly Americans concerned about global warming but people are driving bigger and bigger vehicles each year. It’s not a priority for them. The cost of fuel is pretty cheap and at the moment there isn’t a better option out there than the internal combustion engine.”
Transport accounts for about a quarter of all US planet-warming emissions but also poses a direct health threat to about 45 million Americans who live, work or attend school within 300ft of roads that are shrouded in high air pollution levels.
This pollution can stunt lung growth, trigger asthma attacks, exacerbate heart disease and cause developmental problems. The EPA estimates 17,000 schools across the US are located next to roads with heavy traffic, with children from low-income and minority groups disproportionately put at risk. California is the only state in the US to ban the construction of a school on the cheap land found beside major highways.
---
That trajectory has been cast in doubt by the Trump presidency. In March, the EPA scrapped a deal struck between Barack Obama’s administration and automakers that would require new cars to run 54.4 miles per gallon of fuel, up from 27.5 miles per gallon, by 2025.
The White House said the new rules had been “shoved down the throats” of car makers, with the main industry lobby group pointing out that consumers overwhelmingly prioritize safety, driving performance and value for money over fuel efficiency. There are more than 70 car models on sale that achieve 40 miles per gallon and they account for just 1% of total new vehicle sales.
Then, last month, the EPA cited “regulatory overreach” by the previous administration for its decision to waive clean truck standards that would have phased out “glider” vehicles that produce 55 times more diesel soot than new trucks. Scott Pruitt, administrator of the EPA, said his predecessors had “attempted to bend the rule of law and expand the reach of the federal government in a way that threatened to put an entire industry of specialized truck manufacturers out of business”.
These rollbacks from the executive branch have dovetailed with an effort by Republicans in the Senate and the House to revamp fuel efficiency rules by replacing state and federal requirements with a single standard. Environmental groups and previous administration officials fear this will lead to a further weakening of emissions standards.
“America’s clean car standards have dramatically improved the fuel efficiency of vehicles, saving consumers billions of dollars and cutting pollution in the process,” said Carol Browner, a former administrator of the EPA.
“Instead of rolling back commonsense, successful and popular clean cars standards, we should focus on innovation and technology that will continue the auto industry’s growth and the pollution reductions we’ve achieved since these standards were first established.”
---
With federal regulation set to be pared back, technological advances in electric and gas-powered cars, as well as consumer preferences, are likely to play an increasingly important role in whether vehicle emissions are forced back down.
A flurry of recent optimistic studies have forecast that, by 2040, as much as 90%of all cars in the US will be electric. But the current conundrum is that petroleum-fueled vehicles are cheaper and seen as more reliable than their electric counterparts by most new buyers. Affordable gasoline is competing with electric recharging stations that are considered too sparse by many drivers to risk running out of puff, no matter the benefit to the environment.
“It’s a challenging position for automotive companies because they are touting electric vehicles but ultimately they have to sell more cars,” said Smith. “Consumers in the US aren’t pushing for electric vehicles to the extent they are in Europe and unless we take a very different approach as a country, that doesn’t look like it will change soon.
“You will need to see a major change in battery technology to make it viable. People are becoming more aware and concerned about global warming, but we aren’t there yet. And when you look at the vehicles being put out by the major car companies, you could argue it’s not an issue for them, either.”
