Category Archives: fossil fuels

fossil fuels, fracking, marine pollution, tar sands

Energy & Environment: Oil companies pushed to release more data on offshore drilling

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Anne C. Mulkern, E&E reporter
Published: Monday, April 14, 2014

Companies involved in offshore oil drilling in federal waters along
California’s coast should voluntarily test for chemical leaks and
release the information, a state lawmaker said Friday.

Providing water quality data would bolster people’s faith that oil
companies want to prevent pollution, Assembly member Das Williams (D)
told industry representatives at an Assembly Select Committee on
Coastal Protection hearing in Santa Barbara, Calif.

California’s S.B. 4, which passed last year, requires base line
testing of water near sites where hydraulic fracturing and other well
stimulation treatments are used, including state waters. But the law
doesn’t apply in the ocean controlled by the federal government.

“If the regulatory structure of S.B. 4 provides that extra level of
safety, and frankly, testing and verification, so therefore
accountability, why would your industry not voluntarily agree to
adhere to those standards in federal waters?” Williams said. “Why
would you not provide that testing data to state regulators? There’s
nothing stopping you from adhering to state regulations in federal
waters.

“Would you do it?” he added.

The inquiry took place at the informational hearing focused on
offshore drilling that uses hydraulic fracturing. Throughout
California, city and state officials are examining rules related to
fracking operations. In the Legislature, S.B. 1132, which would
temporarily ban hydraulic fracturing and other unconventional oil
drilling, last week passed out of its first committee in the state’s
Senate (EnergyWire, April 9).

That same day, the board of supervisors in Butte County, 80 miles
north of Sacramento, in a 4-1 vote directed staff to come back with an
ordinance that would bar fracking. There have been similar votes
seeking moratorium ordinances in Los Angeles and Culver City. Nearby,
Carson last month imposed a ban on all oil drilling.

Williams’ question Friday came after Dan Tormey, while speaking on
behalf of the California Independent Petroleum Association (CIPA),
supported new state rules on water.

“With S.B. 4 and the addition of water quality monitoring, I do think
that’s a good idea,” Tormey said, “to measure what the base-line
conditions are and then to see afterward whether those have been
affected.”

Williams then asked about voluntarily providing the data as it relates
to drilling in federal waters.

“It’s an unfair question,” replied Peter Candy, an attorney also
representing CIPA. “You would have to ask individual operators.” Those
drilling platform operators would need to talk to federal officials,
Candy said, adding that there currently are movements toward those
conversations.

‘Prove good faith’

“We don’t need them if you guys voluntarily decided to do it,”
Williams said, which triggered applause from the audience. “If you
really wanted to prove good faith to the public, you could decide to
do that.”

Candy said that it “would go operator by operator. It’s difficult for
us to sit up here today and answer for individual operators.”

Craig Johns, representing the Western States Petroleum Association
(WSPA), said that S.B. 4’s provisions on water testing focus on
protecting groundwater. Ocean water isn’t used for drinking, he said.
Additionally, he said, EPA monitors for any adverse impacts on the
aquatic environment from offshore drilling.

Williams responded sharply.

“I think on behalf of fishermen and swimmers and surfers and
beachgoers of this county and the state, seawater does have a
beneficial use,” even if it’s not used for drinking water, though
that, too, is changing, he said, referring to desalination.

The California Coastal Commission began probing offshore fracking last
year after a news report revealed that regulators had allowed fracking
in the Pacific Ocean at least a dozen times since the late 1990s. The
Associated Press unearthed the data through a Freedom of Information
Act request.

In waters controlled by the federal government, there are 23 platforms
with outer continental shelf (OCS) plans granting approval for
exploration. A dozen individual wells have done some form of fracking
in the last 25 years, Alison Dettmer, chief deputy head of the Coastal
Commission’s Energy and Ocean Resources division, told lawmakers.

The agency has limited power when it comes to federal waters, she
said. Its purview is limited to evaluating whether activities are
consistent with state law.

Discharges to the ocean are prohibited in state waters but are allowed
and practiced in a number of federal waters, the Coastal Commission
has said previously. The agency plans to send U.S. EPA a letter
requesting that the agency modify its permits so that drilling
platform operators that plan to discharge would submit to an
additional Coastal Commission review, Dettmer said.

Assemblymember Mark Stone (D), chairman of the Select Committee on
Coastal Protection, at the hearing noted that he had seen in his
background materials that the oil and gas industry rejects that the
commission has review authority over OCS plans.

Dettmer said that it’s “a complicated question.”

“We’re going to have to go case by case to look at the individual OCS
plans,” Dettmer said, explaining that the agency would be evaluating
whether each initial plan “actually anticipated at that time doing any
form of well stimulation.”

Federal vs. state jurisdiction

During questioning later, Stone asked Candy — representing CIPA —
his view of the Coastal Commission’s authority. Candy said that CIPA’s
position isn’t that the state agency “lacks all authority to do
consistency reviews.”

But, Candy said, “in cases where you’ve got an established facility
and an approved OCS plan, then the commission needs to be wary of
infringing upon” the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Safety and
Environmental Enforcement and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.
Federal regulations give those agencies “exclusive jurisdiction” for
determining what falls within the scope of an OCS plan versus what
would require significant revision, which would trigger a commission
consistency review, he said.

“This industry is highly regulated,” Candy said. “The protections are
in place.” The Coastal Commission should be ensuring that “the
regulators are doing their jobs,” he said, “but not requiring
consistency review every time an operator proposes to hydraulically
fracture a well.”

Stone responded that “the point of consistency review is that
oversight over a federal agency” to “ensure that the federal action is
not jeopardizing coastal resources.”

Interior Department representatives turned down a request to testify
at the hearing, Stone said.

Environmental groups, meanwhile, urged more protections.

Brian Segee, staff attorney with the Santa Barbara-based Environmental
Defense Center, said that the Santa Barbara channel is rich with
marine life that includes threatened and endangered species. There are
bluefin, humpback and killer whales, porpoises, dolphins, southern sea
otters and hundreds of other fishes, birds and invertebrates, he said.

Fracking releases harmful air pollution, uses large amounts of water,
could increase risk of earthquakes and, by producing more oil, hurts
efforts to reduce climate change, Segee said.

In addition, he said, some companies are using hydrochloric and
hydrofluoric acid in wells and should fall under the definition in
S.B. 4 for well stimulation. But there’s an industry attempt to
curtail S.B. 4’s scope by exploiting an exclusion for “routine well
cleanout work, routine well maintenance and routine removal of
formation damage due to drilling.”

“Until a moratorium is enacted … it is imperative that attention be
paid to this critical issue and attempt to circumvent the plain
language and intent of S.B. 4,” Segee said.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

fossil fuels, fracking, Keystone XL, tar sands

Common Dreams: In Small Canadian Town Democracy Wins, Tar Sands Loses; Kitimat, British Columbia’s ‘no’ vote follows widespread opposition to Northern Gateway

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Published on Monday, April 14, 2014

– Andrea Germanos, staff writer

Photo: Stephen Boyle/cc/flickrIn a vote cheered as a victory for democracy, one community in British Columbia has given a flat rejection to a proposed tar sands pipeline.

Over 58 percent of voters who headed to the polls in the North Coast municipality of Kitimat on Saturday said “no” to Enbridge’s Northern Gateway project.

That project would include a pipeline to carry tar sands crude from near Edmonton, Alberta to Kitimat.

CBC News reports that

Kitimat is the community most affected by the $6.5-billion project, because as the endpoint for the pipeline bringing bitumen from Alberta, it would house a marine terminal where the supertankers would load up.

“The people have spoken. That’s what we wanted — it’s a democratic process,” Kitimat Mayor Joanne Monaghan said in a statement following the vote. “We’ll be talking about this Monday night at Council, and then we’ll go from there with whatever Council decides.”

One group welcoming the rejection is the Dogwood Initiative, a B.C.-based group that advocates for decision-making power for environmental decisions to be in the hands of the people.

“This shows what happens when you actually give people the chance to vote on Enbridge’s proposal,” stated Kai Nagata, Energy & Democracy Director with the group.

The rejection was also a reflection of voter awareness of the environmental threats posed by the Northern Gate, according to the B.C.-based Raincoast Conservation Foundation.

“The vote in Kitimat illustrates how acutely aware British Columbians are that our province’s coast, which hosts incomparable land and seascapes, is in imminent jeopardy from the proposed export of diluted bitumen from Alberta’s tar sands to the oil industry’s global markets by the threat of a catastrophic Exxon Valdez type spill, as well as a host of other impacts,” said Chris Genovali, Executive Director of Raincoast.

“For example, the Enbridge Northern Gateway Project will result in increased tanker traffic and vessel noise through sensitive and productive waters, impoverishing critical habitat for numerous species of threatened and endangered whales. Additionally, the chronic oiling accompanying Northern Gateway’s tankers and terminal will likely slowly degrade habitat and water quality to the point where near-shore environments are no longer productive or capable of supporting nurseries for wild salmon, one of B.C.’s greatest natural assets,” said Genovali.

Photo: Neal Jennings/cc/flickrIn December 2013, a federal Joint Review Panel (JRP) gave its recommendation to approve the pipeline, but that approval prompted backlash from environmental groups, including ForestEthics Advocacy and Living Oceans Society, who say the approval was made without taking into consideration the full environmental impacts of the project. The groups, representing by Ecojustice, have filed suit to block the JRP’s report from being used as a basis for full federal approval of the project.

“The panel cannot consider the so-called economic benefits of oilsands expansion tied to this pipeline but ignore the adverse impacts that expansion will have on climate change, endangered wildlife and ecosystems,” stated Nikki Skuce, senior energy campaigner with ForestEthics Advocacy, when their lawsuit was filed.

A resounding “No” for the pipeline was also heard this past Friday, when, as the Globe and Mail reports,

A group of First Nations with territory covering a quarter of the route for the proposed Northern Gateway oil pipeline met with federal representatives Friday to officially reject the project.

The First Nations representatives said there is no more debate, as they banned the pipeline under their traditional laws.

“We do not, we will not, allow this pipeline,” the Globe and Mail reports Peter Erickson, a hereditary chief of the Nak’azdli First Nation, as telling the bureaucrats. “We’re going to send the message today to the federal government and to the company itself: Their pipeline is dead. Under no circumstances will that proposal be allowed.”

“Their pipeline is now a pipe dream,” Erickson added.

Nagata’s group is saying that all British Columbians should have a vote on the Northern Gateway.

“This project would have serious ramifications for the whole province, so all British Columbians deserve to vote on it,” said Nagata. “That should extend far beyond just speaking to a panel or writing your local newspaper. Regardless of whether you support this proposal, the decision should be made by British Columbians.”

To help make this happen, the Dogwood Initiative has launched a new website, LetBCvote.ca, to harness the province’s direct democracy laws by gathering the signatures of at least 10 per cent of the registered voters to get the issue onto a ballot.

A federal review panel is expected to give its final decision on Enbridge’s project in June.

_____________

climate change, energy policy, fossil fuels

Global Dashboard: Climate Change Is Not a Debate: It Is a Struggle That Pits Survivors Against Fossil Fuel Profiteers

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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/04/10-2crop_climate
Published on Thursday, April 10, 2014

by Ben Phillips

(Credit: Oxfam / cc / Flickr)Climate change is not a debate. The scientists couldn’t be clearer about how real and how harmful it is. But governments are still not basing their commitments on what is needed, and fossil fuel companies remain confidently fossilised in their economic outlook and plan.

So why haven’t the facts haven’t driven the policy? In part, it’s the collective action problem. But let’s not be naive: there are billionaires getting richer and richer from fossil fuels. For them, the collective failure to responsibly manage fossil fuel reserves isn’t a failure at all, it’s a hugely profitable success.

Climate change is impossible to make sense of as a debate, precisely because it is not a debate. It’s a struggle.

As has been said of “failed states”, you can only understand them if you understand who is doing well out of the so-called failure. The same is true of “failed global politics”: The broken-down Warsaw talks sponsored by the coal industry were a huge success for the sponsors. Don’t assume that politicians who second-guess scientists are being stupid – look at their donors, and you’ll find many of them are being very clever. Likewise the “sceptical” think tankers paid for from oil tankers. In successfully ensuring a recurring “not yet” to any decent plan to tackle climate change, the fossil fuel lobby make the tobacco industry look like amateurs. As Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman puts it, “fossil fuel money is drowning democracy”.

The fossil fuel lobby is determined to hold out. But they are beatable. We’ve seen them make one tactical retreat already. Those who didn’t want climate change to get in the way of their irresponsibility used to say that climate was a myth; now they are starting to say it’s inevitable. It’s a shameless pivot from denialism to fatalism, of course, a clever move that will buy the fossil fuel lobby more time. (And time is money.) But that they have been forced to pivot is an indication of weakness, a chink in the armour.

The fossil fuel lobby is weakened too by the growing movement pushing for other parts of business to separate themselves from, and start to take on, the fossil fuel lobby: we’ve seen the wiser parts of the finance industry start to connect the sustainability of their investments with the sustainability of the climate, and to recognise the risks inherent in betting on unlimited carbon use; and we’ve seen the wiser parts of the food industry – an industry which both contributes to and suffers from climate change – start to look for ways to reduce their carbon footprint and protect the agricultural and water resources on which they depend. As they start to shift, the fossil fuel lobby will become ever more isolated.

But what most threatens the fossil fuel lobby is the power of survivors as campaigners. Of course, this is not the first time that affected people have spoken out about climate change, but one of the consequences of climate change is that the numbers of the affected grows ever larger. The raw, brutal, damage to people wrought by climate change has been a spur for re-energised powerful grassroots activism, driven by experience, by groups ranging from Nicaraguan coffee growers to Manilla slum dwellers. Communities hit by extreme weather in countries like the UK and US are getting more organised too. And increasingly the governments of the poorest countries are speaking on behalf of their people. Diplomats have stopped being diplomatic. The ecological has become personal.

This movement of the affected is still inchoate, but it is the most important force for action on climate change. Just as people affected by HIV took on the pharmaceutical industry (and, ultimately, and with great sacrifice, won), so too the people most affected by climate are taking on the power of the fossil fuel lobby. They are making it clear that this is a struggle between interests. And they are calling upon others to choose a side.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
Ben Phillips

Ben Phillips is Campaigns and Policy Director of Oxfam. He has lived and worked in four continents and 10 cities including New Delhi and Washington DC, as well as with children in poverty in East London.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

fossil fuels, oil pollution

MySanAntonio from the Houston Chronicle: Latest oil incident belies painful truth

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http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/environment/article/Latest-oil-incident-belies-painful-truth-5381316.php

GalvestonSpill4
Photo By Jennifer Reynolds / Galveston County Daily News
Oil spill response crews remove absorbent material on the beach in Galveston. About 170,000 gallons of oil spilled into Galveston Bay on March 22.

BY MATTHEW TRESAUGUE, HOUSTON CHRONICLE : APRIL 6, 2014

HOUSTON – Shortly before noon March 30, a storage tank on a platform in the northernmost lobe of Galveston Bay began overflowing because of an equipment malfunction. At least 160 gallons of light crude oil poured into the water and spread to nearby marshes.

The incident mainly occurred in the background, as attention was focused on a larger problem across the bay, where crews were in their ninth day of cleaning up nearly 170,000 gallons of heavy oil spilled by a punctured barge.

The one-two punch underscores a depressing truth about these blue-collar waters: Oil spills happen almost every day.

Galveston Bay has averaged 285 spills a year since 1998, according to the Houston Advanced Research Center, which publishes periodic reports on the state of the bay’s ecosystem.

The spills typically are small, averaging 103 gallons per incident. Most were less than a gallon. Yet the spills occur frequently enough to raise concerns about the health of the bay.

“It’s like death by a thousand cuts, especially when you combine the oil spills with all of the other stressors to the bay,” said Lisa Gonzalez, a marine scientist who serves as the Houston Advanced Research Center’s vice president.

The area’s growing human footprint has taken a toll. More than 35,000 acres of coastal marshes have disappeared, primarily because of subsidence, the sinking of soft soils because of groundwater pumping.

The bay remains resilient, however, as the most productive and commercially valuable bay and estuary system in Texas and the heart of the state’s $2 billion fishing industry. Experts say the size of the fishing industry suggests that the bay is healthy. But it’s hard to tell because the ecosystem is always changing, and scientific knowledge is lacking.

Antonietta Quigg, a marine biologist at Texas A&M University at Galveston, said spilled oil is a chronic issue with long-term consequences for the bay’s animals and plants. For years, Quigg has measured the bay’s health through plankton, some of the smallest, most sensitive organisms in the water.

In the first days after the March 22 spill, Quigg’s research team took water samples near where the Summer Wind, a bulk carrier as long as a football field, collided with a barge, causing heavy bunker fuel oil to empty into the lower end of the bay.

The winds and waves pushed the black goo into the Gulf of Mexico instead of the fragile estuaries ringing the bay. While some consider the oil’s movement to be a lucky break, the spill still caused harm.

It’s still too early to tell how the spill affected plankton. But Quigg’s preliminary findings show oil-consuming bacteria, which occur naturally in the bay’s subtropical waters, are helping to clean up the mess.

The oil spill was the largest in the bay since a 1990 collision between a tanker and three barges released about 700,000 gallons of heavy crude into the Houston Ship Channel, just south of Redfish Island. The incident was larger than all spills combined for Galveston Bay in any given year since 1998, according to the Texas General Land Office.

It received 284 reports of oil spills in the bay in 1998, the first year of the state agency’s data. That number peaked at 397 incidents in 2001 and since has trended downward, with a low of 184 spills in 2011.

“We have gone from a culture 30 years ago where (if) you spilled something you didn’t tell anybody, where today if you spill something, regardless of the amount, you self-report,” said Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson.

Even with greater attention to preventing spills, oil inevitably gets into the water.

The recent spill from the storage tank was blamed on a high-water alarm that failed. Oil-laced water poured over the brim and fouled at least 300 yards of marshland, said Scott Gaudet of the land office.
“We’ve made good progress, and there are fewer spills in the bay,” he said. “But tanks overflow, hoses leak and people make mistakes.”

Special thanks to Richard Charter