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Category: Permian Basin

  • Greenpeace Calls on US and Mexico to Defuse Largest Carbon Bomb in North America

    Ahead of U.S. President Joe Biden’s Tuesday meeting with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Greenpeace implored the two men to commit to ending all new oil and gas development in the Permian Basin, increasing clean energy investments, and securing a just transition for fossil fuel workers.

    As detailed in a recent multimedia report, the Permian Basin—home to two million people in West Texas and southeast New Mexico—was transformed into “the world’s single most prolific oil and gas field” during last decade’s drilling and fracking boom.

    If fossil fuel executives’ plans to expand extraction in the basin and boost exports from the Gulf Coast are allowed to go forward, experts estimate that nearly 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide would be emitted by 2050—equivalent to 10% of the world’s remaining “carbon budget,” or the amount of pollution compatible with limiting global warming to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels by the century’s end. Meanwhile, a recent study found that the basin’s pipelines are currently leaking 14 times more methane than previously thought.

    “Mexico’s updated climate goals can only be attained if both Mexico and the U.S. put an end to exploitation of the Permian Basin,” Gustavo Ampugnani, executive director of Greenpeace Mexico, said Tuesday in a statement. “Greenpeace offices in the two countries will campaign on all fronts until Presidents López Obrador and Biden put their money where their mouths are.”

    According to Greenpeace:

    As both nations face increased threats from the climate crisis, leaders from the U.S. and Mexico continue to incentivize the fossil fuel industry to ramp up oil and gas production in the Permian Basin and greenlight polluting fossil fuel infrastructure projects that will lock us into decades of emissions. From drilling and refining operations in Texas, to pipelines carrying Permian oil and gas through Mexico, the fossil fuel industry jeopardizes the health and safety of communities at each stage of the fossil fuel production process.

    Last year, the U.S. became the world’s top exporter of liquefied natural gas. “Around 70% of Mexico’s natural gas supply is being met by U.S. pipeline imports,” Greenpeace noted. “This is not what climate leadership looks like.”

    “From drought and record heatwaves to stronger, more frequent storms and flooding, we are living in a climate emergency.”

    Prior to last November’s COP27 climate conference—which ended, like the 26 meetings before it, with no blueprint for rapidly cutting off planet-wrecking fossil fuels—the United Nations published reports warning that due to woefully inadequate emissions reductions targets and policies, there is “no credible path to 1.5°C in place,” and only “urgent system-wide transformation” can prevent a cataclysmic temperature rise of nearly 3°C by 2100.

    According to the latest data, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide—the three main heat-trapping gases pushing temperatures upward—reached an all-time high in 2021, and greenhouse gas emissions only continued to climb in 2022.

    Despite ample evidence that new fossil fuel projects will worsen deadly climate chaos, oil and gas corporations—supported by trillions of dollars in public subsidies each year—are still planning to expand dirty energy production in the coming years, including in the Permian Basin.

    “The oil and gas industry has lit a fuse on the Permian Basin carbon bomb that threatens to blow up any hope of a livable future,” John Noel, senior climate campaigner at Greenpeace USA, said Tuesday. “The technology to address the climate crisis already exists. It’s time for Presidents Biden and López Obrador to commit to ending the exploitation and destruction of our communities at the hands of the oil and gas industry.”

    “From drought and record heatwaves to stronger, more frequent storms and flooding, we are living in a climate emergency,” Noel added. “Last year, President Biden said that he will treat it as such. It’s time for him to make good on those words by kickstarting a fossil fuel phaseout and declaring a climate emergency.”

    Greenpeace’s intervention came as Biden and López Obrador prepared to engage in bilateral talks as part of the so-called “Tres Amigos” summit in Mexico City, which also features Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

    In the lead-up to the meeting, more than 100 progressive advocacy groups from around North America urged the continent’s heads of government to cooperate on mitigating the climate crisis, ensuring the just treatment of migrants, and reducing gun violence.

  • As Texas Grid Falters, Energy Advocates Urge Biden to Declare Climate Emergency

    Texas energy and environmental analysts and advocates are urging President Joe Biden to formally declare a state of climate emergency in order to shore up the state’s precarious grid.

    While Biden announced modest steps to combat the climate crisis last week at a shuttered coal-fired power plant in Somerset, Massachusetts, being retrofitted for offshore wind power production, he stopped far short of declaring a national emergency.

    Such a declaration would unlock new executive powers that could help ensure increased reliability for Texas’s faltering power grid, while reining in runaway methane emissions from oil and gas infrastructure in the Permian Basin, analysts and advocates based in Texas tell Truthout. Moreover, they say, new executive power to reinstate a crude oil export ban could also potentially lower domestic gas prices while supporting Gulf Coast communities of color, often dubbed “sacrifice zones,” struggling with the impacts of increased fracked gas refining.

    The executive actions President Biden announced last week will bolster the domestic offshore wind industry in the Gulf of Mexico and the Southeast. The administration said it also plans to spend $2.3 billion to help communities cope with longer-lasting heat waves through programs administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Department of Health and Human Services, and other agencies.

    Like much of Europe and millions of Americans across the nation, Texans continue to bake under longer-lasting heat advisories during a summer on pace to be the hottest on record — a fact scientists say is linked to the climate crisis.

    The searing heat has driven electricity demand to record highs, nearly imperiling Texas’s shaky power grid, which remains independent of the nation’s two other national grids, the Western Interconnection and the Eastern Interconnection, even after an emergency blackout during Winter Storm Uri in February of 2021 left as many as 700 Texans dead and millions without power and water for days.

    The state’s grid operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), said demand for electricity briefly topped 80,000 megawatts for the first time ever last week, surpassing even the worst-case summer forecasts ERCOT had anticipated.

    Twice this month, ERCOT called on Texans, many of whom are still suffering from lingering trauma as a result of the February 2021 blackout, to limit power use during sweltering, three-digit afternoons as demand threatened to overwhelm supply.

    Now, ERCOT is ordering the state’s aging power plants to delay maintenance and exceed their pollution limits in order to continue operating around the clock to pump out power. Energy experts warn the record-shattering pace is further taxing a system already near its limits.

    ERCOT previously put out a misleading press release blaming wind energy for the grid’s shortfalls despite the fact that the amount of wind generation was within state projections for a summer day while gas, coal and nuclear underperformed. Energy analysts, however, have pointed out that solar energy and battery storage in particular have played perhaps the most central role in keeping the state’s power grid afloat this summer.

    A climate emergency declaration now could prove crucial in bailing out the state’s precarious power grid. According to reporting from Brian Kahn, such a declaration would not only invoke additional emergency powers such as those invoked by President Biden’s Defense Production Act (DPA) to fund additional production of solar panels, it could also provide a cash infusion for clean energy technology if federal agencies direct more money to the DPA beyond its limited budget of $545 million.

    Moreover, President Biden could wield the $650 billion federal procurement budget and implement climate resiliency projects under the Stafford Act, which directs and coordinates FEMA, as additional tools under a climate emergency. Together, the DPA, procurement budget and Stafford Act could allow the government massive purchasing power, freeing up billions for clean energy, electric vehicles and, crucially, battery-storage technology that could stabilize Texas’s power grid and save Texans from rolling blackouts during future record-setting, climate-fueled summer heat waves.

    “Having more storage on the grid is absolutely one of the most important things we could do to increase grid reliability and resiliency,” said Doug Lewin, an energy consultant and president of Stoic Energy based in Austin, Texas, in an interview with Truthout.

    It would take several kinds of bulk storage, he noted, including football field size installations of battery storage as well as distributed storage through standalone batteries. Moreover, he said, electric vehicle storage combined with other forms of storage, including iron air and vanadium flow batteries, will prove key to having a resilient and reliable power grid.

    “Storage would be a much better way to meet peak [demand] than these ‘50s-era [power] plants which often have very few pollution controls, but were grandfathered in, given [that] they were operating before the Clean Air Act passed,” Lewin told Truthout.

    Solar storage, paired with the state legislature and/or the state Public Utilities Commission (PUC) directing energy transmission distribution in the state to come up with concrete action plans on energy efficiency, are among the most important tools for grid reliability amid an intensifying climate crisis, Lewin explained. Unless the PUC intervenes, Texas will continue to have energy efficiency attainment that is 80 percent lower than the average among the 27 states with currently existing efficiency goals.

    “A call for [energy] conservation is not energy efficiency. Conservation is reducing your energy use and not getting the same output. Efficiency is: You’re getting the same outcome, the same result, while using less energy,” Lewin told Truthout. “Conservation is deprivation … and there’s a real question as to how much conservation ERCOT and the PUC can call for before the general public starts saying, ‘Forget this. I’m not doing it.’”

    According to Texas Sierra Club Chapter Director Dave Cortez, both energy efficiency and increased storage would also help to drive down the spiking energy bills Texans have faced after several cold snaps last winter, as well as this summer’s heat wave. “These [fossil-fuel powered] plants are being run into the ground, and we simply can’t count on them,” he told Truthout. “It’s not a reliable system, and it leaves all of us exposed to extremely high prices for electricity.”

    Cortez warned that after this summer’s heat wave is over, millions of Texans could be saddled with extremely high debt due to skyrocketing electricity bills. Politicians and regulators must make plans now to prevent utility shutoffs, just as they did during the pandemic, he said.

    Beyond shoring up Texas’s grid, Cortez and other Texas environmental and energy advocates are urging President Biden to invoke emergency powers to suspend offshore oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico and to ensure that the final 2023-2028 Oil and Gas Leasing Program includes no new oil and gas leasing anywhere off the coast of the United States, including Alaska and the Gulf.

    Reinstating the 40-year-old crude oil export ban that Congress lifted in 2015 would not only help to rein in skyrocketing methane emissions from leaking and venting oil and gas infrastructure in the Permian Basin, it would also potentially bring down prices at the gas pump, advocates say. While restricting exports would likely flood the United States domestic market, causing prices to lower, refiners could counter that trend by reducing output and raising prices.

    An Oil Change International report estimates methane emissions from the Permian will amount to more than 9.5 billion tons of CO2-equitvalent by 2050 as fracked gas extraction is expected to increase 50 percent over the next decade to meet global demand (as opposed to domestic demand). That’s in direct opposition to the 40 percent decline climate scientists say is needed to keep warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius.

    Further, Permian oil and gas is primarily shipped via pipelines to the Gulf Coast and refined in toxic petrochemical plants for export on the global market. If the dozens of planned oil, petrochemical and so-called liquefied natural gas (LNG) export projects under federal jurisdiction are built, Gulf Coast communities and ecosystems will continue to suffer the disproportionate impacts of added pollution — and then take added hits during climate-fueled hurricanes.

    During the Winter Storm Uri blackout, Cortez says, “We saw gas companies continuing to export gas even though there was a supply shortage of gas to our power plants…. Fundamentally, the communities along the Gulf Coast that are already struggling … not just [with] skyrocketing bills, in terms of their electricity and difficulty keeping their home livable, cool and affordable; they’ve been pummeled by extreme storms from South Texas in the Rio Grande Valley all the way to New Orleans.”

    Frontline climate activist John Beard, who spent decades working at a local Exxon plant in Port Arthur, Texas, and later founded the Port Arthur Community Action Network, likewise urged President Biden to take decisive action to halt new oil and gas leases and LNG projects in and near the Gulf. “Fortune favors the bold, and we look for our president to provide the leadership to be the climate president he said that he was going to be,” Beard says. “What has happened is now the president has been put in a position where basically he has to put up or shut up. He can no longer tell us about these things and not take the action necessary.”

    In terms of the modest executive actions President Biden did announce last week, Cortez told Truthout that the administration is basically just putting more money behind energy and climate resiliency programs that already exist, rather than offering new ones. Still, Cortez remains cautiously optimistic about a new effort by the Department of the Interior to expand offshore wind power at two sites in the Gulf, including one off the coast of Texas.

    The Sierra Club and other environmental organizations are pressuring the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to attach strong labor and worker training and safety standards to the offshore wind leases Biden announced last week, as well as strong environmental safeguards for endangered wildlife.

    “We want to see Texans get the maximum benefit from investments in offshore wind, and right now, because it’s Texas and Louisiana and other horrific Gulf Coast state governments, there’s no guarantees that these are going to be family supporting, good-paying jobs,” Cortez says.

    He advocated for training at Texas high schools and community colleges in areas that depend on the building trades — places like Brownsville, Port Arthur, Beaumont and Corpus Christi. Strong labor standards for offshore wind leases, Cortez argues, would ensure long and stable careers for thousands working to build and manufacture the component parts to service wind farms in federal waters off the Gulf. Right now, no such plans are in place.

    For Cortez, a just transition must be paired with a more radical move toward a system of energy democracy, in which working-class people are actually able to shape decisions around how they get their power and water. This is especially critical after Winter Storm Uri ushered in a massive wealth transfer from working-class Texans to multibillion-dollar energy corporations like Energy Transfer Partners, CenterPoint Energy and Encore, which continue to line the pockets of state lawmakers like Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick.

    “Our government is still captured by the oil and gas industry, and that’s what allowed the oil export ban to be lifted in the first place,” Cortez says. “That’s what allowed [former President Barack] Obama to approve the construction of Keystone XL in Texas. And that’s still what’s costing all of us so much at the pump, and is allowing this broken system to remain in place.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Thermal Videos Reveal Heavy Pollution From the Texas Oil Boom

    A flare burns off gas into the atmosphere at a Permian Basin oil field in Eddy County, New Mexico on April 23, 2020.

    Sharon Wilson, an activist documenting the latest fracking boom in Texas, recently returned from the United Nations climate summit and was “devastated” when the final agreement did not mention any reduction in oil and gas drilling. Wilson uses a thermographic camera to capture pollution spewing from fossil fuel infrastructure in the Permian Basin, where oil production is projected to increase by 50 percent over the next decade. Mike Ludwig asks Wilson what the Permian “climate bomb” looks like up close and personal.

    Music by Dan Mason.

    TRANSCRIPT

    This is a rush transcript lightly edited for brevity.

    Welcome back to Climate Front Lines, the podcast exploring the people and places on the front lines of the climate crisis. Today’s episode will take us from the UN climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, to the Permian Basin, a vast shale formation across West Texas and eastern New Mexico, where oil production is projected to increase by 50 percent over the next decade as the latest fracking and drilling boom continues.

    Our guide to the Permian Basin is Sharon Wilson, a senior field advocate and optical gas imaging thermographer with the environmental group Earthworks. Using an infrared thermal imaging camera, Wilson has documented oil booms in Texas for over a decade, and her videos capture startling images of toxic pollution and greenhouse gases that are invisible to the naked eye. Environmentalists say the drilling boom in the Permian Basin is a “climate bomb” that will feed expanding pipelines, petrochemical plants and export terminals, ensuring that the United States will continue exporting oil to be burned in other countries for decades to come. Truthout’s Candice Bernd published a great story on all that yesterday, and you should definitely check it out. But I wanted to ask Sharon Wilson what the Permian “climate bomb” looks like up close and personal in the fracking fields of West Texas.

    But the first stop is the United Nation’s COP26 summit that wrapped up last weekend, where the latest global warming agreement left advocates disappointed to say the least. Sharon Wilson had just returned from the conference when I spoke to her on Tuesday. The nations of the world did agree — on a voluntary basis I might add — to “phase-down” rather than “phase-out” unabated coal burning and subsidies for the fossil fuel industry, but Sharon Wilson says she was “devastated” when the agreement said nothing about reducing the production of oil and natural gas. Wilson was also shocked by the industry’s influence at the summit. In the Blue Zone, an area where delegates and others with UN credentials gathered, Wilson saw what she describes as a “propaganda poster” boasting about what the fossil fuel industry claims to be doing right, from promoting women’s rights to creating jobs. But Wilson was not allowed to bring her own message into the conference. Let’s listen to the interview.

    Sharon Wilson: The thing that, the thing that was so crazy about this poster, this oil and gas poster was that I had a poster that just said, ask me about methane from oil and gas. And I was not allowed to bring that poster inside. They wouldn’t let me bring it in the blue zone. They said, well, we’re going to get an approval. We have to get an approval for it and we’ll let you know, we kept emailing them, asking for the approval and it never was approved and

    Mike Ludwig: Approval to carry a sign into the convention, like a permit?

    SW: It had to be an approval from someone at the UN. Everything apparently had to be approved … every poster you know … they even wanted to approve or scrutinize the scarves we were wearing that said you know, something about climate change.

    So everything had to be scrutinized and approved and yet, they approved a poster that was pure propaganda from the oil and gas industry. I want to know who is in charge of that. And how did that happen? Because we know why we were there at that conference. It’s a climate change conference that we are there because of oil and gas. So it seemed pretty outrageous to me that that could happen.

    ML: Then what about the final agreement … there’s like a, a push to phase out coal, but didn’t really say that much about oil and gas. What’s your take?

    SW: Well, I think they even softened the language around coal. Phase out, they softened that language and I can’t remember the exact phrasing.

    They also softened the language about oil and gas subsidy. So it was … basically weasel language that they used in talking about phasing out coal and talking about subsidies to oil and gas. So. You know, and, and they also used weasel language and support for island nations and other vulnerable communities that are the first to feel the dramatic impacts from climate change countries, rich countries should be paying some kind of restitution and pay, to provide help to those nations, where they are feeling the direct impacts. And we didn’t.

    ML: You know, I think it’s interesting that you were talking about getting permission to bring a sign about climate change into a climate change conference, a global climate change conference where the fossil fuel industry had plenty of messaging, but you’re also … in Texas where it’s one of the easiest places to get permission or permit to drill for oil and gas and process it.

    And can you tell us a little bit about where you live and the kind of land that you work on? As a watchdog of the industry.

    SW: I currently live in Dallas and I moved here because there is no active oil and gas drilling here. Years ago in 1996, I bought land in the country and it was in Wise County, Texas, just north of the DFW metroplex. And that’s where George Mitchell was experimenting to learn how to extract oil and gas from shale rock.

    ML: Who is George Mitchell?

    SW: George Mitchell is known as the father of fracking. And he, he founded Mitchell energy that he later sold to Devin Energy, but he married the two technologies, hydraulic fracturing with horizontal drilling so that it, you know, he actually developed the technology that made it possible to produce oil and gas from shale.

    And if he hadn’t developed that technology, we would probably all have clean, renewable energy right now, but that happened right in my backyard. Pretty soon … soon after I moved out there. So I experienced direct impacts on my property. The air turned brown. We had smog out in the middle of nowhere and there was nothing, there were no highways, there was nothing out there but oil and gas extraction and we developed smog and then eventually my water turned black. And so, that’s how I got involved in being an activist.

    ML: That’s so interesting because here’s where fracking first was developed. And it’s almost a preview of what the boom, the fracking boom across the country would look like with allegations of water contamination, contamination by wastewater, into, into rivers and streams and lakes. And also air pollution that’s associated with the oil and gas production. When we were told, you know, 10, 15 years ago that fracking was, was very safe and of course it took years, but the research finally came in. That it does cause ground water pollution and obviously oil and gas development and processing is also a big source of methane.

    Is that part of the work that you do in Texas?

    SW: Yes. Initially I learned that these cameras exist, optical gas imaging cameras. And this was back in 2012. Maybe when I first ran across this information. Nope. Before then even, I got my hands on some state optical gas imaging videos that made the pollution from oil and gas visible, because it’s normally invisible it.

    If you look at a site, it just looks, it looks like some tanks and some metal and different pieces of equipment, but you can’t see these clouds of pollution that are coming from these pieces of equipment without an optical gas imaging camera.

    So at first I wanted to, Earthworks to get one of these cameras because, the oil and gas industry would plop down next to someone like they did me. And if that person said, you know, we’re smelling horrible odors, we’re getting sick. The oil and gas industry would say, it’s not us. It’s look, you can see our equipment is all claimed. There’s nothing coming out of it. It’s not.

    I kid you not, they told people it’s the candles you’re burning in your house. It’s the Windex you’re using to clean that’s what’s causing your health impacts. And it’s not this giant elephant that plopped down right next to your yard. That’s passing this methane gas, not us. So I wanted to help people who were in that situation by getting a video of the pollution and show them that, yes, you’re not crazy. This is what’s happening. And I’ve had people openly weep when I show them. Yes, you’re right. You are being polluted. Because you know, this is some pretty intense gaslighting that people experience from the oil and gas industry.

    So that was initially I wanted to help people help communities, but now it is a global issue and what’s happening in Texas and in all over the U S is impacting people all around the globe. And especially Texas is a really bad actor in climate change.

    ML: And is that because of the amount of methane that is being released by the expanding industry there? I mean, there’s been a massive boom fracking boom in Texas, as there was earlier in Pennsylvania and also in other parts of the west, but the Permian basin, which is what the industry calls that area of west, Texas and New Mexico is seeing a big boom. And, and that’s not just of drilling rigs, right? That’s also of processing and transport and infrastructure pipeline, and methane can leak from that. Is that what your videotapes are finding is, is methane spewing out of this equipment, and is that your biggest concern of the air pollution, at least on a global scale?

    SW: The methane? Yes, we are finding methane and volatile organic compounds and the methane is a huge concern for climate globally for climate change, the volatile organic compounds are a huge concern for the people, the communities who live, where this is happening with this right in their backyards, because volatile organic compounds contain things like methane, benzene, toiling, ethyl, benzene, xylene, things that are known to be very harmful to human health. Methane is harmful to the climate. It creates some it’s helps create ozone, but it’s not, it doesn’t, it’s not toxic to humans. It’s in this so you can suffocate it can displace oxygen, but the main concern with the health impacts are the gases that come with methane, the volatile organic compounds. So what’s happening is, and the Permian basin, boom is just the latest boom in Texas. The first boom, the first fracking boom was in the Barnett shale, where, and then it expanded to the Eagle Ford shale on the Haynesville shale and now the Permian basin. And it’s basically all over Texas. We have oil and gas it’s everywhere, but the Permian basin is the lightest one and it’s a very big basin. So it’s a huge area. And we’re producing, I think about 5 million barrels of oil per day, and it’s expected to double By 2030.

    So president Biden said, you know, he tried to float this basically BS that America is back at the climate conference and we’re leading the way and you can’t be a leader on solving climate change. If you intend to double production and we have more production today than we did when Trump was president.

    So we’re actually going backward.

    ML: You know, I think if you brought this up with the Biden administration, they might point to the Environmental Protection Agency and say, Hey, we are trying right now to develop new regulations for methane, which basically would require the industry to update their equipment, to prevent leaks because a lot of the methane emissions are the gas they’re producing from natural gas fields, or maybe from oil wells being vented or leaked in the atmosphere. Do you think that goes far enough or do you think we need to be moving beyond these fossil fuel?

    SW: Well, we have to move beyond. I mean, the science is clear that we have to move beyond also fuels and we have to do it fast. And even the International Energy Agency, the IEA, which was created to basically ensure a steady supply of oil and gas, they said no new investment in oil and gas after this year, after this year and it’s November. So even, even they say we have to get off oil and gas, but I heard nothing about that at the COP.

    And, you know, passing methane rules is good. We need methane rules. I need to, I need to understand how they expect to enforce these rules. First of all, a lot of the technologies that they claim will capture the emissions. I document those failing all the time. And most of these technologies depend on reliable electricity. In west Texas, we don’t have reliable electricity anymore. The intention, whether that’s been created, we had that bad freeze that a lot of places were out of electricity for 10 days. And that’s our more and that’s a time when with no electricity, there is no methane captured.

    So besides the problems with the technology, how are they going to enforce this? Because oil and gas is everywhere. And if there’s anything that I have learned after a decade of work, or more than a decade of work on trying to do something about oil and gas emissions, they are not going to do it voluntarily. So it’s going to take. A lot of inspections, a lot of enforcements, and that will take an army.

    So what army are we going to hire to regulate oil and gas, and who’s going to pay for it?

    ML: I want to really drill into this because you’re in a unique position in Texas, which is known as one of the least regulated states for fossil fuel production. At least at the time the state level. What has your experience been? If you would go a little bit more in depth about, about being on the ground and attempting to have the rules and forest documenting pollution and attempting to have the industry be held accountable to people.

    SW: Yeah, it is very depressing. So since 2014 is when I was certified as an optical gas imaging, demographer, and it’s the same certification that the industry gets.And I use the same equipment that they use. In fact, when I got certified, I was in a classroom full of industry camera operators. So, I started. After I got certified, I started submitting video as evidence to the state of Texas with a complaint. And oftentimes the complaint was accompanied by people who lived nearby.

    I’ve submitted over 240 of those complaints. And a lot of times I find so much that it’s just triage. I can only do, I’m just one person. I can only do so much. So I don’t make a complaint on everything, but I’ve made it, I’ve made over 240 is probably approaching 300 complaints with video evidence proof that this facility is polluting and Texas has only taken action in a fraction of those maybe 10 percent.

    And then when they do take action, they often do not follow up to see whatever they required the industry to do was completed and that whatever fix the industry does the operator does at their site. It doesn’t last. You can go back to this site in six weeks and find the same problem. So they have this equipment has to be constantly maintained, are, you know, it just doesn’t work.

    And even in one case, this is so outrageous. I have. It’s not, it’s not the only outrageous thing, but it’s one of the most outrageous things I’ve ever witnessed an operator drilled holes in 18 tanks. And so I kept reporting. I kept sending videos. I didn’t know they drilled holes, but I knew there was a lot of pollution coming from these towns.

    So I kept sending compliance and sending compliance. And finally, I did an open records request and learned that one of those complaints, they finally did an investigation and they learned that the operator had drilled holes in 18 tanks. The operator did not receive a violation for deliberately drilling holes in their tanks. They did however, receive a violation because they had been operating for years without a permit.

    ML: that common in Texas? Cause it’s such a drill baby drill attitude. And it’s been kind of an oil man’s paradise for a hundred years that people will just start drilling without applying for a permit, knowing that if they get caught, they’ll just get a slap on the wrist and file up the paperwork?

    SW: It is, it’s apparently very common. We have found a number of sites where they don’t get that they’ll get a permit to drill, but then there are other permits that are required after they get a permit to drill. And one of those permits is. Want to operate a flare for more than 10 days, the first 10 days is a, you get a pass to operate a flyer.

    And then after that you have to get a permit or an, a rule 32 exemption. And we did an analysis of observed flares in the Permian basin in one region of the Permian basin and of those observed, 84 percent did not have a permit. Even big companies did not have a permit to operate the flare. So it was such an alarming discovery that we sent the report to the railroad commission and they said, oh, you’re wrong.

    It’s only 69 percent of the flares that are un-permitted, but they did not provide any proof, not even a response to our request for proof that those additional flares had a permit. They just were just supposed to take them at their word. So somewhere between 84 percent and 6 percent of the flares in that region of the observed flares were unpermitted.

    And we found many cases where, they don’t require the operator to follow through and get the additional permits needed after they drill. So, yeah, it’s kind of a wild west atmosphere and it’s pretty lawless.

    ML: I want to just jump in and note that the railroad commission is actually the regulatory agency in Texas that does this permitting for oil and gas permits that are supposed to have environmental concerns and implications. And I also want to just note that I’ve seen your videos and they are pretty alarming. And to just kind of describe them for a second, you could be looking at some piece of oil and gas infrastructure, you know, maybe a pipeline. What would you call it? Like a terminal or a place for pipelines connect.What kind of infrastructure do you normally look at?

    SW: We look at everything. So it’s, it all starts with a hole in the ground. And that is where you’ll find the well site and there’ll be tanks and some other equipment their tanks are a lot of a big problem because they can’t, they have to release pressure. They have to off gas. And so they don’t really, I mean, they can’t. The gas in a tank, the tanks hold liquids, but the liquids have associated gas that off gases and they vent that. And then they have flares on most of these sites and the oil and gas industry cannot properly operate a flare to save their lives.

    ML: Let’s just clarify really quick what a flare is. And I’ve seen these in their very alarming and we need to think about flaring in context of methane, which is a greenhouse gas that is much more intensive than carbon dioxide. It is what is produced when oil and gas drilling, you know, releases natural gases from below the earth, and it is flared literally straight into the atmosphere. And can you tell us more about what that looks like and what the problems are with this?

    SW: It’s terrifying to see a flare up close. It’s terrifying to look out at night and see how many flares there are. It looks like a big pipe and on top of the pipe is a flame. And when you get up close, you can hear it roaring like a jet engine.

    Sometimes you can barely talk because they’re so loud and that’s how much pressure and force. These flares are burning off the gas that is produced because in the Permian basin, they, the target is oil. That’s what they want is the oil. A lot of gas comes up with the oil and they want to just get rid of it because the prices are low.

    It costs them to transport it in a pipeline to market. So they’re either going to VIN it or they’re going to burn it in a flare. The prop flares that are lit are doing what they’re supposed to supposed to do. They’re scary. They do pollute, they put out CO2, a formaldehyde, rarely does a flare burn efficiently.

    They’re supposed to burn 98 percent efficiently in Texas. And that’s pretty rare. But the, the biggest problem that we see with flares is that they cannot keep them live. So when they go, when the flame goes out, you have a pipe that to the naked eye just looks like a pipe, but then with the camera, you can see this giant cloud of methane and volatile, organic compounds just blasting out.

    And if you get downwind from that, it’s pretty horrifying. I mean, you actually are convinced that you cannot breathe and you’re going to die unless you get out of the past. Keep in mind, some people in Texas people can live 200 feet sometimes even closer from one of these flares. And when it becomes unlit, they’re stuck there.

    They can’t drive away. Like I do. They’re stuck there. They either have to go stay somewhere else until they like the flare. Are they just get sick or they have to abandon their property. It’s it’s horrible. So the flares are a big problem.

    ML: I mean, and this is natural gas and methane that not only is very climate intensive and turn of green greenhouse gases. This is actually stuff that could be captured and used as fuel, but because fracking has made guests so cheap, they just burn it off directly into the atmosphere. Or like you said, they just vent it. If it’s not burning and I’ve seen your videos, they’re quite startling. You could look at a piece. Oil and gas infrastructure, like a tank or a flare and see nothing just with the naked eye, but then you look at your videos and you can just see the emissions blowing into the sky.

    SW: Yeah, it’s, it’s horrifying. And the industry, I have seen them get quite creative at using our atmosphere to dump their methane into, just find all different ways that they can a dump it because you can’t see it. If you don’t have a camera, you don’t know it’s happening. And oil and gas is everywhere in Texas. It’s in people’s backyards. It’s all over, out in the remote areas. So that’s again. Bringing it back to this thought of the methane rules, which we need, but how are they going to enforce these rules? Because it will take vigorous enforcement and investigations to ever bring methane down. And I do not believe.

    That methane levels will decrease in our atmosphere until they stop permitting new oil and gas. I do not believe that you can reduce methane while producing more and more methane.

    ML: And as far as regulations go, I’ve heard that you’ve probably inspected with your camera, more pieces of oil and equipment then the regulators or maybe even the industry?

    SW: We did an open records request and asked one region in one regional office in the Permian base. For the spreadsheet that showed how often they checked out their optical gas imaging camera. And during the timeframe that we asked for these records, they checked the camera out 44 times. I did over 300 individual investigations during that same time before.

    ML: Now as far as preventing new permits, keeping the fossil fuels in the ground, the, by the administration might argue that they only have kind of powered to prevent drilling on public lands, which Biden did put a moratorium on drilling and public lands. Unfortunately, it got challenged in court. There’s an injunction and I believe. Personally, I believe due to a lot of tension already within the interior department, we’re seeing interior agencies. Once again began leasing out public lands and waters such as the Gulf of Mexico to oil and gas companies.

    Is that an issue in the Permian basin in Texas? Are there public lands that the federal government is still giving away to the oil and gas and.

    SW: Texas has a very few federal lands. I mean, just a tiny, tiny bit in Texas. We do have Texas operated Texas lands, but that’s different than the federal lands, but Biden could take action today, right now this moment, he could declare a national climate emergency. That would give him expanded executive powers. And with those, he could reinstate the crude oil export ban. That was overturned in 2015, when they overturned this decades, old crude oil export ban that gave birth to the Permian basin because we can’t.

    We don’t have the capacity to refine the light sweet crude coming from the Permian basin. So it has to be exported and executives of top oil and gas companies have said from here on out, every molecule will be exported. That may be a slight exaggeration, but most of it is exported. So. Biden’s expanded powers under a national climate emergency.

    He could reinstate that crude oil export ban. That means that the Permian basin would not double in project and production. By 2030, it would country start contracting and you know, a lot of that production and that would solve a huge part of the problem. He also would be able to. Deny certain large infrastructure projects that he would keep us locked in two decades, more oil and gas use.

    So there’s many things that he can do with those expanded powers and why he hasn’t done that. I don’t know. He made campaign promises and he said on the campaign trail, the buck stops with me. So stop blaming Congress. On not taking these actions and just do what needs to be done, declare a national climate emergency.

    ML: SO what would you like to see from Congress? Are you excited about a green, new deal? Are you excited about the infrastructure packages that of Democrats have been working on or do you think we need to be thinking even bigger?

    SW: I would be very excited about the green new deal. I think that would be amazing, but it seems to be dead on arrival right now.I think Congress needs to work together to stop stop the subsidies that go to oil and gas. Give those instead to clean, renewable energy, to alternatives, to things like the fertilizer and plastics, so that those there are alternatives, but they don’t have the capital to expand. So we need to take money away from the oil and gas industry and give it to renewable energy and real alternatives.

    Not these. Things like the carbon capture, which is just another way to an industry scheme to keep expanding and keep creating sacrificed phones. Congress should stop all new permits. There should be, we don’t need more oil and gas. We’re we’re drowning in oil and gas. So stop all new permits and only issue a new permit under very strict.

    Regulations and requirements, and then somehow try to get your arm or arms around regulating all this mess we have out there. There are some policies that have been written where To create a federal program to charge a tax, a carbon tax to the industry, to fund a federal program where they hire workers to clean up and plug all the abandoned Wells that are all over littering.

    The whole country. That will end up costing taxpayers, trillions to take care of if we don’t get that program started right now. So there are a lot of things that could happen. And I don’t know. Biden is president Biden is. The leader of our country. He is the leader of Congress. Get your people in line, pass some real measures.

    The infrastructure bill had some good things in it, but it also gave the oil and gas industry over $24 billion. Part of that is to, is to be given to the state. The states are the ones who created the problem, but they want to give this taxpayer money to the states to start plugging and cleaning up old oil and gas Wells.

    Now, if they give it to the railroad commission, Christie Craddick has probably already started way the plugin, LLC. And she’s going to get some, you know, they’re going to find a way to give that money to their crony. To, you know, capitalize it on it themselves because it’s just the oil and gas industry in Texas is just corrupt.

    ML: Who is Christie?

    SW: She is on the railroad commission she’s a commissioner, they have three commissioners and they are elected and all three of them get elected because they get a ton of oil and gas money and they, they call themselves the railroad commission. So people don’t really know what they’re in charge of.

    So voters, you know, just vote without really thinking it through. And all three of the commissioners are invested. They have. Investments in the companies that they’re supposed to regulate.

    ML: Now, what do voters and Texans think about? All this? Texas has a long history of oil and gas. People have gotten rich off of it. Also, there was a very intense winter storm that was hugely destructive that scientists said could have been linked to climate change. And also, like you’ve said, the oil and gas industry dominates the landscape and pollutes near people’s homes. What are Texans thinking about?

    SW: Well, you have to remember that the oil and gas industry has lied to you and gaslighted the American public for decades. When I started speaking out and trying to sound the warnings warning signs, I got sued twice trying to shut me up. So there’s been intense intimidation and a lot of propaganda pumped to Texans by. And the other, the other part of that with voting is we have some of the most regressive voting laws in the country.

    It is harder to vote in Texas than anywhere else in the United States. So we’ve got, I think voters are concerned. I don’t know if they’re going to be able to, to actually go vote.

    ML: Right. And when we talk about industry capture the. The industry has over politics in Texas, obviously a place where Republicans have the governor’s office and have dominated in the legislature and also use that majority to pass a very restrictive voting law. How does the industry play out in state politics?

    SW: They have a pipeline that goes straight to Austin and it just pumps it’s oil and gas money. It is drenched in dirty oil and gas money. So I’m really, I don’t know if voters can vote. Maybe they can change, turn the situation around, but I think a lot of the pressure is going to have to be external because Texas is ruining things, not just for.

    It’s ruining things for all of us, for every person on this planet. And so we need some external pressure. Another thing that the Biden EPA could do is they could step in and Texas and resend the implementation of the clean air act. So the EPA turned over implementation of the Clean Air Act to states. It’s really not turned out very well in any state. No state does a good job of regulating oil and gas, but especially in Texas, they need to rescind that implementation and step in and take over themselves.

    ML: Right. And what you’re saying is, is that there’s an exemption basically where the state regulators in Texas, which I guess would be the railroad commission have primacy or they’re, they’re in the position to do most of the regulating and the federal government, the EPA kind of steps back, is that correct?

    ML: Well, that’s partially correct to make things a little more confusing in Texas, we have two environmental agencies, the Texas commission on environmental quality regulates most of the air police. The railroad commission regulates the oil and gas permits and some other things about oil and gas.

    So they have a memorandum of understanding that no one really understands very well, including people who work for the agencies, but basically. The Texas commission on environmental quality regulates air pollution. And the railroad commission is over issuing drilling, permits, and some water pollution and things like that.

    ML: What if one of these agencies may be the environmental quality agency called you up and said, Hey, we know that you’re out here with your camera. I’m finding this pollution. Why don’t you come work for us? Or do you think it’d be important to maintain your independence?

    ML: Well funny that you should mention that because we have on contract a former TCEQ regulator who worked for TCEQ for 30 years and he helped start there optical gas imaging, some graphy program.

    He was over the mobile lab. So he had. Quite a bit of responsibility for air pollution in Texas. And he retired early because he wanted to do more and it, he wants to do something more to help the environment. And he knew that TCEQ wasn’t getting it, getting it done.

    ML: That’s so interesting. Do you have any final thoughts?

    Just on Texas or on the United nations climate summit?

    SW: I think that the climate summit so far was a failure. I know it was a failure, but I think we can’t give up hope. We have to get. Angry. We have to get involved and we need to really push president Biden. We need to push him really hard because there are things that he could do and he’s not doing them.

    ML: Well, thank you so much, Sharon Wilson for joining us today on Climate Front Lines.

    SW: Thank you for having me.

    I like to end this podcast on a positive note, but that’s tough to do after everything we’ve heard from Sharon Wilson about the “climate bomb” going off in Texas. Wilson has a tough job; like many journalists, activists and researchers, she watches the destruction of the planet unfold before her very eyes –and in infrared. After reporting on environmental injustice for the past decade, I know how heavy it can feel. But I’m glad that the Sharon Wilsons of the world are out there exposing the fossil fuel pollution that powerful industries don’t want us to see. The climate crisis can seem abstract sometimes; in the news, we are constantly bombarded with figures estimating how so many tons of carbon and methane emissions will likely result in this or that degree of warming and disruption, but actually seeing those emissions up close – and confronting the polluters – puts the challenges we face, and what must be done about them, into perspective. Climate disruption is a global problem, but if we learned anything from the latest UN summit, action must be taken locally and on the front lines.

    If you enjoyed our interview and want to help us spread the word, please rate and share this podcast and subscribe on your podcast platform to hear our latest episodes. Climate Front Lines is produced by Jared Rodriguez and me, Mike Ludwig. Thank you for listening and until next time, remember, where there is a movement, there is hope.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Gulf Coast Tribe Vows to Resist Enbridge’s New Pipeline Expansion Plans

    As Indigenous Water Protectors and allies in northern Minnesota are stuck with legal and environmental fallout of Enbridge Energy’s Line 3 tar sands pipeline’s construction and operation, Enbridge is already moving on — eyeing ways to streamline and further expand its ability to deliver Canadian tar sands to the Gulf Coast for export to global markets.

    The Canadian oil giant is looking to increase capacity across its fossil fuel infrastructure systems that connect to the Texas Gulf Coast, including potentially building a pipeline linking the Houston area to its newly acquired crude-export hub at the Port of Corpus Christi in order to accommodate Line 3’s ramped up capacity, according to reporting by S&P Global Platts.

    The company is also looking at ways to expand its capacity across its Southern Access Extension and Flanagan South pipelines, corporate officials reportedly said on its third-quarter earnings call. It’s just waiting on a major Canadian regulatory decision later this month that will determine whether Enbridge can overhaul the way it awards space on its biggest tar sands pipeline network into the U.S., allowing it to contract up to 90 percent of its capacity on its Mainline system by signing long-term deals with potential shippers, rather than operating as a so-called “common carrier.” Corporate officials say they will provide more details on future projects at a December investors event.

    Last month saw the startup of Enbridge’s Line 3 expansion, which is now bringing 760,000 barrels of tar sands bitumen a day from Edmonton, Canada, to Superior, Wisconsin. It also saw its Wisconsin-to-Illinois Southern Access pipeline expansion come online, increasing its capacity to 1.2 million barrels of crude per day. On top of that, the oil giant closed in mid-October its $3 billion acquisition of the Moda Ingleside Energy Center, the U.S.’s largest crude-export hub near Corpus Christi, which also delivers fracked gas from the Permian and Eagle Ford basins to global markets.

    “Returning the line to full capacity sets us up for downstream expansion to the US Gulf Coast,” Enbridge CEO Al Monaco told Platts, referring to the Line 3 and Southern Access expansions, which, he says, promote “full path access for Canadian [tar sands] to the US Gulf Coast.” Like TC Energy’s hopes with the now nixed Keystone XL pipeline, Enbridge wants to light its own fuse to what climate scientists have described as the world’s largest climate emissions bomb in Alberta’s tar sands, even as oil prices finally slipped to their lowest level in six weeks Wednesday amid signs of impending oversupply after rising to their highest levels in seven years last month.

    Enbridge’s Gulf Coast expansion plans promise to lock in increased planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions over the long term, not only from Alberta’s tar sands climate bomb, but also from another major emissions bomb in West Texas and southeast New Mexico’s sprawling Permian Shale Basin. Enbridge’s plans worsen the findings of a new analysis showing fracked gas extraction in the Permian is expected to increase 50 percent over the next decade.

    The plans also come at a time when many climate justice activists are reeling from a watered-down agreement at the United Nations’ COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, that they say is too weak to meaningfully reduce emissions and limit global heating to 1.5 degrees Celsius — the target scientists say we must stay under to avoid the most catastrophic consequences of the climate crisis.

    To make matters even worse, the plans come as the Biden administration held the largest federal offshore drilling auction of Gulf waters in U.S. history Wednesday. ExxonMobil and Chevron were among the top buyers at yesterday’s federal auction of oil leases in the Gulf, which generated more than $190 million — the highest since 2019.

    “You have to wonder if Big Oil enablers like Enbridge are following world climate news at all. Experts are telling us to move as quickly away from fossil fuels as possible, including fossil fuel infrastructure,” Winona LaDuke, executive director of Honor the Earth, told Truthout. “No new pipelines and export terminals in the Gulf region is the way to go, especially for a climate criminal like Enbridge. The new Line 3 pipeline is already the equivalent of 50 new coal-fired power plants. This new line in Texas is not something we need in the time of the ‘Code Red’ climate crisis, especially after an ultimately dismal climate conference in Glasgow.”

    Now, Texas Gulf Coast Indigenous communities are vowing resistance to Enbridge’s Gulf expansion plans in solidarity with the White Earth Band of Ojibwe Water Protector LaDuke and other Anishinaabe peoples’ continued resistance to Enbridge and Line 3.

    “A lot of the organizations that I work with down here in Corpus Christi Bay that are dealing with the Enbridge expansion and the Cheniere [Energy liquified natural gas export terminal] expansion and the whole fossil fuel industry here, … we’re ready,” said Love Sanchez, co-founder of Indigenous Peoples of the Coastal Bend (IPCB) who is descended from the Karankawa Kadla Tribe of the Texas Gulf Coast. “We’re just kind of on standby to see what’s next and planning behind the scenes, and seeing how we could prevent the expansion from happening.”

    Love tells Truthout Gulf South communities aren’t afraid, even though they know opposing Enbridge’s expansion will be a challenge. “I was upset [about Enbridge’s expansion plans] because it’s like: They really are in a position of confidence that they’re just like, ‘We’re going to keep going.’ And I’m thinking to myself, ‘Well, we’re going to keep going too.’ We’re not going to bow down. We’re not going to back out of what we’re doing.”

    IPCB, the Karankawa Kadla Tribe and the Ingleside on the Bay Coastal Watch Association filed a lawsuit in federal court against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in August for issuing a permit for the then-Moda Midstream-owned Ingleside terminal — the same crude-export terminal Enbridge purchased in mid-October and wants to link with its Seaway Pipeline — to double its capacity and expand operations into an undeveloped area sacred to the area’s Native people.

    The suit argues the plans to construct an additional deep-water dock and turning basin failed to address environmental and community concerns as required under the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Water Act, and that the expansion will destroy a Karankawa cultural site and ecologically sensitive seagrasses and wetlands. Enbridge says it plans to delay construction until August 2022.

    The Karankawa peoples’ ancestors have lived in the area of the McGloin’s Bluff site, where the proposed terminal expansion is slated to be built, for hundreds of years. In fact, archeologists uncovered more than 39,000 artifacts, including pottery shards, arrowheads, tools, and fish and animal bones, from a historic Karankawa village during an investigation of McGloin’s Bluff in 2008-2009, and recommended that the site be listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

    One archaeologist who worked on the assessment of the site has said that because the area was so heavily occupied by the Karankawa people, there’s a chance the site still contains Indigenous burials. In 2002, the skull of a prehistoric or early historic Indigenous woman was found by a pipeline construction crew at Ingleside on the Bay, according to a 2006 report obtained by The Texas Tribune.

    The plaintiff groups are also concerned about damage to seagrass beds, which not only reduce coastal erosion but also provide important habitat and nurseries for marine species including waterfowl, sea trout, red fish, and juvenile shrimp and crabs.

    The Army Corps wrote in a response to public comments that because the Karankawa Kadla are not a federally recognized tribe, “They have no special consultation rights and are considered members of the public.” In permit documents, the Corps said the project’s required archaeological surveys and environmental mitigation had been done.

    Enbridge Spokesperson Michael Barnes said the expansion won’t impact the historic Karankawa village site at McGloin’s Bluff: It’s new megaship dock will require dredging of up to eight acres of seagrasses located within an active ship channel, he says. As the Army Corp permit documents specify, the company promises to plant new seagrass beds at a separate site to compensate for those it will destroy, while also setting aside 70 acres of land (excluding McGloin’s Bluff) as permanent green space. “We are confident the nearly year-and-a-half application review process was comprehensive, and that the permit was properly issued,” Barnes told Truthout.

    IPCB Co-founder Sanchez says Enbridge’s promised mitigation and compensation measures aren’t enough, and that its permit was rubber-stamped, like most fossil fuel infrastructure projects in the U.S. “They say they’re not dredging over sacred lands, but they are,” Sanchez tells Truthout. “They have to dredge into the bay to, of course, get the pier out there…. They have to make some room for it. Then they’re going to dredge onto the land, of course, because they’re going to be constructing. So when they say they’re not, they’re lying. So how do we prove that? That’s why we’re in court.”

    In the meantime, Sanchez tells Truthout she’s concerned about the plaintiff groups’ ability to monitor the difficult-to-see areas above the bluff site in case construction activity does start before August 2022: Texas passed a bill outlawing small drone flights over “critical” oil and gas infrastructure, including export terminals.

    She called Enbridge’s broader plans to expand its capacity and infrastructure connections in order to bring Canadian tar sands to the Gulf Coast “a whole new mess.” In addition to its new Ingleside export terminal, the company has been steadily securing a number of infrastructure projects on the Texas Gulf Coast, including the Rio Bravo and Valley Crossing Pipelines in South Texas. The company co-owns the Seaway Pipeline with Enterprise Products Partners and is likewise partnering with Enterprise to build the Sea Port Oil Terminal offshore of the Houston Ship Channel.

    On top of all the expansions in the Gulf, Enbridge could potentially ramp up its Line 3 capacity even beyond what it has been previously permitted for, and has also been in talks with shippers about reversing the flow of its Line 13 pipeline, which transports diluent from the Chicago area to Alberta’s tar sands region, in an effort to boost crude export capacity. Enbridge is targeting a 2023 startup date for the Line 13 project, which is part of its larger Mainline system optimization.

    Climate activists who have long been engaged in the fight against Line 3 say Enbridge’s creation of an abundant supply of Canadian tar sands through its new infrastructure acquisitions and expansions artificially inflate demand while promising a disastrous climate future in the long term.

    “The expansions you’re seeing right now are not an add-on to Line 3. Those are part of the integral reason for building Line 3 for Enbridge,” said Andy Pearson, Midwest tar sands coordinator for the Minnesota branch of 350.org, in an interview.

    The Minnesota Department of Commerce challenged Enbridge’s long-term oil demand forecast, which the state’s Public Utilities Commission ultimately accepted when it approved the Line 3 pipeline. In the forecast, the company assumes constant demand for tar sands by refineries.

    To justify Line 3’s expansion and replacement in northern Minnesota without having major U.S. or Midwestern market demand for its product, Pearson says, the company needs to be able to move its extracted product to global markets, so its Gulf Coast expansion plans are simply “a natural outcome of Line 3 getting completed.”

    “The expansion of export capacity in the Gulf is, I would say, them fulfilling the other half of that forecast,” Pearson tells Truthout. “What they had submitted was like a piece of paper with the infinity symbol drawn on it, saying, ‘We don’t really need to tell you anything about demand because we’ll just export it, and we could export the whole of Canada’s tar sands if we need to and that would be fine.’”

    Moreover, he says, the Biden administration’s near-exclusive focus on demand-side fossil fuel economics fails to tackle one of the most critical parts of the global climate equation by preventing infrastructure buildouts that promise to lock in the continued extraction and use of one of the most greenhouse gas and water-intensive fossil fuels on the planet.

    Between ballooning Permian extraction, oil and gas leasing, and infrastructure buildouts in and along the Gulf, the Biden administration is overseeing one of the largest oil booms across the Gulf South — a fact that hasn’t gone unnoticed by its most-impacted communities.

    “I’m not going to be like, ‘Yeah, I believe in the Biden administration’ because he was the vice president when the oil export ban was lifted at the end of ’15,” IPCB Co-founder Sanchez says. “So that’s very disheartening to know that he was a part of that. And to be asking him to roll that back and then to see him not do that, and to see [fracking projects expand under his administration].… It’s just sad to see these Indigenous communities, people-of-color communities experience the brunt of that because he’s not listening.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Methane Is Flaring Out of Control. Biden Administration, Congress Must Step In.

    A flare burns at an Apache facility near Balmorhea, Texas, on April 2, 2017.

    This summer, methane got a nickname that stuck. Climate scientists and policy analysts have been calling the greenhouse gas a “low-hanging fruit” for years, but the term seems to have caught on more broadly among world leaders, journalists and organizers, due in part to a major United Nations report on methane and the most dire Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment issued yet.

    Methane is the second greatest contributor to the climate emergency after carbon dioxide, but unlike CO2, it only sticks around the atmosphere for about a decade. So cutting methane emissions drastically and immediately can have a sizable impact on keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius and thereby averting the most catastrophic impacts of climate change, such as global food shortage.

    In total, the oil and gas industry is responsible for over one-third of methane emissions, some of which occur through flaring and venting: the practice of burning off, or releasing unwanted methane gas in the process of drilling, pumping, transporting and refining fossil fuels.

    An August 19 report by Earthworks reveals that among the lowest of low-hanging fruits may be found in the Permian Basin, in West Texas, where up to 84 percent of producers are flaring without permits. Since fracking was commercialized a decade ago, the Permian Basin has exploded as the top oil-producing region in the U.S.

    The report outlines how state regulators charged with keeping tabs on flaring, including the Railroad Commission of Texas (RRC), which issues flaring permits, and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), which oversees air quality, are doing nothing to stop producers observed to be dumping gas into the atmosphere. In other words, the Permian Basin is even more of a climate bomb — and a potential site of climate intervention — than environmentalists may have originally thought.

    Texas is the top flarer of all U.S. states, according to federal data from 2019. But the practice is a problem far beyond the Lone Star State. A July study in Environmental Research Letters found that across the U.S., over half a million people live within three miles of a flare. Living near a flare is associated with 50 percent higher odds of premature birth. In addition to being a climate pollutant, methane, which seeps out of leaky flares, is also the primary precursor to the asthma-causing pollutant ground-level ozone.

    Methane emissions have slid under the rug for years — in part because the gas is invisible to the human eye, but also because systems for monitoring emissions are less comprehensive and therefore more uncertain than for CO2. Sometimes, incomplete flaring leads to black smoke that is visible, also known as black carbon. But in recordings at oil and gas production sites without a special camera, you can also see a lot of sky.

    The increased use of optical gas imaging (OGI) cameras in recent years has made it possible to watch dark plumes of otherwise unseen pollutants escape from inactive-looking infrastructure, like steel storage tanks and thin metal chimneys.

    Sharon Wilson, a senior field advocate for Earthworks and co-author of the report on unpermitted flaring, is a certified optical gas imaging thermographer and has been busy capturing footage of oil and gas production sites around the U.S. since 2014.

    It’s only when putting an OGI camera up to one’s face, Wilson told Truthout, that dark plumes of pollutants become visible, turning landscapes into what look like war zones. “If people could see with their naked eye what I see with my lens, there would never have been a fracking boom.”

    According to the report, many flares are left unlit, which means they are seeping methane straight into the atmosphere, rather than burning it, which makes the release visible and at least converts the gas into less-potent carbon dioxide.

    To assess flaring operations in the Permian, Wilson and co-author Jack McDonald pulled from two data sets. One was generated from Environmental Defense Fund helicopter flyovers using OGI cameras from the sky to capture flares in January, March and June of 2020. After ensuring the data was focused specifically on the area of the Permian Basin in Texas, rather than in New Mexico, the authors cross-referenced that data with permits logged in the RRC’s database.

    If there was any overlap between a flare observed during flyovers and one for which a permit could be identified in the database, over any period, the authors gave the producer and regulators the benefit of the doubt, and counted that site as permitted. But ultimately, of the total 227 flares they ended up counting, a mere 35 sites had permits to flare every time they were observed to be doing so. Many companies were found to be flaring without ever obtaining a permit, including Diamondback Energy, Conoco and Shell.

    In Texas, flaring permits are governed by a state administrative law known as Rule 32. Under the rule, flaring is only legal for the first 10 days of a new oil and gas operation. After that, the practice is illegal without a permit, except for during 24-hour emergency periods. But the law does not clearly define what conditions oil and gas companies need to justify a permit or emergency exemption.

    As such, the operations that have received permits have essentially been rubber-stamped, the report suggests. Operators have applied for and received permits to flare for a host of nebulous reasons such as “inconsistent curtailments” or “economic conditions.” Still, the vast majority are unpermitted, the report suggests.

    Earthworks visited one site known as the “Seattle Slew” 14 times with an optical gas camera, as is described in the report, and detected pollution every time — nine of which involved flaring specifically. The owner of the site, MDC, has never been issued a permit from the RRC, according to the analysis. Earthworks reported as much to the TCEQ.

    According to correspondence Earthworks obtained via a public records request, the state agency did reach out to the company about the findings. “There is no way to estimate how much gas was vented, as we don’t measure our tank gas … since it isn’t sold to gas sales but instead sent to the combustor for incineration,” MDC replied. “Also, we don’t know for how long this gas was vented to the atmosphere.”

    In spite of this response, the state agency did not issue any violations, Earthworks found. A TCEQ representative told Truthout that “compliance determinations were made based on a review of the completed questionnaires and other relevant data such as reported emission events and applicable permits or authorizations,” noting that the facility did have a permit covering other emissions, including volatile organic compounds, nitrous oxide and carbon.

    Wilson says she’s documented numerous similar instances in which she’s reported emissions violations on the ground, such as at Diamondback’s Waler State Battery site, which regulators have all but shrugged off.

    In response to the report, RRC Spokesperson Andrew Keese told Reuters, “A short-term observation of a flare from a flyover and absence of an explicit exception does not necessarily mean the observed flaring is illegal.”

    In July, the RRC published data suggesting that the practice of flaring was declining across the state, dropping from 2.29 percent of all natural gas produced in June 2019, to 0.65 percent in May 2021. “Texas is seeing significantly reduced flaring rates as a result of improved technologies, infrastructure and regulatory processes,” RRC Chair Christi Craddick said in a statement.

    McDonald, however, said that dealings with the two state agencies do not offer much assurance. “From what we can tell, this seems to be an issue broadly across Texas, with just this kind of systemic lack of will to go and get these permits.”

    Without closely monitoring releases, or following up on violations, the agency’s data is a moot point. “Even if they are right that exempt flaring is exclusively the cause of the flaring, the RRC does not know how much flaring is happening,” McDonald said. “That means they are dramatically underestimating the amount of flaring that’s actually happening in the state because they aren’t able to account for all those exempt flares.”

    As Clean Energy Wire has reported, oil and gas production in places like the Permian has expanded faster than infrastructure to transport it. Oil is still profitable, but gas prices are so low that it’s cheaper to burn it on the spot, or release it directly, than to pay to send it to markets.

    The report concludes with a handful of actions state lawmakers and regulators could take to bring protocols in line with the regulatory agencies’ purported missions, including making all permitting data and enforcement actions publicly available online; updating Rule 32 such that it clearly identifies what justifications warrant a flaring permit or an emergency exemption; and creating an impartial panel free of oil and gas interests within the RRC to review all flaring permits.

    But Wilson says real reform will also require action beyond state lines. “After over a decade, it’s pretty clear that Texas has no intention of enforcing any rules,” Wilson said, noting lawmakers’ and regulators’ conflicts of interest. The RRC’s Craddick, for instance, owns land with her father — a state congressman — that generated over $100,000 from natural gas production in 2019, according to The Texas Tribune.

    The Biden administration is likely to unveil a new methane rule in September. In anticipation, the RRC and TCEQ penned a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in July requesting minimal changes. “The TCEQ has a robust air permitting program. Air permits typically include fugitive monitoring programs and control of volatile organic compound emissions, which could include methane emissions since methane is not separated from [volatile organic compounds] prior to atmospheric release,” agency directors wrote. “Additional requirements to control and monitor methane specifically are burdensome to the regulated community, duplicative and are therefore unnecessary.”

    Given that the EPA delegates how states must implement Clean Air Act regulations, Wilson says the moment warrants the strongest possible rule, such as one that would lead to slashing oil and gas methane emissions 65 percent by 2025. “If Biden is serious about taking action on the climate, the federal government will need to step in,” she said. “What they give, they can take away.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.