It seems he has unintentionally been captured by the influence of “development machine” (which happens to be the title of a 25-year-old University of California book on developers and their practices). A casual reference to “stagnant population growth” does not make population growth itself a legitimate path to economic prosperity. For just a few examples, this EPA report titled “How Small Towns and Cities Can Use Local Assets to Rebuild Their Economies: Lessons from Successful Places” highlights what small cities can do for economic health with a stable population.
It is true that we need to provide for housing, and I like the idea of tasteful additions of duplexes, ADUs and multifamily units as infill development. But, of course, it is the developers who build – not the cities – and developers have shown their true intentions when they have the chance to build expensive housing instead of affordable or middle-cost housing. They go for the higher profit. We are told they have to do this because of the fees, time to process and so forth.
Anyone read The Ox-Bow Incident? You should. It would teach you about what the “market can bear” the intentions of the commercial class – in this case, the railroads. And yes, we are being railroaded into building anything, anywhere, no matter what.
So, back to Stephen’s piece. The population growth issue is being used by the city in support of sprawl development out by Lake Herman Road. Now back up a second and think about population growth and the need to develop outside of the city’s urban footprint. If it were true that we must have population growth to thrive, when does it stop? We just keep having population growth to the end of time? Of course not. This is a failed concept and people should stop saying that we must approve development inconsistent with the city’s General Plan due to stagnant population growth (General Plans regard the constitution of land use development and fealty to them is the law, not a choice).
To be clear, Stephen does not say he supports sprawl development. He doesn’t. In fact, he supports the East Fifth Gateway mixed-use plan. It’s a good plan and needs city initiatives to encourage development. But he does use the “stagnant population” theme, which is troubling.
I suggest that we dig deeper into this concept of population growth and connect the dots of congested roads, long lines at National Parks, food shortages and pollution. There is a connection. It is not likely that we will solve problems like these by having more people.
And lastly, population growth is projected to begin to decline near the end of the century. This is certainly true in the US and California. We could wind up with lots of empty residential development just like we are seeing with the over-built, retail commercial development that we were warned about years ago.
What then, is the answer?
Consider economic development with the increasing need for manufacturing that is green, more local shopping at smaller, more community-based stores, not to mention the arts and entertainment. Our aging population will need services and housing accommodations over the next 25 years.
Thoughtful development with these needs in mind will create a place that people want to visit, shop in and work in. This is not a pie-in-the-sky idea, but it does take hard work and we, the people, need to do our part and help with city revenues for our infrastructure. And maybe with less stress the city council and staff can focus on the future so clearly described in the General Plan.
The saga of the repurposing of two of the refineries in the San Francisco Bay Area to manufacturing liquid biofuels from high deforestation risk commodities like soy took another anti-democratic twist this week. Local authorities sped through a hearing on January 16, 2024 on the revised environmental review of the massive Phillips 66 biofuel refinery project in the unincorporated community of Rodeo on the northern shores of the Bay, rushing to keep the $1 billion investment moving forward while taking measures to curtail public participation in the process.
On that day in early May 2022 the Contra Costa County Supervisors unanimously denied the appeals and wholeheartedly green lighted both of the biofuel refinery projects. Following those decisions by local elected officials, the Center for Biological Diversity, in partnership with Communities for a Better Environment, and with the legal and technical expertise of the Stanford Environmental Law Clinic, filed parallel lawsuits challenging the simultaneous approval of the environmental review of both unprecedented refinery conversion projects. The court case on the Marathon/Neste joint venture at the Martinez refinery resulted in a partial decision exposing flaws with the environmental review, focusing singularly on the flawed odor management plan, an unsatisfactory result for climate justice advocates. That lawsuit has already been sent on to the state appeals court, and will be heard in the coming year.
The Phillips 66 refinery in Rodeo has been getting lucrative incentives for making biofuels even though the environmental review of the project was found deficient by a judge. | Uncredited image from Biofuelwatch post.
However, in the case of the Phillips 66 biofuel refinery project, the same judge ruled that the original environmental review of the biofuels project was illegal and had failed to address serious questions of cumulative impacts, while embarking on the illegal tactic of piecemealing — the illegal breaking up of the entirety of a project into discrete pieces, thus averting the legally required review of the project as a whole.
Despite being presented with more evidence about the dangers of characterizing the conversion of the more than century old Phillips 66 Rodeo refinery to making biofuels as a climate solution, the county proceeded with great haste to finalize the revised environmental review during the holiday. Precisely four weeks after the close in early December 2023 of written public comment on the draft the county announced the January 16 public hearing to approve the final revised version.
The newest final version of the project review once again roundly dismissed all the evidence and information provided by community members and the organizations that engaged on the public comment. Despite the requirements under the California Environmental Quality Act to assess how new information can influence the veracity of the entirety of the environmental review, the county discarded new factual information provided in the public comment that in essence further substantiated the record of evidence that had resulted in the court of law ruling that the original environmental review was illegal in the first place.
Neither the Board of Supervisors nor County Staff expressed any sort of contrition nor leadership self reflection when faced with the fact that they had previously rubber stamped an environmental review that the court had later found deficient.
Kerry Guerin is an attorney with Communities for a Better Environment who attended the January 2024 hearing on the Phillips 66 project.. | Uncredited image from Biofuelwatch post.
Of the evidence presented to the county by community members regarding the safety concerns with the processing of feedstocks like soy was the existence of the most recent draft of what is known as a Flare Minimization Plan (FMP), presented by Phillips 66 on an annual basis for the Rodeo refinery to the local Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD). The FMP is an annual requirement, the review of which is buried in the opaque processes of BAAQMD staff and not easily accessible to the public. The late 2023 version of the FMP for the Phillips 66 Rodeo refinery apparently still remains confidential. However, the 2022 ‘nonconfidential’ version of the FMP was shared with Biofuelwatch.
Remarkably, despite the fact that Phillips 66 has been making liquid biofuels at their Rodeo refinery since April 2021, more than a year before receiving final approval for their project from the County in May 2022, an anomaly that the court saw as being relevant to the illegal piecemealing of the environmental review of the project, their most recent ‘nonconfidential’ version of their Flare Minimization Plan from October 2022 does not even mention biofuels. As a matter of fact, scrutiny of the 2022 FMP document reveals absolutely no mention of the refinery conversion project at all.
In essence, Phillips 66 has received lucrative Low Carbon Fuel Standard credits from the California Air Resources Board for producing ‘renewable diesel’ from feedstocks like soy and canola with a hydrogen intensive ‘hydroprocessed esters and fatty acids’ hydro cracker technology at their Rodeo refinery, but the most recent publicly available version of the FMP for that same refinery regulated by the local air district BAAQMD does not even mention the words biofuels, renewable diesel, hydrotreated vegetable oils, HEFA, soy, canola, animal tallow or any of the terms that are directly associated with making these products. As far as the BAAQMD supervised Phillips 66 Rodeo Refinery Flare Minimization Plan goes the biofuel project apparently does not even exist.
Notably absent from the recent county supervisors hearing on the revised environmental review were any representatives from BAAQMD, neither to provide comment or to be available to answer questions from decision makers, once again raising questions about to what extent the local air district is fulfilling their responsibility to implement regulatory activities within the context of current and future operations.
This incongruence of biofuel production not even existing in a recent Phillips 66 FMP was brushed aside by county authorities, who also appeared completely unconcerned about the recent devastating fire at the Marathon-Neste biofuel refinery in Martinez. At the same time, the County was obligated in their documentation to recognize that there exist numerous ‘significant and unavoidable environmental impacts‘ from the project. Those impacts were dismissed because of the economic significance of the refinery project.
Tyson Bagley is the United Steelworkers Health and Safety Representative for the Phillips 66 Rodeo refinery who attended the January 2024 hearing and spoke in strong support of the Phillips 66 biofuels project. | Uncredited image from Biofuelwatch post.
Notably, and not surprisingly, labor organizations representing workers at the Phillips 66 refinery came out in strong force in support of approval of the project, celebrating the opportunity to keep the refinery operating into the foreseeable future to make ‘renewable’ fuels with ‘renewable’ feedstocks to provide the state with the ‘low carbon’ energy sources that are central to aspirations to achieve ‘decarbonization.’
Adding a particularly grotesque dynamic of inequity to the proceedings was the manner in which the local authorities conducted the review hearing.
After having spent two hours celebrating the legacy of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr in commemoration of the treasured annual federal holiday, the Board of Supervisors reconvened to hear the agenda item on the Phillips 66 biofuel refinery environmental review. Remarkably, after an abbreviated 15 minute staff presentation that reasserted the urgency of approving the project again, the chair of the Board stated that public comment would be restricted to 1 minute. Though the audience in attendance was predominantly labor and company representatives in Phillips 66 uniform, there were hoots of disbelief from advocates that instead of the traditional 3 minute time allowed for public comment at most public hearings, in this instance an individual speaker would get only one minute. That an individual public comment on an issue of such magnitude and technical complexity would be limited to 1 minute is unheard of with such a small audience.
That the Contra Costa County Board of Supervisors would come out of a ceremony dedicated to elevating the legacy of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr to immediately open an agenda item on the permitting of a controversial polluting industrial facility owned and operated by a company worth ~$60 billion dollars, and with a long legacy of conflict with affected communities, and tell concerned community members that their time to address the board would be abbreviated in this manner was roundly seen as outrageous — to put it in polite terms.
Even county staff knew, after all they had done to ram the project through, that limiting public comment at the hearing was simply a ‘very bad look.’ The clear obstruction of the public right to meaningful participation that was manifested by the limitation on public comment at the hearing on the Phillips 66 biofuels project clearly accentuates the corporate impunity facilitated by the irregular and industry friendly governance of not only the biofuel refinery issue specifically but of the energy sector in the state more broadly.
It made no difference to the acquiescent and beholden to industry Contra Costa County Board of Supervisors, who rapidly moved to approve the Phillips 66 project with a unanimous 5-0 vote.
Contact Gary Hughes (garyhughes.bfw@gmail.com), who is the Americas Program Coordinator with Biofuelwatch, with inquiries.
[Note from BenIndy: The EPA and the Kern County Planning and Natural Resources staff have scheduled four joint workshops regarding the Kern County Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS), or ‘Carbon Removal,’ project described below. Tomorrow, Wednesday 17, from 3-5pm, is the FIRST VIRTUAL HEARING; find instructions for how to join HERE. While verbal comments will not be accepted during the virtual meeting, the public is welcome to join and ask questions in the chat. If you plan to join, follow the instructions at the link. Meanwhile, a group of Solano residents have assembled to fight a new CCS project proposed for a site in Montezuma Hills, Solano; that group’s next meeting is January 24. You can learn more about this project at the Sunflower Alliance website. If you are interested in joining this group, email your contact details to benindy@mngl.ca and we’ll pass them on to one of the group members so you can connect. We have a long, hard slog ahead if we’re going to beat back these boondoggles.]
An oil pumpjack in Kern County, California. Harika Maddala / Inside Climate News.
Omar Hayat sees the future in a patch of dirt near Bakersfield, California, where oil was discovered more than a century ago. That discovery paved the way for Kern County’s lucrative petroleum industry. Now, Hayat hopes to use the same dirt patch to launch a new business—one that may help California reach its ambitious climate goals.
“We want to be accepted as a solution,” said Hayat, who is executive vice president of operations at California Resources Corporation, one of the state’s leading oil producers.
Hayat is leading the company’s push to store climate-warming carbon more than a mile underground, in the cracks and crevices of ancient rock formations. The firm is one of several companies developing plans to capture carbon from oil and gas plants and the air, and store it deep beneath California’s oil country at the foot of the San Joaquin Valley.
Kern County is betting those projects will make it the center of California’s nascent carbon removal and storage industry. The county is already the state’s largest oil producer and a top producer of agricultural products, but climate change—and the state’s effort to mitigate it—pose a threat to those economic mainstays. The county hopes the new carbon management industry will help make up for the hundreds of millions in tax revenue it anticipates losing by 2045, when California plans to phase out all oil drilling and eliminate most carbon emissions.“Our economy is built on oil and agriculture. This is how we keep our libraries open. This is how we provide Meals on Wheels. This is how we provide our services to the million people here,” says Lorelei Oviatt, the county’s director of planning and natural resources.
In late December, Kern and the federal government took steps that could allow CRC to begin capturing and storing carbon next year. The county published its draft environmental review of the company’s project, and the U.S.Environmental Protection Agency said it plans to approve permits to allow CRC to inject carbon under an oil field.
Kern has found opportunity in renewable energy, becoming the state’s biggest producer of solar and wind energy. But the county’s push for carbon management amounts to a huge experiment—with its economy and community, as well as California’s climate commitments, hanging in the balance.
In the 900-page environmental assessment, Kern officials determined that CRC’s project is likely to have “significant and unavoidable” impacts on local air quality, even with measures taken to curb emissions. The report also notes the proximity of proposed pipelines to schools and neighborhoods. Those are among several issues likely to be contested when the public begins weighing in on the project this week.
Still, the county sees carbon management as critical to its future.
“It’s existential,” Oviatt said. “What is this place going to look like in 30 years? What’s it going to look like in five?”
“Enormous Numbers”
In addition to moving quickly towards clean sources of energy, countries will need to remove carbon from the air in order to avoid the worst effects of climate change according to theIPCC, the United Nations panel that assesses the science of climate change.
Today, 41 commercial carbon capture facilities are operating worldwide.Together they have the capacity to capture much less than 1 percent of the emissions that countries produce every year—negating annual emissions equivalent to 49 million metric tons of carbon per year.
California, which has positioned itself as a global leader on climate action, wants to pull an unprecedented amount of carbon from the air—100 million metric tons—by 2045. That represents nearly a quarter of the emissions the state produces today.
“Those are enormous numbers, relative to where not just California is today, but where the world is today,” said Michael Wara, director of the climate and energy policy program at Stanford University.
Still, the Biden Administration is pouring billions into the carbon capture and storage industry, and Kern is racing to get a piece of it. Much of that money is going to regions led by Republican lawmakers who support boosting domestic energy production. Until he resigned from Congress last month, Bakersfield Republican and former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy represented much of Kern County.
Last year, the U.S. Department of Energy announced it would offer $3.5 billion for companies to demonstrate direct air capture, a process that sucks carbon from the air so that it can be stowed underground. The department recently said it would give $1.2 billion in grants for “Direct Air Capture hubs” in Louisiana and Texas.
Carbon removal projects proposed in California, all located in the conservative-leaning Central Valley, earned more than $20 million from the pool of federal funding for feasibility and planning studies, including roughly $12 million to a group led in part by CRC, Hayat’s company, and the city of Bakersfield. The amount is small compared to the billions to be disbursed elsewhere, but significant enough to continue fueling ambitions in Kern.
Omar Hayat, executive vice president of operations at California Resources Corporation. | Harika Maddala/ Inside Climate News.
Several other major oil and gas companies are also racing to launch their own carbon capture facilities in Kern, including Chevron and Aera Energy. Though certain details of CRC’s carbon removal proposal have not been made public, its ambitions center on a project called “Carbon TerraVault 1.” The project would be located in the Elk Hills Oil Field, one of the most productive in the nation, near the site where oil was discovered in 1911. The company wants to inject millions of tons of liquefied carbon a mile underground, beginning with carbon dioxide from the oilfield.
“Looking for Hope”
If all of the projects proposed for the county come online, planning director Oviatt says Kern could be home to most of the storage required to achieve the state’s carbon removal goals. Oviatt frames the growth of this industry as inevitable. Even if the projects currently proposed don’t win regulatory approval, she’s confident that more proposals will follow them, she said at a recent public forum.
The county estimates that the carbon removal industry could generate as much as $64 million per year in tax revenues and create thousands of jobs. Kern envisions much of that money coming from a proposed Carbon Management Business Park, which it sees as a way to bring in emerging climate-friendly industries—including future direct air capture projects.
If the oil industry leaves Kern, more than 16,000 jobs could disappear and the area’s already-high poverty and unemployment rates could climb. A county-commissioned study estimates the business park could support up to 22,000 permanent jobs, both in carbon removal and in adjacent industries.
“That’s encouraging,” Oviatt says. “We are looking for hope.”
But realizing that vision is dependent on buy-in from the private sector. Oviatt says a handful of companies have expressed interest in the idea but so far none have submitted formal applications.
And community support for the county’s vision is hardly unanimous. At an October county Board of Supervisors meeting, residents and environmental activists expressed concerns about the need for pipelines to carry carbon across the state, which could rupture or leak.
They also questioned whether the proposed TerraVault and business park would worsen air quality. The American Lung Association consistently ranks Kern County’s air as among the most polluted in the country.
“It does not make sense to proceed with this park given the current health and air quality conditions in Kern County,” said Emma De La Rosa, an advocate with the Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability.
Other community organizers like Ileana Navarro with the Central California Environmental Justice Network called for greater transparency and questioned the technology’s track record.
“Projects worldwide have failed to live up to their promise on climate benefits, so why take the risk here in our backyards and in the backyards of already overburdened communities?,” the Bakersfield resident asked.
Oil pumpjacks spread throughout an oilfield in Kern County, California. | Harika Maddala / Inside Climate News.
The county’s environmental review shows that pipelines carrying carbon dioxide and injection sites are slated to sit within a few miles of a handful of elementary schools and a couple of towns.
Oviatt says that any future project would be located far away from neighborhoods to reduce the health risks to residents. But she was frank about the county’s prospects if a thriving carbon removal industry fails to take off in the region.
“I think we’re all concerned about our health, but we’re also concerned: Will Kern County survive these policies of the state of California?” Oviatt told the meeting. “I wanted to make sure the community understands that we are at a very, very difficult crossroads.”
Kern County’s “Gift From God”
Carbon can’t be injected and permanently stowed underground just anywhere, but the storage potential in the Central Valley is “a gift from God,” George Peridas, the energy program director at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said at an April symposium on carbon management. The San Joaquin Valley is one of about three dozen areas nationwide with the potential to store the climate pollutant, according to assessments by the U.S. Geological Survey. That’s because depleted oil and gas fields here can, in theory, make ideal reservoirs for captured carbon.
For decades, petroleum companies operating in the region have made billions pumping fossil fuels out of the ground. Now, these same corporations hope to also make money by pumping liquefied carbon back underground.
“It’s just like reconfiguring a Lego set,” Hayat, the oil executive, says. “Instead of using that CO2, for example, for increasing oil and gas production, we’re just putting it away for storage.”
But critics say it’s not so simple.
Storing carbon permanently and safely remains a complex technological challenge full of potential pitfalls. Extracting oil is different than ensuring carbon stays buried for thousands of years without leaking, according to Daniel Ress, a staff attorney at the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment. California already has thousands of uncapped oil wells, many of which are leaking greenhouse gasses and other pollutants into the air. Ress is concerned that carbon stored underground could escape.
“I’m skeptical that this can be done well in this area where there’s so much oil and gas exploration,” Ress said.
Until now, oil companies have almost exclusively injected carbon to extract more oil from the earth. The CEO of Occidental Petroleum — CRC’s former parent company — said last yearthat carbon removal could give the petroleum industry “a license to continue to operate for the next 60, 70, 80 years”. California law prohibits companies from using captured carbon to enhance drilling in the state. Still some environmentalists like Ress worry that injecting carbon could be used to extend the life of fossil fuels.
Several major obstacles remain on the path to building and operating carbon capture and storage plants. California has just one commercial carbon removal project in operation. The state has also banned new carbon pipelines until federal regulations are put in place, which could challenge CRC’s ambitious plans. Without pipelines to move the carbon from industrial centers to the vault, the company’s potential customer base is limited.
But the county and the EPA’s actions last month boosted CRC’s hope for its TerraVault project. Company president and CEO Francisco Leon called the moves a “significant milestone” in attaining California’s “ambitious climate goals.”
Kern is the first county in the state to assess the environmental risks of a carbon storage project, working on the draft for about a year. Still, CRC’s project is facing a potentially lengthy approval process. The planning commission is expected to vote on the project in March, with a vote from county supervisors likely this summer.
This story is a collaboration between KVPR, Inside Climate News, the Investigative Editing Corps and Report for America.
Benicia resident and author Stephen Golub, A Promised Land
By Stephen Golub, originally posted in the Benicia Herald January 15, 2024
Over the course of the next ten days, Benicians will have two major opportunities to weigh in on the future of our community.
January 15-25: Addressing Our $6.5 Million Budget Gap
The first opportunity features a community survey, open houses and virtual workshops by which we can have our say on how to address the City’s budget crisis. As you may know, a variety of factors (stagnant population growth for 20 years, very little new housing or housing sales, limited retail outlets, etc.) have constrained our tax base while inflation and other factors have increased our costs. The bottom line is that we face a budget deficit of $6.5 million per year.
In an effort to get community input on the problem and potential solutions, the City has organized various in-person and online ways in which we can offer opinions and ask questions. They will take place from January 15 through 25.
January 15-25: Community Survey (online link here)
To alleviate the problem, the City has already cut $4.5 million from its budget. This has involved reducing ten staff positions and service cuts that include reduction of swimming pool hours, closing the Benicia Library on Sundays, eliminating road paving projects except for emergencies, delayed and deferred maintenance/upgrades on city equipment and facilities (including parks and the storm water system), and cutting support for July 4th and Christmas Tree celebrations.
But, even after those cuts, a $6.5 million gap remains. One way of addressing it over the medium-to-long term is by building the tax base by cutting regulations so as to facilitate commercial investment and approving such projects as the “Eastern Gateway” initiative, which encourages mixed-use development in the area of East 5th St./Military East.
In the shorter run, the City has placed two budget measures on the March 5 ballot. Measure A increases the local hotel tax. Measure B, by far the larger revenue-producing vehicle, increases the local sales tax by 75 cents cent per $100. This works out to costing the average Benician about 33 cents per day.
Regardless of how you feel about all this, the next ten days offer opportunities to air your input, through the in-person and virtual meetings and the community survey. Again, BelieveinBenicia.org is a good way to weigh in and get more information online.
January 18: Sharing in Refinery Fines
In early 2022, we learned from the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (aka the Air District) that for at least 15 years Valero’s Benicia Refinery had been putting toxic emissions hundreds of times the regulatory limits into our air, without telling us, the City government or the Air District about it.
What’s more, for nearly three subsequent years the Air District itself had known about this, but had not informed us until two years ago. In addition, the Air District still has not informed us what fines it will levy on Valero, perhaps because it may be still negotiating the matter nearly five years after becoming aware of the violations.
Nor has it let us know whether or how any portion of the fines will go to benefit Benicia, beyond a vague assurance that it may allocate some sums from the fines for health and safety matters here.
On January 18 at 6 pm, we’ll have a chance to learn more, ask questions about and offer our opinions on Air District actions and policies regarding such fines, regarding not just Valero and Benicia but also the other refineries and communities in the area. On that day, the Air District’s Community Advisory Council will meet at the Air District’s Headquarters, at 375 Beale Street in San Francisco. But we can also access the meeting online and offer comments there.
More specifically, one key agenda item for the meeting is:
“4. Funding Community Benefits from Penalty Fund. This is an action item for the Council to consider recommending to the Air District Board of Directors that they set a policy that automatically allocates a portion of penalties for regional and local community benefits.”
The January 18 Community Advisory Council meeting will make a decision that could potentially yield great benefits to Benicia. It might well be worth attending in person, since we’re talking about potentially millions of dollars for Benicia from this one Valero incident and/or other violations by this or other refineries (such as in Martinez) down the line. (Again, the discussion is not just about Benicia and Valero, but about all local refineries and affected communities.)
But for those of us who can’t make it to San Francisco for the meeting, we can Zoom in and have up to three minutes each for public comment. Here’s the link for the relevant page where, if you scroll down a bit, you can in turn simply watch the meeting, join via Zoom to comment during the meeting or write a public comment.
The meeting offers a great way of seeking to secure well-deserved, potentially major compensation for Benicia, for both past and future harms. I intend to attend, whether in person or online.
Visit BelieveInBenicia.org to learn more about Benicia’s Resiliency Plan, sign up for updates from Benicia City Manager Mario Giuliani, and join the effort to help shape Benicia’s future. Add your voice!
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