Tag Archives: Valero Benicia Refinery

Benicia City Council, Big Oil, Negative campaigning, Nielsen Merksamer, Valero Benicia Refinery, Valero Services Inc.

SF Chron: Attorney associated with Valero-funded PAC connected to ‘faux-ilition’ scheme targeting oil refinery regulations and penalties

[Note from BenIndy Contributor Nathalie Christian: An attorney associated with the firm a Valero-funded PAC has used throughout allegedly misleading campaign efforts in Benicia elections has been exposed as a key figure behind a ‘phony coalition’ some say was manufactured to oppose refinery regulations and penalties. Watchdog and advocacy organizations describe the coalition – dubbed a ‘faux-ilition’ by Calpeek – as a Big Oil–funded scheme to make industry opposition to a proposal to cap oil company profits appear grassroots-driven. (Industry leaders deny the allegation.) Benicians may recognize the name of the firm – Nielsen Merksamer – as well as the name of the attorney in question from Roger Straw’s reporting on the Valero-funded PAC’s efforts to influence local elections. (This PAC was previously known as ‘Working Families’ and more recently as ‘Progress for Benicia.’) Nielsen Merksamer was also behind a letter threatening litigation over a Benicia Open Government Commission’s candidate forum in 2018. Nielsen Merksamer’s clients include Valero Energy Corporation of course, as well as other Big Oil giants BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Exxon.]

How a network of ‘phony’ groups sprung up to fight Newsom’s oil regulations

San Francisco Chronicle, by Dustin Gardiner, June 19, 2023 (Updated June 20)

Groups with names like Californians Against Higher Taxes sprung up to oppose Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to penalize oil companies. Advocates say one man is behind three of them.

California lawmakers were on the verge of passing Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposal to allow the state to cap the profits of oil companies when a trio of advocacy groups with innocuous-sounding names went on an advertising blitz.

The groups — nonprofits that call themselves Californians Against Higher Taxes, Californians for Affordable and Reliable Energy and Californians for Energy Independence — campaigned against Newsom’s measure in a blizzard of social media posts and television ads. The groups said that further regulation of oil refineries would make the state more dependent on foreign crude oil imports or would raise the cost of gas for consumers, dubbing the proposal “Gavin’s gas tax.”

Those groups also billed themselves as coalitions of thousands of concerned taxpayers or small-business owners. Their ads and websites are rife with stock images of everyday-looking people.

But the organizations, according to corporate and lobbyist filings, weren’t created by average Californians or small businesses. One attorney from the North Bay, who has a long history of working with oil companies and trade associations, was central in organizing all three groups.

Steven Lucas, a San Rafael attorney who specializes in political law, is listed as the CFO and secretary for two of the groups, Californians for Affordable and Reliable Energy and Californians for Energy Independence. He also held the same roles with Californians Against Higher Taxes until last year.

Lucas did not respond to emails and voicemails requesting comment. The groups he operated were heavily funded by oil refineries and the Western States Petroleum Association, an industry trade group.

Environmentalists and consumer advocates said the advertising campaign is an example of how the oil industry used “astroturf” or “front” groups to try to kill Newsom’s proposal using misleading tactics.

It’s designed to create the perception that there’s a grassroots movement that’s against oil industry accountability. These are not real groups; these are phony groups created for the purpose of preventing the oil industry from facing accountability for its high prices and environmental crimes.” Jamie Court, president of Consumer Watchdog

“It’s designed to create the perception that there’s a grassroots movement that’s against oil industry accountability,” said Jamie Court, president of Consumer Watchdog, an advocacy group that pushed to cap soaring gas profits. “These are not real groups; these are phony groups created for the purpose of preventing the oil industry from facing accountability for its high prices and environmental crimes.”

Lawmakers ultimately passed Newsom’s proposal, though it was significantly scaled back after he got a lukewarm response from some moderate Democrats amid the oil industry’s ad push.

The bill Newsom signed into law gives state energy regulators the authority to place a cap on oil refiners’ profits in California — and to set the amount. They also now have the authority to fine companies that exceed the cap and require them to disclose information about their operations and prices.

The Democratic governor’s original proposal would have gone further by requiring legislators to set the amount of the profit cap. Still, the bill that passed was a major victory for environmentalists and consumer advocates who had failed, for decades, to pass measures designed to combat California’s highest-in-the-nation gas prices.

As lawmakers considered Newsom’s measure, the oil industry spent more than $9.4 million in the first quarter of 2023 on lobbying and public-influence campaigning, largely centered on Newsom’s oil profit proposal. About $5.2 million of that money was funneled into the three advocacy groups with ties to Lucas.

Combined, the oil-industry affiliated groups have run 568 social media ads on Facebook and Instagram since December, according to data from parent company Meta.

The ad tsunami started in late 2022, quickly after Newsom called a special session for lawmakers to consider measures to combat skyrocketing gas prices consumers were paying at the pump. He accused the oil refiners of “price gouging” Californians as the price of a gallon of regular gasoline soared to a statewide average of $6.42 last fall.

But opponents of the measure said the accusation that they used “astroturf” or deceptive tactics to stoke a perception of opposition is unfair and negates the concerns of a broad coalition of groups.

They said many business interests, including the California Chamber of Commerce and agricultural companies, also had concerns that Newsom’s approach, including the proposal that lawmakers ultimately adopted and his more aggressive earlier pitch, could have the unintended consequence of driving prices up if it causes oil companies to produce less gas in California.

In addition to Lucas, the three advocacy groups are headed by business association executives. Californians for Energy Independence listed Allan Zaremberg, the former leader of the state Chamber of Commerce who died this year, as its CEO. Californians for Affordable and Reliable Energy lists its CEO as Robert Lapsley, president of the California Business Roundtable, another association of business groups that includes oil companies.

Californians Against Higher Taxes, which was organized by Lucas and the law firm where he works, is now led by Jennifer Barrera, CEO of the Chamber of Commerce; and Thomas Hiltachk, a political attorney. Hiltachk did not respond to a request for comment.

Kevin Slagle, a spokesperson for the Western States Petroleum Association, said the notion that the opposition campaign cloaked its efforts is laughable. He said the groups had to report their spending, and that the effort through third-party groups was combined with ads directly funded and managed by oil companies and WSPA.

“It’s disingenuous to call these efforts fake. They’re very real and they’re based on legitimate policy concerns,” Slagle said. “Our political system has so much transparency built into it.”

Of the two dozen oil companies and trade associations that poured more than $9.4 million into California lobbying and influence campaigns, Chevron contributed more than half of that total. The company, the largest oil refiner in California, spent $4.9 million, including $3.63 million it contributed to Californians for Energy Independence.

Ross Allen, a Chevron spokesperson, defended the company’s lobbying efforts and suggested “attacks” on oil refining in the state are putting the supply at risk. He said California has volatile energy markets, in part, due to its clean-fuel standards that cut off its gas supply from the rest of the country.

“Chevron works hard to educate policymakers and the public about how fragile California’s energy markets really are,” Allen wrote in an email.

But Melissa Aronczyk, an associate professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey who studies the impact of public-relations campaigns on climate change policy, said the playbook that oil companies used by deploying “astroturf” groups in California is hardly new. She said the difference is that environmentalists have become more adept at uncloaking such tactics.

“People have much more awareness about greenwashing than they did ever before,” she said, using a term for marketing that’s intended to mislead the public about environmental impacts.

“[…] the tactic of using outside groups with seemingly innocuous names is designed to trick voters who might be more skeptical of advertising if they could see it’s paid for by oil companies.”

Aronczyk said the tactic of using outside groups with seemingly innocuous names is designed to trick voters who might be more skeptical of advertising if they could see it’s paid for by oil companies. In California, candidates and ballot measure campaigns must disclose their major donors in fine print at the bottom of ads. But that same disclosure requirement doesn’t apply to ads for issue-based campaigns that aren’t tied to an election.

She likened the “puppet campaign” strategy to the marketing tactics employed by other embattled industries, including tobacco companies and prescription drug firms, which bankrolled third-party advocacy groups to fight regulations targeting cigarettes and the proliferation of opioid drugs, respectively.

“They really are running scared, and that’s why they’re resorting to these tactics,” Aronczyk said. “It is a very short playbook, and it has been used for many decades.”

Indeed, Lucas, the attorney behind oil-industry-funded advocacy groups, is a partner at a law firm, Nielsen Merksamer, which also has a long history of working with tobacco companies to fight restrictions in California.

In 2017, two other attorneys from the firm were the treasurers of an advocacy group dubbed “Let’s Be Real” that worked with the tobacco industry in an unsuccessful attempt to overturn San Francisco’s law banning the sale of flavored tobacco and vaping products. Similarly, the firm played a major role in coordinating a failed referendum to repeal a 2020 statewide law that banned most flavored tobacco products.

READ MORE:

Air Monitoring, Benicia Community Air Monitoring Program (BCAMP), Valero Benicia Refinery

‘Too toxic’ – Recent string of deadly refinery fires in Texas includes Valero

[BenIndy Contributor Nathalie Christian: Three refinery fires in three weeks! And the refineries involved are downplaying potential health impacts and insisting there is no danger to nearby communities. Sounds a lot like the Martinez refinery incident that occurred recently, where the refinery insisted that a shower of chemical dust that reached as far as Benicia wasn’t dangerous to residents . . . just before independent parties investigated and determined that this perfectly safe dust was actually highly toxic. So who can you trust after refinery incidents like these?  It is essential that Benicia residents concerned about air quality and incident response at Benicia’s Valero Refinery attend the upcoming CAP public meeting this June 13 to learn more and ask questions about our own local refinery.  – N.C. ]

‘Too toxic’: Refinery fires leave East Texas residents reeling

A motorcyclist drives by Valero's West Plant in Chorpus Christi
A motorcyclist rides past Valero’s West plant as black smoke billows from a fire at the refinery on Wednesday in Corpus Christi, Tex. (Angela Piazza/AP)

Three dangerous blazes in three weeks have struck refineries and a chemical plant, leaving one dead and over a dozen injured

Washington Post, by Amudalat Ajasa, May 20, 2023

First Shell, then Marathon, then Valero. In the last three weeks, major fires have broken out at these companies’ oil refineries and chemical plants in East Texas, leaving one dead and over a dozen injured.

The blazes in Deer Park, Galveston Bay and Corpus Christi follow a years-long string of explosions, fires and toxic releases in a region where oil refining and chemical production is highly concentrated, often close to residential neighborhoods. And while some residents have grown accustomed to the incidents, others are alarmed by how frequently they are hitting home.

“I have grown up here and watched neighborhoods near the refineries become too toxic to live in and people forced to leave their homes due to the toxicity,” Kristina Land, a resident of Corpus Christi, told The Washington Post.

On Wednesday, a fire broke out at the Valero West Refinery in Corpus Christi, sending smoke plumes into the sky and prompting emergency responders to mobilize. The cause of the fire is yet unknown.

Land, who is 45 years old, was in her home 20 miles from the refinery when she saw the black smoke on the horizon. She had to go on social media to find out what was happening.

She blames local officials for not encouraging more transparency.

“Our local government doesn’t ever want us to know how bad [the fires] really are, so we never truly know,” Land said. “They just sweep everything under the rug and never talk about it again.”

A map of recent fires at TX refineries

Refineries in the Lone Star State are regulated by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, which did not make officials available for an interview, but issued a statement.

Victoria Cann, a media specialist for TCEQ, said the three recent fires appear to be unrelated, “but investigations are underway into the cause, response, and clean up actions associated with each incident.”

She said the agency responded to each of them by deploying staff with monitoring equipment as appropriate and has “conducted surveillance to assess potential impacts to the local community.”

The first of the May refinery fires happened two weeks ago.

On May 5, heavy gas oil, gasoline and light gas oil ignited at Shell’s Deer Park chemicals facility in Deer Park, which sent 9 workers to the hospital. The plume from the fire, which occurred right outside of Houston, was visible for miles.

The fire, which started at 2:59 p.m., blazed on and off for days — after being reignited multiple times — before crews could completely neutralize it nearly three days later.

Emergency crews responded to the fire less than 19 hours after the TCEQ hosted a hearing to expand the Intercontinental Terminal Plant — a plant near Shell which blanketed the area with high levels of benzene, a chemical linked to cancer, in 2019.

Environmentalists say the accidents keep happening because the oil industry has little fear of penalties from regulators.

“Without a change from industry … communities are going to continue to feel the effects of these chemicals being spewed out by these facilities,” said Cassandra Casados, the communications coordinator at Air Alliance Houston.

A week after Shell’s fire was contained, a new plant fire erupted in Texas City, under 40 miles away, erupted. Galveston’s Marathon Petroleum confirmed that the fire caused the death of one employee and sent two others to the hospital. Emergency crews extinguished the fire — caused by a failed pump seal — in under four hours, according to city officials.

This is the second fatal incident to occur at Marathon’s Galveston Bay refinery this year. In March, a contract worker died after being electrocuted at the refinery.

Air monitoring at the state and facility level for all three sites is ongoing to determine the exposure risks to harmful levels of chemicals. Officials at the refineries and in nearby communities said the fires were not cause for concern:

  • “There is no danger to the nearby community,” Shell Deer Park said in a post following the incident.
  • Texas City Emergency Management stated that there was no need for a shelter in place following the fatal fire and that there was no threat to residents.
  • Valero’s west refinery did not warrant any “action from the community,” the city of Corpus Christi said in a news release.

Over the last several years, the Environmental Integrity Project — a D.C. based watchdog group — has monitored refinery fires and emissions, in East Texas and elsewhere. Too often, local officials minimize the impact of these incidents and issue “all is well statements,” said Eric Schaeffer, a former Environmental Protection Agency official who directs the watchdog group.

Black plume smoke is usually indicative that fine particulate matter — too small to see generally — is lingering in the air, according to Schaeffer. When refineries catch fire, the chemicals from the plumes aren’t contained to the site: They drift into residential areas.

“You’re going to have a lot of pollutants released,” Schaeffer said of these incidents. “That’s probably the biggest concern for the residents.”

Read more! 
As Air Quality is so essential to our health, you might want to check out these resources:
Air Monitoring, Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD), Benicia Community Air Monitoring Program (BCAMP), Valero Benicia Refinery

Save the date! Valero CAP open to public June 13

Valero’s Community Advisory Panel (CAP) invites Benicia residents to learn about air monitoring and incident response at Benicia Refinery

The Valero Refinery in Benicia was one of four refineries in the SF Bay Area that did not meet air quality requirements for compliance with the Bay Area Quality Management District. (Chris Riley/Times-Herald)

By Nathalie Christian, May 17, 2023

Save the date of Tuesday, June 13, 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. for a peek behind Valero’s curtain

Benicia residents have received a very special invitation from Valero’s Community Advisory Panel (CAP) to learn about how Valero’s Benicia Refinery monitors air quality and responds to incidents. Please see the image below for the full ad distributed by Valero’s Benicia-based Director of Government Affairs and Community Relations.

Marilyn Bardet, a CAP member representing the Good Neighbor Steering Committee (to name just one of her many community-facing roles), wrote the following regarding this rare opportunity:

The subject will be air monitoring and Valero’s incident reporting as per the current [memorandum of agreement] governing the City’s obligatory relation to Valero vis a vis emergency response, incident reporting, et al. […]

I urge you to attend (via Zoom or in person), especially if you are concerned about air quality in Benicia [and the] transparency and accuracy of Valero’s [monitoring and
reporting].

Of the five San Francisco Bay Area refineries, only the Martinez Refining Company has met the minimum air quality requirement for compliance with the Bay Area Air Quality Management District.

Putting the ‘fine’ in ‘refinery’

In a recent post, Benicia Community Air Monitoring Program Board Member Kathy Kerridge said that after her trip to Valero’s Benicia refinery several months ago, she’s “not surprised” that it and the three other refineries that failed (Richmond’s Chevron and Phillips 66 and Pacheo’s Tesero) were non-compliant with Air District and EPA requirements – despite the ongoing threat of fines.

“Fines are trivial to them,” Kerridge said in the article. Indeed, oil companies like Valero have enjoyed astronomical profits these last few years as they capitalize on the worldwide energy crisis, raking in billions while customers pay more at the pumps.

Such fines include the Benicia Valero refinery agreeing to pay $1.2 million for multiple Clean Air Act violations, including one dangerous incident in 2017 that led to a shelter-in-place order at two elementary schools in Benicia.

When Valero had an adjusted net income of $3.1 billion in the first quarter, nominal payouts for dangerous events impacting Benicia’s most vulnerable – elementary-aged children – can feel “like a direct slap to the face with the community,” as Kerridge has put it.

You can’t spell ‘refinery’ without the word ‘fine,’ after all.

So what do we do when we have community concerns and don’t feel that fines leveraged by the EPA and BAAQMD are having the desired impact?

We should show up to events like these.

A reminder to attend will be posted closer to June 30. Presumably, Zoom details will become available as we approach the date.

Valero CAP Announcemnet
Click image to enlarge.

 

[Conflict of interest note: In full disclosure, I recently encouraged a family member to apply to sit on Valero’s CAP. Truly, their intentions were honorable – this family member has a much brighter outlook than I do and really felt Valero could be a great community partner here in Benicia. Alas, they were not selected. One must wonder if our shared last name and my activity here factored in that decision. Thankfully, Marilyn sits on this panel as our representative, and we’re in great hands with her!]

Read more! As Air Quality is so essential to our health, you might want to check out these resources:
Air Quality, Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD), Benicia Community Air Monitoring Program (BCAMP), Benicia Herald, Valero Benicia Refinery

Benicia Herald: ‘Refineries failing at fenceline monitoring’

[Editor: The Benicia Herald  does not have an online edition – their lead story in today’s print edition is presented here as a photographic image (click to enlarge). To support our local newspaper, please subscribe by email at beniciacirculation@gmail.com or by phone at 707-745-6838.]

After this quick read, PLEASE SEND YOUR COMMENTS on Valero’s Air Monitoring Plans and Quality Assurance Project Plans to the Bay Area Air District.  They are accepting comments on the refineries’ plans through Thursday, April 20 at 5 p.m. Details on the BenIndy here. Comments should be sent to jlapka@baaqmd.gov.

Read more! As Air Quality is so essential to our health, you might want to check out these resources: