Category Archives: Air Quality

Air Quality, Environmental Impacts, Fracking, Oil Industry

Texas fracking verdict puts industry on notice about toxic air emissions

Repost from The Center For Public Integrity

Texas fracking verdict puts industry on notice about toxic air emissions

A nearly $3 million jury verdict against a Texas oil and gas company highlights regulatory failures and health risks linked to fracking

By David Hasemyer  |  May 28, 2014 
A TCEQ investigator filmed these "heavy plumes" of emissions wafting from the Aruba facility using an infrared camera. Thirty seconds later he reportedly “felt the physical effects of dizziness and a sore throat”. Screenshot from TCEQ video
A TCEQ investigator filmed these “heavy plumes” of emissions wafting from the Aruba facility using an infrared camera. Thirty seconds later he reportedly “felt the physical effects of dizziness and a sore throat”. Screenshot from TCEQ video

Between February 2010 and July 2011, Lisa and Bob Parr filed 13 complaints about air pollution from gas and oil operations near their ranch in Wise County, Texas. Sometimes they had trouble breathing, they told the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ). They also experienced nausea, nosebleeds, ringing ears and rashes.

Other families were also alarmed. Between 2008 and 2011, the TCEQ received 77 complaints from Wise County, in the Barnett Shale drilling area in North Texas. One said the odor was so powerful that the complainant “couldn’t go outside,” according to the TCEQ report.

Frustrated and angry, the Parrs decided to sue. Their attorney warned them that lawsuits against the oil and gas industry rarely, if ever, succeed. But the Parrs persisted and last month won what appears to be the first successful U.S. lawsuit alleging that toxic air emissions from oil and gas production sickened people living nearby. A Dallas County jury found that Aruba Petroleum, a privately owned company based in Plano, Texas, “intentionally created a private nuisance” that affected the family’s health and awarded the Parrs almost $3 million in damages.

“When you don’t have a strong regulatory system, a system to prevent what happened to this family, the only place left to turn for help is the courts,” said Robert Percival, director of the University of Maryland’s Environmental Law Program.

There are no assurances the verdict against Aruba will survive an appeal or lead to regulatory changes in Texas or any of the other states where people complain their health is jeopardized by gas and oil drilling. The issues are so complex that the industry, the public and policy makers may be sorting through them for years.

Aruba has asked Judge Mark Greenberg, who presided over the Parrs’ case, to reverse the jury’s verdict. Greenberg is expected to hear arguments over the verdict in June.

“This case will be looked at very, very closely because it has set the stage in a way that has never been set before,” said attorney Tomas Ramirez. He represents two families in similar lawsuits in the booming Eagle Ford Shale of South Texas, where emissions are raising the same alarms that have been sounding in the heavily developed Barnett Shale region the Parrs call home.

Aruba used two long-standing industry arguments in its defense: That the emissions could have come from one of its competitors’ wells, and that it was in compliance with Texas environmental rules.

The fact that those arguments failed in this case “exposes every company to more possible litigation,” said Thomas McGarity, a University of Texas law school professor who specializes in environmental and administrative law.

“Losing this case was not good for the industry,” McGarity said. “My guess is the industry will coalesce around this case. The industry will want to stop the dam from breaking wide open … This is where they will take a stand.”

Aruba officials declined requests for interviews but released a statement though a public relations firm that said: “We contended the plaintiffs were neither harmed by the presence of our drilling operations nor was the value of their property diminished because of our natural gas development.”

In a motion to overturn the verdict, company lawyers argued “there is no evidence that Aruba engaged in any conduct intended to cause harm … Aruba’s operations complied with best industry practices and met the standard for a reasonable and prudent oil and gas operator.”

Air Quality, Bakken Crude, Bay Area Refineries, Benicia-Martinez rail bridge, Martinez CA, Spill prevention and response, Take Action

Request to Martinez City Council: moratorium on crude by rail

Repost from The Martinez Gazette

Martinez Environmental Group: Martinez moratorium resolution, facts to consider

May 11, 2014 | by GUY COOPER,  Special to the Gazette

The Martinez Environmental Group presented a resolution to the City Council May 7, proposing opposition to increased crude-by-rail (CBR) traffic through our city, mirroring similar resolutions and expressions of concern already proffered by Berkeley, Richmond, Davis, Benicia, and many other communities along the tracks. The following is what I wish I would have said in support at that meeting if I hadn’t chickened out.

A major attraction of Martinez is its status as a transportation hub. People commute and travel via Amtrak. There are connections to BART and bus destinations north, south, east and west. The train brings people to our town, sometimes for the first time. They stop, stroll, eat, drink, shop. I’ve talked to many of them. They like what they see, are amazed by the friendliness of the locals. Many are surprised such a town even exists huddled beside those hulking refineries. Basically, they come and go with a good impression that can’t hurt.

Personally, I love being able to jump on the train, catch a Giants game, make a trip to the City or Jack London Square for an event, or head towards Davis, Sacramento, or Truckee for a weekend. Naturally, money is spent on tickets, restaurants, hotels, etc.

If WestPac, Tesoro, Valero, Kinder Morgan, Chevron and Phillips 66 have their way, we could see five to six oil trains a day pass through. Each train consists of about 100 tanker cars. Each car holds about 30,000 gallons of crude. So each train contains about 3 million gallons, is over a mile long, and weighs about 28 million pounds.

A major consideration: How much can our 85-year-old rusty Benicia/Martinez rail trestle tolerate? Has it ever had to endure that kind of traffic before? What’s the frequency of inspections and maintenance of that span? None of this info is easily accessible. The Coast Guard and rail companies have haggled over a bridge refurb for years. How can it be done without contaminating the water, and who’s going to pay for it? Meanwhile, nothing happens. A few years back Channel 4 did a piece on the trestle, noting the heavy rust, separated metal and bent bolts. I guess it was stoutly built way back when, but how long can we expect our elderly bridge to endure an onslaught not seen since WWII? If the rail bridge failed under the load of one of these trains … well, I don’t even want to contemplate that disaster.

These oil trains would use the same tracks used by the California Zephyr, the Capital Corridor commuters, the Coast Starlight.

Farmers, industrial customers, and rail passengers in the heartland of this country are already complaining about train delays and freight delivery impacts due to oil train traffic kludging up the system. What exactly will the local economic impact be if passenger rail schedules are severely disrupted?

Have you noticed the increase in delays lately just trying to get across the tracks to the waterfront as oil trains are built, rolling back and forth, attaching more cars, blocking traffic?

Exactly what economic impact do the local refineries have? Taxes, wages … I’d like to see the details. And please, not the contributions to local causes. For them, that’s just a drop in the PR bucket. What about the health effects of the carcinogens and other toxics spewed into our local environment? We rate amongst the worst in the country in that regard, because of the refineries. What are those costs? The more trains, the more detrimental health impacts. These trains out-gas toxic stuff while unloading or just sitting. Has that been factored into the cost/benefit mix? How about emergency response costs? Not just in responding to a sudden emergency, but in equipping and staffing for the eventuality. Are the oil producers and refiners offering to cover those costs?

Here’s some more math. These so-called “Bakken Bombers” carry a crude that has been likened to gasoline in volatility. One gallon of gas is equivalent to the explosive power of 63 sticks of dynamite. A Bakken Bomber contains about 3 million gallons, or the equivalent of 189,000,000 sticks of dynamite. You know, I’ve been to Hiroshima, Japan. A sobering experience. The power of the bomb that flattened that city was rated at 12 kilotons, or equivalent to 4.8 million sticks of TNT. So one Bakken Bomber train could potentially contain the explosive power of 39 Hiroshimas.

My point is, there is very little benefit to our city hosting this exponential increase in oil train traffic. And much at risk. Any one of these trains could annihilate our town or indelibly poison our water front. It’s just not worth it.

I believe the City of Martinez should be acutely concerned about this issue and wish to join our neighboring municipalities in conveying that concern to the powers at the state and federal levels that can do something about it. So I ask that the City Council call for a moratorium on crude-by-rail until all safety and health concerns are remedied. Vote to pass our resolution.

Air Quality, Petroleum Coke (Petcoke)

NRDC sues Koch brothers over handling of petcoke; Chicago adopts new regulations

Repost from The Huffington Post

Koch Brothers Face Lawsuit Over Chicago’s Toxic Black Dust

The Huffington Post  | by  Joseph Erbentraut  |  05/02/2014

Environmentalists are planning to take billionaires Charles and David Koch to court, alleging the brothers’ companies are responsible for polluting Chicago’s Southeast Side with the black, thick dust known as petroleum coke — or petcoke, a byproduct of the oil refining process.

ThinkProgress reported this week that the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and Southeast Environmental Task Force (SETF) have given a 90-day notice of an intention to sue Koch-owned companies including KCBX Terminals over the pollution associated with their petcoke storage facilities located along the Calumet River in a low-income, partially industrial Chicago community.

In a press release, the groups said the lawsuit stems from neighbors complaining that the dust spewing from the facilities’ large, uncovered petcoke piles has polluted the river, “invaded” their homes and blackened area skies.

“People are complaining about finding dust from these sites inside their homes,” Peggy Salazar, SETF executive director, said in a statement. “Black dust is coating their houses and probably their lungs. This has to stop. And hopefully this suit will achieve that.”

(Read NRDC’s full notice letter.)

On Wednesday, the Chicago City Council approved regulations that ban new petcoke storage facilities from opening up in the city, but do not require the shutdown of the three sites currently in operation.

The Chicago Tribune reports the storage sites will be newly required to report how much petcoke and coal they ship through the city on a quarterly basis. They will also need to enclose their piles within two years and cannot expand their operations.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s office described the ordinance as the toughest petcoke regulations in the nation, but environmental groups pushing for an outright ban disagree.

“It is the city’s ultimate obligation to protect its residents,” Salazar said Wednesday, according to the Northwest Indiana Times. “We don’t believe they did that here.”

Most of the petcoke in Chicago is shipped in from the nearby BP refinery in Whiting, Indiana, which is tripling their output of the dangerous dust after expanding their facility. Petcoke can cause health problems like coughing, wheezing and shortness of breath, in addition to aggravating existing respiratory conditions like asthma, according to the Chicago Department of Public Health.

Facing similar concerns voiced by residents living near petcoke facilities there, Detroit moved to ban petcoke last year.

Air Quality, Bakken Crude, Bay Area Refineries, Martinez CA, Rail accidents, Shell Oil, Tar sands crude

The hypocrisy of our our “friendly” giants: Big Oil in our back yards

Repost from The Martinez Gazette
[Editor: The following letter to the editor of The Martinez Gazette comes from our sister city across the Carquinez Strait, but it describes life in every refinery town.  Like Shell Oil, Valero in Benicia does an excellent job of contributing to popular charitable causes here and promotes itself as highly concerned with public health and safety – all the while filling our California skies with pollutants and seeking permission to bring in toxic and dangerous tar-sands and Bakken crudes that lay waste to the earth and its inhabitants from the strip mines and fracking fields all the way to our back door.  – RS]

‘Shell Oil is the hypocrisy at Earth Day’

 May 4, 2014

Dear editor:

Martinez celebrated John Muir’s Birthday and Earth Day last weekend at the John Muir Historical Site. Attendees were offered environmental information from sustainable and recyclable, to energy and water saving to causes of greenhouse gas (GHG) and global warming with the usual sponsors of the IBEW, Republic Services, City of Martinez, and Shell Oil of Martinez.

How does a fossil fuel industry corporation that produces 175 tons of hydrocarbons a day at it’s Martinez Refinery, owns 60 percent of Canadian Boreal Forest that is decimating the ecology to strip mine highly toxic tar sands crude oil to be shipped to its refineries, and has less than 2.5 percent of its overall expenditures in sustainable and renewable energy while totally divesting itself of solar energy and decreasing wind energy interests, get a place at John Muir’s Birthday/ Earth Day event? Certainly, John Muir would have left them off the list.

Shell and Big Oil was the elephant at the party. The Earth Day hypocrisy is that refineries in the Bay Area are the single largest stationary source of volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Shell is responsible for 492 million pounds of VOCs per year. Contra Costa County is the third most toxic county in the state of California. Short term exposure to sulfur dioxide, a refining byproduct, can result in respiratory illness and cardiovascular issues as well as aggravation of asthma. Do you or someone you know have asthma or respiratory illnesses?

There is no spare the air day for Shell or any refinery. When you can’t put a log on the fire, Shell emits over 700,000 tons of hydrocarbons per year, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Shell as well as the four other refineries in the Bay Area, are now refining a dirtier crude oil high in sulfur and other metals which emits more hydrocarbons. The tar sand oil from Alberta Canada is heavy like tar and sinks when it hits water, making oil spill recovery impossible. Shell receives this type of crude by ship and a spill of this type while off loading would foul our drinking water in Martinez.

Bakken crude oil, extracted from the Dakotas, is very explosive because of its low flash point and can explode before it is refined. This type of crude is being shipped by rail car through our downtown to the Bay Area refineries and has been in the news recently with train derailments and explosions in Casselton, North Dakota, Louisiana, Lac Megantic Canada and most recently in Lynchburg, Virginia.

The fossil fuel industry is always trying to improve their image within their communities despite their records as gross polluters. Chevron takes a single page ad in the Times every week telling us what a partner they are in the community since sending 15,000 residents to neighboring hospitals after a 2012 fire at their Richmond Refinery. Shell distributed flyers at Earth Day proposing to modernize their Martinez facility by cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 700,000 metric tons a year and reducing water usage by 15 percent. Why did it take them until the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said the fossil fuel industry is the leading contributor of GHG  emissions and a drought in California to get them to start reducing the amount of toxins they emit and the amount of water they use?

If the fossil fuel industry was truly committed to solving the energy issue as it relates to climate change and becoming a leader of green technology, they would not have eliminated wind and solar energy from their repertoire. The easy to extract oil has now been processed and these companies insist on extracting every drop of oil by drilling, hydro fracking, or strip mining to the point where the cost to extract crude oil is equal to the cost to burn it in an efficient engine.

The hypocrisy lies in the fact that Shell Oil made almost $20 billion dollars last year and was awarded the Martinez Business of the Year Award all the while convincing the planners, leaders, and deciders that they are entitled to a seat at the Birthday Party because they put change in the pockets of the community.

Our children and grandchildren are the apples of our eyes and the soft spot in our hearts. Shell Oil knows this and they focus their donations to Martinez Education Foundation, Martinez Unified School District, school scholarships, back packs so our kids can shelter in place, etc… for the children. THIS is the hypocrisy. They contaminate the ground, spew toxics that foul our air, our children’s air: because the money in the community’s pockets makes this poisoning acceptable.

Shell Oil is the Earth Day Hypocrisy.

– James Neu, Martinez