Category Archives: California Regulation

California Regulation, Crude By Rail, Emergency Readiness & Response, Federal Regulation (U.S.), Hazmat notification, Massive increase in crude-by-rail, Public Safety, Rail inspection

KQED: California’s Not Ready for Influx of Oil Trains, Says Report

Repost from KQED Science, NPR/PBS

California’s Not Ready for Influx of Oil Trains, Says Report

Molly Samuel, KQED Science | June 12, 2014

Trains carrying oil can pose serious risks to public safety and the environment, and California isn’t prepared, according to a report released by state agencies this week.

Crude-by-rail is a growing concern, as an oil boom in North Dakota has meant increasing amounts of crude traveling to refineries by rail. A series of fiery derailments in the past year, including one that killed 47 people in a Quebec town, has focused attention on the need to prevent accidents and be prepared for emergency response.

‘Even though we haven’t had an accident, which is great, we want to be able to respond to it when there is an accident.’– Kelly Huston, Office of Emergency Services

The report warns that a derailment in California could kill people, destroy neighborhoods, damage water supplies and threaten natural areas.

“Even though we haven’t had an accident, which is great, we want to be able to respond to it when there is an accident,” said Kelly Huston, a deputy director at the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (OES). “With the increase in the amount of crude oil on rail coming through California’s cities and counties, we believe there should be some increased training for first responders.”

The report was released by an inter-agency group that includes the OES, the state Department of Fish and Wildlife and the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), among others. It recommends boosting funding for emergency responder training, and for equipment to handle hazardous material accidents. It also supports an item in Governor Jerry Brown’s proposed budget that would provide more money to the Office of Oil Spill Prevention and Response, which has focused on marine oil spills in the past, but is now preparing for the possibility of inland spills.

It’s not all about accident response; there are also recommendations for prevention. Most rail regulation is up to the federal government; the CPUC helps enforce safety rules with its own rail inspectors. There are 52 of them, responsible for monitoring more than 5,400 miles of track in the state. “This staffing level is seriously inadequate,” the report says.

Paul King, deputy director for the rail safety at the CPUC, said the Governor’s budget aims to help. “To meet the volume of trains and the magnitude of the risk that [crude-by-rail] presents,” King said, “the Governor has put in his budget for extra staffing.”

There are other gaps the state cannot fill alone. As the CPUC pointed out in a report released last year, there is only one federal railroad bridge inspector for 11 Western states.

The report also raised the need for more information. As of last weekend, railroads that are transporting large shipments of Bakken, the volatile crude oil from North Dakota, must notify states. Huston of the OES said he got the first batch of documents Monday, but he said they’re of limited use and not timely enough. He said the OES is following up with BNSF and the federal Department of Transportation, the agency that issued the notification order.

Huston said he’d also like to see a map that the public could access, showing where the oil train shipments are headed. The railroads are resisting releasing information about crude shipments to the public.

Most of California’s oil comes either from within the state or overseas, and travels to refineries here by pipeline or ship. And that’s still the case. According the the California Energy Commission, only about one percent of California’s crude came by train in 2013. But trains carrying oil are becoming more frequent, and the CEC projects that by 2016, trains could be bringing in about 23 percent of California’s crude.

Bridge safety, California Regulation, Rail inspection, Valero Crude By Rail

KRON4 Report: controversial Benicia proposal, new state regulations, big money

Repost from KRON4 News, San Francisco
[Editor: This video includes an excellent interview with Earth Justice’s Suma Peesapati, who focuses attention on California’s poorly maintained bridges and their lack of adequate inspections.   The report concludes with mention of a possible new 6.5 cent California tax on the oil companies for every barrel of oil imported into the state.  – RS]

VIDEO: Benicia’s Crude-By-Rail Project Prompts Safety Concerns

By Mario Sevilla  |  Wed Jun 11th, 2014

benicia

BENICIA (KRON) — Several refineries in California are preparing to receive crude oil by rail but it is a hugely controversial idea. KRON 4 Jeff Bush is live in Benicia near one of the plants which will receive crude by rail…

Bakken Crude, BNSF Railway, California Energy Commission, California Environmental Quality Committee, California Regulation, Massive increase in crude-by-rail, Union Pacific Railroad

California legislators offering bills to prevent oil by rail accidents – Union Pacific & BNSF react

Repost from The Los Angeles Times, via The Columbian

California moves to prevent spills of oil shipped by trains

By Marc Lifsher, Los Angeles Times, June 6, 2014

SACRAMENTO, Calif. – Although most people think of oil spills in California as potential beachfront disasters, there is new anxiety in Sacramento about the surge of crude oil now coming through the state each day by train.

Gov. Jerry Brown and lawmakers want to avoid the sort of fiery disaster that killed 47 people in July in southern Quebec when tank cars exploded as they carried oil from the booming Bakken oil fields of North Dakota through Canada. Other less spectacular oil tanker car derailments occurred in Aliceville, Ala.; Casselton, N.D.; and Lynchburg, Va., during the past 12 months.

With a steady increase of oil now being shipped into California from out of state, policymakers are scrambling to come up with spill-prevention programs to lower the risk of potentially deadly accidents. Proposals under consideration include hiring new state railroad inspectors, developing better spill-response plans and improving communications between rail carriers and emergency services agencies.

“California is seeing a huge shift in the way we import oil,” said state Sen. Fran Pavley, D-Agoura Hills, one of two lawmakers pushing oil-by-rail safety bills this session in the Legislature. “We need to address the new and unique hazards of crude-by-rail transportation.”

The threat to California communities is particularly dire, environmental justice groups contend, because many of the state’s busiest rail lines run through densely populated areas, and refineries often are in low-income neighborhoods, such as Wilmington in southern Los Angeles County and Richmond in Northern California’s Contra Costa County.

Railroads question the need for new state regulations that could conflict with the federal government’s historic oversight of all aspects of rail safety, operations and working conditions. Rail companies say they have “a 99.997 percent safe delivery record of hazardous materials” and they are eager to cooperate with state officials to ensure even safer operations.

Oil imports by rail account for just about 1 percent of total shipments to California refineries. Most of the crude arrives by ship or by pipelines from in-state production fields.

But that mix is changing fast. Last year, railroads brought 6.3 million barrels of crude into the Golden State, mostly from North Dakota and Canada, according to the California Energy Commission. That’s up from 1.1 million barrels in 2012 and just 498,000 in 2010. A barrel contains 42 gallons of crude oil.

Shipments to Southern California accounted for most of last year’s almost sixfold jump in crude-by-rail activity, the commission reported. Tank-car transportation, it estimates, could reach about a quarter of all state imports in 2016 if the trend continues.

Volume went “from nothing to massive, a huge expansion,” said Julia May, a senior scientist at Communities for a Better Environment, a Huntington Park group that advocates for low-income people living near pollution sources. “It’s a major concern.”

Three proposals for protecting the state against rail-related oil spills are under consideration.

As part of his annual budget, Brown wants to expand an existing prevention-and-response program for ocean oil spills to cover inland areas. The initiative would be funded by a proposed 6.5-cent-per-barrel fee on all crude oil delivered by rail to refineries. Additionally, Brown is asking lawmakers to approve hiring new track inspectors.

Separately, Pavley last week steered a similar spill-response measure, SB 1319, through the state Senate, winning approval on a 23-11 vote.

In the lower house, Assemblyman Roger Dickinson, D-Sacramento, recently amended a bill that would require railroads to report to the state Office of Emergency Services information about hazardous materials, including crude oil, being transported into the state.

His proposal, AB 380, which was unanimously approved by the Senate Environmental Quality Committee on Wednesday, also would require rail carriers to maintain live, 24-hour communications lines that would enable local first-responders to contact them.

“We want to make sure that in California we get the information we need,” Dickinson said.

Meanwhile, the federal government, which is ultimately responsible for railroad safety regulation, recently issued an emergency order to railroads to notify states of the specific routes they will use when transporting more than 1 million barrels of Bakken crude. Such oil “may be more flammable than traditional heavy crude,” the U.S. Department of Transportation warned.

“The number and type of petroleum crude oil railroad accidents … that have occurred during the last year is startling,” the department said in its May 7 order, referring to recent accidents in Quebec, Alabama, North Dakota and Virginia.

The Brown administration plans and the Pavley legislation are opposed by the two principal railroads that haul crude oil to California: Union Pacific and BNSF.

“The railroads understand the questions and concerns that California has regarding crude oil shipped into the state by rail,” the two companies said in a May 22 letter to Pavley.

They also warned that the proposed California rules may be unworkable, preempted by existing federal laws and harmful to national security concerns.

Union Pacific and BNSF also cautioned policymakers to be skeptical of official projections of an extremely rapid increase of crude shipments to California.

The oil industry in a May 28 “alert” to state senators called the Pavley bill “excessive” and “not narrowly focused on areas where there may be a real risk from potential oil spills by rail.”

The prospect of more and bigger accidents is real if immediate changes are not made, warned Jayni Foley Hein, executive director of the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment at the University of California-Berkeley School of Law.

“The danger is not so much the oil itself as a commodity,” Hein said, “but the sheer number of cars carrying this oil . combined with aging infrastructure.”

California Regulation, California Senate Bill 4 (SB4), Fracking

Are Regulators Ignoring California’s New Fracking Law, SB4?

Repost from NBC Bay Area, Investigative Unit

Are Regulators Ignoring California’s New Fracking Law?

An analysis of oil wells fracked and reported by industry since the beginning of the year shows dozens of those wells are not showing up on the State’s website, as required by new state law.
Wednesday, May 28, 2014  |  By Stephen Stock, Liza Meak, Scott Pham and Mark Villarreal

As many as 77 different oil wells that the gas and oil industry reported were fracked in January and February had yet to show up on the website run by California’s Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources (DOGGR) by May 20, 2014. Stephen Stock reports in a video that aired on May 27, 2014.

As many as 77 different oil wells that the gas and oil industry reported were fracked in January and February had yet to show up on the website run by California’s Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources (DOGGR) by May 20, 2014.

That apparently flies in the face of a new law, titled [Senate Bill Four] or SB4, which requires the state to notify residents within 60 days of any well stimulation. SB4 also was supposed to require that oil and gas companies notify neighbors about upcoming well stimulation activities.

Well stimulation includes things such as hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking”), the use of gravel or hydrochloric acid, or other acids to stimulate well production.

Governor Brown signed the bill into law last September [pdf] and it took effect January 1, 2014.

Environmental Group, The Center For Biological Diversity analyzed publicly available fracking records. NBC Bay Area verified the analysis and found a total of 116 oil wells that have been fracked and voluntarily reported on the industry’s own website, Frac Focus.

Those fracking operations took place in January and February of 2014, after the new law took effect and long past the 60-day notification period.

As of May 20, 2014, 77 of those 116 wells had not yet been posted on the State of California’s website run by DOGGR.

The Center for Biological Diversity and NBC Bay Area also independently verified 62 separate wells where local air quality management records show hydrochloric acid was used. Those 62 wells don’t show up on the DOGGR website either, as of May 20, 2014.

That hydrocholoric acid data comes from the South Coast Air Quality Management District in Southern California (SCAQMD).

The new state law only requires that DOGGR post the use of hydrochloric acid on wells when the technique is used to stimulate well production.

State officials deny DOGGR is dragging its feet in implementing the new law, even though there are a number of wells that should have been listed on the state’s website before May 20th of this year.

“We’re hitting all of our marks,” said Jason Marshall, Chief Deputy Director of California’s Department of Conservation, which oversees DOGGR and the implementation of SB4.

“The requirements of SB4 is for the operators [oil and gas companies] to report to Frac Focus within 60 days after completing the stimulation job, the fracking, or other forms of stimulation,” said Marshall. “Then there’s an additional 15 days after that for it to show up on our site.”

“We are working diligently,” Marshall told NBC Bay Area. “As the operators are reporting the stuff on Frac Focus, we’re working diligently with them to get that additional information, so then that we can link that up so we can post it on our site.

Marshall also said that the reporting requirements for activities such as the use of hydrochloric acid are different between DOGGR and the South Coast Air Quality Management District.

“There’s actually a difference of reporting requirements down in the South Coast Air district, and from that versus what’s in Senate Bill Four (SB4),” Marshall said, “And there have been a number of operations that are not reportable under Senate Bill 4, but are under the South Coast rule and we’ve been working with South Coast so we have a little bit better continuity. We hope to remove the confusion for the public on well, how come it’s reported here but not there.”

Marhsall admitted that “some” the department’s reporting may confuse an already confused public. “But we can only control what we’re handed, in terms of implementation of SB4,” he said.

Hollin Kretzmann with the Center for Biological Diversity said all this is a smokescreen. Kretzmann, an attorney, who originally analyzed the fracking and well stimulation data, said the state simply isn’t following the new law.

The bottom line is these legislations aren’t working,” said Kretzmann. “They aren’t keeping communities safe from the dangers of fracking.”

That’s why Kretzmann says The Center for Biological Diversity sent a letter to Governor Jerry Brown, citing these discrepancies as reason to call for an immediate halt to fracking throughout California.

“Basically, fracking communities across California are being kept in the dark about what’s happening in their communities,” said Kretzmann. “Fracking is a dangerous practice and to not know where it’s happening or how frequently is a huge concern to not just me but to all Californians.”

Living Next Door to a Drilling Operation

At first glance St Andrews Gardens Apartments in Los Angeles appears like any other neighborhood in California.

But beyond the cinderblock wall and behind a stretched tarp next to the parking lot, St Andrews Gardens’ resident Don Martin only recently discovered that an oil drilling operation was using hydrochloric acid to treat the well behind a wall.

“The only barrier between this particular site and our apartment units is this wall,” Martin said. “It angers me because first of all, we weren’t informed there were chemicals at this particular location. Absolutely, we have a right to know what’s going on in our back yard behind that tarp.”

“SB4 is still a new law, it doesn’t happen overnight,” said State Senator Mark Leno of San Francisco, who co-sponsored SB4.

Even so, Senator Leno is concerned about what NBC Bay Area and The Center for Biological Diversity found in the analysis of the data.

He says that’s why he is now calling for a halt to all well stimulation including fracking until the issue can be studied further.

“I’m concerned and it only reinforces why we should consider a moratorium while we gather the information that’s required in SB4,” Leno told NBC Bay Area.

When asked if the point of SB4 was to inform, educate and clear up public confusion, Jason Marshall of California’s Department of Conservation agreed but said DOGGR is complying with the law as it is currently written.

“It absolutely is the point,” said Marshall. “One of the central points of SB4 is to increase public transparency. But again, we can’t impose more reporting requirements on operators.”

Los Angeles resident Don Martin says he just wants himself and his neighbors living next to the well to be informed.

“It started to be a concern to our health and safety,” said Martin. “In order to protect the residents here, it [SB4] absolutely needs to be enforced. And that’s part of the problem is the lack of enforcement.”

The Department of Conservation’s Jason Marshall does admit the law could and should be tweaked to help clear up confusion and San Francisco State Senator Leno says he will work to make that happen.