Category Archives: Fracking

California Regulation, Cap-and-trade, Carbon taxes, Climate Change, Fracking, Global warming, Vatican conference on climate change

SF Chronicle editorial: A climate pilgrimage

Repost from The San Francisco Chronicle
[Editor:  The San Francisco Chronicle ran three (!) stories on the Vatican Conference on climate change, including two rather stiff challenges to California Governor Jerry Brown.  See below for one.  See also: As California pumps out oil, Gov. Brown says world must cut back … and SF Mayor touts green vehicles at Vatican conference.  – RS]

Climate change road trip for Jerry Brown and Ed Lee

Editorial, The San Francisco Chronicle, July 21, 2015 5:16pm

California is taking its climate change ambitions on a pilgrimage to Rome. The mission amplifies the major steps that have put this state out front in reshaping energy use and also taps into a sweeping papal message on reining in environmental damage.

Leading the tour is Gov. Jerry Brown, joined by San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee among some 60 global mayors. The Vatican gathering, which will also touch on human trafficking, intends to build on Pope Francis’ encyclical denouncing the toll from climate change and puts pressure on world leaders to take action at a U.N. summit in Paris in December.

Former Jesuit seminarian Brown put himself in tune with Francis by talking up the “moral dimension” of human-caused problems such as erratic weather, rising seas and dirty air. But he also struck a more earthly note, lashing out at “troglodyte” skeptics who deny the science behind rising temperatures and shifting climates.

California is already a leader in reducing tailpipe emissions, cutting fossil fuel use and increasing energy efficiency, going well beyond national standards. In the next 15 years, Brown wants to kick up the pace: Half of California’s electricity will come from renewables such as solar, wind or biofuels, and gas pump use will drop by half as well.

He told his audience of clerics and politicians that such goals sound “unimaginable” but are needed. Brown lashed out at “fierce opposition and blind inertia” from doubtful lawmakers and dug-in business interests. Brown himself is no stranger to these pressures, giving his blessing to fracking for oil and gas, widely opposed by environmentalists. In his encyclical, Francis also criticized cap-and-trade regulations as too lax, though the carbon-tax mechanism is a bedrock feature of the governor’s energy plans.

The gathering is also chance for other leaders to showcase policies. Lee unwrapped a plan to phase out petroleum in favor of renewable diesel fuels for the municipal fleet by the end of the year. It’s a another step in clearing the air of damaging greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change.

California Regulation, Climate Change, Climate change denial, Fracking, Global warming, Oil Industry, Oil producers, Vatican conference on climate change

As California pumps out oil, Gov. Brown says world must cut back

Repost from The San Francisco Chronicle (SFGate)
[Editor:  The San Francisco Chronicle ran three (!) stories on the Vatican Conference on climate change, including two rather stiff challenges to California Governor Jerry Brown.  See below for one.  See also: Editorial-A climate pilgrimage, …and Mayor touts city’s green vehicles at pope’s event.  – RS]

As California pumps out oil, Gov. Brown says world must cut back

By David R. Baker, July 21, 2015 4:02 pm
Gov. Jerry Brown delivers his speech during the conference at the Vatican. Photo: Gregorio Borgia, Associated Press
Gov. Jerry Brown delivers his speech during the conference at the Vatican. Photo: Gregorio Borgia, Associated Press (1st of 10 images – click for more).

One-third of the world’s oil must stay in the ground if humanity hopes to avoid the worst effects of global warming, Gov. Jerry Brown told a climate conference at the Vatican Tuesday.

“We are going to have to set a clear goal,” Brown told a crowd of mayors and public officials from around the world. “And that goal is almost unimaginable. One-third of the oil that we know exists as reserves can never be taken out of the ground. Fifty percent of the gas can never be used and over 90 percent of the coal. Now, that is a revolution.”

For an American politician of Brown’s stature, it was a rare statement. Even those who acknowledge the threat of climate change prefer not to address the idea that tapping all of the world’s known fossil fuel reserves would trigger catastrophic levels of warming, a notion widely embraced in the environmental movement.

But Brown’s comment was particularly noteworthy for another reason.

California, for all its efforts to fight climate change, remains America’s third-largest oil producing state, out-pumped only by Texas and North Dakota. And while Brown wants to cut California’s use of oil by 50 percent in the next 15 years, he has generally supported oil production within the state’s borders.

Brown has for years refused to ban hydraulic fracturing, preferring to regulate it instead. He has argued that finding a way to tap the oil trapped within California’s Monterey Shale formation could produce an economic boom for the state. His stance has infuriated many environmentalists, even as they laud his efforts to boost renewable power and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

So Brown’s comments, at the Vatican global symposium on climate change and modern slavery, raised a few eyebrows back home.

“We agree, fossil fuels need to stay in the ground,” said Kassie Siegel of the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the environmental groups pushing for a fracking ban. “That’s why Gov. Brown can’t be a climate leader and expand fossil fuel production in his own state. Climate leaders do not frack.”

Brown urged the gathered mayors to push for climate action within their own countries, saying they needed to “light a fire” under their national leaders. And he took aim at opponents of such action, saying they were “bamboozling” the public with a well-financed disinformation campaign.

“We have very powerful opposition that, in at least my country, spends billions on trying to keep from office people such as yourselves and elect troglodytes and other deniers of the obvious science,” Brown said.

Aquifers, Crude By Rail, Fracking, Injection wells

Some California oil firms may lose sites for dumping … by 12/31/16

Repost from The San Francisco Chronicle

U.S. likely to bar oil-waste dumping into 10 California aquifers

By David R. Baker, July 16, 2015 7:26pm

"The

Oil companies will probably have to stop injecting their wastewater into 10 Central Valley aquifers that the state has let them use for years, in the latest fallout from a simmering dispute over whether California has adequately protected its groundwater from contamination.

The aquifers lie at the heart of a decades-old bureaucratic snafu whose discovery has upended the state office that regulates oil-field operations and prompted lawmakers to demand reform.

Starting in 1983, California’s Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources let companies dump water left over from their drilling operations into 11 aquifers that the state believed had received federal exemptions from the U.S. Safe Drinking Water Act, which shields groundwater supplies from pollution. But the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency insisted it had never granted the exemptions. The aquifers, according to the EPA, should have been protected.

After the disagreement came to light, the division agreed to stop oil-company injections into the disputed aquifers or ask the EPA for formal exemptions, which would allow oil companies to continue using the aquifers for disposal. But in an update to the EPA on Wednesday, the division said 10 of the 11 aquifers probably would not meet the legal standards for exemption. They lie too close to the surface — in one case, as shallow as 200 feet — and their water isn’t salty enough.

One of the 10 aquifers may still be eligible for an exemption, because it may be part of an oil reservoir, said division spokesman Donald Drysdale. The division is still seeking more information.

“We’re trying to run that to ground right now,” he said.

Five of the aquifers are no longer being used for wastewater disposal, according to the division. If the others don’t receive exemptions, wastewater injections there must stop by Dec. 31, 2016.

California’s oil fields contain large amounts of salty water mixed with the oil, the remains of an ancient sea. That water must be stripped from the petroleum and disposed of, usually by pumping it back underground. Often, it goes back into the same oil reservoir it came from.

But over time, the division has allowed oil companies to inject billions of barrels of this wastewater into aquifers that had relatively clean water — water that with treatment could have been used for drinking or irrigation. So far, the state has not found any instances in which the injections contaminated drinking-water supplies. But the division has shut down 23 injection wells that it considered high-risk, due to their close proximity to drinking-water wells.

The division has now established a timetable for phasing out all of the injections into aquifers that should have been protected by the Safe Drinking Water Act, with the last injection wells scheduled to close in February 2017. That long time frame will give the oil companies a chance to find other ways to deal with their “produced water.” But it has infuriated environmentalists, who have sued the state to force an immediate shutdown of the injection wells.

The federal EPA can exempt aquifers from the law, but only under stringent conditions. The aquifer must be salty enough or deep enough that tapping it for drinking water isn’t practical. If it contains significant amounts of oil or minerals, it’s considered a strong candidate for exemption.

If, however, someone already uses it for drinking, it cannot receive an exemption.

David R. Baker is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer.
Air Quality, Bakken Crude, Carbon dioxide, Clean Air Act, Climate Change, Climate change denial, Fracking, Oil industry knew, Tar sands crude

They Knew, They Lied: ExxonMobil and Climate Change

Repost from TruthOut

They Knew, They Lied: ExxonMobil and Climate Change

By William Rivers Pitt, 16 July 2015 00:00
(Photo: Los Angeles Smog via Shutterstock)
Los Angeles Smog – Shutterstock

Between 1956 and 1964, Bell Laboratories produced a number of television specials titled “The Bell Laboratories Science Series.” The topics ranged from an examination of the Sun, to human blood, deep space, the mind, the nature of time and life itself. The programs were produced by Frank Capra, whose films include It’s a Wonderful Life and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, so the production value of the series was notably superior. Even 30 years later, schools all across the US were still showing these Bell Labs films to students.

In 1958, a chapter in this series titled “The Unchained Goddess” was broadcast. The topic was the weather, and it starred Richard Carlson and a USC professor named Dr. Frank C. Baxter. At one point in the program, Carlson asked Dr. Baxter, “What would happen if we could change the course of the Gulf Stream, or the other great ocean currents, or warm up Hudson Bay with atomic furnaces?” The “atomic furnaces” bit is a quaint throwback to the atom-crazy 1950s, but the response given by Dr. Baxter is what makes this particular film notable.

“Extremely dangerous questions,” replied Dr. Baxter, “because with our present knowledge we have no idea what would happen. Even now, Man may be unwittingly changing the world’s climate through the waste products of his civilization. Due to our release, through factories and automobiles every year, of more than 6 billion tons of carbon dioxide – which helps air absorb heat from the Sun – our atmosphere seems to be getting warmer. It’s been calculated that a few degrees rise in the Earth’s temperature would melt the polar ice caps, and if this happens, an inland sea would fill a good portion of the Mississippi Valley. Tourists in glass-bottomed boats would be viewing the drowned towers of Miami through 150 feet of tropical water.”

Again, this was broadcast in 1958. The fact that climate concerns were being voiced almost 60 years ago is likely surprising to many, but the history and beginnings of the environmental movement in the US date even earlier. Ten years before, in 1948, the first piece of federal legislation to regulate water quality – the Federal Water Pollution Control Act – was passed. President Eisenhower spoke to the issue of air pollution, which had killed nearly 300 people in New York City two years earlier, in his 1955 State of the Union Address. That same year, the Air Pollution Control Act was passed.

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