Since DFW was first identified has having a smog problem in the mid to late 1980's, there's a standard formula that's become familiar to folks in local air quality: NOx and VOCs + Sunlight = Ozone. There have always been two primary culprits to North Texas' chronic smog problem. NOx, or Nitrogen Oxides which primarily come from combustion sources (engines, boilers, furnaces), and VOCs, or Volatile Organic Compounds that are mostly invisible plumes and fumes from things like gasoline pumps, storage tanks, as well as combustion. These pollutants combine with sunlight and heat that chemically interacts with them and forms ozone downwind. When the first air pollution control measures were adopted, Austin and the EPA agreed that VOCS were the driving force DFW ozone levels. Some old-timers may remember the Mrs. Baird's bakery on the West Freeway in Ft. Worth having to install controls that eliminated the smell of baking bread that was stout enough to waft across the highway. That's also why every gas pump in Collin, Denton, Dallas, and Tarrant Counties has a "Vapor Recovery Unit." Over the years, the blame shifted to a combination of VOCs and NOx, and that's what made it possible to bring large NOx polluters like cement plants and coal plants into the picture. Still, VOC emissions remained a major player in the DFW smog problem, and they've been addressed with controls on everything from solvents, to boat resins, to bakeries by every single clean air plan ever drafted by the state and EPA. But now Austin is saying VOCs aren't such a big problem after all, that DFW's smog is all about the NOx. Why? Austin's computer model says so. This is the same computer model that says DFW ozone levels will reach historic lows this summer. But might there be another reason? TCEQ's de-emphasis on VOCs coincides precisely with a very large jump in VOC pollution from the gas industry, a jump due to the explosion of drilling in the Barnett Shale and the government's lack of regulation to control it. In 2006, cars and trucks in DFW still spewed more VOCs than the gas industry. This year, the gas industry will release 30 MORE TONS PER DAY of VOCs than all the cars and trucks in DFW combined according to the TCEQ itself. But you'd never know it from looking at any of the public material the TCEQ produces about DFW's ozone problem. Instead it's all NOx all the time. This slant benefits a politicized TCEQ in a couple of ways. First, when you talk about NOx, you don't have to talk about the doubling of gas industry emissions over the past decade or so. Second, you can keep repeating the mantra that it's all about cars. Cars only produce about 15% of the VOC pollution in DFW vs 49% of all NOx in North Texas. No need to worry about new controls on cement plants or coal plants when it's really all about cars. Until today, that TCEQ message creep was showing up locally in websites and promotional material sponsored by the North Central Texas Council of Governments (NCTCOG) made up of area municipal and county governments. Unlike in past years when the familiar formula of both NOx and VOcs was recited to the public, this year NCTCOG's Air North Texas site, Air Facts page trumpeted that "On road vehicles cause half of the ozone forming emissions. Ozone forms when nitrogen oxides (NOx) combine with sunlight and intense heat." That just wasn't true. When you combine all VOC and NOx emissions (as calculated by TCEQ) in DFW, on-road vehicles account for 29% of ALL ozone forming emissions. Point Sources like cement plants and other industrial facilities, combined with oil and gas sources, total 25% - a much different looking pie chart than when you use NOx emission alone. To its credit, as a result of our inquiry, the NCTCOG Air North Texas "air facts" page has been re-edited to put VOCs back into the equation as of today, along with a little bit of spin claiming that "historical emphasis has indicated NOx reductions are the most appropriate way the region can lower ozone levels." We label that spin because it relies totally on the TCEQ's point of view, which has been, how do we put it, "historically wrong." We've already discussed how the DFW smog problem began as just a VOCs problem. We know they're still a factor. And if NOx reductions alone are so darn effective, why haven't they worked better? According to the TCEQ, total NOx pollution from ALL DFW sources decreased by almost 150 tons per day over the last six years. And yet 2011 was the worst ozone season since 2007. VOC Pollution? It's increased by 17 tons per day despite almost every individual category going down, save the ambiguous "Area" sources and emissions from the Oil and Gas industry. So if NOx decreases ozone so much more effectively than VOC decreases, how come 2011 ozone levels didn't reflect that? Many public officials around the country cite scientific evidence that already smoggy air turbocharges the ability of gas patch pollution to create more ozone. Usually very weak VOC molecules are transformed into smog-producing machines. TCEQ refuses to factor in this scientifically validated increased reactivity of VOCs being released by gas sources despite predominate winds carrying already smoggy air into the heart of drilling country in Tarrant, Denton, Wise, and Johnson Counties. It's model doesn't recognize this phenomena happening. TCEQ may also be underestimating the ability of these weak VOCs to already make ozone. In her 2011 landmark "Leaking Money" report for Downwinders, Dr. Melanie Sattler wrote that just the sheer volume of new gas industry VOCs is enough to affect DFW ozone levels. If DFW is ever going to solve its chronic smog problem, it has to have reliable information about what the increase in gas industry pollution is doing to our air. We don't have that now and no one in Austin is interested in finding out. Local leaders would be wise to decouple themselves from the TCEQ's politicized and uncurious approach to DFW air quality planning in Austin and find funding for their own research that can test for things the state doesn't want to know....Here's the full statement of Chris Klaus, Senior program Manager at NCTCOG and the lead staff person ther for all things air: "We appreciate your e-mail and comments regarding air quality facts and information on our Air North Texas and the North Central Texas Council of Governments’ (NCTCOG) websites.  We welcome and value this type of input.  In regards to your comments, historical emphasis has indicated NOx reductions are the most appropriate way the region can lower ozone levels.  Of the primary emission sources, on-road vehicle activities account for nearly half of the NOx inventory.  We frequently discuss NOx and VOCs when providing outreach, and have updated the Air North Texas website to make sure VOCs are referenced when appropriate.  Air North Texas is meant for the general public, and NCTCOG staff feels it is more effective to educate them about what they can do to improve air quality, and how to protect their health and the environment."  Read More

About four or so years ago, Downwinders put out a nice little report that summarized decades worth of air pollution coming from all three Midlothian cement plants. For years, residents were told that the plumes they saw coming from the smokestacks of the kilns were " just steam." The point of the report was to prove that of course this wasn't true. You don't just emit steam and then report thousands of tons of air pollution to the EPA. So our report was titled "Not Just Steam" and you can download it from our "Cementpedia" page (look under "E" for "emission inventory"). Today some Colleyville and Southlake citizens, along with Oil and Gas Accountability Project organizer Sharon Wilson, released results from air testing they contracted a Richardson company to perform downwind while Titan Operations was fracking a natural gas well. Specifically, it was a time when the well operators were recovering the "flowback" from the well. Contrary to the recent claim from Chesapeake spokespeople that such gas well emissions are "just steam," this stuff was chock full of 26 chemicals, including Carbon Disulfide, a neurotoxin detected at twice the state level for short-term exposure, Benzene, a known carcinogen detected at 9 times above the state's short-term exposure limits, and Naphthalene, a suspected carcinogen detected more than 7 times above the state short term limit.  Carbonyl Sulfide, Dimethyl Disulfide and Pyridine were all also detected above safe limits for long-term exposure. In other words: No Just Steam. Here's the press release, at the bottom of which is all the technical information about the testing. Even though Colleyville prohibits "gases to be vented into the atmosphere or to be burned by open flame" this well is going great guns. It's also true that it's these very kind of drilling emissions that would have been stopped from new wells within the next 60-90 days under new federal rules as they were originally proposed. But they got changed by industry, so now they don't take effect until 2015. Old wells? Forgetaboutit. Why do we keep telling citizens that their environmental health is a do-it-yourself project? Because of situations like this where no government agency is keeping up with industrial abuses. There are an estimated 20,000 gas wells in the Barnett Shale.   Read More

The Dallas Residents at Risk Alliance, of which Downwinders is a member, is taking its successful March 27 community meeting format on the road again over the next couple of weeks. If you want to know what all the fuss was about, or need a refresher, you'll have three chances: Thursday April 26th, 6:30 to 8 pm, El Centro Community College/West Campus, 3300 North Hampton Road;  Thursday May 3rd, 7 pm to 8:30pm North Hills Prep School, 606 E Royal (near L.B. Huoston),  Tuesday, May 8th, 7 to 8:30 pm Harmony School, 8120 West Camp Wisdom Road. All three will feature members of the Alliance going through the Fracking 101 slide show and fundamental concerns, special guest speakers from the Dallas gas drilling task force and other experts, and a list of things that residents can do to make sure this epic saga has a happy ending when a vote comes up at the City Council within the next 30-60 days. Momentum is growing toward a saner solution. Come be a part of the most important environmental issue in Dallas since the lead smelter fights of the 1980's. And if you really want to plug into how to stop fracking from riding roughshod over Dallas, don't forget about the weekly Tuesday 6 pm evening Residents at Risk Alliance organizing meetings at 3303 Lee Parkway Suite 402, the offices of Alliance member Texas Campaign for the Environment. Everyone is invited. All you need is your interest in preventing a disaster before it starts.   Read More

This map is a layout of the Billingsley-City of Dallas joint "eco-development" by the name of "Cypress Waters" taking shape on North Lake in Northwestern Dallas. The same one the Dallas Morning News wrote about today. Only they didn't include this perspective of the development - the master plan for the development. Maybe because it makes explicit reference to the fact that there will be gas wells tastefully scattered among the neighborhoods and schools of Cypress Waters, a fact never mentioned in the Morning News story (they're the green rectangles on the map). Indeed, there's a drill site that sits directly across the street from TWO schools. This is the completely FUBAR'd world of developers unfamiliar with the messiness of gas drilling, or alternatively don't care about the impact of that messiness on their residents. On a map, a well pad is a nicely contained rectangle of a different color that just sits there and mingles with the other colored rectangles. On the ground, it's 24/7 traffic, noise, smells, fumes, health effects, and accidents that don't stay within the rectangle. Remember that just a month ago the Colorado School of Public Health published a study that concluded that residents living within a half mile of a gas well were exposed to at least five different toxic chemicals at levels above federal regulatory concern and stood a 66% higher chance of getting cancer. Four out of six of the wells in this planned Cypress Waters eco-development are much closer to people than a half-mile. Some look like their as close as a half block. Yeah, that's real eco of y'all. People who design developments like this should be sentenced to live on their front lines. UPDATE @ 4:30 PM: To its credit the Dallas Morning News is now running a story from their City Hall reporter on its digital front page that talks about the fact that Cypress Hill is also hosting six drilling sites and even posts the same map that we have up here. It's a good piece and if it's language would have been inserted into the larger Business Section article this morning, there would have been no basis to complain. Good for citizens howling about this. Good for the Morning News being responsive to reader comments about so obvious an omission and making the correction by putting it on the front page of the web site. Should we credit this reasonableness to the "Wilonsky Effect?"  Read More

For the second time in a row, the "Real Estate Writer" for the Dallas Morning News has written a feature article about a nice, new expensive development where there are gas leases and permits already being requested, and yet failed to mention anything about those pesky gas wells. From what we can tell, the Real Estate Writer seems to be a DMN position paid for by Real Estate developers. Last month it was the West Dallas area surrounding the new Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge, where the city has leased its own land out for multiple gas leases. Today it's the "Cypress Waters" planned community being built by Lucy (Crow) Billingsley around North Lake, where there's already a gas pad permit in the pipeline, so to speak. But you'd never know it from reading the article. “We have 82 acres on LBJ Freeway that we have saved at the project’s primary entry point so that we can have retail to service the development,” Billingsley said. “We will also have restaurants on the lake.”  And if the wells get permitted, those diners will be getting lots of items off the official menu. We know she's a Crow. We know its a big development. But really? To be this much of a shill is embarrassing. UPDATE 11:30 AM: Dallas Area Residents for Responsible Drilling's Raymond Crawford e-mailed the DMN writer, Steve Brown and asked him if he knew about the wells slated for this development. Brown's reply was as enlightening as it was brief: "Yes, they've set aside six drill sites on the master plan for the project...I'm thinking that they consider this not a problem for rental housing but of course it would be a factor for people buying homes." Yes, of course, because homeowners have lungs, whereas we're not even sure if renters are a higher life form at all. Amazing isn't it?   Read More

Word comes today that the recent updating of a national Canadian Greenhouse Gas emissions inventory shows all industrial and commercial sectors holding steady or making progress in 2010, save one: Oil and Gas. Canada had to perform the inventory under the terms of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Unfortunately, the dramatic rise in emissions from oilsands (Re: Keystone) and gas development more than off-set the progress in the rest of the economy. This is the money quote from the Canada.Com article: "Canada's official report last year generated controversy because of a decision to exclude a breakdown of oilsands emissions from the inventory, even though this emissions breakdown was included in the previous year's inventory. The missing details eventually revealed that the booming sector's pollution was dramatically rising to levels that would make it difficult for the federal government to meet its own annual emissions target of 607 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions by 2020." Now, come south to Dallas. We know City Hall is sitting on a similar updating of Greenhouse Gas pollution emissions being emitted by both City of Dallas operations, and the metropolis as a whole. This pollution inventory was required by the 2005 Mayor's Climate Change Agreement, of which Dallas is a signatory. Cities pledged to cut 2012 GHG pollution to 1990 levels. We'll see how close or far Dallas is to accomplishing that goal when the numbers are released. But here's the real number you need to keep an eye on - the amount of Greenhouse Gas pollution emitted by industrial sources in Dallas. The last time the city did such a survey, it totaled only 25,000 tons a year from all large industrial facilities combined. By contrast, a single gas compressor can easily spew 25,000 tons a year of the same kind of pollution. Gas fields have multiple compressors. It's not unusual for large compressors to emit up to 50,000, 75,000, even 90,000 tons or more of air pollution every single year. Without mitigating or off-setting this tidal wave of air pollution from gas drilling, Dallas will never be able to meet its obligations to reduce its Greenhouse Gas pollution, and in fact, it will be responsible for making local air quality much worse. A vote to allow unfettered drilling is a vote for immediately doubling the industrial GHG pollution coming from Dallas, and in the long run, a vote to increase it by probably a magnitude or two. Why should you care if climate change doesn't get you excited? The same GHG pollution making it impossible for Dallas to reduce its carbon footprint is the same air pollution that makes our smog worse, and its the same air pollution that makes it 66% more likely for you to contract cancer if you live within a half-mile of a gas well. It's all inter-connected. Dallas is poised to reverse years of air quality progress if it doesn't do something to address the large increases in air pollution caused by gas drilling.   Read More

The new oil and gas air toxics rules that over a hundred people came out to support this last summer at an EPA hearing in Arlington are under heavy fire as they're getting closer to getting implemented. These are rules, that for the first time would clamp down on the Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) released by gas drilling that cause smog, toxic air pollution and make global warming worse. EPA recently announced a two-week delay in their being brought on line and there's a campaign by industry to gut the rules entirely by limiting their scope in a ridiculous way. Sharon has all the details in how you can urge the EPA to get a backbone and go through with their modest reforms, and The Hill has a good article explaining the effort to roll back the rules. Whether these rules are implemented in their original form or not, the struggle over their creation and scope argues for why more local governments should be looking at regulating these emissions through the lens of Greenhouse Gas pollution (GHG), as Downwinders and others are suggesting Dallas do in its new gas drilling ordinance. Lack of federal and state action on GHG pollution allows local governments to fill in the gap and level the playing field to reduce air pollution that would otherwise fall through the cracks and loopholes of current law. Even if the new EPA rules were to come on stream in their original form, they still wouldn't cover 70-75% of the VOC emissions causing so many problems. This is why local governments must act out of self-defense. In this case, no other level of government is making sure that new gas pollution doesn't contribute to already bad regional ozone problems, doesn't blow open a city's commitment to reducing its carbon footprint, as Dallas has pledged to do under the 2005 Mayor's Climate Change Agreement, and doesn't poison a city's neighborhoods. If the as industry was treated like other industrial polluters, it would have to mitigate or "off-set" these air pollution increase with air pollution decreases elsewhere in the same area. Gas operators do not have to do this. Local regulation could make them. It could force gas operators to decrease air pollution as much as they increase it in Dallas by paying for projects that reduce the same kind of GHG pollution as they emit. It would also act as a automatic incentive for the gas operators not to release as much air pollution to begin with - stopping it before it starts. EPA is not going to save the residents of the Shale from the gas industry. They'e got to do that themselves. Here's a way that could help.   Read More

Sharon already caught all of this, but it's important to note its relevance to what's going on in the re-writing of the Dallas drilling ordinance. We really wonder if most of the members of the Dallas gas drilling task force knew what a compressor station was and did, or spoke to anyone that's lived within 500 feet of one. Because on the very last day of the Task Force, and without taking any public input, they decided to let compressors sit on well pads that could be as close as 500-1000 feet from a home, school, hospital or other "protected use." Why is that a bad idea? Compressors are some of the largest and most polluting kinds of facilities in the natural gas fuel cycle. They routinely emit tens of thousands of tons of air pollution. They are very loud. Their low-decibel noise output can cause serious health effects. And, oh yeah, they can explode, like this Williams Company compressor did in a Pennsylvania township last week:  "An explosion at a natural gas compressor station in Susquehanna County on Thursday morning blew a hole in the roof of the complex holding the engines, shaking homes as far as a half-mile away and drawing emergency responders from nearby counties. The 11 a.m. blast at the Lathrop compressor station off Route 29 sent black and gray clouds billowing from the building for several hours, but the damage was contained to the site and no one was injured, said a spokeswoman for Williams Partners LP, which owns the Lathrop station."  A half mile is more than twice the distance of the elastic 500-1000 foot buffer zone the Dallas task force recommended. The compressor station pressurizes and dehydrates natural gas from the local Marcellus Shale for transport to market. It was moving 365 million cubic feet of gas PER DAY. In reports on the day of the accident, Williams and its partners sounded very contrite. But then this happened: "A damaged Susquehanna County natural gas compressor station restarted operations last week despite state regulators' request the facility remain shut down during an investigation, the Department of Environmental Protection said Wednesday.Williams Partners turned on some of the seven compressor engines at the Lathrop station without permission Friday evening after the state denied the company's request to begin operating in a limited capacity, regulators said." And so besides demonstrating why 500-100 feet might be a bit too close to put a compressor to your children's swing set, this story also shows why we also need every local government to have its on gas enforcement infrastructure that watches these gas operators like hawks, not ostriches.   Read More

It doesn't often work out this way, but three related stories came over the transom recently that so eloquently spelled out the case for Dallas regulating the Greenhouse gas pollution from the gas industry, that we could have written them ourselves. but we didn't have to. Downwinders and the Dallas Residents at Risk alliance support the idea of the City of Dallas requiring the  "mitigating", or "off-setting"  of new and large air pollution emissions that come with gas drilling. For every ton of Greenhouse Gas emitted by a new well, or compressor, or storage tank, the operators would have to fund a project that would reduce that same amount of pollution in Dallas, so that there would be no net increases in pollution. So why do this? ARTICLE #1: The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review covers a local permit for a gas compressor station that could emit between 20 and 90 tons of smog-forming Nitrogen Oxide, also a Greenhouse Gas. The state already has almost 400 such facilities because of its location in the Marcellus Shale gas play. According to the article, "The stations, which compress gas to get it to move through pipelines, release air pollutants that compound the state's long-standing ozone problem." Gas drilling brings large amounts of new air pollution that isn't covered under current regulations on either the state or federal level. Just one compressor station in Dallas could spew more Greenhouse Gas pollution than all the current industrial sources in the city combined. ARTICLE #2: The New Scientist gives voice to the growing perspective that the fastest way to affect climate change progress is to cut methane and soot emissions, not necessarily CO2. "Methane is a more important control on global temperature than previously realised. The gas's influence is much greater than its direct effect on the atmosphere," says Peter Cox, of the University of Exeter. Curbing methane, he adds, may now be the only way to prevent dangerous warming. "Oil and Gas sources in the US make-up 40% of all industrial methane pollution releases. Dallas has signed the US mayors agreement to reduce its Greenhouse Gas emissions. It won't be ale to keep that commitment if it allows gas drilling without some form of mitigation or off-setting. ARTICLE #3: A piece from the San Luis Obispo Tribune that details how a local county air pollution control board is now regulating greenhouse gases for new housing and commercial developments. What are they doing? Requiring mitigation. "The staff estimates that of 1,142 projects countywide over the next 10 years, 56 would be large enough to require mitigations. Mitigations usually come in the form of sidewalks, bike paths and other amenities that discourage the use of cars.Other developments could be exempted if they are covered by a qualified local emission reduction strategy...." Dallas wouldn't even be the first to think about GHG emission control on the local level, although it might be the first to apply it to the gas industry. Because that's what the biggest new threat to air quality in Dallas is.   Read More