Small victories are still victories

This morning, by a vote of 9-2, the Oil and Gas Sub-Committee of the North Central Texas Council of Governments’ Clean Air Steering Committee voted to request the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to:

1) Review its existing regulations governing gas field air pollution to make sure “they are adequate to achieve their intended purpose,” and

2) Consider requiring controls on gas field condensate tanks in the 9-county DFW non-attainment area that emit 15 tons per year of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) or more,

3) formalize best practices of the gas industry, including vapor recovery on tanks, low-leak pneumatic valves, and green completion into TCEQ rules that apply uniformly to the DFW 9-county non-attainment area.

You can download and read the entire text of the letter here, sans a minor amendment in language that was put on at Judge Mark Riley’s (Parker Co) request immediately before the vote took place.

All in all, not bad. Citizens and local governments put enough pressure on the local regional air quality planning process to get it to address the issue of reducing Shale pollution in this air plan, signing-off on a letter that basically, after a lot of pussyfooting around, endorses the Fair Share strategy outlined in the resolutions passed by Dallas County, DISH, Flower Mound, and Bartonville, with others to come.  This seems more impressive when you realize it’s a total reversal since December, when basically this same body voted against making any recommendations about improving air quality to the state, or EPA, about anything.

And even more impressive when you know that TCEQ is only recommending controls on tanks that emit 25 tons of VOC pollution per year or more, so the regional group went 10 tons lower than what the state proposed just last Friday. This is not an unimportant difference – TCEQ’s proposed rules would cover only 588 out of 1370 tanks in the DFW 9-county area, while the regional proposal would cover 913.

Kudos to Ft. Worth Councilman Jungus Jordan who threaded the rhetorical needle necessary to gather up enough votes to endorse the letter. Special thanks to Judge Riley who always seems to be the most authentic voice in the room when the issue of gas drilling comes up.

And thanks to you dear breather, for helping us build up enough steam to see that the locals didn’t just walk away from their responsibility after the fiasco in December. We now have the regional body on record as saying they want to see the state to do specific things to reduce gas field pollution. They’ve never done that before. And we’re going to take that and run with it all the way to Austin on June 8th and beyond.

That’s what happened officially. We won one and did something that the gas industry and TCEQ would rather us not have done. So yes, let’s celebrate victories when we can pull them off. The next round is on us.

But it’s what else that was transpiring in that Arlington conference room that gives one pause.

For one thing, participants had to be reminded that the goal of this plan was to reach a level of smog poisoning that the EPA has already declared as being “unprotective of human health.” And it still wasn’t clear at the end of the discussion that all of them, you know, really understood that. We’re aiming at an obsolete standard –  not even the Bush one that’s being replaced in two months – but the one that was replaced by the Bush Administration for being unprotective of human health. How bad does you air have to be when you’re not even meeting the smog standard that W thought was unhealthy? And yet, the idea of protecting regional public health by going beyond the minimum needed to achieve a dubious obsolete success rarely got mentioned by anyone but the environmental group representatives and, fortunately, Judge Riley.

All that talk about doing “as much as it takes”, “not settling for a passing grade”, “being the best you can be” – that only applies to local boosterism. When it comes to pursuing aggressive strategies to get safe and legal air for DFW residents to actually breathe – fuhgeddaboudit.

The lack of self-awareness in the room was palatable. Here they were talking about the necessity of a new DFW clean air plan because the old DFW clean air plan TCEQ had built had failed, (has had every other DFW clean air plan in the history of TCEQ), and yet Dallas Chamber of Commerce rep and industry attorney Howard Gilburg joined Collin County Judge Kieth Self in saying if this new proposed plan is good enough for TCEQ, it ought to be good enough for us. Leave it up to the experts. The ones that have never been right. Why do we even need to meet at all, right?

And then there was the mystery of Mayor Cluck, who in the space of 45 seconds made the following points in this order: 1) we do have an air quality problem here in DFW, 2) we should only use voluntary measures to control gas field air pollution, and BTW, the threat of such pollution is exaggerated, and 3) we’re about to toughen gas drilling regulations in Arlington. Try wrapping your mind around those intellectual contradictions and then meet us in the bar. It was his first meeting since the Sub-Committee was formed.

The TCEQ dropped by to say they were blowing off the entire 2011 VOC shortfall problem. For this year and next, the TCEQ was supposed to have met targeted reductions in smog-forming pollution, including VOCs. They will not meet these reductions for 2011. This has never happened before in DFW air planning history that anyone can recall.

TCEQ’s defense to this failure was, “Golly, we would have to have started on this SIP way before last summer if we were going to be able to pass new rules to take effect this summer.” Yes, that’s right. You would have had to start planning this SIP right after you knew you were going to need one – right after the monitors tripped in the summer of 2009, right after a group called Downwinders at Risk said you should start it, because if you didn’t, we’d expect to hear all kinds of excuses from TCEQ about running out of time to do things that are necessary when crunch time came.

Voilà.

Can they get away with this? Maybe. If they can make the black box math work on the back end and get their 2012 targets met, there’s apparently some precedent for EPA letting it slide. And if that’s really so, what incentive does an underachieving agency like TCEQ have in beating expectations and doing anything less than the absolute minimum? “TCEQ – when just getting by is all you want.”

The Commission spokesman also confirmed that final runs of the computer modeling being done with new EPA software for transportation pollution WILL NOT be finished before the public comment period ends on this proposed clean air plan on July 25th. What this means is that the public will see one air plan during the comment period and then a potentially totally different one – without any additional public comment –  will be submitted by TCEQ to EPA in December. This is the “Pod Plan” from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. They’ve done “preliminary modeling” with the new software, the results of which are buried in the husk of this current SIP that used the older software. After the public comment period, these results will be supplemented and they will grow, slowly but surely, until they take over the whole plan.

And of course, this being another month and another TCEQ presentation, we have another updated inventory of Shale VOCs. And these updates only go one direction – up. Just since April, TCEQ seems to have identified 11 more tons a day of gas pollution – for a total of 114.1 tons per day now from all gas sources in the DFW 9-county area. But just wait a month. Chances are that’s still an underestimate.

A new ozone standard is scheduled to be announced in July. It will be much tougher than the one this “plan” is aimed at. Lord help us.