Why Attending September 29th’s EPA Hearing on New Air Toxics Rules for rhe Gas Industry is Even More Important Now
Because it’s the only way we’re going to be able to significantly cut smog-forming pollution from the gas industry for the foreseeable future.
Gas production laces the air with toxic substances like sulfur dioxide and benzene, a volatile organic compound, or VOC, and emits pollutants that form smog, which blankets many Western gas fields. Ozone — the main component of smog — is created when VOCs and nitrogen oxide interact with sunlight. It can cause respiratory ailments, while VOCs themselves can be carcinogenic.
Because of the high pressure at which fracking fluid is injected into and flows back out of the ground, more pollution initially escapes from fracked wells than from conventional ones. Whether or not wells are fracked, pollutants leak out all along the production chain — from pipelines, storage tanks, diesel trucks and compressor stations. Tens of thousands of new gas wells have been drilled in recent years, and in production hubs, air pollution has simultaneously worsened. Ozone levels spiked above federal limits 26 times in rural Utah’s Uintah Basin in the first three months of 2011. There, and in Sublette County, Wyo., ozone levels have even exceeded those of famously smoggy Los Angeles.
Yet air-quality standards for oil and gas production haven’t been updated in years; VOC standards have sat untouched since 1985. In late July, however, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed ambitious new air rules for the industry — among the first federal regulations of any kind to cover fracking. “They’re a major milestone,” says Jeremy Nichols, climate and energy program director for WildEarth Guardians, which, with another group, sued the EPA to prompt the new rules. “The emission reductions are just huge.”
The rules would mainly cover VOCs and air toxics, pollutants such as sulfur dioxide that are known or believed to cause cancer and other major illnesses. They aim to cut the industry’s overall VOC emissions by an estimated 25 percent, air toxics by 30 percent, and methane — a super-charged greenhouse gas — by 26 percent. Stricter VOC controls would be required at compressor stations, storage tanks and processing plants. Limits would be set for air toxics emissions, and new and refractured wells would have to be equipped to separate methane and smog-forming VOCs from water when they flow back out of a fracked well, a process known as green completion.
Without a new clean air plan to construct until 2012-2013, these new EPA rules are DFW’s best hope for reducing sources of smog pollution which have gone mostly unregulated at the state and local level. We need to protect them and make sure they’re implemented in full.
In 2008, almost 100 DFW residents spoke at an EPA hearing at DFW Airport on behalf of the new cement plant emission rules that will bring new controls to the Midlothian cement plants by 2013. We filled every speaker slot from 9 am to 9pm. It was an incredible success that demonstrated to industry and EPA that there was widespread popular support for the new rules – even in Texas.
We have to do the same thing on September 29th at the Arlington City Council Chambers. Sign-up for a 5 minute speaking slot – that’s all we’re asking, five minutes to tell the EPA why clean air is important to you and your family; five minutes to tell them your own stories about breathing fumes from drilling pads, or compressors, or processing plants; five minutes to say why you don’t want to breathe poisons, no matter how large or small the levels. Don’t leave it up to someone else to testify.
EPA Hearing on New Rules for Gas Industry Air Pollution
When: Thursday September 29th, from 9 am to 9 pm
Where: Arlington City Hall Council Chambers
You can register for a five minute time slot between 9am and 9 pm by calling Ms. Joan Rogers at EPA: 919-541-4487.
This way, you only hamper our ability to take a breath