Volatile Organic Compounds
Red Alert for Dec 20th: Dallas Wants to Drill Like It’s 2009
This is a heads-up to all Dallas residents: Dallas City Hall – the building, the people, everything – has climbed into a time machine and traveled all the way back to 2010.
This has allowed the City council and staff to ignore citizen demands for a more protective gas drilling ordinance, the defeat of a council member who advocated drilling, the creation and conclusion of a task force for helping write a new ordinance, and a bunch of public hearings over the last two years – all so that Dallas City Hall can now just go ahead and do what the gas operators originally asked it to do at the beginning.
The first Special Use Permit request from a gas well operator to allow drilling in Dallas since 2010 will be on the agenda at the December 20th Dallas Plan Commission meeting at City Hall. It concerns a new request to drill by XTO (Exxon-Mobil) at the old Navel Air Station in southwest Dallas, near the Grand Prairie line, that was submitted on November 16th.
Time it's taken the City of Dallas to write a new drilling ordinance in Dallas: 24 months and counting
Time it took XTO to get its new drilling request heard despite not having that new ordinance yet: 20 days
You can read about the sudden jump into municipal action here behind the DMN paywall.
"XTO’s latest requests are apparently on a fast track, headed to the City Plan Commission….
A new, tougher Dallas drilling ordinance is in the works but has not been approved or even published for review, so the existing ordinance would govern the XTO applications, based on the city’s legal view that one set of rules should apply throughout the process."
Every Dallas City Council member appoints a representative to the City Plan Commission. Dallas residents should call their own City Council member (info here), or their Plan Commission appointee (download a list and contact info here) and tell them to reject this XTO request and any others that try to get processed before a new drilling ordinance is in place.
Here's the media release that Dallas Residents at Risk put out this morning about the sudden turn around:
Dallas Officials Consider Throwing Away Years of Work on New Gas Drilling Ordinance and Simply Let Fracking Begin
Have Mayor Rawlings and the Dallas City Council made a decision to move ahead with existing, pending and even new gas drilling applications without taking any action on the new “fracking” ordinance that has been in the works since 2010?
Two weeks ago, Exxon-owned gas company XTO filed a new gas drilling application—because their previous bid to drill at Hensley Field was denied by the Dallas City Plan Commission two years ago. Then the City Council appointed a special Gas Drilling Task Force, whose members met every week for eight months to consider proposals for a new ordinance. They finished their work in February of this year and issued their official recommendations, yet the City Council has not even begun drafting a new ordinance. The only rumored exception: City officials may consider simply changing the existing ordinance to allow fracking in floodplains, which would be necessary for gas company Trinity East to move ahead with its plans to drill in floodplain areas along the Trinity River. Neighborhood groups and environmental advocates say that’s unacceptable.
"This is the largest retreat of leadership that I can ever remember on such an important public health and environmental issue,” said Jim Schermbeck, Downwinders at Risk. “After three years of citizen complaints, a task force created, convened and concluded, expert and public testimony, and all Dallas residents get is a pair of shrugged shoulders from Mayor Rawlings and the Council? It's a bad joke."
There have been several major scientific studies surrounding the risks of fracking since Dallas officials began debating the new ordinance. Community leaders worry that new evidence pointing to health and safety risks for residents living near drilling sites will simply be ignored.
“So what if there's a 66% higher cancer risk within a half mile of a gas well; so what if already bad Dallas smog is made worse; so what if we still have no idea what chemicals will be used for fracking in Dallas,” said Claudia Meyer of the Mountain Creek Neighborhood Alliance. “It's as if the Mayor and Council are closing their eyes, plugging their ears, and desperately hoping to make all these new facts go away by just pretending they never happened.”
The new drilling applications leave Dallas officials exactly where they started, with the City Plan Commission being asked to shoulder the responsibility of deciding on whether to allow fracking to go forward. Advocates say the Commission should decline this offer and let the City Council do what it said it was going to do: Draft and pass a new gas drilling ordinance first.
“If we were only going to end up where we started, what was the point of a task force, or public hearings or anything that's happened since permitting stopped because the City wanted a new drilling ordinance,” said Zac Trahan with Texas Campaign for the Environment. “This is complete and utter dereliction of duty and public trust by the elected officials of this city on one of the most important public health and environmental questions to face Dallas in decades."
Cuts in Methane and PM Pollution Can Slow Climate Change
In an opinion piece in The Daily Climate, Michael MacCraken, the chief scientist for the DC-based Climate Institute advocates an end-run strategy to avoid the political logjam over large CO2 cuts as a way to fight global warming. He suggests concentrating on reducing Methane and Particulate Matter pollution as a way to "appreciably slow the rate of warming over the next several decades." He cites an earlier UN study that concluded:
"…a moderately aggressive international emissions control program focused on the short-lived compounds could roughly halve the projected warming between the present and 2050. While slowing the warming through this approach might seem to also offer additional time for cutting CO2 emissions, this is not the case. Instead, these actions are more appropriately viewed as partially making up for earlier policy delays.
For the United States to do its share, aggressive limits on CO2 emissions must be complemented by aggressive limits of emissions of short-lived species. In particular, the Environmental Protection Agency will need to be more aggressive in cutting short-lived emissions, particularly of methane from the oil and gas industry, and making its voluntary methane and black carbon programs mandatory.
With climate change so far along, the question now is no longer whether impacts can be avoided, but rather how bad they will become. What we do with respect to both mitigation and adaptation will control that outcome. The longer we wait, the worse the impacts and sharper the required energy transition."
While methane gradually breaks down in the atmosphere, forming carbon dioxide, it has 100 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide for the first 20 years it’s exposed to the environment. A study by Cornell University Environmental Biology Professor Robert Howarth found between four and eight percent of the methane produced by a fracking well is leaked into the atmosphere during the well’s lifetime. For all the immediate environmental benefits of natural gas, the methods used for its extraction could create a larger greenhouse footprint than oil or coal over time.
EPA is considering a new national PM pollution standard because of its public health impacts and should use the opportunity to win deeper cuts that offer so many "co-benefits." Every reduction in soot is now doubly important. Cars, cement kilns, coal plants, and just about any industrial boiler or furnace spews out PM. They all need to be targeted as part of a larger effort to bring this kind of pollution under better control.
This impact on global warming is also one more reason why Dallas residents should be demanding that the city incorporate some kind of "off-sets" policy regarding new oil and gas air pollution as part of a new City drilling ordinance. Not only can it hep reduce smog and some of the toxins released by the drilling and processing of natural gas; it can also provide some needed help for climate change at a time when the city is just squeaking by its own greenhouse gas reduction goals.
Yes Virginia, There is a Pro-Cancer Lobby
The New York Times' Nicolas Kristof, who's established himself as one the nation's leading editorialist on the harms of what he calls "Big Chem," has another excellent piece in the Sunday edition.
Using the curious case of Formaldehyde, the carcinogen that isn't one according to the people who make money manufacturing it, Kristoff draws a portrait of the kind of industry-fueled professional obfuscation that Big Tobacco, Big Oil and Every other Big Industry of the last 60 years has used to escape necessary regulation.
Part of this strategy is to block, delay and bury information that proves your product's guilt, and so it is with Formaldehyde, something most of us think we only run across in High School biology labs. As it turns out, the chemicals is used in a wide variety of products and our homes are full of it. Our general exposure to formaldehyde has increased. This use and exposure has risen even as the World Health Organization and American scientists have concluded that formaldehyde causes cancer.
And so a seemingly innocuous document like the 500-page "Report on Carcinogens" from the National Institutes of Health becomes a real threat to the manufactured "uncertainty" the chemical industry has spent so much to construct.
“Formaldehyde is known to be a human carcinogen,” declared the most recent Report on Carcinogens, published in 2011. Previous editions had listed it only as a suspected carcinogen, but the newer report, citing many studies of human and animal exposure to formaldehyde, made the case that it was time to stop equivocating."
This conclusion made the report an instant target. Industry got its supporters in the house to demand a follow-up study for Formaldehyde and that no other Reports on Carcinogens be published with the new consensus language on its cancer-causing impacts.
So a chemical that the science says is clearly a carcinogen is still being sold in lots of household products as if it was perfectly safe thanks to folks who, collectively, make up what might be called the "pro-cancer lobby."
Besides all of us being exposed to Formaldehyde through consumer products, people who live in places where natural gas is being mined, like the Barnett Shale, as well as those downwind of waste-burning cement plants, like the ones in Midlothian, get dosed with more of the stuff. So, you know, we're doubly-blessed in DFW.
Study: Gas Drilling “Significantly” Increasing DFW Smog
In the middle of another bad North Texas ozone season, a new study by a Houston research consortium concludes that Barnett Shale natural gas facilities "significantly" raise smog levels in DFW, affecting air quality far downwind.
According to the study, ozone impacts from gas industry pollution are so large, they'll likely keep North Texas from being able to achieve the EPA's new 75 parts per billion (ppb) ozone standard.
Author Eduardo P. Olaguer, a Senior Research Scientist and Director of Air Quality Research at the Houston Advanced Research Center, concludes that, "Major metropolitan areas in or near shale formations will be hard pressed to demonstrate future attainment of the federal ozone standard, unless significant controls are placed on emissions from increased oil and gas exploration and production….urban drilling and the associated growth in industry emissions may be sufficient to keep the area (DFW) in nonattainment."
Olaguer's article describing his study was recently published in the July 18th edition of the Journal of the Air & Waste Management Association. It's the first independent study to examine specific North Texas ozone impacts from the gas industry.
Environmental groups say air pollution from natural gas sources is already making it impossible for DFW to meet even the obsolete 15-year old standard of 85 ppb. So far in 2012, five monitors have violated that level of smog despite a state plan that Austin guaranteed would reduce ozone concentrations in DFW to record lows this year. Counting 2012's failure, DFW has been in continual violation of the Clean Air Act for its smog pollution since 1991.
"This study is proof we need a regional strategy of self-defense to reduce air pollution from the gas industry," said Downwinders at Risk Director Jim Schermbeck, whose group has been leading the fight to reduce smog-forming pollution from gas sources for two years now. "TCEQ and EPA are not doing enough to rein-in these facilities. Despite their official plans, our air is getting dirtier, not cleaner because gas pollution is still under-regulated. It's time for us to do more at the local level."
Schermbeck suggested the study could make a difference in the upcoming city council vote on a new Dallas gas drilling ordinance.
"Dallas has a chance to react positively to this new evidence by adopting the nation's first policy aimed at mitigating the tons of new pollution caused by gas mining in its new drilling ordinance. That would be a very large step forward in advancing regional clean air goals."
A city-wide coalition of neighborhood, homeowners, and environmental groups has been urging the Dallas city council to require gas operators to reduce as much air pollution as they release through funding of anti-pollution measures across the city. The Houston Center study gives them a lot of fresh arguments.
According to it, "…oil and gas activities can have significant near-source impacts on ambient ozone, through either regular emissions or flares and other emission events associated with process upsets,and perhaps also maintenance, startup, and shutdown of oil and gas facilities."
In fact, just routine emissions from a single gas compressor station or large flare can raise ozone levels by 3 parts per billion as far as five miles downwind, and sometimes by 10 ppb or more as far as 10 miles downwind.
Those impacts rival the size of smog effects traced back to the Midlothian cement kilns or East Texas coal-fired power plants by previous studies.
As the study notes, "Given the possible impact of large single facilities, it is all the more conceivable that aggregations of oil and gas sites may act in concert so that they contribute several parts per billion to 8-hr ozone during actual exceedances."
This conclusion directly contradicts the stance of the Natural Gas industry and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, both of which deny that Barnett Shale gas emissions are large enough or located in areas that can influence DFW ozone levels.
But the Houston study is based in part on data collected by industry, as well as information from the city-sponsored "Fort Worth Study," and citizen-sponsored testing in the town of DISH in Denton County. It also uses a kind of computer modeling that allows for a more realistic understanding of how large releases from gas facilities can increase ozone pollution than the one the TCEQ uses. It's the most sophisticated challenge yet to the state and industry's claim that gas emissions do not constitute a large threat to DFW air quality.
"This is reality-based science, not the ideologically-influenced happy talk that's coming out of TCEQ these days," said Schermbeck. "Local governments in North Texas, especially those that are traditional allies of clean air, need to pay close attention and act on it."
The report is available for downloading here.
Government Toxicity Test Misses Real World Reactions
Just last week we were posting about the cumulative impacts of air pollution that are never taken into account by EPA risk assement. Now a new University of North Carolina study concludes that the toxic soup of chemicals and particulates found in many metropolitan areas is more harmful to human health than a common test used by government often reveals.
Researchers used a sunlit rooftop chamber to combine car diesel exhaust with a mix of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) simulating urban air. They compared two methods for measuring the concoction’s toxicity: directly exposing human lung cells to particulates in chamber air with an electrostatic system, and a widely used method – that filters the air, resuspends the filtered particulates in a solution, and then applies this mixture to lung cells.
The cells directly exposed to the mix in the chamber experienced inflamation, whereas those that went through the filtering process did not. Based on analysis, scientists attributed the difference in reaction to semivolatile carbonyl compounds, which coat particles in air but are lost during filtration. Formaldehyde is one such carbonyl compound. Sunlight hitting VOCs in the atmosphere can create carbonyl compounds and coat very small soot particles, or Particulate Matter, suspended in air with the pollutants. When you breathe in the soot, you actually breathe in a tiny delivery device for these kinds of pollutants as well.
No risk assessment process incorporates these kinds of real world health impacts and it's just one reson why these assessments are not good models for actual human health impacts from pollution.