S-T: “Gas industry should help fight smog in Dallas-Fort Worth”

Wherein the Star-Telegram’s Mike Norman invokes the nostalgic West Freeway aromas of Mrs. Baird’s to call for the gas industry to do its fair share to clean the air. Thanks to Mr. Norman for this piece at a media address that hasn’t always been at its best when reporting on gas issues.

This editorial seal-of-approval arrives one day after the DFW regional air quality planning process endorsed the same idea, and in anticipation of another round of Fair Share resolutions after Memorial Day.

Gas Operators “Leaking Money”: $52 Million a Year in DFW

Report: Pollution Controls Would Earn DFW Gas Operators $52 Million Annually

“Industry has run out of excuses to do the right thing says

clean air group. Demands State add more Shale pollution

to regional air plan June 8th.

(Arlington)—- Gas companies, their shareholders, and local mineral rights owners could gain $52 million a year in increased revenues by installing simple air pollution control devices in the DFW nine-county “non-attainment area” for ozone, or smog.   

“Leaking Money: Potential Revenues from Reduction of Natural Gas and Condensate Emissions in North Central Texas” by Dr. Melanie Sattler Ph.D.,P.E, was commissioned by local citizens group Downwinders at Risk to provide the first estimate of monetary losses to the gas industry as a result of continuing to allow intentional releases of smog-forming Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) in the DFW area.   

Citing controls already in use by gas operators, and quoting current market prices for gas and its various chemical constituents, Dr. Sattler estimates that the industry could collect product worth $51.9 million annually from installation of those controls in the non-attainment area’s nine-counties, plus Wise County.  

Wise County was included in the report because of its concentration of gas facilities and the likelihood of it being officially included in the DFW ozone area when a new federal standard for the pollutant is announced this summer. 

“We’ve known for some time that the technology was readily available to dramatically reduce this kind of pollution,” said Downwinders Director Jim Schermbeck. “Now we can point to millions in new profits that could be made if it was uniformly installed in our region, a region that’s been violating the Clean Air Act for 20 years and needs the gas industry to do its fair share for cleaner air. With this report, the industry and TCEQ have officially run out of excuses.”   

Control technologies for VOC pollution in the gas field can capture escaping fumes, or prevent their leakage, reducing waste and adding to product inventory for the gas operator.

Dr. Sattler’s was the latest development in a two-week-old “Fair Share” campaign launched by the group to try to get the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) to include gas pollution in the current DFW air plan scheduled for a TCEQ vote in Austin on June 8th.  

VOC pollution from the gas industry has grown significantly in the last six years, to the point where the TCEQ concludes it now accounts for more annual tonnage than all the cars and trucks in DFW combined. Because this growth in emissions has happened so recently, it’s never been addressed in any previous DFW air plans.

Since May 9th, Dallas County, DISH, Flower Mound, Bartonville have all unanimously passed “Fair Share” resolutions, with Southlake committed to a June 7th passage. More votes on similar resolutions around the region are pending. On Wednesday morning, the Council of Government’s Oil and Gas Sub-Committee is expected to vote on approving a letter to TCEQ echoing these local officials’ call for including more Shale pollution in the plan.

Last Friday at 5pm, TCEQ released a “revision” to the DFW plan that for the first time proposed modest cuts in Shale pollution – 14 tons per day from new controls on condensate tanks. But Schermbeck contrasted the size of those new cuts with the 100-tons-a-day of VOC pollution the Commission has said gas facilities emit in DFW. “What TCEQ is proposing is just a drop in the bucket compared with what could and should happen on June 8th.”  

He cited one of the conclusions of the “Leaking Money” report in making the charge that the state was still avoiding easy answers in clamping down on gas pollution.  

“Using TCEQ and industry numbers, Dr. Sattler shows that just replacing small valves in gas industry equipment in the 9 county area plus Wise County would decrease VOC pollution by 71 tons a day while bringing in $35 million in revenue. That’s five times the drop in pollution that the TCEQ “revision” on Friday promises. Just by replacing valves!”   

Schermbeck also pointed out that because of historically low prices for gas, the report’s revenue estimates were a worst-case estimate, and bound to rise with the cost of natural gas. Despite these low prices the report concludes that “most retrofit investments pay for themselves in little over a year, and replacements in as little as 6 months.”

“We have no doubt that some industry spokespeople will find reason to quibble with our numbers – even though Dr. Sattler’s math is based on industry and TCEQ sources. We encourage them to do their own studies and show how many millions of dollars their companies, shareholders, and mineral rights partners would reap from doing the right thing and cutting their pollution.”

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.

27-0 “Who Can Be Against Clean Air?’

As Flower Mound Council member Al Filidoro put it on Monday night: “Who can be against clean air?”

So far at least, no one but the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

Bartonville’s Town Council became the fourth North Texas local government in eight days to pass a Fair Share resolution, and the fourth to pass it unanimously.

Located in the thick of the Cross Timbers in middle Denton County, Bartonville is home to some of the most notorious gas industrial facilities in DFW. One was featured in the Dallas Morning News series on gas that ran this week. It means a lot that we have the town’s support.

Thank you Mayor Ron Robertson and Council. And thanks to Sharon Wilson of the Texas Oil and Gas Accountability Project for representing us in Bartonville.

Meanwhile, down the Timbers in Northern Tarrant County, Southlake City Council member Al Zito (we’re the prefered clean air group of guys named Al) made sure Fair Share was up for discussion on that Council’s agenda. Like so many Shale cities, Southlake local politics is being wretched by the conflict between the promises of gas field financial gain for some residents, and the overriding concerns for public health and safety by others.

Mayor John Terrell said he’d watched the Flower Mound Council pass their Fair Share resolution on TV Monday night and believed it was something Southlake could pass too – unanimously. Nobody disagreed. There was discussion by the Mayor and other members about how the city had incorporated a lot of the same pollution control devices mentioned in the resolution into its recent overhauling of city drilling ordinances.

Southlake will hold their formal vote on June 7th, just in time to be counted for the scheduled June 8th TCEQ vote on the DFW plan. Thanks to Council member Zito for initiating things in Southlake, and for the support of Mayor Terrell and the rest of the other Council members. It felt good to emerge again with a consensus, especially in a city that hasn’t seen it on this issue.

It’s only been eight days, but please take a moment to consider a couple of things about what’s happening.

Like the breadth of support for the simple good idea of including Shale VOCs in this DFW clean air plan. Dallas County and Southlake. John Wiley Price and Calvin Tillman. Democrats and Republicans. Liberals and Conservatives. Rural and Urban and Suburban. That’s not just hyperbole, that’s a real regional consensus taking shape.

Citizens are building local political support for at least the air quality part of Responsible Drilling even while we suffer through the most regressive sate legislative session in recent memory. We’ll be lucky just to maintain the status quo in Austin this year, but locally, we’re gaining ground.

A regional clean air policy position is being built from the ground-up. It’s not FLOWING FROM Washington, or Austin, or even Council of Governments headquarters in Arlington. It originated with a citizens group. It’s being put together, plank by plank, by local governments, and DIRECTED AT Washington and Austin and Arlington. That’s so grassroots you can taste the dirt in your mouth.

Ever heard of the “better block” movement? When you want your neighbors and elected officials to see how your community could be improved, you take a weekend off and Do-It-Yourself. You bring in the trees in planters. You put a fresh coat of paint on. You invite the food vendors and entertainment. You set up kiosks of all kinds. You don’t talk about how things could be transformed. You transform them. And people see how it could be different. And they like it. And the perception becomes the new reality.

We still have a long way to go, and we won’t always win by unanimous margins, but the Fair Share campaign has already changed the political reality surrounding the June 8th vote in Austin by establishing a different political reality. The traditional regional voices for air quality aren’t being responsive to this problem and citizens are filling a vacuum of leadership. We’re doing it ourselves.

This Morning Dallas County Joined the Fair Share Movement

Dallas County Votes for Fair Share Resolution

(Dallas)—Dallas County Commissioners provided the region’s second vote in as many days urging the state to cut gas industry pollution as part of the next DFW ozone clean-up plan.

All five Commissioners, including two Republicans and three Democrats, voted in favor of a “Fair Share” resolution that requests the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to fill a projected shortfall in cuts in smog-forming Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) in the air plan with tonnage produced by Barnett Shale drilling and development. 

Gas industry sources now account for more VOC pollution than all the vehicles in DFW, but these emissions have never been covered by any previous clean air plan. Advocates of the strategy argue that now is the time for Barnett Shale sources to do their “fair share” to clean North Texas air.  

Dallas County, representing approximately 2.5 million residents, followed on the heels of tiny community of DISH in Denton County (population 300), that passed the region’s first Fair Share resolution on Monday night.  

DFW clean air group Downwinders at Risk is leading a 30-day campaign to collect as many such resolutions from local governments as meeting schedules for various councils and commissioners courts will allow in order to show Austin a broad consensus in the region to cut gas drilling air pollution.  

Downwinders’ Jim Schermbeck, Cherelle Blazer of the Texas Oil and Accountability Project, Raymond Crawford of Dallas Area Residents for Responsible Drilling, and Molly Rooke of the Dallas Sierra Club were all on hand to personally thank Judge Clay Jenkins and the Commissioners Court for taking a stand for regional air quality.

“We’re very appreciative of the Court taking up this issue and unanimously passing this resolution today,” said Schermbeck. “TCEQ is guilty of doing what it’s accusing Washington of often doing – ignoring local attitudes and preferences. It’s clear that North Texas governments and residents want Austin to use this opportunity to catch-up with the last six years of explosive growth in drilling and reign in these emissions.”