Archive for July 2012
Follow-up: Homeowners Insurance Won’t Cover Fracking Losses
In the light of Nationwide's decison to quit writing policies for those who lease land to frackers, the Hartford Courant did a quick round of call
s and discovered that homeowners were already up a creek when it came to any damge from gas drilling they might incur:
"If the ground shifts at a fracking site and breaks the foundation of a nearby home, or if the chemicals taint a drinking-water well, standard homeowner and commercial-property policies won't cover the cost, said Robert Hartwig, president of the Insurance Information Institute, a property-casualty resource and trade group. Standard property-insurance policies cover a specific set of calamities, such as fire, lightning, thunderstorms, ice and hail.
"There's really no distinction here between fracking or any other, say, mining, operation here," Hartwig said. "This sort of thing is not covered by the policy and it never was."
Nationwide Insurance Makes It Official: Fracking is a Bad Risk
After circulating on citizen group blogs in upstate New York for a day or two, Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company confirmed that an internal memo outlining new prohibitions on insuring individuals or businesses who lease land for natural gas fracking was authentic and reflected company policy. With the disclosure Nationwide becomes the first insurance company to say it won't cover damages caused by horizontal fracturing.
According to the memo,
“After months of research and discussion, we have determined that the exposures presented by hydraulic fracturing are too great to ignore. Risks involved with hydraulic fracturing are now prohibited for General Liability, Commercial Auto, Motor Truck Cargo, Auto Physical Damage and Public Auto (insurance) coverage.”
This prohibition applies to landowners who lease land for shale gas drilling, and contractors involved in fracking operations, including those who haul water to and from drill sites; pipe and lumber haulers; and operators of bulldozers, dump trucks and other vehicles used in drill site preparation. That's a lot of the gas fuel cycle suddenly not covered.
Nationwide is the first to de-couple itself from fracking, but we bet it isn't the last. Some analysts were suggesting that negative publicity surrounding the fracking process influenced Nationwide's decision. Given the discovery rate of new hazards associated with fracking over the last two years, that's not a factor likely to get better with time.
It may be that at by the time all the dust settles, the gas industry will have to depend on some kind of massive government bailout to even be able to get fracking insurance. This is the same problem the nuclear power industry faced 50 years ago. No sane insurance company would offer coverage for a nuclear power plant, so the federal government stepped in and subsidized it in the form of the Price-Anderson Act. Without this literal Act of Congress, there wouldn't even be one nuclear power plant in the U.S.
Insurance companies aren't politically bias. They aren't partisan. They aren't treehuggers. They operate according to cold hard stats. And now those stats say fracking is a very bad risk. So bad that at least one major carrier has stopped even offering policies that cover damage from it.
If, like the City of Dallas, you were hoping to lease your land for natural gas drilling, this is something that should concern you.
Losing the Battle, but Winning the War: Implications of the Air as a “Public Trust”
By now, most of you will have already heard about a ruling from a State District Court Judge that determined that an old established part of English Common Law that seeks to protect resources in the name of a "public trust" applied to the air we breathe, as well as the water we drink.
This is a revolutionary concept only in the offices of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, which argued that air was not deserving of that status. For the rest of us, it strikes us as very common sense indeed and the basis of the Clean Air Act and just about every other piece of federal clean air regulations passed in the last 40 years. "We all live downwind," isn't just a bumper sticker. It's a physical fact.
Often overlooked in the hoopla surrounding the decision over the last 24 hours is the fact that the groups bringing suit against TCEQ for not writing new Greenhouse gas pollution rules actually lost their case to compel the Commission to do so. The Judge ruled that as long as the state was challenging EPA greenhouse gas rules, she could not force TCEQ to follow through. So the status quo on the ground doesn't change right away.
But here's why the groups – the fledgling and semi-mysterious Texas Environmental Law Center and its Mothership, Our Children's Trust, out of Oregon – actually won by losing. In denying the group's immediate request for action, the Judge found that the basis for demanding action – that air is a shared resource even more than water, and should be protected as such – was justified.
With that language, a new standard of public health protection was established in Texas. One that could have implications for all kinds of air pollutants, not just Greenhouse Gases. It's not a standard the TCEQ wanted because they don't get to define it. The courts do. Its effect isn't immediate, but over the long haul it may be the biggest challenge to TCEQ in decades. This comes just at the moment as TCEQ is moving rapidly to close down most public participation in permitting and put all of the power to affect policy and facilities back in Austin. It throws a huge monkey wrench into closing-off new avenues that citizens can use to challenge TCEQ. This is what makes this decision truly dangerous to the Powers-That-Be. You can bet they'll be hundreds of thousands of dollars in high-priced lawyers' fees spent by TCEQ and the petrochemical industry to try to undermine, overturn, or otherwise sabotage it.
This turning of the tables wasn't accomplished by established Texas environmental groups. None of the usual suspects were within 50-miles of this long-shot, guerilla-law gambit. This was a team of younger lawyers from outside the state bringing the fight directly to Austin's doorstep as part of an ambitious national legal strategy modeled on the NAACP's state-by-state challenge of segregation in the 1950's and 60's. It took imagination to pull this off, and lead lawyer Adam Abrams should be congratulated for succeeding in what many of his peers probably took to be a fool's errand.
You can download the official press release from Our Children's Trust here. As of Thursday, the TCEQ still hadn't issued one of its own.
It Didn’t Come From Space: Frisco’s Purple Blobs and the Clean-up of Exide
Via Frisco Unleaded member Eileen Canavan, comes this blast from the past that has implications for the scheduled clean-up of the Exide lead smelter.
On August 11th, 1979 the annual Perseid meteor shower was taking place over DFW. The very same night, Sybil Christian found three desk-phone-sized, two-pound purple blobs with the constancy of whipped cream in her front year, located in the "farming town" of Frisco. All three were warm to the touch and contained small chunks of metal. She was convinced they were space rocks.
Ms. Christian sprayed the blobs with a garden hose. One melted into the lawn. The other two were taken by Frisco police to the Heard National Space Museum and eventually to NASA. The further up the scientific food chain the samples went, the more it seemed as if there might be something to Ms. Christian's theory.
But an Assistant Director at the Ft. Worth Museum of Science and History wasn't buying it. He visited Frisco in the daytime and looked around to see what was near Ms. Christian's home. NASA had reported the the metal chunks found in Ms Christian's blobs were lead. So the scientific sleuth looked for possible sources of the metal. He found a large one – the GNB (now Exide) lead smelter about a mile and half away. "In the back" were tons of the same purple blob substance. It was a caustic soda used to clean the impurities out of lead from the millions of used batteries the plant was breaking open and mining for the metal. It was also learned that trucks carrying scrap iron went past the caustic soda dump and the Christian's house EVERY DAY. Case solved, according to the Museum Mythbuster.
But that was 1979, when lead waste falling off the back of a truck, instead of falling from space, in the small farming community of Frisco didn't strike people as being totally whacked.
At the bottom is Stewart Creek, on its way to Lake Lewisville, a source of drinking water for Dallas and other North Texas cities. The white stuff is contamination from the Exide lead smelter which is right behind the wall. This is an EPA inspection photo.
Everything agreed to by the City of Frisco and Exide as part of their historic settlement announced in late May concerns contamination in and around the smelter itself – either the physical structures or the acres of buffer zone the company tried to build around the smelter. Nothing is mentioned in the settlement about off-site contamination that decades of sloppy practices and misguided policy produced – the paving of Frisco city streets with lead. The use of lead as fill or soil additives in Frisco and Collin County. The dumping of lead waste in vacant lots. The routine spillage of lead waste along neighborhood streets.
Although it's a humorous incident, this 1979 story is also deeply disturbing. We'll never be able to fully know the extent of the toxic legacy left by the Frisco smelter because so little in the first two to three decades of operation was reported or noted. A spill here, a dumping ground there. Who will remember, or even be alive, some 30 years later to tell us what happened?
But that shouldn't be a license by the authorities or Exide to ignore tracking down the leads we do have and trying to minimize the surprises down the road. At this point there's no effort being made by EPA, the state of Texas, or the City of Frisco to chronicle the memories of old-timers and do archival searches to provide a better map of total contamination risks.
Moreover, with the Exide settlement, the City of Frisco has waived its right to have any say in how the worst part of the smelter is cleaned-up. It has agreed to not challenge any plans the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality will come up with for final disposition of the plant site, including just leaving everything in place and pouring some cement over it. Remember please that we got to this point in large part due to TCEQ not doing its job. Now the same people who created the problem are in charge of fixing it. Somehow, we don't think they have the local population's best interest at heart.
Who will be making sure the Exide clean-up is done well and right on behalf of the residents of Frisco?
“Altering the Odds:” Texas Heat Waves 20 Times More Likely than 50 Years Ago
This year has seen the hottest half year in US history. Last year was one of the 15 hottest years ever recorded. It not only seems hotter. It's actually getting hotter. There's a reason for that, and it ain't sunspots.
Researchers working at universities in Oregon and England have estimated that "La Nina" weather patterns combined with global warming have increased the likelihood of such record-setting heat waves in Texas by 20 times compared to the 1960's.
Their findings were part of the annual "State of the Climate" report prepared by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) along with a study published in the July issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. "Climate change has altered the odds of some of these events occurring," said Tom Peterson of NOAA's National Climatic Data Center.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) steadily increased in 2011, with the global annual average exceeding 390 parts per million (ppm) for the first time since instrumental records began. Many climate scientists now believe that we must decrease that number to no more than 350 ppm in order to avert the worst consequences of climate change.
Dallas City Hall just got through patting itself on the back for reaching its GreenHouse Gas reduction goals of 6 years ago – although it appears that a lot of GHG pollution within the city of Dallas wasn't actually inventoried to get that pleasant result. The city is now grappling with a new gas drilling ordinance that could send annual GHG totals for Dallas soaring. What is the responsibility of a city that, on the one hand, promotes itself as a regional leader in air quality efforts, and on the other hand, wants to open itself up to the un-and-under-regulated emissions of gas mining and processing?
Proposed Corpus Pet Coke Plant Too Dirty for New Power Plant Rules
A $3 billion proposed power plant that would sit on Corpus Christi's bay and emit over 13 million tons of Greenhouse pollution a year may never be built because it can't meet new EPA power plant emissions rules. That's the headline of this Monday Fuel Fix article by the Houston Chronicle's Matthew Tresaugue.
Chase Power was planning on opening the the Las Brisas (the Breezes) power plant in 2013, but that may never happen unless the company or the state of Texas is successful in lawsuits against the Agency's New Source Performance Standards.
Those standards don't apply to older plants, but they do apply to power plants under construction or planned, like Las Brisas. They require all power plants to achieve greenhouse emission limits that are difficult to meet without CO2 sequestration or other carbon-eating technology.
Las Brisias is designed to burn Petroleum Coke, a refinery by-product that is particularly nasty and releases as much carbon as coal. If it ever is built, it would instantly become the fourth largest CO2 polluter in the state.
Instead of trying to adapt or find a technology that could greatly reduce its carbon footprint, Chase Power is joining Texas in suing the EPA, while also petitioning to get an exemption from the Agency that would allow it to disregard the new greenhouse gas rules. Their local Congressman, Rep. Pete Olsen, is more than happy to oblige them.
Why Isn’t This Happening in Midlothian?
A Zachary Construction Company-owned San Antonio cement plant is finally going forward with the nation's first full-scale carbon capture plant .
Austin-based Skyonic Corp. will build a $125 million facility by 2014 to recycle 15% of the cement plant's CO2 emissions, or about 83,000 tons a year, into less-harmful byproducts such as bicarbonate soda. It also promises to filter acid gases and heavy metals pollution out of the kiln's plume.
Skyonic has a patented process called "SkyMine" that it says converts carbon dioxide emissions into baking soda and can be retrofitted to any industrial plant. The company received $25 million in stimulus funding from the Department of Energy toward the final cost of the San Antonio facility.
The project was first announced in 2010, but had trouble attractign addtional private funding until now.
Cement plants are among the largest point sources of CO2 on the planet, and the industry as a whole accounts for just over 5% of the world's human-made CO2 . Kilns are among the first wave of facilities that had to inventory their Greenhouse Gas pollution for EPA in 2010, and are expected to be targeted for actual reuductions in the future.
Modernization among the three large cement plants in Midlothian has reduced their carbon foot print over the last 20 years, but they still remain the largest point sources for CO2 pollution in North Texas, with over two million tons of emissions annually self-reported by Ash Grove, Holcim, and TXI in that 2010 inventory – the latest we have.
As Gas Mining Moves East, So Do Smog Violations
Failing the Test on Smog
This is a response to statements in this.
1) "The downward trend" that Mr Clawson of TCEQ says has only been "interrupted," is, in fact continuing, and he knows this because it's TCEQ monitoring that's proving it. This last March saw the highest ozone levels ever recorded for that month since TCEQ air quality monitoring began in 1997. It's only June, and there are already two monitors whose three-year runing average "Design Value" is above the old 85 ppb standard. The "best ever" ozone summer we were supposed to experience this year, according to TCEQ's prediction to EPA submitted in December, is completely off the rails.
2) The "87 ppb" Design Value Mr. Clawson cites is from 2010. Last year it was 92 ppb – at the Keller monitor. This year so far, the Keller monitor is already at a Design Value of 87, a violation of the old standard and something TCEQ said would not happen.
3) The NCTCOG claim that,"the DFW region has a tougher time than other metropolitan areas in the U.S. because of its climate plus its position downwind from outside sources of pollution" is also misleading. Houston is a hotspot for bad air, and yet last year DFW exceeded the number of bad air days and the severity of the violations in that city. Other metropolitan ares downwind of power plants as well as DFW, and yet they've all managed to do better in achieving cleaner air. Atlanta, Phoenix, and other Sunbelt cities that started out at the same smoggy spot a decade ago have all conquered the old 85 ppb std. DFW has not. It's already blown it again this year. Instead of blaming climate or coal plants, it is more realistic to blame DFW's air quality failure on a lack of political will by local and state officials to get serious about decreasing air pollution.
However, there is one large area of policy where the excuses of lack of will and new downwind sources collide – in the official lack of attention paid to the rise of Barnett and Haynesville Shale gas pollution as a source of smog in DFW.
4) The statement that only "5 percent" of the smog-forming emissions in DFW come from oil and gas drilling and production is also highly misleading. First, we know this is one of the fastest-growing categories of air pollution over the last decade. The increase in gas pollution is erasing decreases in emissions from other sources. Second, according to the information submitted by TCEQ to EPA last December, oil and gas emissions are the second largest source (20%) of smog-forming Volatile Organic Compounds, or VOCs in the 9-county DFW non-attainment area. That's more than the total VOCs produced by all on-road vehicles in the same 9 county area. Based on recent field studies by NOAA and others, this is probably an underestimate.
This statement also ignores the impact of gas emissions to the south and east of DFW, like Freestone County's, that are not included in the 9-county area inventory, but are probably influencing air pollution here.
What's always left out of this pie chart is the fact that cars now have a removal efficiency of approximately 90%. No other major sources come close to that kind of effort, despite technology being available to achieve it – at cement kilns, gas operations. and coal plants. That's where "the lowest hanging fruit" remains. But since all those industries are large contributors to the politicians directing the status quo, there's no political will to target them. Exhibit A: the 2011 DFW clean air plan submitted by the state, which relies primarily on marketplace forces to replace old cars with new ones, instead of any new round of pollution controls for any industry sources.
5) The NCTCOG claim that "monitors in the north Dallas and Frisco areas have had the highest readings of the region but the plume seems to be shifting west" is also based on old data. In fact, the opposite is occurring. Violating monitors are moving EAST (just like gas mining). And there are more of them. From 2008 to 2010, Eagle Mountain Lake and Keller were the epicenter of smog in DFW. But in 2011, while Keller tripped the std, EML did not. Moreover, during that same 08-10 period there were only 1-3 monitors in violation of that std. Last year, there were seven. And they included not just Keller and Parker County, but Denton, Grapevine, Pilot Point, Frisco and North Dallas – directly in contradiction to the NCTCOG claim.
This year, the very first monitor to record four "exceedances" of the 85ppb std was located near Mockingbird and I-35 in Central Dallas – the first time that monitor has done so since 2005. Moreover, the fourth exceedance came in June – the earliest that has happened since 2006, when 12 out of 19 monitors were in violation at the end of the summer.
As much as the officials and agencies would like us all to ignore the summer of 2011 and think of it as an aberation, it would be more prudent to see it as another warning sign that DFW needs to do much more to get safe and legal air.
The Petrochemical Circle of Smog
Here's a piece by Texas Tribune off-shoot "State Impact" that more or less revels in the news that the Shale boom in Texas and elsewhere is now finally making its presence felt in the petrochemical capital of the world – the Houston Ship Channels and surrounding communities long the Gulf Coast. Fracking has made natural gas and its condensates so cheap and plentiful that billions are being spent to build new plastics manufacturing and processing plants. It's the "re-birth of the U.S. petro-chemical industry," to quote one producer.
Already the hub of something like 60% of all petrochemical capacity in the US, the Houston/Harris County area has an on-going historical struggle with air pollution. Residents who live near huge facilities like the Exxon-Mobil Baytown Refinery are always on guard against catastrophic accidents, much less the daily or weekly indignities of breathing its perfectly legal voluminous air pollution. Much of the pollution is not only toxic but also adds to Houston's smog problems.
These new Shale-driven facilities, while cleaner than their older counterparts, will nevertheless be adding tens of thousands of tons of new air pollution to the Houston skies. That's going to complicate things for getting cleaner air in Houston. They haven't really mastered how to have clean air after the first birth of the petrochemical industry, much less a rebirth.
DFW is downwind of Houston. When it's harder for Houston to achieve cleaner air, it's also harder for DFW. What else makes it harder for DFW to achieve cleaner air? Large new sources of Un-and-under-regulated emissions from Shale gas mining.
So gas is mined and processed here in North Texas, where it adds to a chronic air quality problem for us. Then it's shipped to Houston, where it's use in making new plastic adds to chronic air quality problems for that city, as well as returning via predominate winds during ozone season to further contribute to deteriorating air quality here in DFW. It's the Petrochemical Circle of Smog.