Want to Quiz the State Over Crappy DFW Air? Tomorrow’s Your Chance As the Empire Strikes Back

By jim | August 11, 2014 |

Darth Vader in a suitRick Perry's minions at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) are drafting a new anti-smog plan for DFW this summer and fall. The only access DFW residents have to how it's being done and why are through periodical regional air quality meetings hosted by the Council of Governments in Arlington. At these meetings staff from TCEQ make presentations on why the air in DFW is getting so much better and why no new pollution control measures are needed to reach smog standards required by the Clean Air Act – despite the fact that the state is 0 for 5 in plans to attain compliance with those standards. In fact, the last such plan from Austin actually resulted in slightly higher levels of smog.

Tomorrow, Tuesday August 12th there will be another such regional air quality meeting. It's going on from 10 am to 12 noon at the Council of Government headquarters in Arlington at 616 Six Flags Road, right across from the amusement park (insert your own joke here). Of course, it's during business hours – you didn't think they're going to make it easy for the public to attend, did you?

Despite that, beginning in April more and more local residents have been showing up at these meetings to express their concern at the lack of progress in bringing safe and legal air to DFW. One of the reasons is that these meetings are the only forum available to citizens to question TCEQ staff in person – and then ask follow-up questions if you don't like the first answer. It's their only opportunity to be a kind of clean air Perry Mason and because it's a public meeting and everyone's looking at them, TCEQ staff have to at least make an attempt to answer those questions. 

Things reached a high point at the last meeting in June when Downwinders and the Sierra Club were allowed to make their own presentations about why the state is falling down on its job. A roomful of concerned citizens and elected officials saw the case against the state was self-evident – all we had to do was quote from its own past press releases and memos to make our point.

Tomorrow's meeting is the first chance the state will have to give a rebuttal to those citizen group presentations. Staff will present all the reasons why we don't need new air pollution controls on the Midlothian cement plants, the gas industry, or the East Texas coal plants, and why another do-nothing anti-smog plan from Austin will be just dandy.

And so, if between inhaler bursts you ever wanted to quiz officials about Rick Perry's air pollution strategies, tomorrow's meeting is going to be your chance.

You may think you're not qualified, but you'd be wrong. Simple common sense questions are often the hardest ones for the TCEQ staff to answer, because you know, they're based on common sense, and so many of their policies aren't.

This is how citizens uncovered the fact that TCEQ was hiding oil and gas pollution in other categories not named oil and gas. This is how we got the TCEQ to release maps of where all the gas industry compressors in DFW are after first explaining there were no such maps. And so on.

All that you need is a curious mind. They're not prepared for those.

Tomorrow, 10 to 12 noon is your opportunity to show your concern about breathing bad air, your desire to see major industrial sources of pollution better controlled, and why you want these anti-smog plans to do more. Be there or keep breathing bad air.

Posted in Air Quality, Cement, Citizen Action, DFW SIP, Fracking, Gas, Natural Gas, Ozone, Rick Perry, Smog, TCEQ and tagged , , , , ,

Highlights from Monday: How the State Hides Gas Industry Pollution

By jim | June 19, 2014 |

shell gameWant to see one example of how low state bureaucrats will stoop to underplay the significance of the impact of oil and gas pollution on DFW air quality? Take a look at some slides that were part of Monday's presentation by Downwinders at Risk's Jim Schermbeck to the regional air planning meeting.

In the first you'll see how the state officially ranks all the "source categories" for human-made, or "Antrhopogenic," smog-forming Nitrogen Oxides (NOx) and Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) pollution in North Texas (all the numbers are Tons Per Day):

O&G source categories Jan 2014 w-arrows

 

Yes the pic is fuzzy, (we can land a person on the Moon but can't seem to get charts to show up with a jpeg format online) but if you squint really hard, you'll notice there are two categories for Oil and Gas pollution numbers among the more traditional "Point Sources," Off-Road, "On-Road", etc – "Oil and Gas Production" and "Oil and Gas – Drill Rigs." Looking at these two categories you might think that adding them together would produce total Oil and Gas pollution numbers. You'd be wrong.

As it turns out, there are other Oil and Gas pollution numbers hidden away in other categories in this chart not labeled "Oil and Gas." For example, in both the "Area" and "Point-Other" categories are the numbers for NOx and VOCs pollution from gas compressors. But wait, you object, aren't gas compressors an integral part of any kind of "Oil and Gas Production?" Yes, yes they are. So why aren't they included in that category instead of being stuffed anonymously in these other categories? Great question. Perhaps it has something to do with the volume of pollution they release. Because when you finally wrestle the numbers from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (the TCEQ didn't voluntarily offer this information), compressor pollution turns out to double the amount of smog-forming NOx released from the Oil and Gas industry in the DFW 10-county "non-attainment area." And NOx pollution is what the TCEQ keeps saying is driving our chronic smog problem. Here's the way Schermbeck presented the same TCEQ "source categories" with the compressor numbers now teased out and added to the ones already identified as Oil and Gas:Slide0065

 

These additions raise the industry's polluter profile significantly. And that's what this next slide is doing. It's totaling all the Oil and Gas pollution and then re-ranking the categories based on these new numbers. Same totals, just different, and more honest, organization of the individual source figures. Instead of Oil and Gas emissions looking relatively small in relation to other sources like cement kilns and power plants and even locomotives, it escalates the Oil and Gas industry into one of the region's foremost industrial air polluters: 

Slide0066

 

And even this much larger number is still underplaying the total amount of air pollution fracking adds to regional air quality because the state hasn't bothered to try to tease-out the "on-road" pollution that all those fracking waste and water trucks adds to the mix. State air modelers shrugged their shoulders and said they couldn't figure out how on earth to do that. Just by "Googling" the subject, Schermbeck found at least two previous studies that did that very thing – a 2005 Denton report and a 2013 Rand Corporation report that even estimated the amount of dust pollution raised by those trucks.

While those truck totals remain a mystery for now, using the TCEQ's own numbers, compressors make up at least 53% of the total NOx pollution released by the Oil and Gas industry in North Texas, and a full quarter of all VOC pollution released. According to Schermbeck, that's why they make such good targets for electrification, an air pollution control measure he was recommending as part of his larger presentation to the regional air planning committee on Monday.

This is just one example of the kind of duplicitous behavior the state of Texas is resorting to in trying to hide the true environmental and public health impact of the Oil and Gas industry. No slight of hand is too petty. Only by diligent digging by citizens is the truth coming out, ton by ton.

Schembeck's entire (unfuzzy) presentation is now online at the North Central Texas Council of Governments website as part of the June 16th agenda. It loses something without his accompanying narration but the jest of it is easily discerned for those who want to plod through it: TCEQ is doing anything but a sincere job of building a serious clean air plan for DFW. But then again, we bet you already knew that.

Posted in Air Plan, Air Quality, Citizen Action, DFW SIP, Fracking, Gas, Natural Gas, Nitrogen Oxides, Ozone, Smog, TCEQ, Volatile Organic Compounds and tagged , , , , ,

2nd TCEQ Clean Air Plan in Four Years Fails, Leaves Air Dirtier

By jim | November 5, 2012 |

For the second time in four years a state-designed clean air plan to bring safe and legal air to DFW residents has failed, missing its goal by an even wider margin than on its first try, and leaving local air quality worse than when it started.

November 1st marked the official end of the eight-month 2012 ozone season. According to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, or TCEQ, its plan was supposed to deliver record-breaking clean air to DFW this summer on its way to bringing the region into compliance with the Clean Air Act for the first time in two decades.

 
Instead, six of the 20 ozone monitors in North Texas recorded levels of smog at or above the now-discarded 1997 standard of 85 parts per billion (ppb), while 17 of them recorded violations of the stricter new health- based 75ppb standard that will take effect in 2018.
 
Clean air activists were anything but surprised.
 
They accused the state plan of being designed to fail by a politicized TCEQ to avoid any new pollution controls on industry at a time when Governor Perry was running for President. Relying mainly on new car sales projections, TCEQ engineers assured local leaders that pollution levels would go down as older vehicles were traded-in for newer, cleaner ones.
 
"Since this 'plan' primarily rested on the hope that lots of people would buy new cars, no serious-thinking person thought it would work " said Jim Schermbeck of DFW-based Downwinders at Risk."Unfortunately, after 12 years of Rick Perry's leadership, the TCEQ is in short supply of serious-thinkers."
 
The margin of error between what TCEQ computer modeling predicted pollution levels would be at DFW air monitors in 2012, and the actual levels of smog they recorded this summer is over  20% at some locations.
 
The average error of all 20 monitors is 10 ppb. None of the 20 area monitors came closer than 4ppb to reaching its predicted TCEQ target.
 
A first attempt at reaching the 85ppb target fell short in 2009 -10, but gave the region its lowest-ever smog readings, albeit still illegal. Since then, air quality in DFW has been getting worse, not better.
 
In fact, air pollution is worse now than when the state started drafting its latest plan in 2010. Two years ago, there was only one monitor recording violations of the 85ppb standard. This year there are six.
 
"Only TCEQ could write a clean air plan that actually makes the air dirtier," remarked Schermbeck.
 
Some of the critical numbers from 2012 were slightly lower than 2011, when North Texas smog levels reached seven-year highs. The slip was large enough to allow Houston to retake a share of the title of "Smog Capital of Texas" that DFW claimed solely for itself last year.
 
In 2012, DFW has a rolling three-year worst average of 87ppb of ozone while Houston clocked in at 88ppb. Houston had 17 days over the old 85ppb limit. DFW had 12. But while Houston experienced 28 days when it was in violation of the new stricter 75 ppb standard, DFW recorded 36. A third of DFW's 20 monitors were over 85ppb. Only a fifth of Houston's 47 monitors were. Likewise, 85% of the monitors in DFW had violations over 75ppb – the same as 2011, while Houston had 87%.
 
Perhaps just as embarrassing to TCEQ as its continued failure to get DFW into attainment with old federal smog limits is Houston's continued backsliding. After a period of progress that saw it reaching compliance with the 85ppb ozone standard in 2009, things have going backwards ever since.
 
Like DFW, Space City was supposed to be on its way to meeting the new standard, not struggling with trying to meet the 15-year old one. Clean air plans for both regions to meet that new 75ppb standard will have to be drafted by the state and submitted to EPA by 2015.
 
Schermbeck said for any new DFW clean air plan to be successful, it must do more to reduce pollution from East Texas coal plants, the Midlothian cement kilns, which are applying for new permits to burn industrial wastes, and the smog-forming pollution caused by natural gas mining and processing
 
"TCEQ continues to underestimate the impact of industrial sources of pollution while overestimating the impact of car pollution. It's all about blaming drivers and ignoring the smokestacks and flares."
 
Schermbeck pointed to the fact that over the last three years, the location of monitors violating the 85 ppb limit has moved further and further east as gas drilling has moved in the same direction. 
 
After being confined to one or two northwest Tarrant County sites, the number of problem monitors has risen to half a dozen and reaches all the way into central Dallas. A TCEQ monitor near Mockingbird and I-35 violated the 85ppb standard for the first time since 2005.
 
Schermbeck speculated that the state hadn't adequately estimated the air pollution impact of new gas facilities in the Barnett Shale itself, as well those being built southeast, or directly upwind, of DFW. He blamed TCEQ's monopoly on the computer modeling that drives the entire air planning process for painting a deceptively cleaner future.
 
"Garbage in, garbage out. As long as this TCEQ is exclusively in charge of the little black box that spits out the results, you're always going to get more political answers than scientific ones. Local officials must understand this and begin to search for their own expertise. Austin just isn't a reliable source of information or advice on how to fight smog."
Posted in Air Plan, Air Quality, car pollution, Cement, cement industry, Citizen Action, DFW SIP, Downwinders at Risk, Drilling in Dallas, EPA, Fracking, Gas, Incineration, Midlothian, Natural Gas, Ozone, Smog, TCEQ and tagged , , , ,