Top 100 Polluter Indexes

https://www.peri.umass.edu/top-100-polluter-indexes

AMERICA’S SECRET ICE BASE WON’T STAY FROZEN FOREVER

https://www.wired.com/story/americas-secret-ice-base-wont-stay-frozen-forever

European Socialists ‘outraged’ at the decision on new pollution limits for diesel cars

Πηγή: maltaIndependent
6 Nov 2015 (updated)

S&D Euro MPs are outraged at the decision taken by EU governments to increase the limits of emissions from diesel cars, the PL said in a statement this morning.

Member states governments representatives today decided on new limits for nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions from diesel cars that are double the "Euro 6" levels agreed back in 2007.

S&D Group vice-president responsible for sustainable development, Kathleen van Brempt, said:

"I am shocked that European governments are ready to authorize the production of cars that will be more pollutant. This is a scandal. Member states obviously refuse to learn from the VW scandal and they show no responsibility for the health of their citizens. It seems that for member states, the interests of the industry are more important than the health of our citizens.

S&D Group spokesperson responsible for sustainable development, Matthias Groote, added:

"The S&D Group has been calling for a Real Driving Emissions (RDE) test procedure for years, which needs to be applied to vehicles from no later than 2017 onwards with no new loopholes in the form of conformity factors or deviation margins to ensure that new diesel cars on EU roads finally meet the "Euro 6" limit agreed almost 10 years ago.

"It is outrageous that after the emissions scandal the EU governments now come forward with such an unambitious conformity factor of 2.1 from September 2017 onwards and a following 1.5 by 2020 without time limitation.

"Lastly, the emissions scandal should be seen as an opportunity for the European car industry to invest in more targeted R&D in order to move faster towards our next step: the electrification of the European car fleet."



S&D Group spokesperson on this issue, Miriam Dalli, stressed:

"The decision taken today by The Technical Committee on Motor Vehicles (TCMV) is unacceptable. We refuse to endorse the decision of the Commission and the member states on this critical issue, because through this decision we are regressing from the decision taken 8 years ago on emissions limits instead of improving the current situation.

"The loopholes of the current testing regime are numerous. Real emissions are highly exceeding the air pollution standards and we want to ensure that the new real driving emissions test solves this situation.

"We must reach the 80 mg/km NOx emissions limit as soon as possible. Our citizens across the entire EU deserve this and we have a duty to deliver it."

Greece blows smoke at the EU

The cash-strapped country suggests looser rules on greenhouse gas emissions in order to boost economic growth.

Πηγή: ALJAZEERA
By John Psaropoulos
March 5 2014

Athens, Greece - Officials here are raising the prospect of softer greenhouse gas emissions rules for European Union members that are in an economic recession. The economically stricken country floated the idea two days after the European Commission launched an ambitious new plan to curb emissions. It was an apparent bid to pit the EU Council of Ministers, which Greece is presiding over until June, against the European Commission.

Europe has set itself a goal of largely decarbonising its energy industry by 2050. The Commission's goal is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030. The main mechanism for achieving that is the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, or ETS, the world's largest carbon market.

Beginning this year, European industry must pay for every tonne of carbon dioxide it emits (or any other greenhouse gas it emits in CO2-equivalent terms), because the ETS will stop handing out almost a billion euros' ($1.37b) worth of free offsets after eight years of operation. The idea is to offset carbon emissions and encourage the use of more environmentally friendly sources of energy.

Greek Environment and Energy Minister Yiannis Maniatis has proposed that strict adherence to these rules could cost Greece 1.1 percent of its economy and 32,700 jobs. "The obligation of European companies to buy all or part of their CO2 emissions rights leads to increased energy costs and adversely affects their competitiveness," a statement [Gr] from the ministry said.

For Greece, the rules mean an annual bill of about 540m euros ($700m) at current low carbon prices, a sum it can hardly afford to pay. The country's economy has shrunk by almost one-third in recent years, and is still in recession today.

Steel yields

In February, two of Greece's biggest iron and steel manufacturers said they were laying off or suspending about 320 workers, partly because of stagnant manufacturing and construction sectors, but mostly because of the high cost of electricity. Late last year Viohalko, a steel producer responsible for about 12 percent of Greece's exports, relocated its head office to Brussels, purportedly for similar reasons.


"Greek heavy industry pays more than twice as much for electricity as neighbouring Italy."

- Andreas Skindilias, CEO of Halyvourgiki

"If the present situation continues, steel manufacturing [in Greece] has an expiry date," Nikos Mariou, who manages steel manufacturer Sidenor, told a national newspaper.

"Greek heavy industry pays more than twice as much for electricity as neighbouring Italy," said Andreas Skindilias, the CEO of Halyvourgiki, one of the companies laying off workers. "They pay about 32 euros ($44) per megawatt hour. We pay 80 euros ($111). Spain and France are also cheaper. These are the countries we compete with for the North African market."

The Greek steel market has fallen from 1.8m tonnes before the crisis to about 350,000 tonnes, according to Halyvourgiki, so exports are the industry's only hope of survival here. "No industry in the world can survive with these energy rates," said Skindilias.

Greece already suffers from an unemployment rate of 28 percent, the highest in the EU, and the government appears to be galvanised by the prospect of further mass layoffs. It announced measures that could reduce energy costs by 150m euros ($200m), such as the so-called "interruptibility" measure, whereby power utilities can ask large consumers to interrupt their operations at short notice, to enable them to divert power to rising household demand. That significantly lowers generation costs, and utilities are prepared to pay for the facility.

The cost of carbon

Greece may think that its proposal to soften emissions rules will fall on sympathetic ears, because it is emblematic of a broader European concern. The continent suffers from high energy costs when compared with the United States, according to the International Energy Agency, a Paris-based think-tank. "Natural gas in the United States still trades at one-third import prices to Europe… European industrial consumers [pay] almost twice as much as their counterparts in the United States," said the International Energy Agency's2013 World Energy Outlook.

The goal Europe has set itself, however, is to produce cleaner energy at competitive rates. Greece faces a particular problem here. The country's worst carbon offender is its energy industry, responsible for more than three-quarters of the country's greenhouse gas emissions, as compared with a global average of two-thirds. Greek power plants pumped 92 million tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere in 2011, the last year for which figures are available.

Much of those emissions came from the Public Power Corporation (PPC), the former state monopoly responsible for 70 percent of electricity production which now faces an estimated bill of 150m euros ($200m) for last year's CO2 emissions. That is almost 40 euros ($55) per household - and hundreds of thousands of households have had their power cut because they can't pay their bills. This is because the PPC still generates most of its electricity from lignite, a dirty form of coal that is currently Greece's only abundant energy resource. In fact, Greece is the world's 15th largest producer of coal, coming third in the EU after Germany and Poland.

The PPC will not divulge comparative figures, but claims that lignite-derived electricity is far cheaper than that generated from imported oil and gas. It is so committed to the fuel that it is preparing to invest 1.4bn euros ($1.8bn) in a new plant in northern Greece.

The Greek chapter of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) commissioned a study showing that the new plant may not be viable once heavy industry weighs into the carbon market, raising the price of carbon offsets.

"This study has shown that in a few decades' time these units will even have negative cashflows under specific circumstances, and might also require tax exemptions and state support in general," said the WWF's Michalis Prodromou. "That is due to the change of the economic and energy environment as we head towards high energy efficiency policies, increased renewable energy penetration and so on."

The WWF has called on Greece to place greater emphasis on energy conservation, and to place a higher target than the EU-mandated 27 percent on energy from renewable sources.

Delayed deregulation

Lignite fuelled Greece's post-war recovery, and many people in the power industry argue that if Greece hopes to preserve its heavy industry, lignite must continue to form a part of its energy mix for the foreseeable future. But the record shows that its dominance as an energy source, and the PPC's exclusive right to mine it, have acted as a brake on cleaner energy and a functioning energy market.

Greece effectively delayed the EU-mandated liberalisation of its electricity market by six years, bowing to political pressure from the PPC's labour union. Since 2001, private investment has been in cleaner gas-fired plants and renewables, but these have had difficulty competing with the PPC because of the cheapness of lignite. The result was that many independent power producers pulled out of their investments.

In 2008, Greece became the first country to be suspended from emissions trading under the Kyoto Protocol, the world's first treaty reining in greenhouse gases, after the country inaccurately reported its carbon emissions.

Maniatis has been notably silent on the softening of emissions rules he requested. Both he and Deputy Minister Asimakis Papageorgiou turned down repeated requests for interview for this story, as did the PPC.

If history is any guide, the Greek government may be trying to protect the value of the PPC as it grooms the company for privatisation next year. Greek governments have spent years protecting state monopolies. They are still coming to terms with the European challenge to protect both industry and the environment.

The Trillion-Gallon Loophole: Lax Rules for Drillers that Inject Pollutants Into the Earth

The remains of a tanker truck after an explosion ripped through an injection well site in a pasture outside of Rosharon, Texas, on Jan. 13, 2003, killing three workers. The fire occurred as two tanker trucks, including the one above, were unloading thousands of gallons of drilling wastewater. 

Πηγή: Pro Publica
By Abrahm Lustgarten
Sept 20 2012

On a cold, overcast afternoon in January 2003, two tanker trucks backed up to an injection well site in a pasture outside Rosharon, Texas. There, under a steel shed, they began to unload thousands of gallons of wastewater for burial deep beneath the earth.

The waste – the byproduct of oil and gas drilling – was described in regulatory documents as a benign mixture of salt and water. But as the liquid rushed from the trucks, it released a billowing vapor of far more volatile materials, including benzene and other flammable hydrocarbons.

The truck engines, left to idle by their drivers, sucked the fumes from the air, revving into a high-pitched whine. Before anyone could react, one of the trucks backfired, releasing a spark that ignited the invisible cloud.

Fifteen-foot-high flames enveloped the steel shed and tankers. Two workers died, and four were rushed to the hospital with burns over much of their bodies. A third worker died six weeks later.

What happened that day at Rosharon was the result of a significant breakdown in the nation’s efforts to regulate the handling of toxic waste, a ProPublica investigation shows.

The site at Rosharon is what is known as a “Class 2” well. Such wells are subject to looser rules and less scrutiny than others designed for hazardous materials. Had the chemicals the workers were disposing of that day come from a factory or a refinery, it would have been illegal to pour them into that well. But regulatory concessions won by the energy industry over the last three decades made it legal to dump similar substances into the Rosharon site – as long as they came from drilling.

Injection wells have proliferated over the last 60 years, in large part because they are the cheapest, most expedient way to manage hundreds of billions of gallons of industrial waste generated in the U.S. each year. Yet the dangers of injection are well known: In accidents dating back to the 1960s, toxic materials have bubbled up to the surface or escaped, contaminating aquifers that store supplies of drinking water.

There are now more than 150,000 Class 2 wells in 33 states, into which oil and gas drillers have injected at least 10 trillion gallons of fluid. The numbers have increased rapidly in recent years, driven by expanding use of hydraulic fracturing to reach previously inaccessible resources.

ProPublica analyzed records summarizing more than 220,000 well inspections conducted between late 2007 and late 2010, including more than 194,000 for Class 2 wells. We also reviewed federal audits of state oversight programs, interviewed dozens of experts and explored court documents, case files, and the evolution of underground disposal law over the past 30 years.

Our examination shows that, amid growing use of Class 2 wells, fundamental safeguards are sometimes being ignored or circumvented. State and federal regulators often do little to confirm what pollutants go into wells for drilling waste. They rely heavily on an honor system in which companies are supposed to report what they are pumping into the earth, whether their wells are structurally sound, and whether they have violated any rules.

More than 1,000 times in the three-year period examined, operators pumped waste into Class 2 wells at pressure levels they knew could fracture rock and lead to leaks. In at least 140 cases, companies injected waste illegally or without a permit.

In several instances, records show, operators did not meet requirements to identify old or abandoned wells near injection sites until waste flooded back up to the surface, or found ways to cheat on tests meant to make sure wells aren’t leaking.

“The program is basically a paper tiger,” said Mario Salazar, a former senior technical advisor to the Environmental Protection Agency who worked with its injection regulation program for 25 years. While wells that handle hazardous waste from other industries have been held to increasingly tough standards, Salazar said, Class 2 wells remain a gaping hole in the system. “There are not enough people to look at how these wells are drilled … to witness whether what they tell you they will do is in fact what they are doing.”

Thanks in part to legislative measures and rulemaking dating back to the late 1970s, material from oil and gas drilling is defined as nonhazardous, no matter what it contains. Oversight of Class 2 wells is often relegated to overstretched, understaffed state oil and gas agencies, which have to balance encouraging energy production with protecting the environment. In some areas, funding for enforcement has dropped even as drilling activity has surged, leading to more wells and more waste overseen by fewer inspectors.

“Class 2 wells constitute a serious problem,” said John Apps, a leading geoscientist and injection expert who works with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “The risk to water? I think it’s high, partially because of the enormous number of these wells and the fact that they are not regulated with the same degree of conscientiousness.”

In response to questions about the adequacy of oversight, the EPA, which holds primary regulatory authority over injection wells, reissued a statement it supplied to ProPublica for an earlier article in June.

“Underground injection has been and continues to be a viable technique for subsurface storage and disposal of fluids when properly done,” a spokesperson wrote. “EPA recognizes that more can be done to enhance drinking water safeguards and, along with states and tribes, will work to improve the efficiency of the underground injection control program."

Some at the EPA and at the Department of Justice, which prosecutes environmental crimes, say the system’s blind spots suggest that many more violations likely go undiscovered – at least until they mushroom into a crisis.

That’s what happened at Rosharon.

The accident prompted the EPA to examine what else had been dumped at the site, ultimately exposing a scheme by a company that was not involved in the explosion, Texas Oil and Gathering, to pass off deadly chemicals from a petroleum refining plant as saltwater from drilling.

The switch saved the company substantial fees by allowing it to dispose of the material in a Class 2 well, instead of a more stringently controlled well for hazardous waste, federal investigators said.

Texas Oil and Gathering’s owner and operations manager were convicted of conspiring to dump illegal waste and violating the Safe Drinking Water Act. Both declined to comment for this article.

Texas officials acknowledged that they had not looked beyond the paperwork submitted by the operators using the well. The delivery trucks weren’t inspected; the wastewater was not sampled.

“Staff had no reason to believe at the time that such testing was necessary at this facility,’’ Ramona Nye, a spokeswoman for the Railroad Commission of Texas, which regulates the oil and gas industry activity in the state, wrote in an email. “The likelihood of unpermitted material being disposed of is low.’’

William Miller, the EPA’s chief investigator on the case, points out that the only reason anyone was held accountable for injection-related violations was because the site blew up.

“If you can get the stuff down the well how is anyone ever going to know what it was?” said Miller, who retired from the EPA in 2011. “There is no way to recover it. It’s an easy way to commit a crime and not have any evidence left of it afterwards.”

States and Industry Resist Environmental Protections

One reason that Texas Oil and Gathering was able to dump toxic waste for years without getting caught is that environmental regulations governing how the oil and gas industry disposes of material underground were weakened almost as soon as they were written.

A series of injection accidents beginning in the 1960s – involving pesticide waste in Colorado, dioxins in Beaumont, Texas, and drilling waste that spread for miles through a drinking water aquifer in Arkansas – prompted lawmakers to impose tougher rules on injection wells.

Wells were divided into classes, depending on the source of the waste they handled. Class 1 wells for chemical, pharmaceutical and other industrial wastes, along with Class 2 wells for the oil and gas industry, were subjected to tough controls under the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974. From the start, the EPA says, oil and gas waste was treated as less toxic than waste from other industries, but all such material was seen as dangerous to drinking water.

Companies drilling the wells were required to do geological modeling to ensure that surrounding rock layers would not allow waste to escape through fissures or fault lines. They also were required to check for the presence of other wells that could be a conduit for contamination. The EPA set baseline standards and mandated periodic inspections for defects. In many cases, states oversaw their implementation.

The ink had barely dried on the new regulations when the oil and gas industry – aided by sympathetic state regulators who thought their existing oversight was sufficient – began arguing that its waste should be treated differently.

Industry officials lobbied for state oil and gas agencies, some of which already had rules in place, to oversee Class 2 wells, not federal or local environmental officials. Some argued state energy regulators had greater expertise in well construction and regional geology.

In 1980, California Rep. Henry Waxman sponsored a measure that allowed the EPA to delegate authority to oversee Class 2 injection to state oil and gas regulators, even if the rules they applied varied from the Safe Drinking Water Act and federal guidelines.

A few years later, Dick Stamets, New Mexico’s chief oil and gas regulator at the time, told a crowd of state regulators and industry representatives that the Waxman amendment was a biblical deliverance from oppressive federal oversight for the drilling industry.

“The Pharaoh EPA did propose regulations and there was chaos upon the earth,” Stamets said. “The people groaned and labored, and great was their suffering until Moses Section 1425 (the Waxman amendment) did lead them to the Promised Land.”

In the late 1980s, the EPA moved to impose more stringent measures on injection wells after Congress banned injection of ”hazardous” waste. The new rules barred underground dumping unless companies could prove the chemicals weren’t a health threat. To earn permission to inject the waste, companies would have to conduct exhaustive scientific reviews to dispose of hazardous materials, proving their waste wouldn’t migrate underground for at least 10,000 years.

The energy industry moved preemptively to shield itself from these changes, too. The Safe Drinking Water Act prohibited the EPA from interfering with the economics of the oil and gas industry unless there was an imminent threat to health or the environment. The industry argued that its waste was mostly harmless brine and that testing and inspecting hundreds of thousands of wells for waste that would qualify as “hazardous” would delay drillers or cost them a fortune.

“It would have been crippling to U.S. oil and gas production,” said Lee Fuller, vice president of government relations for the Independent Petroleum Association of America. Fuller was a former staff member for the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, whose ranking member at the time, the late Texas Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, led the fight against the hazardous waste rule. “So yes, the industry was very aggressively seeking some mechanism to address those consequences.”

Bentsen had won the industry a temporary reprieve in 1980 by persuading Congress to redefine any substance that resulted from drilling – or “producing” – an oil or gas well as “non-hazardous,” regardless of its chemical makeup, pending EPA study. In 1988, the EPA made it permanent, handing oil and gas companies a landmark exemption. From then on, benzene from the fertilizer industry was considered hazardous, threatening health and underground water supplies; benzene derived from wells for the oil and gas industry was not.

The effect was that the largest waste stream headed for underground injection, that from the oil and gas industry, was exempted from one of the most effective parts of environmental rules governing hazardous waste disposal.

“A blanket exemption without any sense of what the actual chemistry of these wastewaters is, is very concerning,” said Briana Mordick, a geologist at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Other protections also began to unravel, widening the gap between Class 1 and Class 2 well regulations. Both regulators and the industry regularly refer to drilling waste as “salt water” even though, according to a 2002 EPA internal training document obtained by ProPublica, “on any given day, the injectate of a Class II-D well has the potential to contain hazardous concentrations of solvents, acids, and other… hazardous wastes.”

Once the wastes were defined as nonhazardous, there was little justification for holding Class 2 wells to the same rules as other waste being injected deep underground.

Today, for example, Class 1 wells for hazardous waste are tested for pressure continuously and are supposed to be inspected for cracks and leaks every 12 months. Oil and gas wells – though the goal is to inspect their sites annually – have to be tested only once every five years.

Injection wells are known to cause earthquakes, so Class 1 wells usually have rigorous seismic and geologic siting requirements. Often, Class 2 wells do not. An EPA staff member might spend an entire year reviewing an application for a new hazardous waste well. Class 2 wells are often permitted in bulk, meaning hundreds can be green-lighted in a matter of days.

Where Class 1 hazardous waste is injected, companies have to inspect a two-mile radius for old wells, making sure contaminants will have no avenue to shoot back up into drinking water aquifers or to the surface. The minimum standard for oil and gas companies is to inspect within 400 yards, even though it is widely believed, according to internal EPA memorandums obtained by ProPublica, that such a rule is arbitrarily defined, runs against “much existing evidence” and “may not afford adequate protection” of drinking water.

EPA officials acknowledge that their Class 1 regulations represent the best practices to keep water safe and that the risk of a Class 2 well leaking is no different than the risk of a Class 1 well leaking. The contrast in regulations reflects “varying legal authorities, not varying levels of confidence,” an agency spokeswoman wrote in an email, referring to the mandate not to let environmental rules interfere with the nation’s drilling progress.

State injection regulators counter that much drilling-related waste is put in the same geologic formations that produce oil and gas, in which contaminants like benzene naturally occur. The water close to these wells is often already undrinkable, they say, so lesser protections make sense.

According to the EPA’s most recent inventory, the number of Class 2 wells is near an all-time high.

Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas and California use tens of thousands of Class 2 wells to push out oil and gas or dispose of fracking fluids and “produced” water, as the waste derived from drilling is called. In North Dakota, injection permits have increased tenfold, with more wells being permitted in one month – September 2011 –than is typical in an entire year.New Mexico issued twice as many permits last year as it did in 2007. Ohio injected twice as much waste in 2011 as it did in 2006 and is evaluating applications for dozens of new injection sites. largely for waste exported by Pennsylvania and New York, where such wells are deemed unsafe.

As much as 70 percent of the waste destined for Class 2 facilities would be considered toxic if it were not for the loopholes in the law, according to Wilma Subra, a chemist and activist who sits on the board of STRONGER, a partnership of oil and gas industry representatives and state regulators aimed at bolstering state standards.

Recently, Stark Concerned Citizens, an anti-drilling group, asked Ohio regulators why radioactive materials such as radium weren’t identified or disclosed when injected into Class 2 wells.

“The law allows it,” Tom Tomastik, a geologist with Ohio’s Department of Natural Resources and a national expert on injection well regulation, replied in a Sept. 17 email. “It does not matter what is in it. As long as it comes from the oil and gas field it can be injected.”

Well Operators Game Safety Tests

When Carl Weller showed up, shovel in hand, at a Kentucky farm field dotted with injection wells in June 2007, he was acting on a tip. Weller, a contracted EPA injection inspector, was an expert in testing for what regulators call “mechanical integrity,” using air pressure to check if wells have leaks or cracks.

Such tests are among the only ways to know whether cement and steel well structures are intact, preventing brine and other chemicals from reaching drinking water.

Using his shovel, Weller dug around the top of a well, unearthing the steel tubing near the surface. A few inches down, he came across an apparatus he had never seen before: A section of high-pressure tubing ran out of the well bore and connected to a three-foot-long section of steel pipe, sealed at both ends. The apparatus appeared designed to divert air pumped into the well into the pipe instead, making the well test as if it were airtight.

“The only reason that I know of that that device would be installed would be to perform a false mechanical integrity test, more than likely because the well itself would not pass,” Weller testified in 2009 as part of a case against the well’s operator. The EPA did not make Weller available to comment for this article.

When EPA inspectors kept digging, they found the buried devices on 10 more wells.

The case stunned regulators. Weller had been inspecting the site’s injection wells, which were used to enhance the recovery of oil, for the better part of a decade, certifying them as safe. After the EPA’s discoveries, workers at the company that operated the wells, Roseclare Oil, accused its manager, Daniel Lewis, of having conspired to cheat the tests for much of that time.

In 2009, Lewis was convicted of a felony charge for gaming the safety tests on Roseclare’s wells and was sentenced to 3 years probation and a $5,000 fine. He maintains his innocence, saying the wells were rigged by his father, who ran the company’s local operations until his death, but said such practices were typical in Kentucky’s oil and gas industry. “I’d say it’s pretty common,” said Lewis, whose probation was commuted in 2011. “But it’s not something people go around talking about either.”

From Lewis’ perspective, injection well operators sometimes have little choice but to try to fool inspectors. Many wells are decades old and were drilled before the current regulations were written. Some are decrepit, their cement aging and cracked. They also can’t be easily – or cheaply – repaired.

Lewis, who is now a part-owner of Roseclare and continues to run its operations, said that before wells were due for EPA inspections he would pretest them himself. If one failed, he’d enter problem-solving mode, prepping the site for the EPA’s arrival. Two of his employees testified that he ordered them to fabricate and install the diverters.

“You go and work in it and try to get it to hold and it won’t hold,” Lewis said of the wells. “What are you going to do? It’s kind of a ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell.’”

Randy Ream, the Assistant U.S. Attorney for Kentucky’s Western District who prosecuted the case against Lewis, called his scheme unusually elaborate but agreed that efforts to get around the rules for injection wells are common. Sometimes, he said, they result in the contamination of private drinking water wells.

“We have people who have constructed wells that are not certified injection wells, or we have people who will put their brine in a tank and carry it over and put it in somebody else’s well,” Ream said. “One guy, he’s got oil coming out of his shower head.”

“There is just so much brine,” Ream added, “and you have to get rid of it.”

So Many Wells, So Few Inspectors

One obstacle to more effective enforcement in Kentucky and elsewhere, Ream said, is that regulators cannot always keep up with well tests and inspections.

According to EPA records, Kentucky has 3,403 Class 2 wells, which are supposed to be tested for mechanical integrity once every five years. But since 2007, an average of just 253 wells a year have been tested, less than half as many as there should have been to remain on schedule.

A spokeswoman for the EPA’s regional office in Atlanta said in an email that only half of Kentucky’s injection wells are actively used and only active wells can be tested. She said mechanical integrity tests are performed on each well every 36 months, but did not address the discrepancy between this schedule and the number of tests reflected in EPA data.

The EPA employs just six people to check its wells across the southeast, not just in Kentucky, but in Tennessee and Florida, too. Those same people are also responsible for working with state inspection programs in North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, which have their own inspection staffs.

Most states aim to visit injection sites at least once a year, and some meet or exceed that schedule, EPA records show. Ohio, for example, recently added staff dedicated exclusively to injection oversight and visits its active injection sites every 12 weeks. (Ohio also insists that Class 2 wells meet many of the more stringent testing and permitting regulations it uses for Class 1 hazardous waste wells.)

“Ohio’s [rules] are based on what we felt we needed to develop to continue to alleviate any concerns,” said Tomastik, of Ohio’s Department of Natural Resources. “Obviously without regulatory presence in the field, the operator is not concerned about operating within the requirements.”

But understaffing seems to be endemic across drilling states, especially where state regulatory agencies are responsible for checking both producing oil and gas wells and injection wells for waste or to enhance production.

In Montana, EPA auditors noted that inspectors are choosing which wells to inspect and have a “significant” workload. In North Dakota, EPA auditors also noted the pressures of “exponential” growth and an “increasing workload.”

To meet the goal of inspecting each well annually, Texas inspectors would have to visit eight wells a day, every day, including Sundays and Christmas. That’s after Texas’ Railroad Commission hired 65 staffers last year to help inspect the state’s 428,000 wells.

Nye, the commission’s spokeswoman, said the state had sufficient funding and inspected each of its commercial disposal wells twice last year.

“The Commission has a stringent and comprehensive review process for these wells,” Nye wrote in an email. “Railroad Commission staff work diligently to ensure saltwater disposal wells are not and will not be a problem.”

But inspectors don’t check on private disposal wells, which are far more numerous, with the same regularity. Nor do they keep a schedule for when officials should conduct such visits.

Other states are struggling under similar burdens. In Wyoming, inspectors would also have to check eight wells a day for each well to be checked once a year – a pace possible if wells are clustered together, experts said, but otherwise difficult to achieve. In West Virginia and Kansas, inspectors would have to check seven wells per day.

Visiting injection wells often ranks low among inspectors’ priorities unless there is an accident or spill, according to a 2007 Texas auditor’s report. The most urgent responsibility for regulators, beyond responding to emergencies, is typically overseeing the development of new oil and gas wells.

The result is that several years can pass between inspections of many injection well sites. In 2010, state regulators visited less than half of the Class 2 sites that a federal well inventory shows they were responsible for monitoring, ProPublica’s analysis showed. EPA inspectors checked on such wells even less frequently, visiting less than one-quarter of the sites under their jurisdiction in 2010.

“I don’t give a darn whether you have federal regulations, or a squeaky clean permitting system,” said Bill Bryson, a member of the Kansas Geological Survey and the former head of Kansas’ oil and gas commission. “If you don’t have somebody going out and looking at the wells it doesn’t do any good, and if you don’t have the right people looking … it doesn’t do any good either.”

Much of the problem with oversight comes down to money, critics say. In some states, budgets and staff for oil and gas agencies have dropped relative to the number of new wells being drilled over the last nine years.

Kansas employs about the same number of inspectors as it did in 2003, even though it drills four times as many new wells. New drilling has nearly doubled in Louisiana over the same period, but the state’s enforcement staff has remained static and its oil and gas budget has increased modestly. In Illinois, drilling has nearly doubled, while the number of enforcement staff has been reduced.

Since the Underground Injection Control program is run under a federal mandate, states rely partly on money from the EPA to fund oversight and enforcement. Federal dollars make up 20 percent of Texas’ budget, for example. But in the last 22 years, the EPA’s annual operating budget for injection has remained about the same: $10 million. Taking inflation into account, funding has dropped at least 40 percent from 1990 to 2012, though the regulations for all well classes have only grown more complex.

“The UIC program has been flat funded for years,” said Dan Jarvis, the field operations manager for Utah’s Division of Oil, Gas and Mining. “With more manpower, obviously you put them on the ground and you’re going to have better compliance. Our field people are some of the greatest guys going, but they are overworked.”

The EPA declined to disclose the operating budget for regional offices that monitor waste wells under federal jurisdiction or oversee state injection programs. Documents show,however, that in 2011 the agency suspended its travel budget for visits to some of the states that have the largest injection programs, including Louisiana, Texas and Oklahoma.

“Do you think we are doing more now than we were doing 30 years ago? No, there is no money,” said Salazar, the former EPA injection expert. “There are not enough people to know what is going on. It is the ideal storm for industry. Less and less people, more and more things that the EPA has to do.”

Ultimately, much of the responsibility for meeting EPA standards falls to companies themselves. Some operators routinely exceed the minimum requirements of injection regulations, says Hughbert Collier, who runs a Texas environmental engineering firm that consults with injection well operators. They conduct their own integrity tests every year and make sure employees visit well sites once a month.

But operators inclined to cut corners have little to hold them back.

“What most people would be surprised about is that regulators don’t have real good control over everything that goes on in the regulated community,” said Miller, the former EPA criminal investigator in Texas. “Most of our environmental law requires self-reporting and that requires honest people.”

When violations are identified – such as the 140 times waste was illegally injected and noted in the regulatory reports – the consequences can be minimal, and only in rare cases do transgressions rise to the level of criminal prosecution. In the three years of national data reviewed by ProPublica, which included more than 24,000 formal notices of violations, only one case was referred to criminal investigators.

Usually, violations result in citations or informal warnings. If operators do not address violations, then modest fines may be levied; in some cases, wells are temporarily shut down. There is no central source of information on the size of fines, but an audit of Louisiana’s injection program provides a glimpse: In 2011, the state collected an average of $158 for each violation.

After three deaths, two federal worker safety investigations and a criminal prosecution, few injection sites nationwide received as much regulatory scrutiny as those in Rosharon, Texas. Yet, despite all the attention, the wells there later failed on the most basic level.

On Feb. 17, 2010, thousands of gallons of waste that had been deposited into these wells gurgled to the surface in what the Railroad Commission described as a “breakout.” Materials injected far below the earth had managed to migrate back up to the surface, perhaps through an old well missed by regulators.

As of this June, investigators were still analyzing whether the chemicals injected underneath the site had reached water supplies.

Lawsuit Claims One-Third of California Drinking Water Contaminated with Cancer-Causing Chemical

Πηγή: AllGov
By Ken Broder
August 19 2012

The movie Erin Brockovich made the chemical carcinogen chromium-6 infamous in 2000. A state law was passed in California the following year requiring formulation of a standard limiting its presence in drinking water by 2004.

Eight years later, two environmental groups have sued the state not only for its failure to put a standard in place; but for not even having agreed on one.

The Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Working Group filed suit in Alameda County Superior Court this week, pressing the government to accelerate the process. The state Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) suggested a “goal” in 2011, but it is up to the California Department of Public Health to set the standard.

The department’s website says it will release a draft recommendation next year on its way to a 2015 final determination.

Erin Brockovich chronicled the experience of residents in the small town of Hinckley, who were exposed to chromium-6 whenPacific Gas & Electric used the heavy metal to prevent rust in water towers. The water seeped into the groundwater and caused health problems that included bronchitis, asthma and lung cancer. PG&E settled with Hinckley residents in 1996 for $333 million.

There is some evidence that chromium-6 can damage DNA. Other studies have linked it to male reproductive harm, liver toxicity and blood disorders. The chemical is on California’s Prop. 65 list of substances known to cause cancer and reproductive harm.

It has long been known as dangerous if inhaled and in 2007 the federal government determined that it’s not OK to eat it either. There is no federal standard for chromium-6.

The state EPA suggested a standard of .02 parts per billion (ppb), which would be a significant improvement over levels found in some California cities by the Environmental Working Group. A 2010 study by the group found chromium-6 in 31 cities, including Riverside (1.69 ppb) and San Jose (1.34 ppb), both of which made the top 5 in the United States.

Chevron: The Toxic Threat Next Door

Chevron's Richmond refinery fire.

Πηγή: Common Dreams
By Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins
August 18 2012

When the fire broke out at the Chevron oil refinery in Richmond, California last week, this is what families living nearby–including some of our own staff at Green For All–experienced: Their windows rattled and their houses shook. Some of them watched fiery explosions and plumes of dark smoke pour from the refinery. Others just heard the frightening wail of the city’s emergency sirens. They gathered up their children and pets, covered their mouths and noses, and scrambled to seal their doors and windows.

Across the Bay, San Francisco residents watched as a toxic black cloud billowed over Richmond–a city in which 85 percent of the residents are minorities and roughly one-quarter live below the poverty line.

In the days after the fire, more than 9,000 people poured into emergency rooms, complaining of nausea, headaches, and breathing problems. Chevron, meanwhile, offered an apology for the “disruption.”

I wish that were enough. Enough to erase the terror that workers and families experienced that day. Enough to prevent the potentially long-term illnesses they face as a result of breathing those toxic fumes. And I wish it were enough to undo the health problems that Richmond’s families have faced for years.

The truth is, it doesn’t take a massive explosion to send folks in this neighborhood to the hospital. Here, next door to the refinery–which has consistently violated the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act–rates of ovarian, prostate, and breast cancer are among the highest in the state, along with incidents of childhood asthma.

But it’s not just about Richmond. Across America, hundreds of other cities choke in the shadow of dangerous, polluting oil operations. Who lives in these cities and neighborhoods? By and large, people of color. In California, a staggering 62 percent of residents living near polluting oil refineries, cement plants, and power plants are people of color. Not surprisingly, rates of asthma are dramatically higher in these communities: One out of every six African-American children in this country suffers from asthma, compared with one in ten nationwide.

No one–whether they’re from Richmond or anywhere else–should have to live in fear of this kind of disaster. They shouldn’t be forced to breathe toxic fumes or drink polluted water just because companies like Chevron refuse to clean up their act. This is a corporation, after all, that raked in almost $27 billion in profits last year–but failed to spend any of it to fix the leaky 40 year-old pipe that almost cost its workers and neighbors their lives.

But we don’t need to wait around for Chevron to do what’s right. We have a choice. We can embrace cleaner, safer, healthier forms of energy and leave oil where it belongs–in the last century.

The first step is to stop rewarding companies like Chevron and BP with billions in subsidiesfrom taxpayers’ pockets while we ask hardworking Americans–especially low-income and minority kids–to pay the price with their health. Instead, we should invest in forms of energy that don’t pollute our air and water.

This isn’t a distant dream; the clean energy revolution is already well underway. Over the past four years, America’s wind and solar sectors have grown substantially–wind power has doubled and solar increased six-fold–enough to power 15 million homes. We’re less dependent on fossil fuels than we have been in decades. And the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that clean energy and other industries that protect our air and water already employ roughly 3.1 million Americans in safe, good-paying jobs that can’t be shipped overseas.

Many of these are the type of jobs that create pathways into the middle class–and out of poverty. They’re exactly the type of jobs that can transform communities like Richmond.

The fight for clean energy is not just an environmental issue. It’s a human rights issue.

Every child deserves to breathe clean air and drink clean water. No matter whether they’re rich or poor, no matter whether they’re black, white, Asian, or Latino. We all deserve to live without the fear of a toxic disaster next door. It’s that simple. But in this country, people of color have shouldered the burden of polluting industries for too long–and it’s time to stop.

All we have to do is decide: Do we stand by and wait for the next oil disaster? Do we sit quietly while our kids struggle to breathe? Do we continue to spend our hard-earned dollars rewarding companies like Chevron with subsidies and tax breaks? Or do we change the game?

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins is the Chief Executive Officer of Green For All.

25 states urge court to make EPA delay power plant rule

Πηγή: Reuters
By Timothy Gardnery

Oct 10 2011

Adding pressure on the Environmental Protection Agency to relax air pollution rules, 25 states urged a federal court on Monday to require the agency to delay a rule on mercury emissions and other pollutants from power plants by at least a year, saying the measure is too costly.

"In the past, EPA has designed its regulations pretty carefully to make sure that they wouldn't be forcing any facilities to shut down," Jeff Holmstead, the former EPA assistant administrator for air and radiation under President George W. Bush, said about the brief, filed electronically on Monday with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

"But now, it looks like there are senior folks at EPA whose main goal is to shut down as many coal-fired power plants as possible."

The EPA is under court order to finalize the so-called maximum achievable control technology rule for utilities, also known as utility MACT, on November 16. But the states want the agency to delay the finalization of the rule, which is designed to reduce emissions of mercury and acid gases from power plants fired by coal and oil, until at least November 16 next year.

Analysts have said the utility MACT rule could push old, inefficient coal-fired power plants into early retirement.

Regulations being formed by the EPA and state governments to cut air and water pollution and control the handling of coal waste are expected to force the retirement of 30,000 to 70,000 megawatts of coal-fired generation, industry studies show. American Electric Power and Duke Energy are some of the companies that could see shutdowns of plants.

The EPA, which is undertaking its most ambitious air pollution regulations in years under Administrator Lisa Jackson, has faced a barrage of criticism from Republicans in the House of Representatives and industry which say the rules will kill jobs and cost companies billions of dollars at the worst possible time.

Last month, the House of Representatives passed a bill called the Transparency in Regulatory Analysis of Impacts on the Nation, or TRAIN, Act, that would block EPA rules including utility MACT. The bill faces an uphill battle in the Democratic-led Senate and the White House has said President Barack Obama would veto the measure.

The EPA says its raft of new air pollution rules will save more money in health costs and hospital visits than they will cost utilities.

Mercury pollution, which accumulates in fish that people eat, can harm the nervous systems of and development of babies. The EPA has also said the rules will create jobs in pollution control devices.

Bill Schuette, the attorney general of Michigan, one of the 25 states that signed the amicus brief, said "Michigan's fragile economy cannot afford the job losses and skyrocketing electricity rates that would accompany the premature implementation of this new federal regulation."

The EPA did not immediately return a request for comment about the filing.

World’s Most Polluted Countries

Πηγή: cnbc

By Rajeshni Naidu-Ghelani

Oct 5 2011

World’s Most Polluted Countries

Emerging nations around the world are often heralded for their fast growth, but we don’t often hear about the downsides of that rapid development.

The World Health Organization (WHO) recently released a report on air quality in countries around the globe, on which we based a list of the ten most polluted countries. Almost all the worst offenders are either major oil and gas producers, or emerging economies that are growing rapidly.

The WHO study looked at air quality in 91 countries, measured by the amount of PM10 particles per cubic meter. PM10 particles are particles of 10 micrometers or less that can cause diseases and infections. According to the WHO, PM10 levels above 20 micrograms per cubic meter can cause health risks. The top ten most polluted countries have PM10 levels from six times to 14 times that level.

So, which countries have the world’s worst air quality? 

10. Kuwait

Pollution level: 123 ug/m3

Kuwait is one of four oil-rich Middle Eastern nations to make the list. It is also the fourth largest exporter of oil among OPEC countries, with the petroleum industry accounting for half of Kuwait’s GDP.

Kuwait made headlines during the first Gulf War in 1990 when Iraqi troops set fire to its oil fields, creating massive air pollution and ground contamination. That led to a decades long environmental clean up.

Today, pollution is largely caused by local oil refineries and industrial plants. Last year, 15,000 students protested against pollution but the government has maintained that levels of air pollution are within environmental standards. Some plants though have been temporarily closed to improve air quality.

A 2010 global survey by consulting firm Gallup found that 57 percent of Kuwaitis were dissatisfied with the air quality in the area they lived in. Local residents are reported to suffer from high rates of respiratory diseases such as asthma, cancer and skin conditions.

9. Nigeria

Pollution level: 124 ug/m3 

Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa and the eighth most populous in the world with over 155 million people. 

Rapid urbanization and economic development have led to haphazard industrial planning in cities like Lagos that are struggling with waste management and high levels of pollution.

The country is also Africa’s largest oil producer, accounting for 2.3 million barrels of crude per day, according to the International Energy Agency. The Niger Delta region, where the world’s biggest energy companies operate, has experienced some of the worst oil spills in history. In August, a United Nations report said 50 years of oil pollution in the Ogoniland area may require the world’s biggest and longest cleanup. The 14-month study showed deeper pollution than previously thought in an area that is home to about one million people. The report said it could take 25 to 30 years to clean up the contaminated drinking water, land and ecosystems.

Pipeline vandalism to feed a black-market in oil is common in the region and often contributes to oil spills. In September, Shell said it would shut production of 25,000 barrels of crude per day in the area due to the recent upsurge of oil thefts.

8. Iran

Pollution level: 124 ug/m3

Iran is home to the world’s most polluted city — Ahvaz, which has three-times the average amount of pollution in the country. Ahvaz, known for its oil fields, is a heavily industrialized desert city of 1.3 million people.

Iran has the world’s third-largest oil reserves and the second largest natural gas reserves. Locally produced, low-quality gasoline has been blamed for the country’s extreme air pollution. The high-octane fuel — much lauded by the country’s leaders — is manufactured in petrochemical plants rather than refineries.

Iran’s capital Tehran made headlines last December, when it was blanketed by smog, forcing the government to declare “pollution holidays” for several days, shuttering offices, businesses and schools. Tehran marked nearly a month of continuously high levels of pollution with hospitals reporting a spike in patients with breathing problems. The state’s English language television channel Press TV said more than 80 percent of the city’s air pollution was attributed to the 3.5 million vehicles on the roads.

Green Dragon: China’s $200 billion clean energy power play

Πηγή: The Crimson
By HEMI H. GANDHI and BRUCE PENG

Oct 3 2011

For years, climate scientists have been warning us that if the world continues its current Greenhouse Gas emissions trajectory, humanity may face perilous climate scenarios. Despite notable climate awareness campaigns and significant renewable energy progress over the last decade, the transition to a low carbon global economy powered by cleaner sources of energy isn’t being realized fast enough to avert the worst possible climate scenarios.

A huge and immediate increase in renewable energy investment—both in the deployment of existing, low-carbon technologies and in research dedicated to new disruptive technologies—is desperately needed to jumpstart this transition. Thus far, all sights have been directed towards global financial markets and western nations to make this investment.

Financial markets have been reluctant to invest at the required scale for two reasons. First, if left unsubsidized, existing clean energy technologies are too expensive to compete with traditional energy sources. Second, there are no foreseeable governmental policies that aggressively tax Greenhouse Gas emissions to incentivize clean energy deployment and innovative research at the required scale.

Western governments are also in no position to make the necessary investment given their huge deficits, domestic problems, and focus on economic recovery. They are further limited by their lack of political flexibility, imagination, and will.

Despite the inability of financial markets and the failure of western governments to substantially address climate change, we believe that a timely solution is still possible, but it will have to come from a seemingly unlikely place: China, ironically the world’s largest polluter and carbon emitter.

China is uniquely positioned to make the massive investment that is required to jumpstart the clean energy revolution given its intertwined political and economic decision making system that has proven adept at making aggressive long-term strategic investments and its large foreign exchange reserves. We propose that the Chinese government divest 20 percent of its over $1 trillion worth of  U.S. treasury bill holdings and create a $200 billion clean energy focused investment fund.

Fund investment could take many different forms and be spread across diverse stages and types of technologies across the globe. Long-term investments would be made in advancing potential leap-frog technologies and buying equity in promising start-ups, large companies like GE and existing investments funds like Khosla Ventures. Specific dollar amounts could be earmarked for research partnerships with premier academic and research institutions like MITand Fraunhofer, global acquisition of strategic energy materials like lithium, attracting top talent to China, and creation of more energy focused tax-free special economic zones within China. Diversified investments would both reduce risk and provide China multiple strategic opportunities to establish leadership in the clean energy space.

Creation of the proposed fund would provide China with both soft and hard benefits, while putting the world on a much safer climate trajectory. First, the fund would present China a strategic opportunity to diversify its foreign investment portfolio. Over two-thirds of China’s $3 trillion in foreign exchange reserves are held in dollar denominated assets, primarily US treasury bills. Re-allocating $200 billion of dollar reserves to an energy-focused sovereign wealth fund would both reduce exposure to dollar risk and offer long-term higher returns.

More importantly, massive clean energy investment right now will aid China moving forward as it attempts to continue growing its energy-hungry economy in the face of inevitable surging global energy demand and skyrocketing prices—all in the midst of fears of climate change and dwindling supplies of fossil fuels. With these mega-trends all converging, the proposed fund would enable China to lead the nascent clean energy revolution and position the country to become the Saudi Arabia of renewable energy. This investment would allow China to make major simultaneous progress toward advancing its energy security, achieving a sustainable technological advantage, and expanding exports and promoting massive job growth.

We believe that this $200 billion self-serving gambit by China would ignite a monumental global energy race. Historic precedent suggests that nations around the world—especially the United States—will be both fearful of and inspired by China’s bold energy action plan. Over 50 years ago, another communist nation, the Soviet Union, shocked the world by launching Sputnik, the first artificial satellite in orbit. The resulting Space Race with the United States unleashed the very best of both America’s and the U.S.S.R.’s competitive spirit and innovative potential. Despite its Cold War context, the Space Race generated unprecedented scientific achievement and hugely beneficial spin-off technologies.

In the same vein, China’s clean energy fund will force countries around the world to make similar strategic commitments and financial investments in clean energy. The resulting tidal wave of global human energy, creativity, and investment dedicated to advancing renewable energy may just be humanity’s best shot at solving the climate and energy crisis.