The oil and gas industries could help fix this!

Photo with Article — A flare burns at a well pad Aug. 26, 2021, near Watford City, N.D. American oil and natural gas wells, pipelines and compressors are spewing three times the amount of the potent heat-trapping gas methane as the government thinks, a new comprehensive study calculates.

American oil and natural gas wells, pipelines and compressors are spewing three times the amount of the potent heat-trapping gas methane as the government thinks, causing $9.3 billion in yearly climate damage, a new comprehensive study calculates.

But because more than half of these methane emissions are coming from a tiny number of oil and gas sites, 1% or less, this means the problem is both worse than the government thought but also fairly fixable, said the lead author of a study in Wednesday’s journal Nature.

The same issue is happening globally. Large methane emissions events around the world detected by satellites grew 50% in 2023 compared to 2022 with more than 5 million metric tons spotted in major fossil fuel leaks, the International Energy Agency reported Wednesday in their Global Methane Tracker 2024. World methane emissions rose slightly in 2023 to 120 million metric tons, the report said.

“This is really an opportunity to cut emissions quite rapidly with targeted efforts at these highest emitting sites,” said lead author Evan Sherwin, an energy and policy analyst at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Lab who wrote the study while at Stanford University. “If we can get this roughly 1% of sites under control, then we’re halfway there because that’s about half of the emissions in most cases.”

Sherwin said the fugitive emissions come throughout the oil and gas production and delivery system, starting with gas flaring. That’s when firms release natural gas to the air or burn it instead of capturing the gas that comes out of energy extraction. There’s also substantial leaks throughout the rest of the system, including tanks, compressors and pipelines, he said.

“It’s actually straightforward to fix,” Sherwin said.

In general about 3% of the U.S. gas produced goes wasted into the air, compared to the Environmental Protection Agency figures of 1%, the study found. Sherwin said that’s a substantial amount, about 6.2 million tons per hour in leaks measured over the daytime. It could be lower at night, but they don’t have those measurements.

The study gets that figure using one million anonymized measurements from airplanes that flew over 52% of American oil wells and 29% of gas production and delivery system sites over a decade. Sherwin said the 3% leak figure is the average for the six regions they looked at and they did not calculate a national average.

Methane over a two-decade period traps about 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide, but only lasts in the atmosphere for about a decade instead of hundreds of years like carbon dioxide, according to the EPA.

About 30% of the world’s warming since pre-industrial times comes from methane emissions, said IEA energy supply unit head Christophe McGlade. The United States is the No. 1 oil and gas production methane emitter, with China polluting even more methane from coal, he said.

Last December, the Biden administration issued a new rule forcing the U.S. oil and natural gas industry to cut its methane emissions. At the same time at the United Nations climate negotiations in Dubai, 50 oil companies around the world pledged to reach near zero methane emissions and end routine flaring in operations by 2030. That Dubai agreement would trim about one-tenth of a degree Celsius, nearly two-tenths of a degree Fahrenheit, from future warming, a prominent climate scientist told The Associated Press.

Monitoring methane from above, instead of at the sites or relying on company estimates, is a growing trend. Earlier this month the market-based Environmental Defense Fund and others launched MethaneSAT into orbit. For energy companies, the lost methane is valuable with Sherwin’s study estimate it is worth about $1 billion a year.

About 40% of the global methane emissions from oil, gas and coal could have been avoided at no extra cost, which is “a massive missed opportunity,” IEA’s McGlade said. The IEA report said if countries do what they promised in Dubai they could cut half of the global methane pollution by 2030, but actions put in place so far only would trim 20% instead, “a very large gap between emissions and actions,” McGlade said.

“It is critical to reduce methane emissions if the world is to meet climate targets,” said Cornell University methane researcher Robert Horwath, who wasn’t part of Sherwin’s study.

“Their analysis makes sense and is the most comprehensive study by far out there on the topic,” said Howarth, who is updating figures in a forthcoming study to incorporate the new data.

The overflight data shows the biggest leaks are in the Permian basin of Texas and New Mexico.

“It’s a region of rapid growth, primarily driven by oil production,” Sherwin said. “So when the drilling happens, both oil and gas comes out, but the main thing that the companies want to sell in most cases was the oil. And there wasn’t enough pipeline capacity to take the gas away” so it spewed into the air instead.

Contrast that with tiny leak rates found in drilling in the Denver region and the Pennsylvania area. Denver leaks are so low because of local strictly enforced regulations and Pennsylvania is more gas-oriented, Sherwin said.

This shows a real problem with what National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association methane-monitoring scientist Gabrielle Petron calls “super-emitters.”

“Reliably detecting and fixing super-emitters is a low hanging fruit to reduce real life greenhouse gas emissions,” Petron, who wasn’t part of Sherwin’s study, said. “This is very important because these super-emitter emissions are ignored by most ‘official’ accounting.”

Stanford University climate scientist Rob Jackson, who also wasn’t part of the study, said, “a few facilities are poisoning the air for everyone.”

“For more than a decade, we’ve been showing that the industry emits far more methane than they or government agencies admit,” Jackson said. “This study is capstone evidence. And yet nothing changes.”

___
Read more of AP’s climate coverage at http://www.apnews.com/climate-and-environment

Oil Companies & Coal Companies were part of the Deception!

DOERING: It’s Living on Earth, I’m Jenni Doering

BELTRAN: And I’m Paloma Beltran. The burning of fossil fuels is the primary source of climate-warming greenhouse gases worldwide. And the science tells us that if we don’t drastically reduce those emissions as soon as possible, we’re headed for even more catastrophic climate disruption. But by 2030 the UN reports that global fossil fuel production is set to be more than double the level consistent with meeting the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement. The dominance of the fossil fuel industry even as we face the climate emergency isn’t all that surprising, says Naomi Oreskes. She’s a professor of the history of science at Harvard and says the fossil fuel industry has stalled climate progress around the globe for decades. Professor Oreskes recently joined Living on Earth’s Steve Curwood to describe the industry’s campaign of disinformation.

CURWOOD: So how far back did big oil companies know about the potentially catastrophic effects their products could have on the climate and the planet?

ORESKES: We know from our research and the research of others that as early as the 1960s, the oil industry was quite well aware that burning fossil fuels put greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. And those gases were almost certain to warm the planet. And they also knew that the effects would likely be very serious. We begin to see really serious sustained work on the issue in the 1970s. And by the mid to late 70s, some companies like ExxonMobil actually had their own in-house scientists doing this research. And so we’ve shown, in our work, we’ve gone back and we’ve looked at those reports, we’ve looked at the scientific papers that were published, either by industry scientists or co-authored by them with academics. And they show very clearly that by the late 70s, early 80s, the oil industry had a very clear picture of what this problem was, understood that it was serious, that it would have large social, economic and political consequences, that it could include very substantive sea level rise, and that it might make their product unsellable.

CURWOOD: Go back to the very beginning. What was the first sort of shot across the bow, so to speak, inside industry? Who spoke up and said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, we really could have a problem here.

ORESKES: Well, there’s a few different shots across the bow. One of my favorite early examples is the physicist Gilbert Plass, who worked for Ford Motor Company. So we have reports from the 50s and 60s where the car industry is beginning to recognize that this could have significance for their long term business model. But also, Plass worked for Ford Aerospace. And they were interested in heat seeking missiles, and the impact of CO2 heat absorption on heat seeking missiles. So Plass did some of the most important early work that proved that climate change would result from increased CO2 in the atmosphere. So that was in the mid 1950s. We also know that in the early 60s, there were a number of studies and reports done, including one by Edward Teller, the famous physicist who spoke to the American Petroleum Institute about this issue. We have a number of reports that my students actually tracked down of air pollution conferences in the early to mid 1960s, where scientists were talking about CO2 as a form of air pollution. And we know that auto industry executives, oil industry executives, chemical industry executives, were present at these meetings and heard these conversations and in some cases participated in them.

CURWOOD: So what did big oil companies do with that information?

ORESKES: Well, at first, they didn’t actually do much of anything. And one of the things that’s been interesting to us and the research we’ve done on the 1960s, is that in the 1960s, there’s this conversation going on, that the oil industry doesn’t seem to be particularly worried about. And my interpretation of that is that so long as climate change seemed far off in the future, they didn’t really think it was something that they had to worry about terribly much. Now, a couple of companies did, and ExxonMobil is the most famous because they actually created a research group to better understand the problem. And they did that in the 1970s. So we know that they were taking it seriously. And we know that their own scientists wrote a number of reports that said, yes, this actually is significant. It is something that companies should be paying attention to. But even then, most scientists in the 1970s still thought that change was pretty far away. And a lot of the reports don’t actually specify when they think discernable effects would occur. But when they do use a number, they sometimes use the year 2000. And sometimes when scientists talked about the issue, they talked to the year 2100. So you can imagine if you were a corporate executive in 1975, and someone comes along talking about climate change as something that would happen in the year 2100, you might reasonably think, hmm, that’s not something I really need to worry about. But what we’ve seen in our work is that it begins to change very dramatically. And in a very specific year: 1989. 1989 is when we first begin to see climate change denial begin to be a thing. So we begin to see reports, advertisements, OpEds, to say, well, hold on, slow down, we don’t really know, we’re not really sure. And so one obvious question is why then? And I think we know the answer, because 1988 is the year that Jim Hansen testifies for the first time in the US Congress, that manmade climate change is underway. And he testifies to the effect that he and his team at NASA are 99% sure that this is the case. And you know, as well as I do, scientists hardly ever say they’re 99% sure about anything. So it’s this very strong, very clear, quite unequivocated statement. And 1988 is also the year that the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is created. So you have these two big things happening to say, okay, we’ve been talking about this as something that’s far off in the future but actually, this is happening faster than we thought and if Hansen is right, it’s actually already happening now. And I think that scares the pants off the oil industry. And I think that helps to explain why we then see this big pivot.

CURWOOD: Yeah, I mean, what did they do with that information, that climate change is here and now, as of 1988?

Prof. Naomi Oreskes is expert on History of Science

CURWOOD: Specifically, talk to me about the strategies that these companies used to mislead consumers and the public about the dangers of fossil fuel. What was the message that was put out there about this, to support this approach?

ORESKES: There was a wide diversity of messaging that was used. But my Research Associate, Geoffrey Supran, and I have identified four big themes that we see repeated over and over again, and we summarize them as follows. It’s not real, it’s not us, it will wreck the economy, it’s too expensive to fix. So the first one, it’s not real, was a strategy to deny that climate change was even happening, to say the science was too unsettled, there were too many uncertainties, to blame it on natural variability, to say the climate has always changed, to blame it on volcanoes. So basically, to deny the scientific evidence. Second one, it’s not us, which is a variation on the theme of the first. Well, maybe there is warming, but it’s not caused by our activities. So it’s actually just natural variability, it’s actually caused by CO2 from volcanoes. Two B is, it’s not us, it’s China. So deflect attention from what we, here in the United States, or what we, ExxonMobil, have done to try to deflect the blame and put it on someone else. Then the second two, the third and fourth, were about the economy. So to claim that if we were to stop using fossil fuels, it would completely wreck the economy, the economy cannot survive without fossil fuels. This is an argument that we’re seeing revived again, even as we speak today. And then the fourth is that it would be too expensive to fix. So yeah, we could do solar, we could do wind, but they’re too expensive. And also, they’re too intermittent, right? I call this the, “renewables are for sissies” argument, that renewables aren’t tough enough, they’re not reliable enough, that only oil, gas and coal are reliable. So there’s this sort of gender laden element about, you know, real men drill for coal. And so we’ve seen all four of these arguments being used at different times in different ways. I always like to say, some people think that the industry doesn’t believe in recycling, but they do, they recycle their refuted arguments.

CURWOOD: From your perspective, what were some of their most effective techniques of disinformation?

ORESKES: I think they were very smart about something that, you know, social media has exploited in recent years, but they already knew this 40 or 50 years ago, which was targeted messaging. And so in a place like Kentucky, they would push a message about losing jobs. If coal is wiped out, you’ll lose your jobs. In a place like, I don’t know, California, they would have a message about government overreach or increases to your taxes. They also had different arguments or different messages for male and female audiences. So the incredibly effective thing they did was to recognize that there wasn’t one thing, and to do a whole lot of different things, also different media: radio, television, print media, and then now we’re seeing tremendous amounts of growth of disinformation on social media.

CURWOOD: Naomi, I understand that there was some really ridiculous, maybe even outlandish advertisements back in the 1960s in magazines. Could you describe one of those spreads for me, please?

ORESKES: There’s a very famous advertisement that was put out by Humble Oil, which was part of this Standard Oil, The John D. Rockefeller network, where they showed a giant glacier and they talked about how much energy it would take to melt the glaciers if that were a good thing. And I think that’s a very nice telling example for us of how our mentalities have changed. Right around the time that scientists were starting to understand how climate change could melt glaciers, and that would be a bad thing, we have people advertising that being able to melt a glacier was a good thing. So part of this story is that it has required us to rethink how we think about nature, the environment, living on earth. And so the difficulty of this story is, it’s not just about disinformation from the fossil fuel industry, but the way in which that disinformation has worked in conjunction with our own fears, anxieties, beliefs, attitudes, to get us to this place where we are today.

CURWOOD: So, this may seem obvious, but what convinces you that this whole process of misinformation was deliberate? That these weren’t sort of people who mistakenly didn’t quite get what was going on?

ORESKES: Well, that’s an easy question to answer, because they said so. I mean, as a historian, I work with documentary evidence. We’ve spent a lot of time in the archives, we’ve visited archives in I don’t know, at least 20 states, I think, as well as looked at lots of documentary material that is available online. And we see how this was planned. We see how it was organized, we see the documents that say, you know, we’re going to say there’s no consensus on climate change, we’re going to design this advertising campaign, and we’re going to run it in these places. And we came across documents that even had focus group studies. They did market research to try to figure out what kinds of messaging would be most effective in persuading the American people not to support meaningful climate action. So we don’t have to interpret, we don’t have to read between the lines. This is all things that they said, they wrote down. And of course, the other big piece of this puzzle, and this is the work that Eric Conway and I did in our book, “Merchants of Doubt,” some of the key players in climate change disinformation came out of the tobacco story. So we showed in our book how two of the original four Merchants of Doubt had worked directly with the tobacco industry, had worked on these strategies for tobacco, and then carried those strategies and tactics into the climate space.

CURWOOD: So talk to me about how these disinformation strategies have changed over time. You mentioned that climate disinformation has moved to social media. So what does the fossil fuel climate denial marketing campaign look like today?

ORESKES: Well, it’s a little hard to answer that question, because one of the things about social media is that it’s so segmented, but one message we are definitely seeing today is a revival of the anti government message, to say that this is all a liberal conspiracy to take away your rights, to take away your hamburgers to take away your right to drive a big car. And this particularly came up in the recent debates about gas indoors. So in New York State, when the state proposed a regulation that would not allow gas in new homes, the fossil fuel industry saturated the state with a set of advertisements saying that this was government overreach, this was government control. If you allow the government to regulate gas stoves, it’s only a matter of time before they regulate everything. And this is an argument we have seen repeatedly used throughout this whole history. And so now we’re seeing it, again, being used to defend gas stoves.

CURWOOD: Naomi, how can environmental advocates, scientists, citizens, push back against these very expensive and sophisticated climate denial marketing campaigns?

ORESKES: It’s not easy, because as you just said, they are sophisticated, and they’re extremely well funded. But the good news is, there are more of us than there are of them. So I think this is why it’s so important for everyone to be mobilized on this issue. If we just rely on a few scientists, we will not win. But if we all become organized, if we speak in our communities, in our churches, in our synagogues, in our mosques, in our schools, at our places of work, if we have the conversation about what’s happening, and particularly the conversation about disinformation, which is an awkward conversation to have, but an essential one, because one of the things that I found is that you can’t really counter disinformation with information because now people just don’t know who to believe. But if you expose it as disinformation, well, nobody wants to be at the losing end of a con. So having that conversation, talking about the disinformation, as we have been doing here today, is extremely important. And then, as much as possible, mobilizing everyone to be engaged in this conversation to the extent that they are able to be.

DOERING: That’s Harvard Professor of the History of Science, Naomi Oreskes, speaking with Living on Earth Host and Executive Producer Steve Curwood. They’ll talk next time about the political history of climate disinformation.

TO BE CONTINUED… the deception continues …. Life on earth depends on us getting this stopped.

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Learning and Sharing Information are Essential Early Steps

Calumet Montana Refinery on a cold November day in 2019

From an Article by David Murray, Great Falls Tribune, December 18, 2023

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has fined the Calumet Montana Refinery in Great Falls $385,000 for violations of U.S. Clean Air Act, related to the refinery’s failure to develop an adequate Risk Management Plan (RMP) that would help prevent chemical accidents and provide guidance for an emergency response in case of a “worst case scenario.”

The EPA’s consent agreement focuses most closely on Calumet’s handling of hydrofluoric acid, a catalyst used to produce high-octane gasoline. In addition to being a highly corrosive liquid, hydrofluoric acid is also a powerful contact poison. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) hydrofluoric acid poisoning can readily occur through exposure to the skin or eyes, or when inhaled or swallowed.

“The Calumet facility is subject to Clean Air Act RMP regulations because it stores and processes large quantities of flammable mixtures and hydrofluoric acid, a highly toxic substance that may cause severe injury, burns or death when released into air,” an EPA news release states. “The RMP rule requires facilities holding more than 10,000 pounds of flammable mixture or 1,000 pounds of hydrofluoric acid to develop a RMP and submit that plan to EPA.

The EPA’s report does not contain any allegations that a specific hazardous release of hydrofluoric acid occurred at any point at the refinery, but it does report that EPA inspectors recorded 40 violations of the Chemical Accident Prevention Provisions of the Clean Air Act dating back to an inspection that occurred in September 2019. It also states that Calumet Montana Refinery officials failed to fully correct all the past violations as mandated by a July 7, 2023, deadline.

The EPA report summarizes “potentially dangerous conditions” observed by EPA inspectors during the September 2019 inspection that included Calumet’s failure to incorporate its flare system to burn off excess hydrocarbon gasses within the Clean Air Act analysis or to develop an adequate risk management plan for containing regulated substances.

Calumet also failed to include a response plan for a “worst case scenario” in the event of a catastrophic failure of its hydrofluoric acid containment system, did not disclose the greatest quantity of hydrofluoric acid contained within a single vessel and did not disclose the full breadth of the geographic area that a catastrophic release of hydrofluoric acid could potentially effect during a worst-case event.

The EPA also cited Calumet for engineering laxes within the system it uses to remove sulfur and other impurities from crude oil. These included a length of refinery piping held up by a temporary support stand, and the refinery’s failure to develop clear, written operating procedures for its employees in the event of an emergency refinery shutdown.

The Consent Agreement also notes that the Calumet Refinery had no 24-hour emergency contact telephone number, and that the existing number was an office line with that staff only attended during regular business hours.

Calumet neither admits or denies the alleged violations but consented to payment of the full $385,000 in civil penalties alleged in the EPA’s complaint. Calumet also waived its right to seek any reduction or waive of the fine through a judicial or administrative hearing.

“Facilities must properly handle hazardous substances to prevent dangerous chemical accidents and follow reporting requirements when releases occur,” said Suzanne Bohan, director of EPA Region 8’s Enforcement and Compliance Assurance Division. “If they don’t, EPA will hold them accountable.”

“RMPs (Risk Management Plans) address the proper design and maintenance of equipment such as pipes and vessels, emergency preparedness and the ability to minimize releases that may occur,” the release goes on to explain. “They provide valuable information to local fire, police and emergency response personnel to prepare for and respond to chemical emergencies.”

While the EPA’s Consent Agreement was critical in its numeration of Calumet Montana Refinery’s code violations, the news release did praise the refinery’s willingness to correct the problems in a timely manner.

“The company has been cooperative in correcting all identified deficiencies to reduce the possibility of an accidental release,” the EPA release states. “We are pleased that Calumet Montana Refining is implementing critical safety measures to protect workers and the community.”

Earth’s geologic strata are irregular, heterogeneous and not reliable to retain carbon dioxide for centuries

>>> Article by Randi Pokladnik, PhD, Tappan Lake, Uhrichsville, OH, December 18, 2023

Recently, the United States Forest Service announced that it is proposing a rule change to allow carbon dioxide captured directly from the air or industrial processes to be stored permanently on public lands. This carbon dioxide would be pumped into Class VI injection wells drilled 3000 feet deep in national forests and grasslands.

The proposed rule, “Land Uses; Special Uses; Carbon Capture and Storage Exemption,” and instructions on how to comment are available in the Federal Register at https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2023-24341.

Comments, identified by RIN 0596–AD55, may be sent through the Federal eRulemaking Portal at https://www.regulations.gov.

Carbon capture utilization and storage has become the new “darling” of the fossil fuel industry and was touted at the climate discussions during the COP28 recently. “Along with 2,456 fossil fuel lobbyists, there were 475 lobbyists specializing in Carbon Capture (Utilization) and Storage (CC(U)S) projects at the COP28.” If you have any doubt as to who is pushing this unproven and expensive technology, just look at the membership of carbon capture organizations.

In its current state, carbon capture is another false promise when it comes to addressing the urgent need to decrease carbon dioxide emissions. A 2019 Report by the Center for International Environmental Law, “Fuel to Fire”, states, “It is not surprising that the fossil fuel industry has invested and is investing heavily in the technologies that would render a transition from fossil fuels less urgent.” Carbon capture is one of those technologies.

“The International Energy Agency estimates that the world will need to be able to capture 1.2 billion tons of CO2 per year by 2050; today, the world’s total carbon capture amounts to just 4 percent of that goal.” The IEA data shows the U.S. could see CO2 capture capacity increase five-times to over 100 metric tons (Mt) CO2 annually with 80 projects coming on line by 2030, but this is hardly enough to make a dent in emissions as more fossil fuel development continues to add to current emissions.

There are several techniques that have been used to capture CO2. These include: absorbing it with a sponge-like material; separating it with membranes; or cooling and condensing it using a cryogenic process. These processes all require high energy inputs, and once captured, the carbon dioxide is either stored or used. Storage involves the gas being transported to locations where it is injected deep underground into saline deposits or rock strata. Biden’s Administration on Environmental Quality said a CCS system that could meet a net zero goal of emissions by 2050 would require a pipeline system of close to 68,000 miles at a cost of $230 billion. The USA currently has 5100 miles of carbon dioxide pipelines.

Tenaska, a company with headquarters in Texas and Nebraska, recently announced that they will be receiving “an award of up to $69 million from the U.S. Department of Energy to assist with new CCS projects.” These include: seven carbon dioxide injection wells in West Virginia (Hancock, Brooke and Marshall) counties; twelve wells in Ohio (Jefferson, Harrison and Carroll counties); and three in Pennsylvania (Washington County). These wells would create 49 permanent jobs.

There is big money to made by the fossil fuel industry when it comes to carbon capture. Instead of being penalized for polluting, they are being paid. What a deal! Not all carbon dioxide captured is incentivized the same. Once captured, carbon dioxide can be stored underground in wells (CCS) or used for another process (CCUS). Currently, a majority of carbon captured and used for another process is for enhanced oil recovery (EOR). During this procedure, pressurized CO2 is pumped into old oil field wells to help force out any remaining oil deposits. The majority of the world’s 21 large-scale CCS plants are located in the USA and Canada, and all but five sell or send their carbon dioxide to facilities involved in enhanced oil recovery.

The Biden Administration is all in on CCS and CCUS projects and has even sweetened the pot. The Inflation Reduction Act increased tax credits from $35 to $85 per ton of CO2 captured and stored and $50 to $180 for every ton of CO2 removed through direct air capture and permanently stored. Companies get $60 ton for industrial CO2 captured and used for EOR and $130 ton for direct air CO2 used for EOR. We are subsiding the polluters’ emissions.

Industry claims that the carbon dioxide can be used for things besides EOR, for example, beverage carbonation. But according to a recent paper in Nature Climate Change, “the tonnage of CO2 humanity emits simply dwarfs the tonnage of carbon-based products it consumes.” Also consider that CCS only addresses the carbon dioxide emissions from stack gases. It does not curb methane gas emissions from fossil fuel extraction such as coal mines and fracking. It does not address additional sources of carbon dioxide emissions from transportation of equipment, construction of a CCS facility and the emissions from the CCS facility itself.

Carbon dioxide injected into rock strata can also contaminate ground and surface water as it combines with water creating carbonic acid. In many cases CCS facilities greatly increase the amount of water needed for power plants fitted with the technology. In addition to using more water, power plants fitted with CCS technology need more energy to power the CCS portion of the facility.

Finally, there are issues of safety involved in CCS, especially during the transportation portion. In 2019, in Yazo, Mississippi, a 24-inch carbon-dioxide containing underground pipeline ruptured. Over 300 people were evacuated and 46 people were treated at hospitals. The concentration of carbon dioxide was high enough to cause gas-powered car engines to stop. First responders said some people were unconscious while others wandered around like zombies.

Unlike solar and wind energy, which according to Clean Technica are “roughly displacing 35 times as much CO2 every year as the complete global history of CCS”, carbon capture technology is still in the early stages of development. It is not ready to be used in the scale necessary to curtail the climate crisis. It has however become a diversion used by the fossil fuel industry and governments to encourage the continued use of oil and gas while ignoring the climate crisis.

Do we want toxic carbon dioxide emissions stored in our national forests or our communities? Do we want more pipelines destroying the landscape? Please send a comment to the US Forest Service by January 2nd to let them know CCS is not a sustainable or safe way to use our forests.

Prof. Michael Mann understands all the risks for our planet!

>>> From an Interview by Geoff Bennett, PBS News, December 12, 2023

As the COP28 climate conference comes to a close, countries are racing against the clock. More than 100 nations are pushing for a firm commitment to stop the use of coal, oil and gas after earlier drafts advocated for eventually phasing out fossil fuels. Geoff Bennett discussed more with Michael Mann, one of the climate experts critical of what’s happened at the summit.

Read the Full Transcript

Geoff Bennett: As the United Nations climate conference, known as COP 28, comes to a close in Dubai, countries are racing against the clock. More than 100 countries, including the U.S., the U.K. and Australia, are pushing for a firm commitment to stop the use of coal, oil and gas, after earlier drafts advocated for eventually phasing out fossil fuels.

Michael Mann has been among those climate experts critical of what’s happened at this summit. He’s the director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania. His new book is “Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons from Earth’s Past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis.”

Michael Mann, welcome back to the “NewsHour.”

Dr. Michael Mann, University of Pennsylvania: Thanks, Geoff. It’s good to be with you.

Geoff Bennett: You co-wrote an op-ed in The L.A. Times saying that not only has COP 28 failed to meet this moment demanding dramatic and immediate climate action; it has made a caricature of it. In what ways?

Dr. Michael Mann: Well, OK, first of all, the host country, United Arab Emirates, is a fossil fuel state. It’s a petro state.

And the president of COP 28, appointed by the host, is, in fact, an oil executive. And so there are reasons to be skeptical from the very start, given just those plain facts, and everything we have seen since, the fact that — again, that the president of COP 28 has been using language claiming that there’s no science to back up the need to phase out fossil fuels, when, of course, the science overwhelmingly indicates we have to bring carbon emissions down dramatically to avert catastrophic warming.

And he even used climate-denier tropes, like we will all be back in the caves if we make a clean energy transition. And so the fact that we haven’t seen much progress, we have seen other petro states like Saudi Arabia now say that there’s no way that they will agree to language to phase out fossil fuels — in fact, they won’t even agree to language to phase down, whatever that means, to phase down fossil fuels.

And so there’s a lot of pessimism right now that a few bad apples are spoiling the possibility of a meaningful agreement, as this window of opportunity is closing. If we don’t see progress now, it becomes increasingly difficult to see a way to keep warming below a catastrophic three degrees Fahrenheit.

Geoff Bennett: And yet these COP summits, they’re the only venue for global climate change negotiations. So what’s a better path forward? What reforms are needed?

Dr. Michael Mann: Yes, that’s right.

And so we resist calls to dissolve the entire COP process, because, as you just said, it is the only multilateral framework we have for global climate negotiations. And polluters would like nothing more than to see the U.N. conference of the parties disappear.

What we do need is to mend it, not end it. We argue, for example, that we can’t allow a single country like Saudi Arabia to prevent the agreement from passing. And so there should be something instead like a supermajority; 75 percent of participating countries have to agree to a particular resolution for it to pass.

But you can’t have a system where one bad actor like Saudi Arabia can block any progress at all. That’s where we are right now. And there need to be penalties. In the past, the enforcement mechanism was called name and shame. For countries who don’t make a good-faith effort to participate in the negotiations, you call them out. You try to shame them.

But some of these countries, like Saudi Arabia, have shown they have no shame. And so there need to be real penalties for bad actors who essentially are trying to prevent any meaningful progress from taking place.

Geoff Bennett: Understanding that critics have made — they have made the point that oil interests have co-opted COP, there are any number of countries who say that completely phasing out fossil fuels hurts them economically and puts them at a disadvantage.

Do they have a point?

Dr. Michael Mann: Well, we no longer kill whales for whale oil because something better came along. That was fossil fuels two centuries ago.

And now something else has come along, something better has come along, clean energy. What we need to do is to provide the incentives for developing countries to leapfrog past the fossil fuel stage of their economic development. We can’t afford for them to make the same mistakes we made.

So we have got to provide assistance to help developing countries develop clean energy infrastructure. It’s win-win. Clean energy means a better planet, a better environment, more jobs. There are far more jobs available in clean energy installation than there are in the largely automated fossil fuel industry.

And we also know that petro states tend to be authoritative states, antidemocratic countries. And so all of the things that we would like to see, more widespread democracy, a cleaner environment, good jobs, clean jobs for people, all of that is favored by a proactive effort to transition. We’re not talking about sort of stopping all fossil fuel production cold turkey.

What we’re talking about is a steady transition, bringing carbon emissions down 50 percent this decade, bringing them down to zero by mid-century. And we have the technology to do that, renewable energy, solar, wind, geothermal. We don’t need new technology. We just need the political will to make this transition.

Geoff Bennett: Michael Mann, thanks, as always, for your insights.

Gas field operations consume many acres across West Virginia

In this issue of the WV SORO Newsletter:

§. Surface Owners Can Sue Drillers to Plug Non-Producing Wells

§. Advocacy on Federal Regulations including the Third Payout of Federal Methane Reduction Funds, EPA’s Methane Rule, and Federal Leasing;

§. 2023 Legislative Update & 2024 Legislative Priorities

§. Kanawha State Forest Gas Well Tour with WV Legislators and Staff

§. Farmland Preservation Now An Option for Surface-Only Owners

§. Citizen Air Monitoring Project

If you are a member and we have your current mailing address, you should be receiving a copy in the mail soon, if you haven’t already. If you don’t receive one and would like to get mailings from us in the future, please use the link at the bottom of this email to update your contact information.

We hope you enjoy reading the latest news and updates from the WV Surface Owners’ Rights Organization.

Thanks for your support! WVSORO.org

West Virginia Surface Owners’ Rights Organization, 1500 Dixie Street, Charleston, WV 25311

info@wvsoro.org 304 346 5891

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NEW MINERAL RIGHTS OWNERS GROUP, Meeting Held 12/2/33 in Tyler County.

Seventy concerned citizens met in Middlebourne yesterday to discuss Senate Bill 694 that has brought forced pooling to West Virginia. Also discussed was the substantial reduction in royalty payments that has occurred since June of this year. The primary speaker was Nate Cain, Candidate for the US Congress from WV Second District. (Source: Tyler Star News & Wetzel Chronicle.)

Subscribe to this daily news blog for news on this and other related information in West Virginia. (See the entry point for your email address in the upper left corner of this page.)

Duane Nichols, Chemical Engineer (Retired), Morgantown, WV

Coal miners & Frack pad workers may be exposed to silica dust …

Letter to Editor by Robert Little via PennLive, November 26, 2023

As a retired family doctor, I’ve seen the suffering faced by patients fighting lung disease. Coal Worker’s pneumoconiosis, or “black lung” has become an epidemic … Younger coal miners are getting sicker than ever, and black lung is costing lives right now.

As we make the necessary transition from coal to cleaner power to tackle the climate crisis, it is our obligation to ensure coal workers aren’t left behind. That means we must act to curb the black lung crisis. Thankfully, we know the cause of this rise of black lung: miners are now cutting through more rock to get at coal, leading to more exposure to silica dust than ever before. Silica dust causes a more severe form of black lung than coal dust. That’s why coal miners have urged the Mining Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) to enact legal limits on silica exposure for years.

MSHA finally listened this year and announced a modest silica safeguard – a step in the right direction that will save more coal miner lives. But apparently even this small step was too much for our Congressman, Scott Perry. Last week, he introduced legislation that would prevent this safeguard from being implemented. And, when asked about what this meant for coal miners, he asked a reporter, “What coal miners?”

This is disgraceful evidence that Perry would rather bailout a few coal executives than protect working Americans, and it must not stand. I urge our Senators to stop this provision before it can cost lives. Pennsylvania’s 4,400 coal miners and everyone here who cares about health before CEO profits deserve better than what Scott Perry is giving us.

>>> Dr Robert Little, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Penna.

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SEE ALSO ~ As coal miners suffer and die from severe black lung, a proposed fix may fall short, By Howard Berkes, Justin Hicks & Allen Siegler, National Public Radio, November 19, 2023

BLACK LUNG DISEASE ~ It’s caused by the inhalation of coal mine dust, especially exposure to highly dangerous silica dust. Silica is one of Earth’s most abundant minerals, and it’s about 20 times more toxic than coal dust. It’s typical in the quartz that surrounds coal seams, especially in central Appalachia.

A micron is one millionth of a meter, difficult to measure accurately!

From an Article by Jen Christensen, Cable News Network (CNN), November 23, 2023

No pollution is good for anyone’s health, but a new study found that scientists may have significantly underestimated just how deadly pollution from coal-fired plants can be. It also shows how tighter regulations can work.

The study, published Thursday in the journal Science, found that exposure to fine particulate air pollution from coal-fired plants is associated with a mortality risk that is 2.1 times greater than that of particle pollution from other sources.

Particle pollution, also known as particulate matter, is the mix of solid and liquid droplets floating in the air, the US Environmental Protection Agency says. It can come in the form of dirt, dust, soot or smoke. Coal- and natural gas-fired power plants create it, as do cars, agriculture, unpaved roads, construction sites and wildfires.

PM2.5, one of the smallest forms of particle pollution, is so tiny – 1/20th of a width of a human hair – that it can travel past your body’s usual defenses. Instead of being carried out when you exhale, it can get stuck in your lungs or go into your bloodstream.

The particles cause irritation and inflammation and may lead to respiratory problems and chronic kidney disease. Exposure can cause cancer, stroke or heart attack; it could also aggravate asthma, and it has been associated with a higher risk of depression and anxiety.

Between 1999 and 2020, 460,000 deaths among people who got health coverage through Medicare were attributable to coal-fired plants, the new study showed. The mortality impact was higher in the eastern part of the US, which sees more coal-related pollution and has higher population density.

As regulations got stricter over the years, deaths from this kind of pollution decreased substantially by 2020, the researchers found. The vast majority of excess deaths due to coal-related particle pollution in the study were between 1999 and 2007, when the US was averaging more than 43,000 excess deaths per year. That’s about the same number of people who died in traffic crashes in 2021. The coal particle pollution-related deaths represented nearly a quarter of all PM2.5-related deaths among Medicare enrollees before 2009.

After 2007, though, excess deaths declined “substantially,” the study says, to 1,600 in 2020. The researchers studied emissions data from 480 coal-fired plants in the US and almost two decades worth of Medicare data. they modeled where the wind carried sulfur dioxides emitted by these plants, which can lead to the formation of other sulfur oxides that react with other compounds in the atmosphere that form particle pollution.

An editorial that was published alongside the study noted a limitation of the research: It didn’t measure PM2.5 directly and did not include the effect of another kind of pollution, nitrogen oxide, which combines with emissions of volatile organic compounds from other sources to form ozone, which can also cause health problems. But the editorial’s authors, Dr. Robert Mendelsohn and Seung Min Kim, scientists at Yale and Columbia, are complimentary of the work.

Study co-author Dr. Francesca Dominici, a professor of biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said that previous studies – “including mine, by the way” – underestimated how damaging pollution from coal plants could be because they used a measure of fine particulate matter from EPA air quality monitors that was good but limited.

The EPA monitors measure fine particulate matter from all sources, and it is difficult to disentangle how much pollution came from coal-fired power plants alone, Dominici said. She hopes the new study will prompt policymakers to quickly adopt clean energy alternatives

“We need to move away from coal pollution. There is really no reason to have it,” Dominici said. “The fact that coal pollution is so much more awful at creating fine particulate matter than other sources is something that should be understood and acted on all around the world, not just in the US.”

While coal use in the US is now much lower than in the 1990s, its use globally is predicted to increase, the study said. In other words, the world could still see a high number of excess deaths for many years to come.

Dr. Laura Kate Bender, a national assistant vice president at the American Lung Association who leads its Healthy Air Campaign, said the new study is very much in line with other research that has shown how dangerous pollution from coal-fired plants is.

“This just adds to the enormous weight of the evidence about not just the burden of PM2.5 on mortality from coal-fired power plants, but also the impacts of cleaning it up,” said Bender, who did not work on the new research.

The study showed that emission reductions brought about by regulation under the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments made a difference, Bender said. Predicted excess mortality from coal-fired plant emissions in 2020 was just 3% of what it was in 1999, the study showed.

“Environmental protections work,” Bender said, but it is important to note that not everyone has shared equally in those benefits.

Due to decades of residential segregation, the American Lung Association says, Black people tend to live where there is a greater exposure to air pollution. Other studies and an EPA review of pollution research have shown that people of color, especially Black people, live with significantly higher levels of particulate matter pollution. That causes a higher risk of premature death for people who are Black, especially compared with White people, even when income is factored in.

The American Lung Association has been advocating for the EPA to adopt a number of stronger measures to limit particulate matter pollution even further. Studies show that people’s health is jeopardized at an even lower level than the national pollution level standards.

“The science clearly shows that tighter limits will be more protective,” Bender said.

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SEE ALSO: The Role of Fossil Fuel Combustion Metals in PM2.5 Air Pollution Health Associations, Polina Maciejczyk, Lung-Chi Chen and George Thurston, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Eckerd College, St. Petersburg, FL 33711, USA & Department of Environmental Medicine, Grossman School of Medicine, New York University, New York, NY 10010, USA

REFERENCE ~ Atmosphere 2021, 12(9), 1086; https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos12091086
Received: 1 July 2021 / Revised: 9 August 2021 / Accepted: 19 August 2021 / Published: 24 August 2021

ABSTRACT ~ In this review, we elucidate the central role played by fossil fuel combustion in the health-related effects that have been associated with inhalation of ambient fine particulate matter (PM2.5). We especially focus on individual properties and concentrations of metals commonly found in PM air pollution, as well as their sources and their adverse health effects, based on both epidemiologic and toxicological evidence. It is known that transition metals, such as Ni, V, Fe, and Cu, are highly capable of participating in redox reactions that produce oxidative stress. Therefore, particles that are enriched, per unit mass, in these metals, such as those from fossil fuel combustion, can have greater potential to produce health effects than other ambient particulate matter. Moreover, fossil fuel combustion particles also contain varying amounts of sulfur, and the acidic nature of the resulting sulfur compounds in particulate matter (e.g., as ammonium sulfate, ammonium bisulfate, or sulfuric acid) makes transition metals in particles more bioavailable, greatly enhancing the potential of fossil fuel combustion PM2.5 to cause oxidative stress and systemic health effects in the human body. In general, there is a need to further recognize particulate matter air pollution mass as a complex source-driven mixture, in order to more effectively quantify and regulate particle air pollution exposure health risks.

Keywords: particulate matter; air pollution; ambient metals; particulate matter associated metals; fossil fuel combustion; inhalation metals; mortality; hospital admissions; particle acidity

Monitoring of land, air and water still needed

>>> Message from Cole Devine, On-Scene Coordinator, U.S. EPA Region 3, November 9, 2023

I apologize for the delay in my response and thank you for reaching out with your concerns.

The health and safety of the local community is top of mind for EPA, WV DHHR, WV DEP, and Marion County. The only verified assessments of the site at this time are those which have been undertaken by responding federal and state agencies.

These assessments did confirm the presence of radioactivity originating from radium 226, with the highest dose rate at 3 mrem per hour in one location. This dose rate, although one of concern, would not cause immediate health effects. However, exposure over a lifetime to lower levels can cause an increase in cancer risk.

Current and future actions to restrict access to the site are also meant to mitigate long term exposures from radiation to trespassers, responders, and the public.

A fence is being erected as a safety protocol to ensure the areas in which the most elevated levels of radium 226 contamination were found remain undisturbed by preventing any unauthorized access. If you would like to discuss specific health concerns and incidents of exposure, please reach out to the state health agency at 304-558-2981.

Below are some links we are working on adding to the website with informational resources.

https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2015-06/relative-doses-radiation.jpg

https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/radiation/emergencies/00_images/infographics/Contamination_versus_Exposure.jpg

https://www.epa.gov/radiation/radiation-sources-and-doses