By Lori Glover
Some Sierra Club Lone Star Chapter members may remember a debate forty years ago about a place called Boquillas, a village on the border of Big Bend National Park. The Sierra Club rallied against electric lines running across the avian migratory path of the Rio Grande. Some may see similarities between that fight and the current fight against the Trans-Pecos Pipeline. Is our opposition to the Trans-Pecos Pipeline an example of privileged Americans shortsightedly refusing energy to poor Mexico?
The Boquillas situation has little to no similarity with the oil and gas industry’s current frantic push to pipe from the U.S. into Mexico, but it does reinforce one of the many myths the oil and gas industry promotes that the public is quick to swallow. You may have seen the American Petroleum Institute’s Vote 4 Energy ads in places like the New York Times Science Take videos. Each short video began with a Vote Energy ad paid for by API featuring a wholesome mother and child or young woman smiling and saying how important it is to continue using fossil fuels as we develop renewable energy. This seemingly innocent logic is a sneaky way of brainwashing the public into thinking we have to continue sucking the earth dry of all its fossil fuels and despoil the planet.
Myth #1: The Trans-Pecos Pipeline will provide desperately needed energy resources to the Mexican people.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), “Mexico is one of the largest producers of petroleum and other hydrocarbon liquids in the world, the fourth-largest producer in the Americas after the United States, Canada, and Brazil.”
More importantly, “Mexico has one of the world's largest shale gas resource bases,” which could support increased natural gas production. According to the EIA's assessment of world shale gas resources, Mexico has an “estimated 545 trillion cubic feet of technically recoverable shale gas resources—the sixth largest of any country examined in the study.” Mexico runs head-to-head with the United States and Canada in terms of shale gas resources. Now that PEMEX has been deregulated, the American oil and gas industry can frack in Mexico on a large scale. “Shale gas will account for an estimated 45 percent of Mexico’s natural gas output by 2026,” according to Emilio Godoy’s Inter Press Service article Fracking Expands Under the Radar on Mexican Lands. Once Mexico taps into its vast shale resources, companies like Energy Transfer Partners could profit from transporting natural gas back up the Trans-Pecos Pipeline to the U.S. once our resources are no longer profitable enough to extract.
The construction of the Trans-Pecos Pipeline is not vital to the Mexican people because there are currently natural gas pipelines passing into Mexico and new ones under construction. At this very moment, Oneok Partners is burying the Roadrunner pipeline from San Elizario, Texas, near El Paso, to Mexico. San Elizario—a poor underserved Hispanic community with families on both sides of the border—protested the pipeline to no avail. The Trans-Pecos Pipeline alone will pump an additional 1.4 billion cubic feet of natural gas to Mexico per day. “Current electricity generation output that leverages natural gas in Mexico suggests Mexico may only need approximately 10%” of what’s to be pushed through the Trans-Pecos Pipeline.
The existence of the Trans-Pecos Pipeline along with the Roadrunner and others are not contingent upon the energy resource needs of Mexico; they are entirely dependent upon the continuing ability to make surplus fracked natural gas available to foreign markets. Big money is looking for the perfect port - an LNG terminal with few restrictions and less opposition from environmentalists—BINGO: Mexico. In a conference held in London on October 29, 2014, Pemex lured investors with plans to export liquefied natural gas to Asia as part of a Transoceanic Corridor project.
Myth #2: The Trans-Pecos Pipeline will provide natural gas to Mexico—a cleaner energy than coal; thereby reducing carbon emissions and global warming.
The Trans-Pecos Pipeline will deliver billions of cubic feet of “fracked” natural gas to Mexico daily. Fracking activities have been toxic to the environment and human health. Leaks of the high-powered greenhouse gas methane abound. “In the United States, methane emissions from natural gas distribution mains accounts for 32 percent of the industry's total methane emissions.” Water sources all over the state and the world have been contaminated, and the disposal wells have been linked to earthquakes. Natural gas may burn cleaner but producing it is dirty business. There are no “clean” fossil fuels and fracking specifically poses unacceptable risks to our community, environment, and our climate, while producing methane—a greenhouse gas 86 times more potent than CO2.
Mexico currently burns less coal than the U.S. for energy production and based on the Trans-Pecos Pipeline’s capacity, only a small percentage of its gas would be needed to replace the coal power plants. So how is promoting the continued large scale production of toxic “fracked” gas necessary for the public good of Mexico or the U.S.?
Myth #3: Pipelines are safe and their footprint on the environment is small.
As pipeline corporations build more and more pipelines faster and faster to compete for profit, the number of pipeline accidents increases. Between 2009 and 2014, there was an 87% increase in pipeline incidents. Recently, Cuero, Texas, experienced another fire at a pipeline compressor station less than a year after the last pipeline fire in Cuero. In April, the Texas Eastern pipeline in Salem, Pennsylvania, ruptured injuring one man and damaging several homes. On June 23, a pipeline leaked 700 barrels of crude oil into a canyon in Ventura, California. Pipelines are NOT safe and their environmental impact is massive.
A pipeline explosion from a gas conduit the size of the Trans-Pecos Pipeline could clear a swath of land a mile wide. Many families live less than a mile from the Trans-Pecos Pipeline path. The constant winds blowing down the Toronto and Sunny Glen canyons could fan the flames of the explosion into the fastest spreading wildfire that community has ever known. Fire from mere train trestle sparks in Toronto Canyon is a constant threat to this community. In 2011, the Gage Holland Fire burned 6,000 of acres and nearly consumed several homes before it was subdued. In that same spring, the Schwartz Fire burned 30,000 acres and the Iron Mountain Fire burned 15,000 acres. The Trans-Pecos Pipeline will cross underneath of FM 1703, effectively cutting off the only entrance and exit for almost 200 homes in the Sunny Glen and Sunny Acres communities. Lives and property may be lost, as will many populations of endangered and threatened species.
Unfortunately, destruction from the Trans-Pecos Pipeline is not merely a matter of future risk. Devastation of the Trans-Pecos region is happening NOW. Construction of the Trans-Pecos Pipeline is underway, clearing a 143 mile, 1-mile wide swath with bulldozers and trenchers. This work will wreak havoc on the nesting grounds of hundreds of migratory birds, disrupt and forever alter the flow and function of the Alamito Creek watershed, and hasten the expansion of desertification— which reduces habitat, food supply, and eventually the populations of species such as the Texas Horned Lizard, Black-Capped Vireo, Chihuahuan Mud Turtle, and the Silvery Minnow.
Does the sanctity of one of the most pristine, wild regions of Texas, the Big Bend—an icon of the cowboy culture and the fierce, independent spirit of Texas, the home of one of the most biodiverse desert regions in the world, the sanctuary of a long list of endangered and threatened plant and animal species—need to be destroyed to provide Mexico with a resource they already possess?
Is the export of natural gas to overseas countries for the economic gain of private industry worth the long term and possibly permanent destruction of the delicate ecosystem of the Big Bend? Must all of Texas be sacrificed to pipelines, oil wells, and gas wells? Is that the Texas we want to the world to see?
Must everyone and everything step aside to line corporate pockets? Are our communities and our environment acceptable collateral damage? Does profit equal public good?
The planet is worth more than all the benefits the oil and gas industry PR machine tosses out like confetti. The lives of the families living off of FM 1703 in the Sunny Glen and Sunny Acres neighborhoods outside of Alpine, Texas, are worth more than the “benefits” of the Trans-Pecos Pipeline. Our air, our water, and our wildlife are worth more than the “benefits” of the Trans-Pecos Pipeline. Preserving the Big Bend, an icon of the cultural and environmental heritage of Texas, is worth more than the Trans-Pecos Pipeline.
Join in the fight against the Trans-Pecos Pipeline. It’s not too late. Write letters to the editor of your local newspaper. Write to legislators. Contribute funds to groups like the Big Bend Sierra Club (through the Lone Star Chapter), Big Bend Conservation Alliance, Defend Big Bend, and Food and Water Watch. Start meetings and protests in your town or make a trip to the Big Bend to stand with us. Make your voices heard loud and clear.
Photo courtesy of Traci Planck Felsot