Catch up on all the episodes of Breaking the Cycle.
Transcript
Courtney Naquin: Hello, friends. Welcome back to Breaking the Cycle. At this point, maybe you’re thinking, alright dude, you’ve been talking a lot about industrial pollution, and we totally get that it’s bad and that it’s contributing to climate change and hurting people’s health. But how bad is the pollution problem? And how has it gotten so bad? And how do these emissions actually happen? Well first, let me ask you this, have you ever driven past an oil and gas rig, or a big plant or refinery and wondered, what the heck is all that metal crap and what’s going on inside there? Or have you ever noticed these big refineries or plants or oil patches out west? Have you ever noticed these huge flames from these big metal towers sometimes followed by huge black clouds of smoke? That’s a flare burning off methane, and that’s just the pollution that’s visible. When methane gas is released but not burned, this is called venting. And these emissions are invisible and odorless, making them hard to detect. And the kicker with venting and flaring is, those are intentional industry operations. They’re technically supposed to happen. But there’s another major issue, which is abandoned and orphaned oil and gas wells, which are littered across New Mexico, Texas, and Louisiana. In fact, there are about 100,000 wells in New Mexico and Texas, which actually leak a ton of methane emissions, and our regulatory agencies aren’t doing much about it.
So to dive deeper into these methane issues, we’re speaking with Miguel Escoto, a west Texas field researcher with Earthworks, and Cyrus Reed, the conservation director for the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club. Miguel, a Texan born and raised, spends a lot of time in the Permian Basin, and is going to walk us through the realities on the ground. We’ll follow up with a conversation with Cyrus about the efforts to properly regulate venting and flaring and well closure, as well as federal support for closing the wells.
I’m your host, Courtney Naquin, recording in Bulbancha, also known as New Orleans, on the ancestral lands of the Houma, Chitimacha, Choctaw, Ishak, and Biloxi People.
Miguel Escoto: My name is Miguel Escoto. I was born and raised in the borderland community of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juarez. For the past two years, I have been working with Earthworks as part of the field team, which goes out into the oil fields, including the Permian Basin oil field and the Eagle Ford oil field, studying the industry. We document the emissions that they have. We use that documentation to try to pressure the state government, the TCEQ and the Railroad Commission, to enforce existing regulation, to reduce emissions. But we also use that documentation and that study to sound the alarm to broader public about what’s going on in these oil fields, which I can talk a little bit more about.
Courtney Naquin: Yeah, definitely, thank you so much because, you know, this podcast is about the Permian to Gulf Coast frack cycle and, in some circles, people refer to the Permian as a climate bomb. So, could you explain to us what that means? Maybe start with an overview of the Permian, what are production levels nowadays compared to, like, pre-COVID levels, for example.
Miguel Escoto: Sure. The Permian climate bomb is, it’s not an exaggeration because it’s a huge problem, a huge threat for the climate crisis. So, the Permian Basin is basically the fracking epicenter of the United States. Here, we have about 40% of United States’ oil supply. And it seems like every administration beats the previous administration as to how much oil and gas is being produced from the Permian Basin. So, right now under the Biden administration, the Permian is producing more oil than during the Trump administration. And Trump was producing more oil and gas than during the Obama administration. And Obama, there was more production than during the Bush administration. So, we see here a skyrocketing of production that has not ended. Part of the reason why the Permian was able to unleash this level of pumping oil and gas from the ground was because of what was happening in the Gulf. So, during the Obama administration, they lifted a decades-long ban on exporting crude oil. What that did is that it unleashed a level of oil and gas that we hadn’t seen. It was able to reach its full potential. So right now, the Permian in west Texas and southeast New Mexico, right here we now have about 5.4 million barrels of oil being produced per day. So, try to imagine 5.4 million barrels of anything per day. That is a crisis because science is telling us we need to stop producing oil and gas now. And we are going the wrong direction.
One of the funniest things that we notice here is how conservatives and the Republican party have fake outrage at Biden. Biden, how dare you, how dare you stop and limit America's great oil and gas potential? Well, if you look at the numbers, Biden is beating Trump. He’s making him look like a chump. Like, it really is incredible when you look at the numbers, how bad we are, how bad the current situation is, and a lot of this conservative outrage is false. It’s fake.
So that relates to the broader supply chain of the Gulf because what happens is a vicious cycle of toxicity. It’s a feedback loop. So, the more drilling that is happening from the Permian Basin, the more the fossil fuel industry downstream in the Gulf can say hey, let’s build these export facilities to increase capacity and ship this oil and gas to the rest of the world. So, the more drilling, the more export capacity. The more export capacity, the more that, on the upstream site, oil and gas drillers can actually drill more. And so that leads, again, to more export, to more drilling, to more export, to more drilling, etcetera. It’s a toxic feedback loop that is not going to end unless we do something about it.
Courtney Naquin: Yeah, thank you so much. Which is precisely why we called this podcast Breaking the Cycle. It is definitely a loop that’s on repeat. Um, and a part of that cycle are two issues that happen in the Permian Basin that maybe not everybody is so aware of, venting and flaring, and abandoned and orphaned wells. And the reason for grouping those together is that there are some state and federal government actions that might help address them. With you, let's focus on venting and flaring. And, anyone who has driven through the Permian, or even through the Gulf coast in some cases, is familiar with flares - for those listening who don’t know, flares are giant flames burning off unwanted gas. As far as I know, it’s a necessary, technically necessary thing to do so to prevent explosions. It's still a very dangerous thing that releases a bunch of emissions. So it’s a disturbing sight to see, and the roar of the flares can be pretty powerful. Can you explain what’s going on with the flares? What is venting? Why do companies flare gas and why should we be worried about it?
Miguel Escoto: Sure so, venting and flaring is a very big problem, but it is only a symptom of the larger disease of fossil fuel production. Why is flaring even a thing? The production of oil and gas is a complicated process. It’s messy. It is dirty. But if we focus specifically on the Permian Basin, their main focus is on extracting oil. And the industry, the economy there, has focused on oil as opposed to gas, which fluctuates in prices. When fracking to extract oil from the ground, operators will come across excess gas. So they have various options as to how to manage this. One option is they can ship it to market so that it can be used for pipelines to refine it. The second thing that they can do with this excess gas is they can flare it. Basically, if you haven’t seen this, imagine being in a west Texas desert. You see a pipe sticking up from the ground and you see a massive flame that is just roaring from this stick in the ground. What they do is they combust the gas, which would reduce the amount of greenhouse gasses being released into the atmosphere. That’s what they were designed to do. They look scary, they look horrifying, which they are. But, technically, they’re in place to reduce emissions. However, there’s a third thing that can happen with this excess gas, which is venting. They can just straight up let the emissions get dumped into the atmosphere. It is unmitigated, there is no control technology, and it is just being blasted into the atmosphere. This isn’t rare. We at Earthworks, we use an optical gas imaging camera to point at oil and gas sites and see what is happening. We’re able to see otherwise invisible methane and VOC emissions. A lot of the times we go up to sites, we point the camera to this stick that’s pointing up from the ground. With the naked eye you don’t see anything. But you point the camera and you see this blasting plume. That is unmitigated methane being dumped into that atmosphere. That is venting. It is a huge problem. So flaring and venting is a huge part of how oil and gas can exist without exploding. So a lot of these gasses are volatile. If they are not managed, it will blow up the entire system. And that’s a lot of the excuse that the oil and gas industry makes.
So why should we be concerned? Two basic categories for this, health and climate. Flaring does not eliminate pollution, it only reduces it when it’s operating at its perfect peak performance, when it’s operating immaculately. It doesn’t eliminate pollution, it just reduces it. So, flaring can result in health problems for people living near the flames because they release volatile organic compounds like benzene, which causes cancer. Studies demonstrate that pregnant women who live near flares have as much as 50% greater chance of resulting in premature birth. Studies also demonstrate that living in proximity to flares is linked to eye, nose, throat irritation, respiratory problems, nausea, headaches, dizziness. It’s a huge problem for health if you’re living next to a flare. We should also be concerned because of the climate. If flares worked perfectly and impeccably, they don't eliminate emissions, they only reduce it. And so, flares operating exactly as intended still release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. According to the Global Carbon Project, properly combusted flaring is responsible for 0.6% of all human-driven fossil carbon dioxide emissions. That number might seem small, but it is a calculation of all human related carbon dioxide emissions, so it’s still substantial. However, there’s also such a thing as a flare that is not operating as it should. Pretty common to see out here. You’re driving through the oil fields, you see here that a flare can be lit but there is still a flame coming out of the pipe that is sticking out of the ground. But, these flares have a smoky plume. There’s a black smoke trailing off of it and this is an improperly lit flare. It’s malfunctioning. When you see this, there is black carbon being emitted. So, black carbon is huge, it’s a huge greenhouse gas. It’s very dangerous for the climate. It’s responsible for 15-30% of global climate change. So, yes, flaring is better than venting, but flaring is not a win. There’s still problems because of it. And, as we can see, the state government has refused to regulate properly.
Courtney Naquin: Thank you. I didn’t actually realize that the flares with the big black plume was an improperly managed flare.
Miguel Escoto: That is not supposed to happen.
Courtney Naquin: I don’t know. I feel like, growing up around industry, that’s just something I saw a lot. I mean, it was always, like, concerning, but you know, you just kind of move on.
Miguel Escoto: Well, right now that is what is en vogue for the industry. It’s their last ditch effort to maintain their industry. They know that the general public is sick and tired of their pollution. They know that the general public wants to transition to renewable energy. So yeah, their carbon capture schemes and their hydrogen schemes are false solutions. They are ways to keep them making profits while nothing’s fundamentally changing. And we have to really stand up against that.
Courtney Naquin: Yeah, definitely. Just for extra clarity, I was wondering, companies will justify venting or flaring because it’s required. Otherwise it’s dangerous, it’s explosive. So, I’m wondering if Texas actually has a law banning the waste of natural resources like gas. So, how do companies get around that prohibition? Is it through that same argument?
Miguel Escoto: Loopholes. Loopholes, loopholes, loopholes. They have a menu of loopholes they can use at their discretion. They’re really spoiled, if you think about it. So one of the main things they have is affirmative defense loopholes, which means that virtually anything can be justified by them saying, that pollution event that you saw which harmed you, that’s part of our shutdown/startup maintenance or malfunction. Basically, everything they can just blanket as one of those excuses. And data from Environment Texas found that 97% of enforcement hearings on potential Clean Air Act violations, they cited this provision, this excuse to say it was part of startup/shutdown maintenance or malfunction. So basically, the exemption has eaten the rule, right? That’s one of the major things. Another way that the industry just gets away with this is, no one looks. No one is counting. For the government, it’s just out of sight, therefore out of mind. I don’t count it, therefore it doesn’t exist.
I want to bring up two important Earthworks Reports that demonstrate this. Because it might sound outrageous and inflammatory for me to say this but, no, It’s based on what they are doing. One report called Flaring in Texas, A Comprehensive Government Failure, it’s a report that found that 69-84% of Texas methane flares are un-permitted, but they’re still blasting. Another important report is called Fatal Vapors, How Texas Oil and Gas Regulators Cause Avoidable Deaths, again by Jack McDonald and Sharon Wilson. So here, this was an analysis of another really important pollutant that oil and gas dumps into the air which is H2S, hydrogen sulfide. Very dangerous, just a byproduct of the system, right? So, an analysis of over 19,000 wells in the Railroad Commission in the Permian found that over 10,000 wells, 51% of these wells, did not file their required permits to assess and inform the State of the danger their well poses. Those are just two quick facts that demonstrate that the government is just not looking. It’s the Wild West. No one’s looking. We can also see this in the amount of inspectors and the few inspections that actually occur. So, the Texas Railroad Commission which regulates oil and gas, not railroads, right? So they aspire to inspect facilities once every five years. There’s only one inspector for every 1,600 oil and gas facilities. According to their system, it’s humanly impossible for there to be inspectors on the ground. Why? Because they’ve made a decision to say, oh, we’re gonna inspect it once every five years.
Last thing I can go on forever about is how they don’t do this correctly. But, last thing I’ll mention is Leak Detection and Repair Inspections, so LDAR inspections. This is a major enforcement mechanism for keeping these oil and gas sites accountable, monitored. So, under the EPA, what is considered really progressive and aggressive monitoring is, you have LDAR inspections four times a year, quarterly. That’s wildly insufficient. It’s almost an insult for them to say, four times out of the entire year, we’re going to open our eyes. I want to share a quick anecdote here that my colleague Sharon Wilson, who is a senior field advocate. So, she was at an oil and gas site. Found emissions from an operator, Diamondback. She found emissions, she filed the complaints, did the civic duty. And so, Diamondback, the operator, their response to this submission was to say, “Oh, TCEQ please ignore this. This doesn’t matter. Why? Well because we passed our LDAR test two days prior so we’re good for the remaining three months. We’re good. What you saw in the video of the pollution, it just doesn’t count, because we already passed our inspection.” And the TCEQ accepted that. They said you’re right Diamondback, this was totally not pollution.
And so, the only adequate regulation, inspection would be 24 hour opening your eyes, right? Otherwise, it’s pointless. When Sharon and I go out into the field and go up to a site, we point the OGI camera, and we don’t see pollution, our joke is that we are 30 minutes too late. Because if you go to a site on a Monday at 9 AM, that same day in the evening, it can be wildly different. That’s how the state just allows it to happen. Loopholes and not checking.
Courtney Naquin: Yeah, thank you. Um, I like calling them spoiled. I’m sure they wouldn’t want to hear that because they always act like they are always under attack.
Miguel Escoto: Oh my gosh. They’re so spoiled, and then Biden’s in office and they’re like boo hoo for us, boo hoo, we don’t get treated specially. When it’s like, dude, look at the amount of oil and gas you’re pumping out of the ground. You’ve never had it better.
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Courtney Naquin: Since you mentioned earlier about flares, it’s normally odorless, or venting is a mostly invisible odorless gas. But I'm wondering if, when you are out in the fields, if you are noticing, like, transmission lines leak badly in addition to flaring and venting?
Miguel Escoto: Almost every part of the oil and gas production process has emissions. This includes the tanks where they store liquids. This includes flares, obviously. It includes compressor stations. It includes all of these different processes, from when the hole is being drilled in the ground, all the way to when it’s, when gas is being used for a power plant. Like, almost every single part of this process has emissions. That’s part of the problem. But yeah, one of the main conclusions from studying the oil fields that Earthworks has determined is that if you produce oil and gas, you will pollute. There’s no if, ands, or buts. So that’s why the main message here, the most consequential legislation we can pass is stop producing, keep it in the ground.
Some other conclusions that we have identified is that all these emissions are not the bug in the design, they are the feature because of how necessary releases are in their system. Here, I’d like to make a very important distinction between leaks and releases. Leaks are pretty small scaled. They’re accidental, usually, and they account for only 8%, roughly, of the pollution. But what is more common, what we see most, is releases. These pressure releases happen throughout the infrastructure that produces and transports the gas. These are permanent, but there’s no metering to ensure that the releases stay within the permit. So, a lot of this is just self-reported guesstimates by petroleum engineers in the companies. Here’s an example. If we go to a compressor station, the purpose of compressor stations is to compress the gas and push it down the pipeline. Right? But the gas has to be at the same pressure as the pipeline. What we often see is that the compressors release these massive plumes of uncombusted gas routinely. Why? Because it’s a fragile delicate system that has to be well calibrated, and it costs a lot of money for them to do it, so they just don’t do it. Another quick example of these releases are blowdowns. Blowdowns are, for example, when you look at a compressor station at a pipeline. Upstream of that pipeline, they want to do maintenance. They want to do something in the pipeline to fix it, to improve it, whatever. What happens to all of the gas that’s coming down that pipeline? What they do is a blowdown. They just release it into the atmosphere. They just let it be dumped into the sky. And so, these are essential, fundamental, intrinsic parts of the process that demonstrate to us that the industry is too dirty to allow it to continue.
Courtney Naquin: It’s something that, well I'll use the word normalize a lot. But it’s been normalized, but whenever you think about it, like, it's really not cool to let this happen to our air and to our, to our bodies. Yeah, cause like you know, like you said earlier, there’s emissions at every point of fracking, of this part of the industry. And similarly, we had a conversation with two health professionals in our previous episode who said something related in that at every point in this industry of fracking, there are health ramifications. There’s really no good way to do oil and gas. So um, I’m wondering how do you people on the ground, if you know, how do people on the ground feel about venting and flaring? Where are they in the Permian, for example? And are they concerned? Are they aware of the health impacts? What’s, like, the on the ground public opinion or the knowledge that they have?
Miguel Escoto: Yeah, well, it's complicated because there is a toxic relationship that happens between the Permian Basin working class and the oil and gas industry. It’s a complicated relationship. It’s difficult for a lot of people to condemn the entire industry. Why? Because they are either a part of it. It has paid for their kids’ food on the table and it has sent them to college. It is something that's been on the generations throughout, but without a doubt, the impact the human health impact that the industry has burdened on to the Permian Basin community is basically a human rights violation. It’s horrible because, let me give you another statistic here about how much volatile organic compounds, VOC emissions, are being produced here locally. So as I mentioned, VOCs are a byproduct of the production of oil and gas. It's carcinogenic, it causes cancer, it's very dangerous for health. In the Permian region, there is as much pollution of VOCs than all of Houston and Dallas Fort Worth combined. Those less than familiar with Texas, think about how ridiculous that sounds. So, we’re talking about the Permian population which is about 400,000 people, maybe say 500,000 people. There is as much and more pollution there than all of Dallas and Dallas Fort Worth and Houston, which collectively is about 10 million people.So, the per capita pollution is just wild.
The workers that are in the industry are also being hurt disproportionately. We have OGI videos with this camera pointing at workers' catwalks of tanks doing their maintenance where the workers don't have protective equipment. They just have plumes, storms of gas blasting into their face. A lot of workers in this industry die. It is an extremely dangerous position, but that's what happens when you have a community under hostage, where you say you either work with this industry or you don't have anything. Yeah, don’t believe the industry when they say that we as an industry all are happy about this, because the workers who are actually on the ground turning levers, laying down the pipe lines, are not are not exposed to the same way as executives in Houston and Wall Street are exposed. It's a complex issue, but at the end of the day, people deserve to live without cancer in the air. It's that simple. And I don't care if you as an industry executive are going to make less profit. I don't care about that. There are other alternatives than living in this atmosphere that kills you.
Courtney Naquin: Yeah, absolutely. A lot of what you’re saying really rings true to other parts of the fracking cycle including in the Gulf, where people are equally prideful in the work and in the oil and gas industry for very similar reasons. But also similarly, there are people that are like, this industry is harming us and at what point do we say we can’t take anymore. Right. But so moving on from venting and flaring, I would like to switch to abandoned and orphaned wells, if you could explain what they are and why we should care. So, can you also tell me what happens when wells aren’t closed properly?
Miguel Escoto: Sure, so the best way to think of this issue is, if you’re an operator, once you decide to drill a well, that is an eternal process. I’m not exaggerating. The drilling of a well is something that you can just do and then bounce, because that well is fundamentally tied to the water sources of that entire region. So you are placing toxic water chemicals into close proximity to these reservoirs of these water resources that are going to sustain these communities, hopefully, for generations to come, right? So, the crisis, the phenomena of abandoned wells happened, the original sin, basically, is allowing these drilling companies to make profits by extracting oil and gas, and then the state telling these operators, it’s okay if you can’t pay for the eternal process of drilling. It’s okay. It’s alright. Once you lose your productivity, once you lose your peak productivity, you as an operator, you can just sell it off to lower tier companies until eventually it’s bankrupt, and eventually the state has to pick up the tab. And so it is a crisis of power dynamics because, yeah, in a just world, if you are the government, you tell the operator, okay you can drill that well but you have to be damn sure that you’re going to be able to maintain it, to plug it forever -- and I say forever because once you plug in a well, that’s not it, you also have to keep monitoring the site. Why? Because underground, these oil fields is chaos. There is skyrocketing seismic activity because of fracking, and the actual process of fracking itself causes chaos underground, which leads to movement, which leads to casing to break, which leads to previously perfectly plugged wells breaking and allowing toxic chemicals to penetrate into water resources. So, that is a crisis. Basically, the Permian and other oil fields are facing down the barrel of a water crisis. Like, every single well is a ticking time bomb of regional water contamination.
Courtney Naquin: Yikes, yeah, that’s all kinds of messed up. I mean I know that you mentioned this a bit earlier about federal agencies are sort of just okay with that. Um, I guess it's the Railroad Commission of Texas, they would be the agents that are responsible for regulating or ensuring these wells are closed and maintained properly. Is that relationship so fraught that this is how companies are able to get away with leaky wells or what have you?
Miguel Escoto: The way we think of both the TCEQ and the Railroad Commission, their job is not to regulate oil and gas, their job is to justify them. If they were an actual regulator, they would have to occasionally stand up to these companies and say you can't do this because I'm representing the public. That is long gone in those two agencies. Those two agencies are now lobbying wings of the oil and gas industry. So if we want to fix this issue there's going to be, we are going to need a radical transformation of those agencies. We’re going to need the EPA to step in. Even the EPA needs to be radically transformed, right? But yeah, it is unacceptable for the government to allow corporations to have a water crisis of this level in the region.
And I'll share the story of Ashley Watts, a ranch owner. She's a ranch owner in Texas that will go as far as to say “I now feel confident that Chevron killed my mother. I don't know if this land will be habitable when everything is done or when it will be.” That is because of her story of how a well that Chevron left in her ranch was starting to leak again and it has become a massive problem because that leak is seeping into water resources and her mother died from a very, very rare form of cancer that, in all likelihood, was caused by this contamination. And so it's a region wide problem. It is an example of how this industry needs to go away. An upside, if we can call it that, there needs to be work done in these Permian oil fields. There needs to be work done if we want the region to have drinkable water. I don't think that's an option. We need drinkable water, so there needs to be work done plugging in and maintaining these wells. And that can be a form of boomtown communities to envision themselves in a just transition to renewable energy. To envision themselves in something like a Green New Deal because it won't look that much different for them. We're going to need people in trucks going to these oil fields maintaining and plugging wells pretty much forever. It's like radioactive nuclear waste, it's here with us forever so we need to take care of it. And it's going to require a lot of jobs and a lot of those jobs can come from the community itself. That being said, if we want to get out of this hole, we have to stop digging. We have to stop drilling new wells because every well we drill is a ticking time bomb.
Courtney Naquin: Yeah, absolutely thank you. Um, it’s thinking about the job as you mentioned, especially as you said it's a 24/7 monitoring sort of ordeal and knowing, just like, if the boom and bust cycle of the fracking industry would combust or just leave, what would happen to communities there.
Miguel Escoto: All of these geologists, all of these welders, all of the roughnecks, they have a role to play in the just transition. We’d like to think of climate jobs as just installing rooftop solar. It’s not only gonna be that, it's also going to include naturalists and biologists who look at the Permian to restore the land, restore the damage that has been done to ensure the health of the wildlife which in effect ensures our health. But it’s a lot more feasible and tangible than maybe people might think.
Courtney Naquin: Yeah you know this podcast looks at the full fracking cycle and having you on the show today helps hone in on the upstream part of the fracking cycle where the extraction happens. So how do these issues of venting and flaring and abandoned wells tie into the whole cycle? And when people talk about greenhouse gas emissions from export terminals and final use, they really consider the upstream emissions. And we keep asking regulators to consider them but it doesn't really happen. Can you just end with why these upstream emissions are important, why we should take them more seriously?
Miguel Escoto: So if you don't take upstream emissions seriously, you are fudging the numbers in favor of industry. You're just giving them a get out of jail free card. That's not just if regulators are doing that, we have to consider why they are bending over backwards to intentionally give the industry more credit. Here are some numbers as to why. So, there's this really good website called permianclimatebomb.org that I encourage everyone here to check out. It has a lot more of the numbers that I was saying and all of the sources if you don't believe me. I'm quoting here from the report. It says, “Scientists studying methane emissions in the permian basin estimate that as much as 3.7% of gas production is being vented into the atmosphere. At this rate methane emissions in the Permian Basin will emit over 9.5 billion tons of CO2 equivalent by 2050. Those emissions are just waste in the system. This would look like, every day from 2021 to 2050, taking 50 standard mile long trains of coal out into the desert, dumping the coal, and just burning it in a giant pile. This pile would be almost two million cubic feet of coal that would cover two New York City blocks. It would be as tall as a giant sequoia tree. It would fill 150 Olympic swimming pools, you get it, it's a lot of greenhouse gasses being dumped into the atmosphere upstream. So you have to talk about it. It also reminds us of the point of looking at the entire supply chain completely because it is a feedback loop. A way we can destroy all of this is to just stop drilling. Keep it in the ground. And we have to be very cognizant of how industry and their PR campaigns try to obfuscate that fact by focusing on other control technologies. And so the best legislation that's going to work, the best available control technology is keeping it in the ground. No more drilling. To get out of this hole, we need to stop digging.
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Courtney Naquin: At this point, you are all pretty used to hearing from me. However, you haven’t really heard too much from my coworker, Roddy Hughes, who is a campaign representative for the Beyond Dirty Fuels Campaign at Sierra Club for the Permian Basin and Gulf Coast. He’s also the producer for this podcast, so he is a huge asset to the show. And for this portion of the episode, Roddy will be interviewing Cyrus Reed, who is the conservation director and lead lobbyist for the Texas chapter at Sierra Club. I had the pleasure of working really closely with Cyrus whenever I was the communications coordinator at the Texas chapter a few years ago. So, I can say with confidence that Cyrus is a very knowledgeable person about the Texas legislature and how it relates to oil and gas issues in Texas. Cyrus is really important to the environmental movement overall, but especially in Texas. So I hope you enjoy Roddy and Cyrus’s conversation, which just provides more insight to abandoned wells, fracking, and the politics surrounding these issues in Texas.
Cyrus Reed: My name is Cyrus Reed. I use he/him pronouns. I live in Austin, Texas. I work for the state chapter here in Texas, which is called the Lone Star chapter. Wasn’t born here but have been here 30 odd years and been working for the chapter since 2007 and I work on a lot of different issues as conservation director, but a lot of them do come down to energy. You know, where we get our energy from, where we get our electricity from, and some of the impacts on people’s health and our habitats and communities and, ultimately, on our planet because of global warming.
Roddy Hughes: We just had a long conversation with Miguel Escoto from Earthworks about venting and flaring and abandoned wells in the Permian. We wanted to talk with you about the lack of regulations and what needs to happen about uh, to better protect our communities, prevent more harmful greenhouse gas emissions. To start, can you talk about some of the regulatory agencies, Railroad Commission, and their role in regulating the oil and gas industry, especially venting and flaring, well closure?
Cyrus Reed: Sorry to cut you off. It gets complicated pretty fast. It’s complicated because in Texas, we actually have two different state agencies that deal in some way with air pollution, venting, and flaring. Probably the most important is the Railroad Commission. You’re probably thinking to yourself, Railroad Commission? What do railroads have to do with oil and gas production? Well, absolutely nothing. The Railroad Commission was started 100 years ago as an agency that regulated railroads. They quickly became an agency that regulates mining and particularly oil and gas mining. The name, in my view, is purposefully confusing to the public. So the public doesn’t know who regulates oil and gas in Texas, but it is the Railroad Commission. It’s composed of three elected commissioners. Their role is to grant the permits for oil wells and gas wells and, in Texas regulation under the Natural Resource Code, we have a basic ‘thou shall not waste oil and gas in its production,’ which should mean that we don’t allow flaring and venting, except we do. And we do because, as in all good regulations, there are lots of exceptions. So as an example, when you drill a well in Texas, you are allowed to vent all that gas and all the stuff that comes out of the Earth for the first ten days, that’s allowed. Once you’ve formed the well and capped it and it’s starting to produce, you are allowed to file for an exception to the Railroad Commission, which allows you to flare off that gas. So if you’re an oil producer and aren't particularly interested in taking advantage of the gas that you’re also producing, in Texas you can just flare it by applying for an exception to the Railroad Commission. And they almost always grant them, almost no matter what. And so, I think between when the fracking boom really took off in, say, 2009, in that period, up until recently, you know, we had over 29,000 exceptions granted.
Now all flaring’s not created equal. You know, you can flare in a manner that destroys most of the gas, meaning that the fracked gas, meaning that the methane isn’t, you’re not getting much methane out into the atmosphere. Unfortunately, the experience on the ground, I’m sure Miguel talked about this, a lot of those flares are improperly operating, or maybe they never applied for the permit and they are doing it anyway or, even worse, maybe they’re just venting it directly. And we have plenty of evidence of that including from the Railroad Commission itself when they’ve done enforcement actions. Lots of operators not following the law and doing things badly. So that’s, that’s Railroad Commission.
Texas Commission of Environmental Quality is Texas's version of the EPA basically. It’s our regulatory body that is supposed to protect our health from air pollution, from water pollution, from land pollution. They also have a role to play, because wells of a certain size are required to get air permits. But TCEQ doesn’t have any specific regulations on methane. So, any regulations we have on Texas regarding methane pollution really only come from the federal government and whatever EPA is requiring. Back when Obama was president, the EPA did for the first time start to regulate methane, but it was in a very limited fashion. It only covered new wells. So, both in 2012 and 2016, there were some air quality regulations that were put forth by the EPA that Sierra Club and others supported. Very limited, only on new wells, really only focused on the well itself, not associated equipment. And those did require some controls and some monitoring of methane pollution. When Trump came into office, he immediately put those rules on hold. There were multiple regulatory processes and lawsuits. At the end of the day, those regulations are still on the books. But now, with Biden in office, we do have a real opportunity to expand those regulations. The Biden administration has publicly said, we are gonna take action on methane pollution. They put out an initial proposal. We’re still waiting for a final proposal. We were hoping it would’ve been out by now. But It’s probably gonna be, frankly, after the election. Those regulations are really important because for the first time they would regulate not only new oil wells, oil wells and gas wells, they would also regulate a lot of the associated equipment including the transmission, some of those pipelines that ultimately carry oil and gas to wherever it’s going. So those would be incredibly beneficial, especially in states like Texas, where our regulators do such a poor job regulating air emissions. So, we are anxiously awaiting for the proposal to drop, and we’re anxiously waiting to see what’s in that proposal. It’s very, very, very important that it covers all oil and gas wells. So, not just the high producers, cause frankly a lot of the high producers have less problems than the low production wells. The low production wells are where we see a lot of these problems. Why? Because the producers, they’re just getting oil out of the ground and they don’t want to spend a lot of money, so they let stuff vent and flare or fugitive emissions leak from their equipment. So, it’s really important that I cover that. It’s important that I include community monitoring, so communities can look for themselves at the emissions that might be impacting them. And it’s incredibly important that we require pneumatic devices. Make sure there’s no bleed. Nothing can get out of them. Those are three things that are incredibly important to the Sierra Club and many other organizations that are working on this.
Roddy Hughes: Really, really interesting but before I ask you about air monitoring and that, I-- why are we wasting so much gas? Why, why venting and flaring? The narrative right now is that with the Ukraine war, that Europe needs gas and, you know, we’re building all these LNG export terminals on the Gulf coast. Why would we be wasting so much gas in the Permian?
Cyrus Reed: I’ll go back to the corporations that produce oil and gas. Oftentimes they might be interested only in the oil because, depending on the price, it’s more valuable. And so, it may be in their economic interest to not invest, to capture that gas and instead let it flare or vent. So that’s one. And then, two would be just politically, at least in Texas, oil and gas has an outsize role in influencing public policy in Texas. Why do I say that? Look at the Railroad Commissioners who regulate oil and gas and who’s funding them. It tends to be the oil and gas industry. And when you have associations, you know, whatever TEXOGA, Texas Oil and Gas Association. There’s a Permian Basin Association, there's an independent producers group as well. They tend to go to the lowest common denominator. Remember basic algebra, or is that algebra, whatever that math is. You have kids. They are not looking at what the leading industry is doing in terms of cleanliness. They’re gonna represent the low producers, anybody who’s not really interested in investing more to make the production process cleaner. So they’re influencing folks like the commissioners, folks like the governor, who appoints the commissioners to the TCEQ, and influencing the legislature. We have tried. We have tried the legislature to get some basic methane controls in Texas. We’ve had study bills, we’ve had regulatory bills. We’ve had bills that said, let’s give the industries some time. Thou shall not flare except for emergencies after 2025. We didn’t even get a hearing. Why is that? Because our ideas were bad? No, because the oil and gas industry went to the chair of those committees and said, you will not have a hearing on this issue, we do not wanna hear about it. It’s not in our interest. So it’s economic and it’s political, but it ultimately gets back to the power of the industry in Texas and not wanting to move forward. Doesn't mean there aren't individual companies who aren't doing things, they are. It just means, as a whole, the industry is not interested in doing this.
Roddy Hughes: Fascinating. Just for the record, we outsource all math tutoring, so I’m not involved in the math education of my children. Really interesting. Let's do talk about air monitoring in the Permian. With all the venting and flaring that’s going on, surely, TCEQ, EPA, whoever, has got just massive amounts of air monitoring to make sure that community members and people out there are not exposed to too much and that we’re limiting the amount of greenhouse emissions in the region. Isn’t that true, Cyrus Reed?
Cyrus Reed: Absolutely not. Under the federal Clean Air Act, TCEQ is required to have a five year monitoring plan and also do an update each year on their basic, you know, how they’re monitoring air pollution in different areas of the state. And I’ll say, in some of our urban areas, Houston, Dallas, Beaumont, Port Arthur, we have some pretty good basic monitoring, especially for ozone pollution which is ground level smog. There is not a single ozone monitor anywhere in west Texas. So, not in Midland, not in Odessa, not in Lubbock, not in Andrews County, not in Big Spring, none. The public interest groups, for years, have been fighting with TCEQ that the requirements are met because Midland Odessa is becoming more urbanized and has lots of population growth so it meets the criteria for having ozone monitors. None. Another issue is SO2, Sulfur dioxide emissions. When you have fossil fuels, when you have fossil fuels with high sulfur content, you’re gonna get sulfur dioxide as well as gas processing and other processes out there. There is one sulfur dioxide monitor in Big Spring, which is far away from Midland Odessa. And think about all those trucks, all those old diesel trucks, going back and forth, taking water or oil and gas all over the Permian Basin. There is no particulate matter monitoring in the Permian Basin. That is all TCEQ not advocating for the money to do that, even if the community is advocating for it. Why? If you don’t monitor and see there’s a pollution problem, then you don’t have to regulate. So, is the Permian Basin busting through health based standards for sulfur dioxide and ozone? I think absolutely it is, having been out there a lot. I think it is. We don’t know because we don’t have the monitoring out there. And groups like EIP have done lots of analysis based upon pollution from permits, particularly on sulfur dioxide actually, showing that the region likely does bust through sulfur dioxide health based standards. But again, we don’t have the monitors out there to prove it. And, frankly, EPA, whether it’s under a Democratic administration or Republican administration, they tend to not step into Texas’s business. So they have never stepped in and required this. We’re gonna be asking them again, cause this is getting, it’s outlandish. I was at a hearing of the Environmental Regulation Committee about a week ago in Odessa. The Chair is from Odessa. They had invited testimony after invited testimony saying we don’t have a problem out here with their pollution. Well that's easy to say when you don't monitor for it. They clearly do. Obviously we’ve had deaths there as well, from hydrogen sulfide workers getting killed from high levels of hydrogen sulfide, which we don’t regulate very well in Texas. So, there are air pollution problems out there. We’re just not monitoring for it.
Roddy Hughes: EIP is the Environmental Integrity Project.
Cyrus Reed: They’ve done a great study. They did a great study a few years back on the problem of sulfur dioxide pollution in west Texas, and the need for controls and monitoring.
Roddy Hughes: Fascinating.
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Roddy Hughes: A lot of your work is with the Texas legislature. Um, and I’ve followed you through the last session and heard about your years of hard work there. A lot of our meetings, you’re actually calling in from some random office at the legislature, wearing your suit. We do have, Texas legislature convenes every couple years. And we have a new session starting early next year. Are there any bills, any priorities that you think have a chance of moving through the legislature that might impact flaring and venting and some of these other air quality issues? What are some of your priorities or approaches to this upcoming session?
Cyrus Reed: Yeah, I’ll say if I were to make a bet, I have a better chance of getting the Biden administration to approve strong methane regulations than I do to get anything approved by the Texas House, the Texas Senate, and signed by the governor, whoever the governor is. Ultimately, it’s a much harder road to get something through the legislature. That being said, I think we have the opportunity of getting something done on flaring because it’s been such an issue because industry itself has said, we’re committed to flare less. So there’s sort of a narrative in Texas that industry wants to do something on flaring. They've created a methane coalition. But I do think a bill that would phase out the use of flaring in the next few years has some potential. Especially if it’s combined with um, we have a program called the Texas Emission Reduction Plan which has pots of money. Maybe if it's combined with some money to help industry monitor etcetera etcetera. I think there’s some potential to do that. The other area where I’d say I feel like there is some potential to do something is on reform of our well plugging and bonding programs.
You know, we have, in Texas we have a lot of experience plugging wells. Been doing it for years. We have a well established program that does plug orphaned wells and we have a pot of money to do that. But we’re not keeping up with the growth so every year the legislature gives some money to the Railroad Commission from these funding sources to plug wells. It’s about a thousand wells a year, which sounds like a lot, except we’ve got a lot of wells. And so, right now there’s about 8,000 wells on the list that have already been approved to be cemented and capped. But there’s a lot more wells behind it. So there’s a process to get a well from being no longer producing to where it’s considered abandoned, to where it’s considered orphaned. And so, hopefully a lot of those wells, the industry will do what they’re supposed to do and plug their own wells. That's actually what’s supposed to happen right? They're required to do that. But if they belly up or leave town or leave out the back door, we the public are left with those orphaned wells.
And so, we need to take advantage of this new pot of federal money that's available, but we also need to reform our system in a couple of ways. One is, we have not changed our bonding requirements since 1989. That seems like yesterday to me, but it’s actually a long time ago. [laughs] And so, the amount that oil and gas companies are required to put up as financial assurance to make sure they plug their wells is only 15-16% of the actual cost of plugging the wells. Why? Because back in 1989, it was a lot cheaper. And we now know a lot more and it’s, it’s, frankly, more complicated today to plug these wells. There’s different kinds of wells, horizontal drilling, vertical drilling. You know. There’s these different factors that make it more difficult. So, we need to update those standards. So we need to look at the bonding levels and also look at the process of how a well goes from a producing to non producing to abandoned to orphaned. Because what's happening is the Railroad Commission keeps giving these extensions to low producing wells. So they’re not getting on the list. Then companies go belly up and then they leave us with that mess. We need to stop those extensions and get a well into the process sooner rather than later. Cause otherwise we’re left holding the bag.
Roddy Hughes: Thank you for getting into that. I was actually going to move to abandoned wells and orphaned wells next. You actually answered a lot of things I wanted to talk about. But I do want to back up for a second. How, it's not hard to understand why a company would want to just abandon a well, right, because it costs money to close these things. Can you talk a little bit more about what is the process? How do one of these companies go from digging a well, extracting their fossil fuels, to that well then being abandoned and closed. Like Occidental just leaving these things, abandoning these or is there a process where they actually hand them off to other companies, sell them? Can you talk more about that?
Cyrus Reed: Yeah, it’s complicated but um…when you get a permit with the Railroad Commission to dig a well, whether it's exploratory or actually production, you are required to put up some financial assurance, some bonding provisions. Again, they are very, very, very low and modest. When the well stops producing and is no longer operating, they are supposed to let the Railroad Commission know, okay this well is now, you know, no longer operating. And there’s supposed to be a period in which they’re supposed to plug that well. But as I mentioned, what frequently happens is the company will, say, file for an extension and say, well, you know, it’s low producing and it's not active right now. But I might want to restart it, you know, a year from now so I’m not gonna do the full plugging.
What often happens particularly with small companies is, there’s a lot of mergers and acquisitions and people buying out wells. So, somebody may purchase these wells or a fly by night company may purchase them and say, oh i have a new technology, i’m gonna restart, i'm gonna re-inject the wells and gonna restart em. Maybe that company then goes belly up or leaves and we can’t find ‘em. Meanwhile, there's a well that’s been abandoned, not yet declared orphaned and so there’s a process with enforcement and with the Attorney General's office where they’re trying to find these people, bring them to court and make them plug the well. But sometimes it doesn’t work out. But again, part of the problem is the policy we have of continually extending the time that companies have to plug these wells. Sort of giving them a grace period. Particularly in volatile, you know, industry like fossil fuels, oil and gas. We the people can be left with those wells eventually. I don’t know if I explained it well but --
Roddy Hughes: No, that was great. One more question about the legislature. You just mentioned ‘we the people’. What role can people take in legislative work in impacting state policy? You know, if you’re a mom or a dad worried about your kids out in Odessa, Midland, what can you do to get involved in that legislative process and influence some of these policies?
Cyrus Reed: Yeah, I think the first thing is, even though, as I said before, industries, companies, oil and gas companies, other industries, electric utilities, do have a lot of power at the legislature. Why? It’s in their economic interest. They hire lobbyists. They give campaign contributions. That doesn't mean that the people can’t also influence what happens at the legislature. So, I would say the most important thing is to form a relationship. So, if you're in Odessa, you should probably get to know the staff and your representative. Find out who your representative is. You can go to the main capitol website in Texas and find out who represents you, who’s your senator, who’s your representative. Call them. Schedule a meeting. Get to know them. Then I would say, we are more powerful together, as my Sierra Club t-shirt says, powerful together. So, working with actual organizations that have hired staff like myself, Earthworks, other organizations, Commission Shift. You know, they’re, people are getting paid to work on these issues. I think it’s really important to become a member of those organizations, working with them. Volunteering is a great way to try to influence the legislature. And then as an example, other groups do this too. Lonestar chapter, we will have, you know, webinars and training coming up on the legislative session, how to get involved, how to follow the bills that are of importance, in our case, to the environment, climate change. So we do a lot of that work. I would encourage people to get involved locally, but also with statewide organizations. Any person can send written comments to legislators and legislative committees. The Texas House actually has a way that you can comment on any bill that has a hearing in a written way. If you have the wherewithal to get to Austin, Texas, and get to a public hearing, it is open to the public. Now, warning. Sometimes you can go to a hearing that’s scheduled to begin at 9:00 AM. They don't get to your bill. They go to the House floor for twelve hours, they come back at 1:00 AM. You may need to have some good travel plans because they may not get to you until late in the evening, put it that way. That’s why all the major industry have hired lobbyists. That’s why Sierra Club has myself and some others. You really need to be nearby and be flexible sometimes to make comments. But you can certainly form a relationship with your representative or state Senator and start to talk to them about your priorities and then work with statewide organizations to see that those priorities get done.
Roddy Hughes: So what you’re saying is if you intend to participate in one of these hearings, you need to pack an extra lunch.
Cyrus Reed: Correct, because the capitol cafeteria doesn’t have really good food and it’s really expensive.
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Courtney Naquin: After these interviews, I keep hearing a phrase from Kayley Shoup, a New Mexico based Permian organizer that we actually interviewed in the first episode. She said, “we have to solve the Permian problem in order to solve the climate crisis in this country.” It seems like a daunting problem, don’t get me wrong, it’s an enormous issue that’s deeply woven into the political landscape of these oil and gas states. But there’s lots of opportunities to get involved, and tell your state regulators and politicians that this is unacceptable. Keep up with the Lone Star chapter and with Earthworks, and even a new nonprofit, Commission Shift, which focuses on reforming the Railroad Commission of Texas to actually get it to do its job and to help us solve the Permian problem.
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Shoutout to the trusty podcast crew, Roddy Hughes, the producer of this podcast, Thomas Walsh, our editor, Natalie McLendon, our project manager, and of course, our friendly musical cowpoke, Purly Gates for her music. See y’all next time!