ACC AM 9/14

Congressional Hearings

1. The Impacts of Federal Policies on Energy Production and Economic Growth in the Gulf

   Sep 15, 2015 | Committee on Natural Resources

   Location: 400 Royal Street, New Orleans, Louisiana / 9:00 AM
2. Oversight of the Cause, Response, and Impacts of EPA’s Gold King Mine Disaster

   Sep 16, 2015 | U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works

   406 Dirksen Senate Office Building/ 10:00 AM
3. Pipeline Safety: State and Local Perspectives

   Sep 18, 2015 | U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, & Transportation

   Location: Montana State University, Billings Library - Room 148/ 10:00 AM

Industry and Association News

4. (ACC Mentioned) New Strength For ANGA Seen Likely in Possible Merger With API

   Sep 11, 2015 | Natural Gas Daily

   By Jamison Cocklin
   
   
   Negotiations about a possible merger of America's Natural Gas Alliance (ANGA) and the American Petroleum Institute (API) are said to be ongoing, according to several sources that work in the oil and gas industry and have knowledge of both organizations.
5. (ACC Mentioned) Composite Leading Indicator Suggest Mixed Economic Trends, ACC Report Says

   Sep 11, 2015 | Chemical Engineering

   By By Scott Jenkins
   
   
   The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD; Paris; www.oecd.org) released its composite leading indicator (CLI) for July, and the results, discussed in the latest Weekly Chemistry and Economic Report from the American Chemistry Council (ACC; Washington, D.C.; www.americanchemistry.com), suggest both positive and negative trends for the global economy.
6. Leading Battery Maker Cuts Staff, Delays Shipments

   Sep 11, 2015 | E&E PM News

   By Katherine Ling
   
   
   A leading manufacturer of advanced grid-scale energy storage batteries has encountered a technical glitch, causing a delay in shipments and staff cuts in a further setback for the industry, which has seen many startups fail.

Chemical Management News

7. (ACC Mentioned) Styrofoam Containers, To Go?

   Sep 12, 2015 | The San Diego Union Tribune

   By By Roxana Popescu
   
   
   Styrofoam food boxes — with their distinctive, crunchy sound, their light yet meaty texture that seems especially engineered for holding hot foods — are poised to go away in Solana Beach.
8. Huge Potential Liability Emerges for BASF

   Sep 11, 2015 | BNA Environment Daily

   By By Jef Feeley and David Voreacos
   
   
   When BASF SE acquired Engelhard Corp. nine years ago for $5 billion, executives unknowingly inherited a ticking legal time bomb.
9. New Use Rule Under Way for Paint Remover

   Sep 11, 2015 | BNA Environment Daily

   By By Pat Rizzuto
   
   
   Consumer uses of a third paint-removing chemical would be restricted under a proposed significant new use rule the Environmental Protection Agency is developing.
10. ECHA to Update Hazardous Substance Threshold Guidance

    Sep 11, 2015 | BNA Daily Environment Report

    By By Stephen Gardner
    
    
    The European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) confirmed Sept. 11 that it will update guidance for companies that sell in the European Union or import products that contain hazardous substances in the wake of an EU Court of Justice ruling on notification thresholds.
11. Hazmat Hauler's Intent Irrelevant for RCRA Fine

    Sep 11, 2015 | BNA Environment Daily

    By By Steven M. Sellers
    
    
    A commercial hauler can't avoid compliance with Oregon's solid waste permit and manifest requirements by claiming ignorance of the hazardous nature of its cargo, the Oregon Court of Appeals ruled (Oil Re-Refining Co. v. Envtl. Quality Comm'n, 2015 BL 292409, Or. Ct. App., No. A149365, 9/10/15).

Chemical Security News

12. Chemical-Discharge Case Against DuPont Goes to Trial

    Sep 13, 2015 | The Wall Street Journal

    By By Nicole Hong
    
    
    An Ohio woman seeking compensation for health problems allegedly caused by water contamination from chemical giant DuPont Co. is headed to trial this week, and its outcome could affect thousands of claims filed by other U.S. residents in a long-standing case.
13. DuPont to Face First Trial Over C-8 Exposure

    Sep 14, 2015 | Reuters (In New York Times)

    By By Jessica Dy
    
    
    Chemical giant DuPont Monday will face the first trial in litigation from residents near one of its plants in West Virginia who have accused the company of sickening them by emitting a toxic chemical that leaked into their drinking water
14. Obama Retaliation Could Spur China to Call off State Visit

    Sep 13, 2015 | The Hill – E2 Wire

    By By Cory Bennett
    
    
    Sanctions punishing China for hacking U.S. companies could drive Beijing to cancel President Xi Jinping’s upcoming U.S. visit, according to experts and former administration officials.

Energy and Environment News

15. (ACC Mentioned) Shale-fed Chemical Boom Still Soars Even As Oil Falls

    Sep 13, 2015 | San Antonio Express News

    By By Jordan Blum
    
    
    Bhavesh Patel said he took a big risk in joining chemical giant LyondellBasell during the “dark days” in 2010 when the company was struggling through bankruptcy.
16. (ACC Mentioned) Ethane Crackers Are Cropping Up

    Sep 13, 2015 | The Intelligencer

    By By Casey Junkins
    
    
    It remains to be seen if Belmont County will ultimately land the $5.7 billion PPT Global Chemical ethane cracker, but six similar projects already are under construction along the nation's Gulf Coast, with Marcellus and Utica shale gas scheduled to provide at least a portion of their feedstock.
17. Proposed LNG Plants Would Harm Economy, Critics Say

    Sep 11, 2015 | BNA Environment Daily

    By By Nushin Huq
    
    
    Critics of three proposed liquefied natural gas facilities in Brownsville, Texas, told federal regulators the plants would threaten wildlife habitats and the local economy, which relies heavily on tourism.
18. E&E Daily's Northey Talks Politics, Momentum on Export Bill

    Sep 11, 2015 | E&E PM News

    Members of Congress returned to Washington this week with a clear focus on energy policy. How are efforts to lift the ban on crude oil exports shaping up in the House and Senate? On today's The Cutting Edge, E&E Daily reporter Hannah Northey discusses this week's House vote and the political maneuvering happening on both sides of the Hill on exports.
19. Parties Agree on Dismissal of Fracking Ban Lawsuit

    Sep 11, 2015 | BNA Environment Report

    By By Nushin Huq
    
    
    A lawsuit by the Texas Oil and Gas Association against Denton, Texas, related to a local hydraulic fracturing ban and a drilling moratorium was dismissed by a state district court after the two parties agreed that the matters before the court were moot (Tex. Oil & Gas Ass'n v. City of Denton, Tex. Dist. Ct., No. 14-08933-431, agreement filed 9/14/15).
20. Shale Producers Hurt by Oil Rout Face Added Iran Supply

    Sep 11, 2015 | BNA Environment Daily

    By By Asjylyn Loder
    
    
    Shale oil producers already awash in a supply glut face added crude as early as next year after an agreement to ease sanctions on Iran cleared a Senate obstacle.
21. How Shale Oil can Kill

    Sep 14, 2015 | E&E Energywire

    By Mike Soraghan
    
    
    When Joe Morales found him, Jim Freemyer was standing over the hatch, dazed and miming the gestures of measuring the crude oil tank with nothing in his hands.
22. Examiners: Not Enough Proof Injections Cause Earthquakes

    Sep 11, 2015 | BNA Environment Daily

    By By Nushin Huq
    
    
    Texas Railroad Commission examiners concluded evidence does not support that EnerVest Operating's disposal well in North Texas is contributing to seismic activity in the region and recommended that the company be allowed to keep its permit, the commission said Sept. 10.
23. Ohio Groups Launch Crowdfunding Campaign Ahead of State Supreme Court Battle

    Sep 14, 2015 | E&E Energywire

    By Pamela King,
    
    
    Grass-roots organizers and government officials are girding for a legal battle over local control of Ohio's hydraulic fracturing industry.
24. Oil Companies Tap New Technologies to Lower Production Costs

    Sep 14, 2015 | Wall Street Journal

    By By Alison Sider and Erin Ailworth
    
    
    The depressed price of oil has spurred a new wave of innovation in energy exploration. When a barrel of oil fetched $100 or more, energy companies were focused on drilling wells and pumping crude just as fast as they could. But now that prices have settled around $50 a barrel, companies are focused on efficiency—getting the most petroleum for the least amount of money. And many are turning to advanced technology for help.
25. Committee Markup of Crude Oil Export Bill Expected Sept. 17

    Sep 11, 2015 | BNA Environment Daily

    By By Ari Natter
    
    
    Legislation that would lift the 40-year-old ban on most crude oil exports is expected to be marked up by the House Energy and Commerce Committee Sept. 17, lobbyists tracking the bill told Bloomberg BNA.
26. Green Groups Push for Halt to Coal, Oil and Gas Leasing on Public Lands

    Sep 14, 2015 | E&E ClimateWire

    By Benjamin Hulac
    
    
    A coalition of more than 400 citizens, in a letter sent this morning, called on President Obama to halt the sale of coal, oil and natural gas leases on public lands. During his seven years in office, they said, Obama has "given new voice" to urgent climate threats and overseen critical steps to cut planet-warming emissions.
27. Write-Downs Abound for Oil Producers

    Sep 13, 2015 | Wall Street Journal

    By By Ryan Dezember
    
    
    U.S. oil-and-gas producers have written down the value of their drilling fields by more in 2015 than any full year in history, as the rout in commodity prices makes properties across the country not worth drilling.
28. State Officials Question Clean Power Plan Approach

    Sep 11, 2015 | BNA Environment Daily

    By By Anthony Adragna
    
    
    The Environmental Protection Agency cannot show any quantifiable climate change gains from its Clean Power Plan, and it overly relied on health benefits from other pollutant reductions to make a case for the regulation, Texas and Ohio officials told a House subcommittee Sept. 11.
29. EPA Issues More Power Plant Emissions Allowances To Implement CSAPR

    Sep 11, 2015 | Inside EPA

    By By Stuart Parker
    
    
    EPA is publishing more allowances for power plant emissions for new utilities as it seeks to implement its Cross-State Air Pollution Rule (CSAPR) air pollution trading program following years of litigation over the regulation, building on a related recent rule that allocated a first set of emissions allowances for power plants.
30. RGGI Carbon Allowance Price Hits Record High

    Sep 11, 2015 | BNA Environment Daily

    By By Gerald B. Silverman
    
    
    Carbon allowances sold by the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) reached a new high of $6.02 each in the latest auction, triggering a cost-containment reserve mechanism, RGGI announced Sept. 11.
31. Emissions Reduction Targets Bill Falters in California

    Sep 11, 2015 | BNA Environment Daily

    By By Carolyn Whetzel
    
    
    California State Sen. Fran Pavley (D) has abandoned efforts during this legislative session to pass legislation (S.B. 32) that would set statewide greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets beyond 2020.
32. Northeast Cap-and-Trade Program Nets $2.2 Billion Since 2008

    Sep 13, 2015 | AP (In the Washington Post)

    The latest auction in the Northeast’s cap-and-trade program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants brought in $152 million to be distributed to the nine participating states including New York.
33. EDF's Symons Says EPA Likely to Change Methane Plan Before it's Final

    Sep 14, 2015 | E&E Energywire

    Last month, U.S. EPA released its proposed rule for the regulation of methane emissions and volatile organic compounds for new and modified oil and gas operations.
34. Greens Sue Obama Admin Over Utah Lease

    Sep 11, 2015 | E&E PM News

    By Manuel Quiñones
    
    
    An environmental group sued the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service today for approving the Utah lease of 40 million tons of coal.
35. GOP Gropes for Way to Kill Climate Rule

    Sep 13, 2015 | The Hill – E2 Wire

    By By Devin Henry
    
    
    Republicans and industry groups are intensifying their search for a way to beat back President Obama’s new climate rule for power plants.
36. Funding Bill Expected to Be Energy, Environment Rider-Free

    Sep 11, 2015 | BNA Environment Daily

    By Ari Natter
    
    
    Short-term government funding legislation that could be brought to the House floor as soon as this week likely will be free of energy and environment policy riders, a senior House Appropriations Committee member told Bloomberg BNA.
37. Fossil Fuel Use Endangers Antarctic Ice, Study Says

    Sep 11, 2015 | BNA Daily Environment

    By By Nora Macaluso
    
    
    The unabated burning of fossil fuels eventually could melt enough Antarctic ice to raise sea levels to a point where cities like Hong Kong, Hamburg and New York would be underwater, according to a study from the Carnegie Institution for Science.
38. Lawmaker Seeks Impeachment of EPA Chief

    Sep 12, 2015 | Washington Examiner

    By By Daniel Chaitin
    
    
    A Republican lawmaker from Arizona wants the head of the Environmental Protection Agency impeached.
39. Oil-Sands Producers Seek New Ways to Get Their Crude

    Sep 13, 2015 | The Wall Street Journal

    By By Chester Dawson
    
    
    High costs and pressure to shrink a vexing environmental footprint are finally pushing western Canada’s oil-sands producers out of the steam age.

Transportation News

40. (ACC Mentioned) PTC Showdown Looms for Government, Railroads

    Sep 11, 2015 | Argus

    The largest railroads serving North America this week warned Congress and federal regulators of widespread freight and passenger rail disruptions next year if the 31 December deadline to implement positive train control (PTC) is not extended.
41. (ACC Mentioned) Drone Trespassing Bill Shot Down In California

    Sep 11, 2015 | Information week

    By Thomas Claburn
    
    
    A California bill to outlaw trespassing drones has been vetoed by Governor Jerry Brown.
42. Senate Subcommittee to Hold Pipeline Field Hearing

    Sep 11, 2015 | BNA Daily Environment

    A Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation subcommittee will hold a pipeline safety field hearing Sept. 18 in Montana, the subcommittee announced Sept. 11. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration Administrator Marie Therese Dominguez will be a witness at the Surface Transportation and Merchant Marine Infrastructure, Safety, and Security Subcommittee hearing in Billings, Mont.

Full Text of Stories Below

Congressional Hearings

1. The Impacts of Federal Policies on Energy Production and Economic Growth in the Gulf

   Sep 15, 2015 | Committee on Natural Resources

   Location:  400 Royal Street, New Orleans, Louisiana / 9:00 AM

   Return to headline | Return to top

2. Oversight of the Cause, Response, and Impacts of EPA’s Gold King Mine Disaster

   Sep 16, 2015 | U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works

   Location: 406 Dirksen Senate Office Building/ 10:00 AM

   Return to headline | Return to top

3. Pipeline Safety: State and Local Perspectives

   Sep 18, 2015 | U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, & Transportation

   Location: Montana State University, Billings Library - Room 148/  10:00 AM

   Return to headline | Return to top

Industry and Association News

4. (ACC Mentioned) New Strength For ANGA Seen Likely in Possible Merger With API

   Sep 11, 2015 | Natural Gas Daily

   By Jamison Cocklin

   Negotiations about a possible merger of America's Natural Gas Alliance (ANGA) and the American Petroleum Institute (API) are said to be ongoing, according to several sources that work in the oil and gas industry and have knowledge of both organizations.

   It's unclear where the talks stand, or what kind of organization would emerge if two of the nation's leading industry interest groups are combined. While neither ANGA nor API denied the possibility of a merger, they did not confirm it and had no comment. But sources believe ANGA would likely fold into API -- an older more established organization with a network that extends throughout the country to reach nearly all corners of the oil and gas industry.

   "It is going to happen. I understand it could be as soon as October," said one industry source who works for an unrelated interest group. "It seems like a situation where everyone's in the [emergency room] saying what can I save," he said referring to the decline in oil and gas prices and the effect it's had on the industry and its representatives across the country.

   Rumors of an ANGA-API merger come at a time of industry retrenchment as producers have been slashing budgets, cutting their workforces and searching for ways to stretch the cash and credit they have on hand. But while the price of oil has fallen precipitously from more than $100/bbl to less than $50/bbl in a little more than a year, natural gas prices have experienced a more sustained decline as markets and infrastructure have failed to materialize for the abundant supplies generated by the shale boom.

   U.S. natural gas benchmark prices have tumbled consistently from a peak of more than $12/MMBtu in 2008 to less than $3/MMBtu this year. ANGA itself has suffered as a result, sources said. Formed in June 2009 at a time when natural gas producers barely had a voice on Capitol Hill for the growing influence of their products, the organization's revenue and membership has declined (see Daily GPI, Sept. 8, 2009).

   At one point, ANGA had more than 20 members, but that number has since fallen to 17. While the organization still collects dues from some of the nation's largest independent gas producers such as Chesapeake Energy Corp., XTO Energy Inc. and Anadarko Petroleum Corp., others, such as Marcellus Shale heavyweight Range Resources Corp., have recently departed.

   "I would see this as a benefit for ANGA to get in and access API's strength and stability. I think [API] offers a more established network of relationships," said one source with extensive experience working in the upstream sector and more recently on public policy and legal affairs. Like others interviewed for this story, he agreed to discuss the possible merger anonymously due to its sensitivity and for fear of alienating colleagues.

   "The natural gas-specific sector is extremely important, but it's difficult because the market really isn't taking off. It is what it is," he said. "The members that help generate gas-specific lobbying efforts or education are finding it more and more difficult to allocate revenue -- they're peeling an onion that's getting thinner and thinner, not fatter.

   "If you look at the net to these mid-level independent gas producers, they're running a pretty fine line. As much as it's shortsighted to cut public perception-type budgets and initiatives, unfortunately they're not a revenue producer in the long term."

   While ANGA focuses solely on the natural gas industry -- primarily its producers -- API has more than 625 members working in the oil and gas supply chain, oilfield services, production and midstream, among other sectors. It was founded in 1919 and is considered to wield significant power on Capitol Hill and through its affiliates in states across the country.

   "In the current environment, API's members are focused on improving efficiencies," said spokesman Carlton Carroll. "API and ANGA have a history of collaborating on issues of importance to U.S. gas producers, and we expect that will continue. We have no comment on internal organization discussions."

   ANGA reported total revenue from its dues-paying members and other investments of about $57 million in 2013, the latest year for which data is available, according to its Internal Revenue Service Form 990 for tax-exempt organizations. That was down from $77 million in the prior year. The API reported total revenue of $225.5 million in 2013 on its Form 990.

   "It could be a negative for the gas-only members, but there are fewer of them than when ANGA got started," said one industry consultant of the possible merger. "And the pressure to reduce expenses would be the driving factor in this commodity price environment."

   Sources also said a merger between both organizations would make sense given their leadership. Martin Durbin, who was named ANGA's CEO in 2013, previously served as API's executive vice president for a short time under its current CEO Jack Gerard. Gerard also previously served as CEO of the American Chemistry Council at a time when Durbin was that organization's vice president of federal relations.

   "I'm not surprised. Given that Marty Durbin has been there just over two years, and not done much new in that time, and with members dropping or likely requesting scaled down dues, he would have been smart to approach his old boss at API [regarding] synergies," the consultant said.

   Another source that works closely with ANGA said that in recent years rumors of a merger between the organizations have been swirling. He added, however, that he has not received any internal correspondence regarding a merger that would change his business relationship with the organization.

   "It's not the first time I've heard this," the source said. "It's sort of insider baseball, but there's been a lot of chatter from the circle about how ANGA is not fulfilling its mission, how it doesn't have as many members and rumors have been swirling."

   The shale boom and a new abundance of natural gas served as one of the main drivers in establishing ANGA six years ago. While the organization focuses heavily on liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports, transportation, power generation and supply reliability, its mission also crosses well with API's. API has put a strong emphasis on LNG and crude oil exports as well as jobs, the economy and emission standards, or energy policy, like ANGA has.

   Sources also acknowledged that it wouldn't be the first time two trade groups have merged, noting that it's not uncommon for some to serve a temporary purpose. Sources added that some local trade organizations, particularly in the gas-rich fields of the Appalachian Basin, have approached them searching for ideas about how to create more value for their membership.

   "I think a lot of the smaller organizations and industry groups are having some pretty hard times too managing their membership base, which is their cash flow," one source said. "Some events have been canceled or scaled back, and I think that factors into the canvas for this type of merger and consolidation stuff."

   For the first time in recent memory, the U.S. Energy Information Administration forecasted in August that oil and gas production in the nation's seven major shale plays would decline slightly in September (see Shale Daily, Aug. 7). Given the circumstances, and ANGA's initial charge to raise awareness about the nation's abundant natural gas, a merger with API might be the next logical step, said the source with upstream and public policy experience.

   "Once that educational hurdle is jumped, maintaining the message becomes more and more difficult and some organizations are often short-lived. You don't always have that 'rally around the flag, chase it up the mountain' consensus that formed the original basis for an organization."

   API and the Independent Petroleum Association of America at one time were the only organizations representing oil and gas producers. The Natural Gas Supply Association (NGSA) split off from API in the late 1970s when natural gas deregulation was a prominent issue. NGSA continues to lobby for natural gas among Washington’s lawmakers. ANGA has weighed more heavily toward changing public perception of natural gas, and some would say it has largely achieved its mission.

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5. (ACC Mentioned) Composite Leading Indicator Suggest Mixed Economic Trends, ACC Report Says

   Sep 11, 2015 | Chemical Engineering

   By By Scott Jenkins

   The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD; Paris; www.oecd.org) released its composite leading indicator (CLI) for July, and the results, discussed in the latest Weekly Chemistry and Economic Report from the American Chemistry Council (ACC; Washington, D.C.; www.americanchemistry.com), suggest both positive and negative trends for the global economy.

   The data signal stable growth momentum in the Euro area as a whole, the ACC report says, particularly in Germany and Italy, with growth firming in France.

   The OECD CLI for July suggests stable economic growth in Japan, and firming growth in India.

   “On the other hand, the outlook continues to deteriorate for China,” the ACC report says, with the CLI pointing to a loss of growth momentum there. The CLI also indicates signs of slowing growth in Russia and weak growth in Brazil, the report says.

   The ACC also reported that shale-gas-related investments in the U.S. chemical industry continue. The ACC’s most recent count shows a total of 246 chemical industry projects representing $155.3 billion in the U.S. Sixty-four percent of the total is foreign direct investment, the ACC says. In July 2014, the total stood at 188 projects and $71.7 billion in investment.

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6. Leading Battery Maker Cuts Staff, Delays Shipments

   Sep 11, 2015 | E&E PM News

   By Katherine Ling

   A leading manufacturer of advanced grid-scale energy storage batteries has encountered a technical glitch, causing a delay in shipments and staff cuts in a further setback for the industry, which has seen many startups fail.

   Ambri Inc. is one of the leaders in the race to make affordable energy storage for the grid to shore up intermittent renewables and help smooth out load. The company's technology is a "liquid" metal battery that relies on a molten salt electrolyte -- and costs about one-third of the current cost of lithium-ion batteries.

   The company has had many high-profile investors, including Bill Gates, Khosla Ventures, oil company Total SA and the Pritzker family.

   A faulty "robust high-temperature seal" for the battery is not working and has caused the delay of its first commercial shipments, which were originally set for later this year and early 2016, Phil Giudice, Ambri's CEO, said in a company note. The company is working on a new design of the seal but still must rigorously test it.

   The delay in the shipments has required the company to cut about one-quarter of its staff, or about 14 people, Giudice said.

   "Our reduction in staff and slowed commercialization path will provide us more time to solve the engineering challenges ahead of us before we re-engage in committing to commercial deployment schedules," he said in the note.

   The company has a small manufacturing plant near Boston and was scheduled to test its technology in Massachusetts, Hawaii, New York and Alaska this year.

   Giudice testified at a House Science, Space and Technology Committee hearing in April on the state of the advanced battery market and the importance of federal support. Ambri did some of its original research under a $7 million grant from the Energy Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) program (E&E Daily, April 27).

   Yet there are few resources for overcoming that second, capital-intensive "valley of death" between demonstration and commercialization, Giudice told lawmakers.

   DOE has devoted significant resources to accelerating energy storage research, including the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research based at Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago, as well as a strong program at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

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Chemical Management News

7. (ACC Mentioned) Styrofoam Containers, To Go?

   Sep 12, 2015 | The San Diego Union Tribune

   By By Roxana Popescu

   Styrofoam food boxes — with their distinctive, crunchy sound, their light yet meaty texture that seems especially engineered for holding hot foods — are poised to go away in Solana Beach.

   Last week, its city council voted to draft an ordinance that would ban polystyrene and other non-recyclable or non-compostable food containers. If it’s approved in October, Solana Beach would become the first city in the county to enact such a ban.

   It is the kind of rule that won’t inconvenience consumers, and based on the experience of other cities, businesses will adjust with little trouble, even if they’re not initially on board, said Peter Zahn, the councilman who proposed the idea.

   Polystyrene is on the chopping block because it’s bad for the environment and ubiquitous. That’s especially true of expanded polystyrene, commonly known as Styrofoam, which is popular with merchants and widely used for takeout.

   Expanded polystyrene breaks down into little beads that end up anywhere but in landfills, zero waste and environment advocates said. And when they do end up there, it takes a very, very long time for them to get broken down, unlike much more degradable paper packaging.

   With this proposed ban, which follows a 2012 ordinance that quashed the use of free plastic retail and grocery bags, this laid-back, chic coastal community has the potential to further anchor its place as a regional trendsetter on matters of sustainability.
   

   Zahn thinks people will come around to the idea, just like they did with plastic bags. There were grumbles at first, but now it’s “second nature” for people to bring their own bags, he said.

   Cities up and down the California coast have long banned polystyrene in various forms, joining places such as San Marcos, Texas, and Somerville, Mass., that don’t jump out for their eco-consciousness. Solana Beach’s law was modeled on one in Santa Monica from 2007.

   Cities actually have been behind some businesses on this issue.

   McDonald’s, which just pledged to use cage-free eggs, moved away from those containers in the 1980s and stopped using foam cups for hot drinks a few years ago. Many other food vendors have also stopped using polystyrene, law or no law.

   “This is not a really brand new, kind of foreign idea,” Zahn said of the proposed ban. “It really has been around. It just hasn’t touched our county yet.”

   He’s been receptive to concerns from businesses, which worry that alternative packaging is more expensive. But he said that in considering ways to reduce waste and boost recycling, cutting polystyrene out entirely made the most sense.

   Cary Coglianese, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in government regulation and environment law, said eco-friendly restrictions at the municipal level reflect a change in values.

   “I think there’s long-standing public support for environmental protection,” he said. People are willing to be green, even when it’s not required, he said, so lawmakers are keeping step with social and market priorities.

   “Sustainability is starting to sell. If it’s selling as a matter of the private marketplace, it makes it easier to see it selling politically,” Coglianese said.

   Weighing costs and benefits

   Polystyrene, a kind of plastic, comes in many shapes and densities, including packing popcorn, thin containers that hold yogurt, and the thicker material that’s a vehicle for takeout foods. It’s also used for insulation — think disposable coolers. In its expanded form, it’s a stiff, bulkier type that breaks up into smaller beads.

   There are a couple of problems with the stuff, said Mark Murray, executive director of Californians Against Waste. It hurts wildlife and water quality, and it’s not recyclable, he said. Polystyrene can end up polluting, even after it’s been thrown away, because it’s so light. A bird or the wind can pick up pieces and spread them away from trash cans or landfills, he said. Elsewhere, it’s been noted that it may be carcinogenic.

   Murray’s group is behind a proposed ban on plastic bags in the state, which was enacted but put on hold pending a referendum next year.

   Nicole Capretz, executive director of the Climate Action Campaign, said that while sustainable materials might cost businesses more, they cost society less — less need for landfills, less need for litter cleanups, less impact on the carbon emissions that lead to rising temperatures and droughts, and so on.

   On the other hand, paper packaging, a common alternative to polystyrene, can also be damaging if it’s printed with ink. Those chemicals can leach into their surroundings, according to a 2009 article in Chemical and Engineering News, a trade publication.

   Solana Beach weighed the pros and cons, over about a year. Its mayor and council received letters from two industry groups, and Zahn has been hearing from business owners.

   The American Chemistry Council wrote that singling out one type of product won’t solve the litter problem, and the alternatives aren’t pristine.

   “A polystyrene hot beverage cup requires about 50 percent LESS energy to produce than a similar plastic-coated paperboard cup with a corrugated cup sleeve, and creates significantly fewer greenhouse gas emissions than a similar coated paper-based cup with its corrugated sleeve,” the group wrote.

   The California Restaurant Association said past bans haven’t worked, and alternatives cost two to three times more, hurting places that operate on thin margins — delis, family-owned restaurants, nursing homes and schools.

   “The City of San Francisco banned polystyrene containers, but according to a 2008 litter re-audit conducted for the city, paper cup litter increased after the ban was enacted. Bans may change the composition of litter, but they do not reduce the amount of litter since litter bugs do not discriminate between materials,” that group wrote.

   Solana Beach Environmental Services Manager Dan King said his city plans to work with local businesses and those who wrote to oppose the ban.

   Up the coast, Dana Point approved a polystyrene ban in 2012 after working extensively with local business people to get their thoughts on it.

   “It really went pretty smooth,” said Mike Killebrew, its assistant city manager. “We didn’t have a bunch of people screaming at us.”

   Neighboring cities on two sides, Laguna Niguel and San Clemente, both adopted polystyrene bans before Dana Point did, he said.

   Embracing restrictions

   Like mandatory recycling or water use rules during droughts, banning polystyrene fits in with a growing spate of laws that target the intersection of environmental practices and consumer behavior. These are in a different category from rules that control industries — like pesticides in farming or limiting auto emissions — and focus on what regular people do.

   Among the other things cities have banned, or tried to ban: plastic bags, plastic bottles, aluminum cans, tiny plastic beads that go in toothpaste and lotions, and disposable diapers.

   Coglianese said some regions are more interested than others in green measures, but overall, the needle has shifted.

   “There’s certainly parts of the country, like California, where those kinds of bans are spreading like wildfire,” he said. It could be that California is seen as a legislative trendsetter and states tend to follow, or that other states first want to see whether California succeeds or fails, he said.

   A few lunchtime diners at a strip mall in Solana Beach were happy to say goodbye to Styrofoam.

   Phyllis Kopp, a lawyer, is less convinced. The notion that cities are interfering with people’s daily lives to protect the environment makes her uneasy. She’s a Democrat, she said, and proud of Solana Beach’s progressive legacy, but she believes “in being green with boundaries.” She’s not convinced that banning Styrofoam would be beneficial and would like to see more evidence.

   She was against the bag ban, too, initially, but now she embraces it. She stopped herself on the way into a Vons, laughing. “I forgot my bags in the car,” she said. “I’ve got a whole collection of bags.”

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8. Huge Potential Liability Emerges for BASF

   Sep 11, 2015 | BNA Environment Daily

   By By Jef Feeley and David Voreacos

   When BASF SE acquired Engelhard Corp. nine years ago for $5 billion, executives unknowingly inherited a ticking legal time bomb.It all began decades ago over the seemingly mundane industrial product talc, used in everything from wallboards to handling auto tires on the factory line.In 1983, Engelhard quietly settled a lawsuit after its officials testified in depositions that talc produced by a company mine contained cancer-causing asbestos. All evidence was sealed, and Engelhard and its law firm repeatedly said in subsequent lawsuits spanning more than two decades that the company's talc was asbestos-free.It wasn't until 2009, after BASF assumed Engelhard's liabilities, that another picture began to emerge. A former Engelhard scientist testifying in a lawsuit filed by his own daughter said he was told that “asbestos in trace amounts was found in talc,” and the company's legal department “told us to purge our records” relating to the mine. A co-worker testified about test results in the 1970s showing the presence of asbestos in the talc.Those revelations pulled back the curtain after a quarter century, setting off a fight over what Engelhard knew about its talc, how its lawyers may have acted and whether thousands of people around the U.S. should have the right to reopen or bring new lawsuits, this time against BASF, for asbestos illnesses. It also raises fundamental questions about whether justice is possible if companies and lawyers hide evidence in civil litigation.“This has really opened a Pandora's Box,” said Tom Bevan, a lawyer in Boston Heights, Ohio, who represented hundreds of people who sued Engelhard in the 1990s and is involved in a current federal case against BASF. “I wouldn't want to be a BASF shareholder right now with potentially billions of dollars in liability coming down the pike because of the lies of a company it bought.”BASF Trying to Distance Itself From BehaviorBASF, based in Ludwigshafen, Germany, faces about 300 lawsuits related to the talc. The company, which is the world's largest chemical maker and had $74.3 billion in revenue last year, has tried to distance itself from the alleged behavior of Engelhard and its former law firm, Cahill Gordon & Reindel LLP. Plaintiffs' lawyers say as many as 10,000 potential cases related to Engelhard's talc could be reopened.The company, which hasn't disclosed any cost estimates over talc-related asbestos cases, disputes Bevan's assessment of possible damages. “This is baseless speculation by plaintiffs' lawyers,” spokeswoman Robin Rotenberg said in a statement. “As a matter of policy, BASF does not speculate” on potential liabilities.Cahill spokeswoman Lynn Tellefsen declined to comment, and the firm said in a federal lawsuit that it behaved properly. BASF replaced the firm in 2010.BASF has gained 1.4 percent in Frankfurt trading since the start of this year, valuing the company at 65 billion euros ($73 billion). Germany's DAX index has risen 4.1 percent in the same period, while the Stoxx Europe 600 Chemicals index added 5.3 percent.Plaintiffs' lawyers and legal experts vary in their estimates of potential damages against BASF.Could be Costly“There's no question in my mind that it might cost BASF billions of dollars to put these cases behind them,” said Erik Gordon, a University of Michigan law professor.Others aren't so sure. While Jonathan George, an attorney at Waters, Kraus & Paul, which has sued the company, said “there is potential substantial liability by BASF,” he contends billions of dollars is “unrealistic.”One case, which seeks class-action status, claims Engelhard and Cahill engaged in fraud and fraudulent concealment by lying about the talc, while hiding and destroying evidence. The company and law firm have consistently denied wrongdoing in court papers.Another case, pending in state court in New Jersey, seeks to force BASF to produce dozens of documents about the talc that the company maintains are confidential.The company “has not found that exposure to Engelhard's talc caused injury due to asbestos contamination,” Rotenberg said.Recent LitigationBASF has said in recent litigation that some asbestos existed in Engelhard's talc but denied it caused injuries. The talc was used in wall board, joint compound and auto body filler. Tires workers used it to help grip products.But did they inhale asbestos that came from Engelhard's mine? BASF says that will be hard to prove. The company also says it will be hard to convince a judge to accept a class action.“Plaintiffs face serious obstacles in attempting to certify a class based on events that took place in thousands of different asbestos cases litigated in different courts and at different points in time by different lawyers,” BASF lawyers said in a May 4 court filing.Former workers blame Engelhard's talc for ailments ranging from mesothelioma, a cancer linked to asbestos, to lung ailments. The average mesothelioma case is worth about $4 million, says Mark Lanier, a veteran Texas plaintiffs' lawyer who has tried more than 50 asbestos cases. Asbestos settlements may ultimately cost corporations and insurers more than $265 billion, according to the Rand Institute, a nonprofit research group.Dying DaughterBASF first had to defend the litigation practices of Engelhard and Cahill in 2009, when Donna Paduano sued in state court in New Jersey over her mesothelioma. Paduano, who never worked at Engelhard, claimed she was exposed to asbestos from her father's clothes or visits to his workplace.A deposition by her father, former Engelhard scientist David Swanson, triggered an investigation by lawyers who uncovered test results showing the presence of asbestos in Engelhard talc more than 25 years earlier. Paduano has since died, as has Swanson, who had lung cancer but took no legal action. Swanson's testimony stunned Paduano's lawyer, Christopher Placitella.“It was the first time any of us had heard” the company knew its product contained asbestos, he said. “I was afraid that this guy would turn out to be a nut and that my whole case would go down the toilet.”Instead, BASF settled the lawsuit with Paduano's family before her death, and Placitella began a years-long quest to understand what Engelhard and Cahill did and what evidence they may have hidden or destroyed.The coverup began, Placitella claims, after a lawsuit filed in 1979 blamed the mesothelioma death of a tire worker on Engelhard talc. Engelhard settled in 1983, and the pre-trial evidence, including testing that showed varying levels of asbestos from a Vermont mine that the company ran since 1967, was sealed—a common practice in corporate litigation.‘Document Retrieval.'The company closed the mine in 1983 and later issued a memo titled, “DOCUMENT RETRIEVAL — DISCONTINUED OPERATIONS,” instructing Engelhard staff to collect documents for discard relating to several companies, including the talc mine's operator. The memo said the company would retain copies of “documents to be preserved.”In recent years, BASF and its new law firm, Kirkland & Ellis LLP, have “expended an extraordinary amount of resources to locate Engelhard documents—including those maintained in a warehouse by Cahill—to find former Engelhard employees and to learn the facts about the Engelhard legacy talc operations,” BASF's Rotenberg said. They provided “tens of thousands of relevant documents” to plaintiffs' lawyers, she said.At the same time, BASF is opposing an application for class-action status filed by the survivors of six people who died of asbestos-related disease. And it's fighting cases by workers who claim that an auto-body filling compound they used exposed them to asbestos from Engelhard's talc. In a personal injury case that ended in mistrial when the plaintiff died in 2013, BASF lawyers said that no Engelhard mine worker ever got ill from the company's asbestos.Lawsuit Filed Against BASFPlacitella filed a federal lawsuit in New Jersey against BASF on behalf of six plaintiffs. Should the case receive class-action status, he says he intends to share evidence of the alleged cover-up with thousands of victims who may move to reopen their asbestos cases in state courts ranging from Pennsylvania to Kentucky. Those plaintiffs had previously sued, but their cases were either thrown out or settled for nominal sums.A federal judge initially dismissed Placitella's case on procedural grounds, but in a reversal last year, a three-judge appellate panel in Philadelphia revived his fraud and fraudulent concealment claims.In reinstating most of the plaintiffs' claims, the panel didn't rule on the merits of the case, returning it to U.S. district court for further proceedings. But it also spelled out its disdain for the sort of conduct described in the complaint.If indeed “they rigged the game from the beginning,” the judges said, “how then can calculated false and misleading statements serve the truth-seeking function of the litigation? According to the complaint, BASF and Cahill were not mischaracterizing the facts; they were creating them.”

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9. New Use Rule Under Way for Paint Remover

   Sep 11, 2015 | BNA Environment Daily

   By By Pat Rizzuto

   Consumer uses of a third paint-removing chemical would be restricted under a proposed significant new use rule the Environmental Protection Agency is developing.In its July action initiation list of regulations under development, which the EPA updated Sept. 2, the agency said it is developing a proposed significant new use rule, or SNUR, that would classify any use of n-ethylpyrrolidone, or NEP, as a paint remover in consumer products to be a new use subject to the agency's review.If consumer paint removal applications of n-ethylpyrrolidone were deemed new uses of the chemical, the EPA would require any company intending that particular use of NEP for that particular application to notify the agency 90 days ahead of time. The 90-day oversight is designed to allow the EPA to determine whether the planned use might pose an unreasonable risk to people or the environment that should be controlled or prevented.The agency already is working on a proposed regulation to address, restrict or ban certain consumer uses of methylene chloride and n-methylpyrrolidone (NMP), which also are solvents that strip paints and other coatings. The EPA has met with state agencies, small businesses, environmental justice organizations and other interested parties about those possible rules (104 DEN A-3, 6/1/15).N-ethylpyrrolidone can replace NMP in many applications, according to BASF information about the chemical said.Trying to Prevent ProblemsThe NEP rulemaking isn't specifically related to rulemaking the agency has under way for NMP, an EPA spokeswoman told Bloomberg BNA Sept. 11 by e-mail.As the agency researched NMP, however, it determined that n-ethylpyrrolidone raised similar toxicological concerns and could be used to substitute for NMP in some applications, the spokeswoman said.“A SNUR on this chemical will ensure that we have an opportunity to review these uses before they begin,” the spokeswoman said.Ashland Inc., BASF Corp. and Stahl USA are among the companies that made n-ethylpyrrolidone in or imported it into the U.S. in 2011, the most recent year for which companies had to submit production information to the EPA.The EPA database didn't provide national production volume information, but Ashland and BASF are among the European chemical manufacturers of n-ethylpyrrolidone that registered it in Europe for an annual production of 1,000 metric tons (2,204,600 pounds) or more.Uses, Health ConcernsUses of NEP described in safety data, technical and other information from various companies are to make adhesives, paints and printing inks, paint strippers and pharmaceuticals and to make a special solvent to clean metal, glass and plastic.Like some other solvents, potential health concerns reported in safety data sheets included NEP being corrosive to eyes.N-ethylpyrrolidone also could harm the development of laboratory animals exposed in the womb when the exposures were high enough to be toxic to the dams.Potential harms NMP posed to developing organisms were among the reasons the agency decided some uses of that paint stripper should be controlled.

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10. ECHA to Update Hazardous Substance Threshold Guidance

    Sep 11, 2015 | BNA Daily Environment Report

    By By Stephen Gardner

    he European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) confirmed Sept. 11 that it will update guidance for companies that sell in the European Union or import products that contain hazardous substances in the wake of an EU Court of Justice ruling on notification thresholds.The ECJ ruled Sept. 10 that an obligation for companies to notify the agency if chemicals that are considered “substances of very high concern” (SVHCs) under the EU's REACH regulation appear in their products in volumes of more than 0.1 percent by weight, applies not only to complex products, such as automobiles, but also to their component parts (176 DEN A-10, 9/11/15).The ruling, which overturns previous ECHA advice on the issue, will mean that potentially many more importers into the EU of products, or “articles” in REACH terminology, will be caught by thenotification provision.Under Article 7 of REACH (Regulation No. 1907/2006 on the registration, evaluation and authorization of chemicals), SVHC-in-article notifications to ECHA must include information on the substance identity and classification and a description of its use in the article.ECHA issued guidance in April 2011 that said the notification obligation applied only to complex products and not to their component parts. The chemicals agency acknowledged, however, that some EU countries believed the obligation also should apply to component parts and that companies could voluntarily report uses of SVHCs in components (68 DEN A-2, 4/8/11).France's Conseil d'Etat in March 2014 asked the ECJ to rule on the issue after two business federations challenged the French interpretation of the threshold, which was that it should apply at the component level (30 DEN A-8, 2/13/15).‘Article’ ClarifiedThe ECJ ruling applies to the 163 substances that are currently on the ECHA SVHC list. Substances of very high concern are candidates for bans in the EU because of their hazardous properties.ECHA told Bloomberg BNA in a statement that the court ruling meant that the 0.1 percent threshold applied to components of a complex article “as long as these [component] articles keep a special shape, surface or design, or as long as it does not become waste.”The chemicals agency said it would revise REACH guidance and the parts of its website that provide information on the issue, but could not say when the revision would be completed.Current guidance would not be withdrawn because it “includes also sections which provide advice on other issues which are not impacted by the 0.1 percent threshold,” ECHA said.Notification ExemptionRuxandra Cana, a partner with attorneys Steptoe & Johnson LLP in Brussels, told Bloomberg BNA Sept. 11 that the ruling would affect companies importing or supplying articles in the European Union that incorporate SVHCs in ways that are not covered by the safe-use descriptions in the relevant REACH registration dossiers.Under REACH, suppliers of substances subject to registration must include information in their registration dossiers setting out how substances can be used safely in different applications.The chemicals agency confirmed that importers of articles “do not have to notify ECHA if the substance has already been REACH registered for the same use.”It added, however, that “in practice, it appears to be difficult” for importers of articles into the EU to find out if their uses of an SVHC are covered by the registration dossier and therefore to “assess whether they can actually use this exemption provision.”ECHA has received the relatively low number of 335 notifications of SVHCs in articles. Cana said the exemption for SVHC uses already covered in registration dossiers was the “most important factor in the low number of notifications.”Case-by-Case AssessmentCana said for uses of an SVHC to which the exemption does not apply “it remains a question of assessment on a case-by-case basis.”Importers of articles into the EU would have to look at component parts to see if they meet the definition of an article, which is that it keeps “a special shape, surface or design” within a complex article, she said.Lucas Bergkamp, a partner with Hunton & Williams LLP in Brussels, told Bloomberg BNA that the court ruling would “add to the compliance burden and make the analysis more granular and complicated” of whether or not notifications should be submitted.The judgment was “not a pragmatic decision,” he said.The European Commission, the EU's executive arm, said in a statement to Bloomberg BNA that it “acknowledges the ECJ ruling and will analyze it in detail, working with ECHA and member states to implement the judgment and consider the revision of guidance.”

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11. Hazmat Hauler's Intent Irrelevant for RCRA Fine

    Sep 11, 2015 | BNA Environment Daily

    By By Steven M. Sellers

    A commercial hauler can't avoid compliance with Oregon's solid waste permit and manifest requirements by claiming ignorance of the hazardous nature of its cargo, the Oregon Court of Appeals ruled (Oil Re-Refining Co. v. Envtl. Quality Comm'n, 2015 BL 292409, Or. Ct. App., No. A149365, 9/10/15).The state's solid waste program, which operates in compliance with the federal Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (42 U.S.C. §§6901-6992K), has no intent requirement for waste haulers, the court said Sept. 10, rejecting an appeal by Oil Re-Refining Co.The ruling affirmed an $118,800 fine imposed by the state's Environmental Quality Commission against ORRCO for transporting hazardous waste produced by Absorbent Technologies Inc. without a proper manifest.The company also lacked a permit to dispose of the water and methanol mixture generated by ATI, the unanimous court said.Assistant Attorney General Jamie Contreras, of the Oregon Attorney General's Office, represented the commission in the appeal. She declined to comment on the decision Sept. 11 but told Bloomberg BNA that ATI was also assessed a civil penalty for “failing to perform a hazardous waste determination and for illegally disposing of hazardous waste.”A request for comment from ORRCO's counsel wasn't successful Sept. 11.Case Dealt With Civil LiabilityRichard Stoll, of Foley & Lardner in Washington, D.C., told Bloomberg BNA Sept. 11 he wasn't surprised by the court's holding on the intent issue because the case dealt with civil, rather than criminal, liability.“If the State had attempted to impose criminal liability without showing the defendant knew the waste was hazardous that would have been an entirely different kettle of—rotten—fish,” said Stoll, who focuses on federal administrative and environmental law.In 2004, ORRCO transported and disposed of nine loads of a water and methanol mixture created by ATI's manufacture of starch-based soil additives. No manifest accompanied the loads, as required by 40 C.F.R. §263.20(a)—a RCRA provision adopted under Oregon law—nor did ORRCO have a site permit to dispose of the waste as required by O.R.S. 466.095(1)(c), according to the decision.The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality assessed a civil penalty against ORRCO for the violations in 2009, and the commission affirmed, imposing a $118,800 civil fine.Water/Methanol MixtureThe commission ruled the water/methanol mixture was hazardous waste, that ORRCO lacked the proper site permit and that the company accepted hazardous waste without a manifest.ORRCO said it had no knowledge the cargo was hazardous and that requiring it to “second-guess” ATI about its waste unfairly shifted the burden of proof.The commission disagreed, finding a hauler's intent irrelevant for purposes of a civil fine. ORRCO had an independent duty to accept hazardous waste only if ATI provided a proper manifest for the cargo, and it also was responsible for disposing of the waste only with an approved site permit, the commission said.ORRCO appealed, and the Oregon Court of Appeals affirmed.Civil, Criminal RCRA Cases ComparedRCRA, and Oregon's EPA-approved waste disposal program, place the burden on waste generators to accurately identify the waste they produce, but that doesn't relieve transporters of their duty in RCRA's “cradle to grave” approach to the safe disposal of hazardous waste, the court said.The manifest imposes an independent responsibility on each actor in solid waste disposal by ensuring that “hazardous waste and all transporters and facilities accepting the waste are continuously tracked and held accountable by signing the manifest,” the court said.Because the manifest is part of a transporter's obligation under RCRA, the court said the civil fine doesn't shift from waste generators to “blameless third parties,” as ORRCO urged.The company's assertion that a related U.S. Department of Transportation regulation (29 C.F.R. §171.2(f)) imposes an intent requirement on hazardous waste haulers—and therefore should be applied here—gained no traction. The EPA expressly declined to adopt a similar provision in implementing RCRA regulations, the court said.Judge Rex Armstrong wrote the opinion, joined by Judges Lynn R. Nakamoto and James C. Egan.The Bell Law Firm represented Oil Re-Refining Co.The Oregon Attorney General's Office represented the Oregon Environmental Commission.

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Chemical Security News

12. Chemical-Discharge Case Against DuPont Goes to Trial

    Sep 13, 2015 | The Wall Street Journal

    By By Nicole Hong

    An Ohio woman seeking compensation for health problems allegedly caused by water contamination from chemical giant DuPont Co. is headed to trial this week, and its outcome could affect thousands of claims filed by other U.S. residents in a long-standing case.

    The federal civil trial in Columbus, Ohio, will focus on 59-year-old Carla Bartlett, a Guysville, Ohio, resident who says she suffered kidney cancer as a result of a toxic chemical discharged by a DuPont plant in West Virginia into the drinking water of surrounding areas.

    DuPont has denied liability for her illnesses.

    Ms. Bartlett’s case is the first of about 3,500 personal-injury claims filed against DuPont to head to trial, with jury selection expected to begin Monday.

    The original class-action lawsuit was filed in 2001 by thousands of residents living in Parkersburg, W.Va., or near its plant there.

    DuPont reached a settlement with the group in 2004 that included an agreement to pay for water filtration systems and a medical monitoring program to determine whether C-8 caused any adverse health effects.

    Ms. Bartlett’s case was selected to act as one of the bellwether trials that will determine how DuPont should proceed against the other individual plaintiffs, lawyers said.

    Ms. Bartlett’s lawyers allege in court documents that DuPont researchers knew about the potential toxicity of C-8—a chemical used to make Teflon products—since as early as the 1960s but failed to disclose the information to communities where DuPont plants were located.

    Her lawyers claim DuPont misled the public about the health consequences of C-8 and even increased its usage despite knowing its effects.

    DuPont also refused to install readily available technologies that could have reduced the amount of C-8 emitted into the air or water, Ms. Bartlett’s lawyers alleged.

    In an emailed statement, a spokesman for DuPont said the company believes Ms. Bartlett’s exposure to C-8 “was insufficient to cause health problems.”

    DuPont’s lawyers also have said in court documents that DuPont couldn’t have foreseen any potential health risks to Ms. Bartlett because of limited medical and scientific knowledge available to the company at the time.

    The company has worked with regulators and voluntarily created a global program to phase out the use of C-8, although the chemical “has been safely and widely used by many companies for decades,” DuPont’s spokesman said.

    After a more than seven-year study, an independent panel of scientists found a likely link between C-8 exposure and six diseases, including kidney cancer and thyroid cancer, allowing plaintiffs with these diseases to file individual claims against DuPont.

    Separately in 2005, DuPont paid $16.5 million to the Environmental Protection Agency to settle allegations that the company hid information on the health and environmental risks of C-8. DuPont said it didn’t admit any liability as part of the settlement.

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13. DuPont to Face First Trial Over C-8 Exposure

    Sep 14, 2015 | Reuters (In New York Times)

    By By Jessica Dy

    Chemical giant DuPont Monday will face the first trial in litigation from residents near one of its plants in West Virginia who have accused the company of sickening them by emitting a toxic chemical that leaked into their drinking water.

    Carla Marie Bartlett is among the approximately 3,500 plaintiffs who have sued DuPont in federal court in Ohio, saying they contracted one of six diseases linked to perfluorooctanoic acid, known as PFOA or C-8. Bartlett said she developed kidney cancer from contaminated water.

    Bartlett's will be the first case to go to trial, in an early test of potential liability for the allegedly decades-long leak. A second trial will start Nov. 30.

    While DuPont is the named defendant, a recent spin-off of its performance chemicals segment, Chemours Co, will cover Dupont's potential liability, according to a Chemours spokeswoman.

    The lawsuits center on DuPont’s Washington Works plant in Parkersburg, West Virginia, where the company used C-8 as a processing aid to make products like Teflon non-stick cookware.

    Plaintiffs say DuPont used C-8 at the plant since the 1950s and continued even after learning that it was potentially toxic and that it had been discovered in nearby drinking water supplies in Ohio and West Virginia.

    DuPont spokesman Daniel Turner said in a statement that knowledge about C-8 has evolved over the past 15 years and that the company has worked with regulators, employees and nearby residents to assess and address health and safety concerns. The company said it has phased out use of C-8 in recent years.

    In 2001, residents brought a class action against DuPont over C-8 exposure. DuPont settled in 2004, agreeing to fund medical monitoring programs and install new water treatment systems. It also agreed to convene a panel of scientists to determine whether any diseases were linked to C-8.

    That panel concluded there was a probable link between C-8 and six diseases: kidney and testicular cancer, ulcerative colitis, thyroid disease, pregnancy-induced hypertension and high cholesterol.

    Class members with one of those diseases then individually sued DuPont. The company agreed not to challenge whether C-8 can cause those diseases, but plaintiffs still must prove it is to blame for their individual illnesses.

    DuPont said it believes Bartlett’s exposure to C-8 was insufficient to cause health problems, and that other factors, like obesity, may be to blame for her cancer.

    A lawyer for Bartlett did not return requests for comment.

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14. Obama Retaliation Could Spur China to Call off State Visit

    Sep 13, 2015 | The Hill – E2 Wire

    By By Cory Bennett

    Sanctions punishing China for hacking U.S. companies could drive Beijing to cancel President Xi Jinping’s upcoming U.S. visit, according to experts and former administration officials.

    The Asian power is increasingly anxious about the potential of economic penalties ahead of what’s seen as an important summit for the future of the U.S.-China relationship.

    The Chinese right now are getting very concerned because they understand this will create embarrassing optics around the visit for them,” said Samm Sacks, China analyst at the Eurasia Group, a political risk consulting firm, who has advised government agencies on Chinese tech policy.

    While some experts and former White House cybersecurity officials are wary the administration will aggravate Beijing just days before Xi lands in Washington, current officials have privately indicated sanctions may be imminent.

    The Obama administration is trying to staunch the rise of China-based cyberattacks pummeling American companies and government agencies. In recent months, the White House has grown more vocal in its public condemnation of Beijing’s cyber espionage, recently calling out China in the White House’s updated National Security Strategy for hacking the U.S. private sector.

    Looming penalties are seen as the next step in that progression.

    “If they don’t announce the sanctions soon,” Sacks said, “it makes the Obama administration look weak.”

    But when those penalties hit is a major question.

    Many see little upside to timing the sanctions this close to the meetings. After months of anticipation, such a move would eliminate any chance of a worthwhile dialogue on cybersecurity at the summit and compound the inevitable blowback, policy specialists agreed.

    “You’re not going to get any better chance to talk to them than right now,” said Jason Healey, a former director of cyber infrastructure protection at the White House. “If I were Obama, I would want some running room.” 

    Healey and others believe the rumors are meant simply as a message to the Chinese delegation as it prepares to make the trip stateside.

    “My sense was that the leaks were happening to try and create some kind of pressure on the Chinese as they come into the summit, to get some type of traction with them,” said Chinese cyber policy expert Adam Segal, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

    Others have heard the leaks were not intentional, and came from hard-liners within the administration who want to press forward with sanctions.

    Either way, the U.S. is in a rare position to apply cybersecurity pressure on China. Many believe the White House has less to lose than its counterpart during the upcoming summit.

    Within the Obama administration, “there’s a tolerance of having a bad visit,” Sacks said.

    Beijing officials are more concerned about the international community’s perception of the meetings, foreign policy experts agreed.

    “They want to send the signal about [Xi’s] arrival on the international stage,” Segal explained.

    That gives the U.S. fleeting leverage.

    Pressure is also mounting on the Obama administration to take a stand against China on hacking since the devastating hacks at the Office of Personnel Management, which exposed over 20 million government workers’ sensitive data.

    Beijing is widely believed to to have ordered the digital assault, although the White House has not publicly blamed China.

    “We obviously have to show some real strength and resolve,” Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) told The Hill. “We're going to have to start laying down the law and come up with some kind of response on that.”

    GOP presidential candidates, including front-runner Donald Trump and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, have pressured Obama to take a hard line on China during the summit. Walker even called on Obama to cancel the meetings as punishment for China's recent decision to devalue its currency.

    Both the right and left have also bashed the administration for what some say is a feckless approach to cybersecurity.

    “They have no policy,” Senate Armed Forces Committee Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz) told The Hill. “We need to have a policy as to how to address the issue.”

    The White House in April attempted to strengthen its hand with an executive order giving the Treasury Department power to levy sanctions on individuals or entities behind cyberattacks or cyber espionage.

    Essentially, the penalties would freeze these targets’ assets in the U.S. financial system and banish them from doing business with American companies.

    If the administration does slap Chinese firms these punishments next week, it would be the government’s first time wielding its new tool.

    The move would trigger a major backlash from Beijing.

    Xi might even refuse to show up to the long-hyped summit, which both sides have been building toward since February.

    “I have heard from some sources in China that it’s not out of the question he would not come,” said Bonnie Glaser, a senior adviser for Asia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

    Sacks estimated there was roughly a 15 percent chance China would squash the summit in retaliation for hacking sanctions.

    More likely, several experts said, is that the Chinese delegation finds a way to express disapproval once it arrives in the United States, similar to Xi’s refusal last year to stay at the designated resort during a meeting with Obama in California.

    But policy specialists cautioned that unveiling the hacking sanctions in the coming days is both unwise and unlikely. The timing, they say, would be inconsistent with the administration's approach to China so far, and only exacerbate the fallout from the sanctions.

    “The Obama administration is trying to walk this line between wielding a more forceful message on cyber, while still keeping the larger message that the two sides need to have this candid, constructive relationship,” Segal said.

    The U.S. will likely use the summit to delineate the scope of the upcoming sanctions, detail the evidence and rationale behind them, and give the Chinese delegation a heads up about when they will hit.

    When the Justice Department last year indicted five members of the Chinese military for hacking, China claimed it was blindsided and pulled out of a joint cybersecurity working group with the U.S.

    But regardless of timing, the punishments will have ramifications for U.S. businesses. China hasbeen weighing a series of counterterrorism laws and banking technology regulations that the business community and foreign governments have condemned as protectionist. Obama and his cabinet have been lobbying heavily for concessions and delays.

    Those negotiations will end immediately once the hacking penalties come down, experts agreed.

    “Any type of compromise on those is going to come to a halt,” Sacks said.

    It’s a concession the White House has come to terms with, she added.

    “National security has been a priority in thinking about this approach, and less the business and economic consequences.”

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Energy and Environment News

15. (ACC Mentioned) Shale-fed Chemical Boom Still Soars Even As Oil Falls

    Sep 13, 2015 | San Antonio Express News

    By By Jordan Blum

    Bhavesh Patel said he took a big risk in joining chemical giant LyondellBasell during the “dark days” in 2010 when the company was struggling through bankruptcy.

    As a senior vice president, he soon received the task of leading widespread layoffs and plant closures around the world. Five years later, Patel is the CEO overseeing $4 billion in planned spending for a rapid succession of expansion projects along the Gulf Coast by 2020, including additions to LyondellBasell’s Channelview complex.

    This petrochemical boom began over the past decade, as natural gas prices fell when new technology boosted production from dense shale formations. Patel and others say projects are continuing even though falling oil prices, also related to the shale boom, are putting a drag on the Gulf Coast economy.

    Natural gas is both raw material and fuel for petrochemical production, and the industry’s expansions have made the part of Texas the birthplace of many products exported to China and the rest of the developing world.

    BUSINESS

     

     LyondellBasell CEO Bob Patel walks through LyondellBasell’s plant in Channelview. LyondellBasell acted quickly to expand its capacity and get a head start on other companies building new facilities that won’t start up until 2017 or later. Shale-fed chemical boom still soars even as oil falls Paul McGuff was hospitalized five years after he was severely burned when his P-51 Mustang caught fire. Through tragedy, veteran McGuff stayed optimistic Juratoys Sardines Fishing Game is being recalled. MSP Recall 0914 The HealthCare.gov website unveils the final rates for next year’s health insurance plans on Oct. 10; the open enrollment period starts Nov. 1. MSP Calendar Personal Finance While the labor participation for women 25 to 54 fell to 73.7 percent this summer from 75.5 percent in late 2007, the drop has been sharper for men in that age group — to 88 percent from 90.9 percent at the end of 2007. At its peak in the mid-1950s, labor participation for men in their prime working age was nearly 98 percent. Many working-age men not rejoining workforce Sabien Colvin, 23, a Sam Houston college student who worked in production at Blue Bell from 2008 to 2013, was disassembling a machine for cleaning when it unexpectedly turned on, slicing off parts of three fingers on his left hand. After his parents complained to OSHA, the agency delivered a scathing report and fined the company for having virtually no program for locking out machines during maintenance, a federal requirement since 1987. Colvin received a couple thousand dollars in worker's compensation, but nothing else from Blue Bell. Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2015, in Huntsville. ( Marie D. De Jesus / Houston Chronicle ) The dirty secrets of Blue Bell’s production Remi Oldham, a geophysics graduate student at Southern Methodist University, runs a cable to connect the seismometer to communications interface equipment housed in the orange metal box in Willow Park. Although SMU researchers have linked disposal wells to seismic activity, Texas Railroad Commission investigators say there is insufficient evidence to connect them. Regulator can’t link well to quakes

    “Those of us who have been in this business for 30 years would never have imagined Texas and Houston to be the big export hub for petrochemicals,” said Exxon Mobil Chemical President Neil Chapman, noting there had been little petrochemical growth in the region for at least 15 years.

    The American Chemistry Council counts 243 announced projects with a cumulative investment of $147 billion from 2010 to 2023. More than 60 percent comes from foreign investment and a small majority of projects remain in the planning stage. Global chemical demand is expected to double from 2000 to 2040, but stay flat in the U.S.

    Texas alone accounts for 99 of the projects with total value of $48.2 billion, and most of those are in Southeast Texas, including Houston, Corpus Christi and Beaumont. That means 15,800 direct new jobs in Texas — not counting construction jobs — and 67,000 nationwide, the council projects.

    Patel, who goes by “Bob,” visited the control room for the $300 million Channelview expansion shortly before it fired up last month. It eventually will produce 250 million pounds annually of ethylene — the primary building block of most plastics.

    “It’s great to see the expansions and all the new shining steel,” Patel, a chemical engineer, told the workers.

    He’s overseeing a rapid turnaround for a once struggling company that has hired about 500 people and plans to bring on another 250 — mostly plant operators — soon.

    Patel, a native of India whose family moved to the U.S. when he was a child, knows what tough times are like and he insists the company will not overbuild and will avoid sizable layoffs during downturns.

    “We’re directing the company in a way we’ll have some stability in terms of job security,” he said. “We’re likely not to pause on the growth as a result of the low oil price.”

    All this growth is possible because the bountiful and cheap natural gas in the U.S. means companies pay less for ethane and other gas byproducts used as feedstocks to make the chemicals and plastics.

    Most of the world uses a feedstock called naphtha drawn from more expensive crude oil. So it is more affordable to manufacture the chemicals and plastics in the U.S., where natural gas is abundant, and then export them.

    Natural gas feedstock prices still are advantaged even with U.S. oil prices hovering just above $40 a barrel, although that price might not have unleashed the petrochemical construction the area is experiencing, said Bill Gilmer, who directs the Bauer Institute for Regional Forecasting at the University of Houston.

     

    Exxon Mobil Chemical is investing close to $6 billion to increase the production of ethylene and polyethylene — the world’s most common plastic — at its Baytown and Mont Belvieu plants. The project represents Exxon Mobil’s first major U.S. chemical expansion in more than 15 years with completion slated for 2017.

    Companies including Chevron Phillips, Dow Chemical and BASF also are investing billions in the region.

    “You’re taking shale gas, you convert it into chemicals, and you’re shipping those chemicals to this growing middle class in the developing world,” said Exxon Mobil Chemical’s Chapman.

    As those people acquire greater wealth, they buy more plastic and rubber products, including automobiles that contain increasing amounts of these materials, said Chapman, a native of England who moved to Houston in 1993.

     

    About two dozen cranes are visible towering above the Baytown plant expansion, putting the new infrastructure into place. The additions include a steam cracker that will add 1.5 million tons per year of ethylene capacity to the 2.2 million tons in place now.

    Exxon Mobil also is adding 1.3 million tons in annual polyethylene capacity in Mont Belvieu about 30 miles east of Houston.

    Texas exploration and production companies and oil field service businesses shed jobs by the thousands this year as oil prices plummeted, but the petrochemical surge is serving as a temporary, partial offset to the job losses in the Houston area.

     

    Houston offers the knowledge base, the cheap natural gas, the historical infrastructure and the Houston Ship Channel access, Gilmer said.

    “It’s the classic cluster,” Gilmer said. “We have this massive system of pipeline under East Houston. It used to be called the spaghetti bowl. And I guess we have maybe a different attitude about building a chemical plant as opposed to New York in terms of public opinion.”

    As such, the Houston region likely still will add nearly 20,000 jobs this year with much of that growth from temporary construction jobs on these projects. Last year, the area added about 104,000 jobs.

    “The construction is temporary though. They’re going to be gone in two years,” Gilmer said. “So you have to be real careful about the plus-20,000 jobs.”

     

    Exxon Chemical, for instance, will have 10,000 peak construction jobs during its expansion, but only 350 permanent new jobs will last after 2017.

    Chapman says the expansion will have direct and indirect economic impact of $1 billion.

    Most of its product is exported, so the expansions at Mont Belvieu and Baytown will generate additional trucking, longshoreman and shipping jobs in addition to work at the plant itself, he said.

     

    Because the Baytown and Mont Belvieu plants have become more efficient in recent years, they have reduced their emission levels, and the expansion will keep the plants within their permitted levels, Chapman said, so there’s little negative community impact.

    The expansion also involves producing a thinner polyethylene that is just as strong, he said, so it becomes more environmentally sustainable by producing less material.

    Even with cheap oil prices now, the petrochemical projects make sense because the natural gas abundance should last for decades in the U.S., said Bobby Tudor, CEO of Tudor Pickering Holt & Co. energy investment banking firm in Houston.

    That’s why LyondellBasell acted quickly to expand its capacity and get a head start on other companies building new facilities that won’t start up until 2017 or later. LyondellBasell also restarted a Channelview methanol plant last year that sat dormant for nearly a decade when gas prices were higher.

     

    LyondellBasell, which is domiciled in the Netherlands but has its operational headquarters in Houston, added 800 million pounds of annual ethylene capacity at its La Porte plant last yea. In 2016, it will finish another 800-million-pound expansion at its Corpus Christi plant. The company is planning to grow again in Channelview by tacking on 550 million pounds in annual capacity.

    Patel said he is reasonably confident the company will decide next year to move forward with a plant to produce 900 million pounds of propylene oxide and 2 billion pounds of tertiary butyl alcohol annually. The substances are used to make products including antifreeze, cosmetics and solvents.

    Even with the expansion, LyondellBasell is using just 1,000 of its 4,000 total acres at Channelview, Patel said, so that space is a strong contender for the new plant. He also said the company is looking to build a new polyethylene plant at one of its southern Texas sites, whether in Channelview or as far out as Matagorda or Victoria. An announcement likely will come later this year.

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16. (ACC Mentioned) Ethane Crackers Are Cropping Up

    Sep 13, 2015 | The Intelligencer

    By By Casey Junkins

    It remains to be seen if Belmont County will ultimately land the $5.7 billion PPT Global Chemical ethane cracker, but six similar projects already are under construction along the nation's Gulf Coast, with Marcellus and Utica shale gas scheduled to provide at least a portion of their feedstock.

    Industry leaders believe ethane yields from just the Marcellus and Utica fields could reach 590,000 barrels daily by 2020, which is up from none at all in 2012. That has led firms such as Exxon Mobil Chemical, Chevron Phillips Chemical, Dow Chemical and other industry giants to begin building their own ethane crackers in Texas and Louisiana.

    Last week, officials with Thailand-based PTT Global Chemical said they would spend $100 million for engineering and design plans for the local ethane cracker, which they hope to build on about 500 acres of Dilles Bottom property along the Ohio River. While PTT leaders hope to make a final investment determination before the end of next year, other companies simply are not waiting.

    "Shale development has provided U.S. chemical producers a double benefit as an energy source and as a key raw material to make plastics and other essential products, creating jobs and economic activity across the value chain," Steve Pryor, president of Exxon Mobil Chemical, said.

    According to Pryor, Exxon's project at Baytown, Texas will ultimately employ about 10,000 construction workers; create 4,000 related jobs in nearby Houston communities; and create 350 permanent positions at the Baytown complex.

    "These are high-paying jobs that lead to fulfilling and rewarding careers in an industry that's vital to the American economy," Pryor said, adding the project should generate about $90 million per year worth of tax revenue for the local areas.

    Any new cracker complex would "crack" the ethane into ethylene, which is used as a basis for plastics and resins contained in items such as food packaging, textiles and pharmaceuticals.

    Jennifer Scott is a spokeswoman for the Washington, D.C.-based American Chemistry Council, which is the trade group representing the chemical industry. She said there are now about 30 such cracker facilities in the U.S., with the most recent opening in 2001.

    "To our knowledge, a BASF/Total cracker at Port Arthur, Texas is the last new ethane cracker built in the U.S. It was started up in December 2001," she said.

    "A Formosa Plastics at Point Comfort, Texas was completed in August 2001, but was shut down and restarted in early 2002."

    According to Scott, the following ethane crackers are under construction along the Gulf Coast, in addition to the Exxon project:

    "To our knowledge, none of the new ethane crackers is operational yet," Scott said.

    Due to the lack of an ethane cracker in the Marcellus and Utica region, many producers ship their ethane southward via the ATEX Express pipeline or similar conduits. The Sunoco Logistics Mariner East pipeline is pumping ethane eastward across Pennsylvania to the Marcus Hook Industry Complex, while the company's Mariner West pipeline is sending the ethane across Ohio so it can go to Canada for cracking.

    Scott said it usually takes about five years from the time a final investment decision to the point at which a cracker would open. She said this includes the time for the permitting process.

    Scott added the PTT project is "on our list of shale-related chemical industry investments."

    "As of this month, our tally stands at 243 announced projects representing a cumulative investment of $147 billion," she said. "Of the projects on our list, 37 percent have been completed or are currently under construction and another 54 percent are in the planning phase."

    However, Scott said her organization would decline to speculate about the viability of PTT's plans.

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17. Proposed LNG Plants Would Harm Economy, Critics Say

    Sep 11, 2015 | BNA Environment Daily

    By By Nushin Huq

    Critics of three proposed liquefied natural gas facilities in Brownsville, Texas, told federal regulators the plants would threaten wildlife habitats and the local economy, which relies heavily on tourism.Texas LNG LLC is proposing to build a facility in the Port of Brownsville, which is close to the Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge and the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge. It is also close to South Padre Island, a popular tourist destination.Environmental groups, including Sea Turtle Inc. and the Lower Rio Grande Sierra Club, told the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission that they were concerned about potential negative impacts to greenfield areas near the project including harming sea turtle and waterbird habitats.In March, Texas LNG submitted a request to initiate the National Environmental Policy Act's pre-filing review of its proposed plant (47 DEN A-17, 3/11/15).The company is proposing to build, own and operate the 4 million metric tons per annum (MTA) LNG facility on a 625-acre site in the Port of Brownsville, close to the Mexican border. The facility would receive natural gas through the intrastate natural gas pipeline to be constructed from the Agua Dulce natural gas hub, about 150 miles north of Brownsville. The commission is concurrently reviewing two other LNG proposals also located on the Port of Brownsville, Rio Grande LNG, owned by NextDecade, and Exelon's Annova LNG (FERC docket numbers PF15-14, PF15-15, PF15-20).In July, FERC released intents to prepare environmental impact statements for the planned projects.“The proposed sites for these 3 projects are all greenfield sites,” the Lower Rio Grande Group, Sierra Club said in its comments to FERC. “They consist of wetlands, black mangroves, upland habitat, wind tidal flats, coastal prairie, and rare and unique vegetated hills called lomas [Annova]. To industrialize these areas would cause not just significant impacts but overwhelmingly destructive impacts. LNG facilities should be restricted to brownfield sites.”The construction of the facilities will have severe effects on colonial waterbird nesting in around the project sites, the group said. The dredging of the surrounding shallow bays could have a potentially negative impact on fish, oysters and shrimp as well.“We are concerned with the potential impact to the Lower Laguna Madre waters, including nearby protected area of South Bay Preserve,” Sea Turtle Inc. said in its comments to FERC. “This preserve is important developmental habitat for the endangered green sea turtle.”Local OppositionSome local government and business groups have also voiced concern over the projects, because they worry about the project's impact on the local economy, according to comments filed. Unlike, ports in Houston, Galveston and Corpus Christi, this part of the Texas coast remains largely unindustrialized. The economy relies heavily on tourism.The South Padre Island Business Owners Association told FERC that tourism is the one and only industry on the South Padre Island and the association's mission is to promote public policy that positively affects their livelihood. The group's board of directors voted unanimously to issue a resolution against the proposed projects, it said in a Sept. 2 letter to FERC.“Known as the ‘Jewel of the Texas Coast’ our whole economy, and therefore, a significant portion of the economy of Cameron County, depends entirely on the natural beauty of our area, the abundance of wildlife, our clean waters which are often as blue as the open sky above, and the breathability of our air,” the group said in its letter to FERC. “Anything that poses a risk to our environment could drastically alter the economy of the entire region.Project SupportFERC also received comments supporting the project including letters from U.S. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Texas State Sen. Eddie Lucio Jr. (D). In separate letters, the men expressed their support for the project, which they said will help the local economy.“The Texas LNG Brownsville Project represents an approximately $1 billion direct investment in the South Texas economy,” Lucio said in his letter. “The project supports development of additional energy infrastructure in the region, and will create or support over 600 engineering, construction, and associated jobs in the region.”The Port Isabel San Bento Navigation District also sent FERC a letter supporting the project.

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18. E&E Daily's Northey Talks Politics, Momentum on Export Bill

    Sep 11, 2015 | E&E PM News

    Members of Congress returned to Washington this week with a clear focus on energy policy. How are efforts to lift the ban on crude oil exports shaping up in the House and Senate? On today's The Cutting Edge, E&E Daily reporter Hannah Northey discusses this week's House vote and the political maneuvering happening on both sides of the Hill on exports.

    Click here to watch E&ETV's The Cutting Edge.

    Monica Trauzzi: Welcome to The Cutting Edge. Members of Congress back in Washington this week after the August recess with a clear focus on energy policy. Will this new momentum lead to a lifting of the ban on crude oil experts? E&E Daily's Hannah Northey is here to talk about the political maneuvering surrounding exports.

    Hannah Northey in the House this week -- we saw House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy and Power pass Congressman Barton's bill on exports. What does the bill do, and what are the chances that this actually moves through the full House?

    Hannah Northey: Yeah, so Barton's bill would essentially lift this 1970s-era ban that the United States has on exporting domestic crude oil. It would also call on the Energy Department to look at the Strategic Petroleum Reserve -- how it's used, how it's composed -- and then report back to Congress.

    There was a lot of confidence yesterday voiced by Barton and other Republicans that this was going to move quickly through the House. Barton even predicted that it would reach the president's desk by Christmas, but -- and sources so far, energy analysts have said that's likely, but they're seeing bigger challenges in the Senate because you have a number of things going on there.

    You have natural partisan divides, you have a lot of negotiating going on between Republicans and Democrats that also involves renewable energy incentives. And you also have a time crunch -- you have a lot of negotiating around the Iran deal, you have the pope coming later this month, and you have a looming budget appropriations process that's at a standstill right now.

    So it's unclear, but yeah [laughter] -- it's moving through the House.

    Monica Trauzzi: We know it's been a pretty divisive issue up until this point in both chambers, and yesterday in that vote, Democrats were not on board. So what is it that the Democrats are looking for?

    Hannah Northey: So, Democrats in the House Energy and Commerce, the subcommittee yesterday, they were pretty critical of Republicans, saying that they had rushed the process, that they wanted more time to come up with a compromise, a deal. But they also -- you know, they gave specific language that could show up as amendments. There were no amendments yesterday, so we're seeing, for example, Bobby Rush from Illinois, he wanted more language that could help out underrepresented communities in the energy sector. Members like the congressman from Pennsylvania or Gene Green from Texas, they wanted more protections for the oil refinery sector. And then, on the other hand, you had Frank Pallone from New Jersey, who was just telling his colleagues to vote it down completely, saying that the bill didn't consider climate or refineries or consumers -- so that's what they're after.

    Monica Trauzzi: You talked a bit about what's happening in the Senate, and in the Senate, there is an effort to move their own bill on exports. How do the two bills compare, House versus Senate?

    Hannah Northey: So, the Senate bill is the OPENS Act, and that's Lisa Murkowski, the chairwoman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Her bill is much more comprehensive, but it includes the same provision that would lift this export ban, but it would also deal with offshore revenues for coastal states, so they can get more money from offshore drilling. So that's how it is.

    Monica Trauzzi: There's a lot of lobbying happening on this now. How is the chess game sort of being played?

    Hannah Northey: We're seeing a really well-oiled machine -- well, yeah [laughter]. Really, a lot of TV ads, online ads from the oil industry, the American Petroleum Institute, PACE has been out there, reaching out to members of Congress about getting the ban lifted.

    On the other side, you're seeing new faces -- the Democratic strategist Karl Frisch with Allied Progress. He is, they have launched a campaign in five states, not lobbying, but trying to, you know, reach out to the public, saying, "Hey, reach out to your senator and keep this ban intact."

    So I think you're seeing a lot more movement from independent oil producers reaching out to Hill members.

    Monica Trauzzi: So how do the efforts on exports tie into the broader push to move a comprehensive energy bill?

    Hannah Northey: That's a good question. They're actually moving on separate tracks, it appears so, for now, anyways. Both in the House and the Senate, so far we've talked about stand-alone bills on the export issue, but the comprehensive energy packages, they don't include that language. But that doesn't mean that they couldn't show up as amendments later -- but for right now, both the House and the Senate leaders have tried to keep out controversial language to move those packages forward.

    Monica Trauzzi: All right, we'll end it there. A lot to watch.

    Hannah Northey: Yeah.

    Monica Trauzzi: Thanks for coming on the show.

    Hannah Northey: Thank you.

    Monica Trauzzi: More Cutting Edge coming next Friday. We'll see you then.

    [End of Audio]

    Click here to watch E&ETV's The Cutting Edge.

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19. Parties Agree on Dismissal of Fracking Ban Lawsuit

    Sep 11, 2015 | BNA Environment Report

    By By Nushin Huq

    A lawsuit by the Texas Oil and Gas Association against Denton, Texas, related to a local hydraulic fracturing ban and a drilling moratorium was dismissed by a state district court after the two parties agreed that the matters before the court were moot (Tex. Oil & Gas Ass'n v. City of Denton, Tex. Dist. Ct., No. 14-08933-431, agreement filed 9/14/15).In the agreed order of dismissal signed by the judge Sept. 4, the parties stated that after Texas H.B. 40 was passed and granted the state exclusive jurisdiction over oil and gas operations, the city of Denton passed another ordinance repealing the hydraulic fracturing ban.Additionally, the moratorium on gas activity expired Aug. 18, and it was not extended. Therefore, the suit should be dismissed, and each party will be responsible for its own legal costs .“We are glad both sides have agreed to this dismissal,” Todd Staples, president of TXOGA, said in a statement. “The oil and natural gas industry looks forward to continuing to responsibly partner with our fellow Texans as we grow our economy and protect our environment. Strict rules such as requiring multiple layers of cement and steel for well casing, along with air monitoring, are working to ensure we are protecting our water and air.”Citizen-Led OrdinanceIn November 2014, Denton passed a citizen-led ordinance banning hydraulic fracturing. TXOGA and the Texas General Land Office both filed separate lawsuits on Nov. 5 challenging the ban, which were later amended to challenge a moratorium as well ( Patterson v. City of Denton, Tex. Dist. Ct., No. D-1-GN-14-004628, filed 12/01/14);(232 DEN A-11, 12/3/14).On June 17, in light of H.B. 40, the Denton City Council voted for another ordinance repealing the ban (117 DEN A-4, 6/18/15)The city council released a statement Sept. 10, which said it was pleased that the TXOGA litigation has been dismissed and anticipates that a dismissal order in the GLO case, which is still pending, will be signed in the near future as well.Earthworks, an environmental group that supported the ban, released a statement criticizing H.B. 40, which stripped the city's ability to enforce its ban.Sharon Wilson, Earthworks' Texas organizer, said in a statement: “This should remind all Texans that until we convince state legislators to represent the majority of Texans who want to restore local oversight of oil and gas development, the public interest will continue to take a back seat to industry profits.”

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20. Shale Producers Hurt by Oil Rout Face Added Iran Supply

    Sep 11, 2015 | BNA Environment Daily

    By By Asjylyn Loder

    Shale oil producers already awash in a supply glut face added crude as early as next year after an agreement to ease sanctions on Iran cleared a Senate obstacle.A Senate vote Sept. 10 paved the way for President Barack Obama to ease financial penalties for doing business with Iran. Democrats kept Republicans’ disapproval resolution from advancing in a 58-42 procedural vote, with 60 required.That may allow additional Iranian exports to hit the market as early as the first quarter of 2016. New supplies will exacerbate a global oversupply that sent oil tumbling by more than half in the past year, and add to the woes of the cash-strapped shale industry.“It's more crude in a market that is already well supplied,” said Sarah Emerson, managing director of ESAI Energy Inc., a consulting company in Wakefield, Mass. “It's certainly not going to make things any better.”The shale boom, which boosted U.S. production to the highest level in about 40 years, helped offset the loss of Iranian exports after the U.S. and the European Union imposed sanctions on the Islamic Republic's oil sales in July 2012 in an effort to force the country to curtail its nuclear program.At its lowest point, Iranian production fell by about 1 million barrels a day, the equivalent of losing all the oil pumped from North Dakota, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.While there are varying estimates on just how much crude Iran can return to the market, August output was 675,000 barrels a day lower than in December 2011. According to forecasts from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, that will be almost double the production cuts by U.S. producers from now through the next year.

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21. How Shale Oil can Kill

    Sep 14, 2015 | E&E Energywire

    By Mike Soraghan

    When Joe Morales found him, Jim Freemyer was standing over the hatch, dazed and miming the gestures of measuring the crude oil tank with nothing in his hands.

    Later, Freemyer wouldn't even remember Morales guiding him off the catwalk. All he recalled was smelling something like gasoline and getting dizzy.

    After that, Freemyer, a truck driver from nearby Evans, Colo., demanded a mask to protect him from the fumes.

    But it didn't. He was wearing the mask three weeks later, when another co-worker found him face down over a different hatch. This time, he was dead.

    Vapors from the crude oil killed him, according to authorities in Weld County, Colo., where Freemyer died in July 2014. The coroner said the 59-year-old suffered "sudden cardiac death" when his already weakened heart was overwhelmed by inhalation of toxic gases and lack of oxygen.

    Freemyer is one of at least nine oil workers to have died this way since 2010, according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) (EnergyWire, April 13). The deaths occurred from Texas to North Dakota. Three were in Colorado, including the deaths of Freemyer and a driver from the same company, Now or Never Trucking.

    The danger of vapors from storage tanks has been poorly understood in the oil field, even flatly denied at times. But documents from the litigation that followed Freemyer's death map out in chilling detail just how toxic gases from oil field storage tanks can kill people.

    All crude oil has toxic compounds called volatile hydrocarbons, such as benzene, butane and propane. Shale oil, such as that from Colorado's Niobrara formation, has more than conventional crude. It's related to why trains loaded with shale crude explode when they derail.

    Lighter than the rest of the oil, the vapors bubble up in storage tanks and collect above the liquid. They can burst out of the tank with enough force to knock off a worker's hard hat.

    And at high concentrations, the hydrocarbons can displace so much oxygen that they asphyxiate victims, even outdoors. At the same time, the chemicals get in the blood and disrupt the heart. In a cruel twist, they disorient the brain so victims often don't try to escape the fumes.

    Earlier this year, NIOSH, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and an industry safety group issued an alert warning of the dangers posed by crude oil vapors (EnergyWire, April 27).

    In some of the other cases identified by NIOSH, authorities missed key details. The workers' deaths were written off as heart problems. Employers hinted that the men were intentionally inhaling oil fumes to get "high." Supervisors and medical officials dismissed the idea that oil fumes could kill anybody (EnergyWire, Oct. 27, 2014).

    But by the time Freemyer died, federal worker safety officials had identified deaths from tank fumes as an alarming trend in the oil field. Freemyer's death became possibly the best-investigated example of that trend.A stream of vapors

    Freemyer was a long-haul trucker who had recently found work closer to home in the oil field. He'd been driving trucks on overnight runs for several years when a family member told him about the money to be made working in Colorado's booming Niobrara Shale.

    He got hired in May 2014 by Now or Never Trucking for a job that paid $1,007 a week. Beyond the money, the hours were better.

    "He could be home on weekends, and it wasn't a night job," said his son, Mike Freemyer.

    Freemyer and his wife, Connie, had settled in Weld County, a sprawling patch of high plains that stretches northeast from the Denver suburbs to the Wyoming line.

    Weld is the heart of the Niobrara Shale boom. You can see the Rockies from the eastern edge of the county, but it looks more like Kansas -- flat and full of cows. Increasingly, in the past few years, the cows have been joined in the fields by the bobbing heads of pumpjacks, where deep holes were fracked to jar loose oil.

    Freemyer was preparing to haul a load of oil from a Weld County well site on the outskirts of Denver when Morales found him in June 2014. Details of the episode, about three weeks before his death, give an unsettling look at how he and the other victims might have died.

    Before they can haul off their loads, oil field truck drivers sample oil in the tanks for water content and measure the volume. The methods seem remarkably low-tech in the smartphone era. They climb stairs to a catwalk and pop open the "thief hatch" to drop in glass vials and tape measures.

    Drivers are told to stand upwind, away from the fumes, when opening tanks. But in the rush to get the job done, sometimes the advice gets forgotten. And sometimes there's no wind.

    Morales, who also drove a truck for Now or Never, testified in May that the wind wasn't blowing the day he found Freemyer.

    "You could see the fumes hitting directly in his face," Morales said.

    Freemyer's nose was running profusely, and his gas monitor was beeping. He was leaning over the hatch, moving his hands, as if to reel in his gauge. But his hands were empty.

    When Freemyer emerged from his daze, Lee Mulkey, Now or Never's operations manager, came and took him to the hospital. He was released and cleared to work the next day. Mulkey said he figured Freemyer, a diabetic, was having blood-sugar problems because he hadn't eaten.

    But Mulkey already had experience with deaths atop tanks. He'd been on-site in March 2014 when OSHA came to investigate the death of another Now or Never employee, Joe Ray Sherman, also found dead on a catwalk at a well site in the same county.

    Workers told the OSHA inspector looking into Sherman's death that "they have been known to get light-headed or dizzy from the vapors coming out of the sample tanks," according to the inspection report. But the coroner deemed Sherman's death to be natural. OSHA cited the company for using headlamps that could ignite the vapors around the tanks, but not for respiratory hazards.

    On the day before Morales found Freemyer dazed on the catwalk, John McNulty, 57, who drove a truck for another company, was found dead on a catwalk at a well site near Gill, Colo.

    The Weld County coroner also classified McNulty's death as natural. But NIOSH includes the circumstances of McNulty and Sherman's deaths in its list of workers felled by fumes. And Sherman's family has hired an attorney to investigate the circumstances of his death.

    After Sherman's death on the catwalk, Now or Never upgraded its employees' monitors to detect methane and gas in addition to hydrogen sulfide.

    But Mulkey was dismissive when Freemyer said he wanted a mask to wear when gauging tanks. Mulkey took Freemyer to a safety equipment store in Greeley to get one, but told him the expense was coming out of his next paycheck.

    He told Freemyer "he could not stop him from wearing a mask," according to the coroner's investigation, and noted that OSHA and the company didn't require it.

    "They told him he didn't need a respirator. They said, 'just stay upwind,'" said Brett Busch, attorney for the Freemyers. "My client was scared."'The sudden bullet'

    Sunday, July 13, 2014, was a warm, dry day in Weld County. Stan Linker pulled his rig up to PDC Energy Inc.'s Gaddis pad outside Johnstown shortly after 1 p.m. After doing some paperwork, he climbed the catwalk and saw another driver at the other end.

    It was Jim Freemyer. He was leaning over the hatch, with his face partially in the tank. Linker felt for a pulse and couldn't find one. He put Freemyer on his back, noticing large amounts of mucus inside the mask Freemyer was wearing. In vain, he tried CPR.

    According to the coroner's investigative report, Freemyer's gas monitor showed that each time he stopped at a well site on the day of his death, his breathing was hindered by the air he was taking in. It had as little as a third the normal amount of oxygen.

    A normal oxygen level is 21 percent. But the monitor showed it dipped below 7 percent at one point. An atmosphere that scarce with oxygen can render you unconscious in half a minute -- probably faster on the high plains 5,000 feet above sea level where Freemyer died.

    The oxygen in the air was replaced with an explosive mix of airborne petroleum vapors. The methane alarm on his gas monitor went off constantly that day, records show. He turned it off, perhaps given a false sense of security by his new mask.

    But the mask was the wrong kind, worker safety experts said. It filtered the air, but it didn't supply oxygen. Instructions said it was not for use in low-oxygen environments, which is exactly what Freemyer was working in.

    It didn't help that Freemyer had hypertension, coronary artery disease and diabetes. But he didn't suffer a heart attack that day, or a diabetic episode. Medical experts said he likely wouldn't have died outside the toxic atmosphere on the catwalk. Jeffrey Rubinstein, a Denver cardiologist, testified when the case went to court that there was no other reason for him to have died that day.

    "I kind of see this case as a patient goes to autopsy, and he has two blocked arteries like this fellow does, but he has a bullet in his brain," Rubinstein said. "When we have this guy's head sitting above toxic fumes, that is the sudden bullet in his brain."

    OSHA hit Now or Never Trucking with a $19,600 fine for violations, including providing inadequate protection from the petroleum fumes. The amount has been negotiated down to $12,500 in a settlement, and the case is still pending.Bitter court battle

    When workers are conducting sampling directly over thief hatches, they should be equipped with "supplied-air respirators" that supply an adequate amount of clean oxygen via a hose or a tank, said Michael Kosnett, a medical toxicologist with the University of Colorado School of Medicine who testified for the family.

    "To the extent it's being done by people without supplied air respirators, they are at a significant risk," Kosnett said.

    Beyond that, Kosnett thinks the industry really needs to figure out a way to sample and measure the tanks without people standing over tank hatches. But in the meantime, they need respirators that supply clean air.

    But Now or Never managers disagree. They say respirators are not needed. Instead, the company has an air-testing program.

    "We will not put in a respirator program, because we don't need them," Mulkey testified in May.

    Now or Never and its workers' compensation provider, Pinnacol Assurance, denied Connie Freemyer's claim for benefits. They cited her husband's existing health problems, alleged that he didn't follow procedures for reducing pressure in the tanks and said that he should have known to get away from the tank.

    The denial sparked a bitter court battle. Busch said he spent $25,000 investigating and preparing the case, many times what it usually takes him to protest a denial.

    In July, an administrative law judge (ALJ) in Colorado brushed aside the companies' arguments and awarded workers' compensation death benefits to Connie Freemyer (EnergyWire, July 30). She'll get $671 a week, which will later decline to $530 for the rest of her life. The cost of the court fight comes out of her benefits.

    Administrative Law Judge Peter Cannici wrote that "Freemyer's job duties and work environment aggravated, accelerated or combined with his pre-existing coronary artery disease to cause his death."

    To family members such as Mike Freemyer, that's proof that his father wasn't violating safety protocols.

    "My dad did everything right," he said.

    A spokeswoman for Pinnacol Assurance said the decision will not be appealed.

    "This was a very complex case," said Edie Sonn, noting Freemyer's health problems and the companies' concerns about safety protocols. "However, we respect the ALJ's finding."

    "Our priority right now is taking care of Ms. Freemyer and making sure that she receives her compensation promptly," Sonn added.

    The insurance company and Freemyer's attorney say they now share a goal -- ensuring that companies improve protections for workers in the oil field.

    Sonn said Pinnacol is working to alert its policyholders about dangers from toxic fumes while tank gauging, sharing materials from NIOSH, and having the company's internal oil and gas expert develop materials. But it does not recommend the use of respirators as a standard practice at oil and gas sites. Busch said they should. He said he hopes the Freemyer case will show oil companies and workers that when it comes to toxic vapors, it's not enough to simply stand upwind.

    "It's not a big deal for them to wear this supplied air," Busch said. "It was so preventable."

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22. Examiners: Not Enough Proof Injections Cause Earthquakes

    Sep 11, 2015 | BNA Environment Daily

    By By Nushin Huq

    Texas Railroad Commission examiners concluded evidence does not support that EnerVest Operating's disposal well in North Texas is contributing to seismic activity in the region and recommended that the company be allowed to keep its permit, the commission said Sept. 10.In their conclusions, the examiners said there is insufficient evidence to conclude that injection is likely to be or determined to be contributing to seismic activity. There is also insufficient evidence that injected fluids are escaping from the permitted disposal zone. Therefore, the examiners concluded that the company's disposal well permits remain active and unchanged.Though the evidence does not support that the wells are causing recent seismic activity, it also does not support the assumption that seismic activity is solely the result of natural tectonic processes, the examiners said.“The Proposal for Decision is not a final decision,” Ryan Larson, director of the hearings division at the Railroad Commission of Texas, said in a statement. “It is a recommendation by Hearings Division examiners.”Larson said that parties to the hearing, EnerVest and the Oil and Gas Division of the Railroad Commission, have 15 days to file exceptions to the examiners' recommendation. Replies to the exceptions may be filed 10 days after the filing of exceptions. Railroad Commissioners make a final decision when they take up the PFD in a future public meeting.Cause of EarthquakesThe commission was examining EnerVest's Briar Lease Well No. 1, Caughlin (Strawn) Field, Wise County, in a show cause proceeding, initiated in April (80 DEN A-16, 4/27/15). The hearing for EnerVest took place on June 15 and 16 and examined the alleged connection between the operation of the well and seismic activity in the vicinity.In August, examiners came to the same conclusion regarding another well, owned by XTO Energy, also involved in a show cause hearing.Both hearings were initiated after the journal Nature Communications published a study by a seismology team from Southern Methodist University that found a combination of gas fluid injection and removal is the most likely cause of earthquakes that occurred in Azle, Texas, at the end of 2013 and the beginning of 2014.The SMU seismology team stands by its report, Kim Cobb, SMU's director of media relations, told Bloomberg BNA Sept. 3 by e-mail after the examiners had released their proposed decision regarding XTO Energy.

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23. Ohio Groups Launch Crowdfunding Campaign Ahead of State Supreme Court Battle

    Sep 14, 2015 | E&E Energywire

    By Pamela King,

    Grass-roots organizers and government officials are girding for a legal battle over local control of Ohio's hydraulic fracturing industry.

    The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) last week launched a fundraising campaign to offset the costs of sending a pair of cases before the Ohio Supreme Court. The first addresses a decision by Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted to block three county charter proposals that would prohibit fracking (Greenwire, Aug. 21). The second asks the Mahoning County Board of Elections to reinstate Youngstown's proposed community bill of rights, which has already met multiple ballot box losses (EnergyWire, Aug. 28).

    As of Friday afternoon, CELDF had raised $803 toward its $10,000 goal.

    At the heart of the petitions is the question of whether Husted has the authority to judge the constitutionality of a proposed ballot initiative ahead of Election Day. Community groups say proper procedure would be to let the charter amendments go to a vote.

    "How can you alter or reform your government if that very government can block you from getting any alterations or reforms on the ballot?" asked Tish O'Dell, CELDF's Ohio lead.

    Husted's office has said it is within his power, as the state's chief elections officer, to pre-emptively strike a ballot question that conflicts with Ohio law.

    "The proponents of these ballot initiatives are certainly within their right to push for change they support, but doing so through county charter amendments is simply not a legal option," Husted's press secretary, Joshua Eck, wrote in an email to EnergyWire. "They could lobby their state representatives and senators or even press for a statewide ballot initiative to change Ohio law, but attempting to change local laws to be in violation of state law isn't an option on the table."

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24. Oil Companies Tap New Technologies to Lower Production Costs

    Sep 14, 2015 | Wall Street Journal

    By By Alison Sider and Erin Ailworth

    The depressed price of oil has spurred a new wave of innovation in energy exploration.

    When a barrel of oil fetched $100 or more, energy companies were focused on drilling wells and pumping crude just as fast as they could. But now that prices have settled around $50 a barrel, companies are focused on efficiency—getting the most petroleum for the least amount of money. And many are turning to advanced technology for help.

    Big oil-field-services companies like Halliburton Co. and Schlumberger Ltd. say their customers are hungrier than ever for technology that saves them cash. Some are using lasers and other high-tech equipment and data analytics before they drill to make sure new wells deliver the most crude for the buck. Others are looking to new techniques that they hope will allow them to wring more crude from both new and old wells.

    You have to keep your focus on finding new and innovative solutions,” says Bruce Tocher,manager for shale oil and gas research at the Norwegian energy company Statoil ASA. “You need those solutions more than ever.”Fracking all over again

    Several companies are looking into refracking—using the latest fracking techniques to get more out of wells that were originally fracked using less advanced techniques. This is still an experimental approach, and companies aren’t making their results public. But they are seeing enough to keep trying.

    ConocoPhillips, for instance, says it has tried several refracks and continues to evaluate the technology. “We do see some potential, particularly in wells that were drilled a few years ago,” says spokeswoman Andrea Urbanek.

    Devon Energy Corp. is actively refracking, particularly in the Barnett natural-gas field in Texas, and is applying what it has learned to other fields, like the Permian and Eagle Ford fields in Texas.

    On a recent conference call with analysts about the company’s earnings, Chief ExecutiveDave Hager described Devon’s efforts to refrack wells using new technology. “We’ve got, I think, a working laboratory in the Barnett,” Mr. Hager said. The company is using finer grains of sand and experimenting with different ways of sealing off old pathways to allow new ones to be created for oil and natural gas to flow.

    “When using the more recent technology of finer-grade sand and more diversion, more capable diversion techniques, that’s really what we’re exploring right now,” Mr. Hager said.

    “There’s tremendous upside with the refracks,” he said.

    In another recent earnings call, Halliburton officials described improvements in fracking technology, including the use of fiber-optic tools to help monitor what’s going on during fracking to make sure that it’s working as well as possible.

    Schlumberger estimates that roughly 10,000 horizontal shale oil and gas wells drilled in the past five years in North America are candidates for refracking, and says it is working with eight producers on the technique.Software and microbes

    For new wells, engineers are relying more than ever on software and sensors to determine exactly the right places to use different amounts of sand, water and chemicals to maximize the amount of oil a well produces.

    In recent years, companies have begun to double or triple the amount of sand they use to hold open the fissures that allow oil to flow through dense rock, which has often resulted in much higher production—but also higher costs. The new technology can help companies figure out the right balance between cost and production, says Gene Beck, vice president of Bakken development and production at Statoil.

    On another front, Glori Energy Inc. of Houston is working with companies including Statoil and Brazil’s Petróleo Brasileiro to test a process that aims to boost output by using tiny organisms already present in conventional oil fields that have been flooded with water, a common technique used to help oil flow.

    The process works, Glori says, by stimulating the microbes with a special nutrient mix. As they feed, the organisms attach themselves to bits of oil—essentially breaking it up and making it easier for the crude to flow through rock.

    Early tests show the technology can extend the life a well by several years and boost the amount of recoverable oil by 33% from initial estimates, on average, Glori says.The next big thing

    Meanwhile, the search for new technologies goes on. The oil and gas division of General Electric Co. plans to increase its spending on R&D this year, says Eric Gebhardt, the division’s chief technology officer and vice president of engineering. And “co-funding from our customers is actually up this year,” he says.

    GE collaborates with some customers who are looking for solutions to particular problems. In some cases, customers will help fund development of specific technologies that they want GE to accelerate. These days they are more willing to do that if they think it will result in improved equipment or data analytics that can help them make an old oil field more productive, Mr. Gebhardt says.

    “These are things that even if the oil price came back up again would still be great solutions,” he says. “They’re just better when there’s a lower price for oil.”

    WellDog, a company started in 1999 to develop techniques to extract natural gas from coal seams, is ramping up its work in North American shale formations. It opened an office in Denver this year and plans to triple its staff at a technology center in Wyoming.

    The company has worked with Royal Dutch Shell PLC to use lasers to locate oil and gas deposits in shale formations. Analyzing the changes in photons that bounce back from underground rock formations can help drillers figure out the best places to locate wells.

    John Pope, WellDog’s chief executive, says energy companies “are spending a lot of time and money to get wells into the lower cost bracket” by embracing data and monitoring tools.

    “We’ve been shocked by how progressive and determined shale customers have been,” he says.

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25. Committee Markup of Crude Oil Export Bill Expected Sept. 17

    Sep 11, 2015 | BNA Environment Daily

    By By Ari Natter

    Legislation that would lift the 40-year-old ban on most crude oil exports is expected to be marked up by the House Energy and Commerce Committee Sept. 17, lobbyists tracking the bill told Bloomberg BNA.“Thursday is the day they are targeting,” said George Baker, executive director of Producers for American Crude Oil Exports, a coalition of Marathon Oil Corp., ConocoPhillips Co. and other companies that support removing the trade prohibition.A committee spokesman said he didn't have any scheduling information on the bill.“I think the question everyone is going to have is, will there be any amendments,” Baker said.The bill (H.R. 702), sponsored by Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), was approved Sept. 10 on a voice vote by the Subcommittee on Energy and Power and is expected to be brought to the floor later this month or in October (176 DEN A-4, 9/11/15).In addition to repealing the section of the 1975 Energy Policy and Conservation Act that established the crude export ban, the legislation bars the federal government from imposing or enforcing any similar restrictions and requires an Energy Department report on the appropriate size and makeup of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.While the legislation is expected to pass the full committee, and the House as well, Republicans are seeking to gain the support of as many Democrats as they can, which may require some concessions.Rep. Bobby Rush (Ill.), the top Democrat on the Subcommittee on Energy and Power, said in an interview with Bloomberg BNA Sept. 10 that he didn't know whether there will be an amendment or not, “but I'm not going to support it without an agreement … to include minorities from participating in all the benefits of it.”Producers, Refiners Differ on SupportThe trade prohibition is opposed by oil producers such as ConocoPhillips Co. and Marathon Oil Corp., but some refiners, such as Valero Energy Corp., argue it should be left in place.The ban, which doesn't apply to refined products such as gasoline and jet fuel, prohibits the export of U.S. crude oil, with exceptions for crude from Alaska and California and crude destined for Canada.

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26. Green Groups Push for Halt to Coal, Oil and Gas Leasing on Public Lands

    Sep 14, 2015 | E&E ClimateWire

    By Benjamin Hulac

    A coalition of more than 400 citizens, in a letter sent this morning, called on President Obama to halt the sale of coal, oil and natural gas leases on public lands. During his seven years in office, they said, Obama has "given new voice" to urgent climate threats and overseen critical steps to cut planet-warming emissions.

    "But these efforts, and the efforts of other leaders, haven't been enough to stop greenhouse gas emissions from reaching record levels and accelerating the world toward climate catastrophe," an advance copy of the letter said.

    Present circumstances -- a glut of fossil energy deposits that can't be burned safely, at-risk national parks, strip mining and wildlife degradation, as the letter describes -- call for a nationwide freeze on approvals for energy companies to tap public land resources, they said.

    "We call on you to exercise your authority under existing federal law to end new federal fossil fuel leasing, and to keep our remaining federal fossil fuels -- our publicly-owned fossil fuels -- safely in the ground," the authors said. "Your legal authority to do so is well established by the courts, and your moral authority ... could not be more clear."

    Noam Chomsky, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology linguistics professor; Tim DeChristopher, the climate activist; Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the author and Waterkeeper Alliance president; Winona LaDuke, the Native American environmental advocate; Michael Mann, the Pennsylvania State University professor; Bill McKibben, 350.org co-founder; and Stuart Pimm, the Duke University ecologist, headlined the letter.

    "It's time to put health first. Stopping federal fossil fuel leasing will help fight climate change and aid in reversing its detrimental impacts on communities' health," Catherine Thomasson, executive director of Physicians for Social Responsibility, which frames climate change as a public health threat, said in a statement.

    The authors argue that a permanent leasing moratorium would also iron out some of the most polarizing conflicts on public land use, such as Arctic drilling, Powder River Basin mining, seismic exploration in the Atlantic Ocean, and fracking and methane leakage in the Southwest's Four Corners region.A big boost for budgets

    Total revenue for the federal government from natural resource sales amounted to $127 billion from 2003 through 2013, according to the Department of the Interior. The bulk of that figure ($99 billion) came from leasing royalties, and about half of the royalties came from oil production.

    The Obama administration has leased about 15 million acres of public lands and 21 million acres of seafloor, according to the letter.

    Many states rely heavily on the royalties and employment fossil fuel operators generate. And their budgets swing sharply from year to year as commodity prices fluctuate. In Alaska, about one-third of the state's jobs connect to oil and gas companies, according to the Alaska Oil and Gas Association, an industry group.

    Rent contracts, royalty payments, federal payments and bonus bids, from oil and gas companies working on state lands, amounted to $2.5 billion in revenue for Alaska in fiscal 2014 alone.

    Seven environmental groups -- the Center for Biological Diversity, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, the Rainforest Action Network, the Sierra Club, WildEarth Guardians and 350.org -- spearheaded the letter campaign, a spokesman said. The group is planning a press conference outside the White House at 10 a.m. tomorrow.

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27. Write-Downs Abound for Oil Producers

    Sep 13, 2015 | Wall Street Journal

    By By Ryan Dezember

    U.S. oil-and-gas producers have written down the value of their drilling fields by more in 2015 than any full year in history, as the rout in commodity prices makes properties across the country not worth drilling.

    A group of 66 oil and gas producers have taken impairment charges totaling $59.8 billion through June, according to a tally by energy consultancy IHS Herold Inc. That tops the previous full-year record of $48.5 billion set in 2008, IHS says.

    In 2008, oil prices plummeted from above $140 a barrel at midyear to below $37 by year-end as the financial system’s near collapse sent the global economy into recession. The drop was steep but relatively short-lived as growing demand from China and other emerging economies was expected to suck up global supplies.

    Now, with China’s economy sputtering and U.S. production at its highest level in decades, prices aren’t expected to return to the $100 level of recent years any time soon.

    Write-downs, or impairments, are taken by companies when the value of assets falls below the value on its books. For energy fields, that can mean that the price of leasing land, drilling and installing pipelines exceed the worth of whatever oil and gas is unearthed.

    Anadarko Petroleum Corp., Chesapeake Energy Corp. and Devon Energy Corp. are among the large energy companies that have taken multibillion-dollar impairments this year, while dozens of smaller companies have made proportionally large write-downs.

    Writing down assets can shrink the pool of oil-and-gas reserves that are used as collateral for loans. Because many oil-and-gas producers spend more than they make selling commodities, abundant credit is crucial to them being able to keep going. These companies’ shares are often valued on forecast production growth more than current profitability.

    This year’s impairment tally is certain to grow, even if oil prices buck forecasts and move higher.

    U.S. securities regulators require exploration-and-production companies to value drilling properties and reserves according to energy prices over the previous 12 months. That means the formulas used to calculate their value at the end of June still included prices from the second half of last year, before oil prices had made much of their descent to their current price around $45 a barrel.

    “There’s a disconnect between the 12-month average and reality,” said IHS analyst Paul O’Donnell. “There will be pricing impairments for the next two quarters, at least.”

    Prices used to determine asset values at the end of June were $71.50 a barrel for oil and $3.40 a million British thermal units for natural gas, IHS says. That compares with U.S. crude prices of $59.47 a barrel and $2.83 for natural gas on June 30. The consultancy expects the prices used at year-end to determine asset value will be around $50.50 and $2.80, respectively.

    At those prices, very few U.S. drilling properties, particularly shale fields, produce profits, analysts and bankers say.

    The write-downs have deflated some of the shale boom’s highfliers. Chesapeake, which rose from a $50,000 startup to become the country’s second largest natural-gas producer by gobbling up huge swaths of shale, has written off about $10 billion this year. That is about twice the Oklahoma City company’s stock market value.

    Some of the write-downs can be chalked up to the drilling land grab that took place over the last decade. At the time many wildcatters quickly leased as much land as they could around new shale prospects before competitors caught wind and drove up prices. The consequence of doing so was that big prices were paid for properties that often turned out to be beyond the best drilling areas.

    “Companies are having to admit that when they made decisions about development and spending money to drill they anticipated higher prices, and their assets aren’t worth as much as they were at $100 a barrel,” said Becky Roof, a managing director at turnaround firm AlixPartners LLP.

    At its peak and under the leadership of co-founder Aubrey McClendon, Chesapeake leased drilling land at a furious pace, staking claim to some 16 million U.S. acres, a land mass slightly larger than West Virginia. Mr. McClendon’s race to grow was well received by investors when energy prices were higher. But when gas prices plummeted in 2009 due to the glut of fuel that his and other companies had produced, Chesapeake ran into financial troubles, made a similarly large write downs, and in early 2013 ousted Mr. McClendon.

    Now swaths of Chesapeake’s territory have been sold or deemed uneconomic to drill.

    The IHS tally doesn’t include large integrated oil companies, such as Chevron Corp., which said in July that it booked $1.96 billion in impairments and $670 million in charges related to project suspensions and adverse tax effects tied to declining oil prices.

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28. State Officials Question Clean Power Plan Approach

    Sep 11, 2015 | BNA Environment Daily

    By By Anthony Adragna

    The Environmental Protection Agency cannot show any quantifiable climate change gains from its Clean Power Plan, and it overly relied on health benefits from other pollutant reductions to make a case for the regulation, Texas and Ohio officials told a House subcommittee Sept. 11.Craig Butler, director of Ohio's EPA, called on the federal EPA to re-release its Clean Power Plan as a proposed rule to allow it to incorporate feedback from various entities. Absent that, the federal agency should stay implementation of the final rule until all litigation is exhausted, he said.“The EPA has not given states, especially Texas, nearly enough time to formulate and submit a state plan,” Bryan Shaw, chairman of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, told the House Science, Space and Technology Subcommittee on the Environment. “And all this when even the EPA acknowledges that this rule will not have a single discernible impact on climate change or sea level rise.”Both states have said they will pursue administrative and legal challenges to the final rule (RIN 2060-AR33), which has not yet been formally published in the Federal Register. The regulation sets unique carbon dioxide emissions rates or, alternatively, mass-based targets for the power sector in each state. State regulators will be tasked with developing plans to meet the targets, which will be phased in between 2022 and 2030.One such lawsuit, which Ohio participated in, was thrown out of a federal appeals court Sept. 9 as premature (175 DEN A-16, 9/10/15).“It seems if you give them an inch, the EPA will take a mile,” Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas) said. “I hope we, as a Congress, can do something about this final rule.”Oregon Official DisagreesThe lone witness supportive of the regulation—Jason Eisdorfer, utility program director of the Oregon Public Utility Commission—said his state was in a “strong position” to comply with the plan and said Oregon was in ongoing discussions with other western states about possible collaboration.Eisdorfer said the Clean Power Plan represented “a good first step in addressing climate change” and said earlier investments made by Oregon to reduce greenhouse gas emissions would help the state meet its reductions targets in the rule.Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.), the subcommittee's ranking member, echoed those comments and said Eisdorfer's perspective crucially showed many states support President Barack Obama's approach to address climate change.“I'm glad the title of the hearing is state perspectives, plural, because there are multiple perspectives,” Bonamici said. “Inaction is unacceptable.”Concern Over Jobs, FeasibilityBoth Ohio and Texas, though, said their perspective was that the regulation would harm their economies, make electricity less reliable and cost thousands of jobs for little more than public health benefits already garnered through other EPA regulations.The Obama administration believes the regulation will improve its negotiating position as it seeks to reach an international climate change agreement later this year in Paris and uses that as a primary justification for the rulemaking, Shaw said.Butler also faulted the EPA for what he described as a lack of adequate outreach in shaping the final regulation.“The administrator often talks about the unprecedented outreach that was done,” Butler said. “Ultimately, I think they're continuing down the strategy that they had all along.”

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29. EPA Issues More Power Plant Emissions Allowances To Implement CSAPR

    Sep 11, 2015 | Inside EPA

    By By Stuart Parker

    EPA is publishing more allowances for power plant emissions for new utilities as it seeks to implement its Cross-State Air Pollution Rule (CSAPR) air pollution trading program following years of litigation over the regulation, building on a related recent rule that allocated a first set of emissions allowances for power plants.

    In a notice of data availability (NODA) slated for publication in the Sept. 14 Federal Register, EPA details the second round of new-unit set asides (NUSAs) for power plants participating in CSAPR. The program is designed to reduce utilities' emissions in order to help states attain EPA's federal air standards.

    EPA issued an earlier final NODA July 28 containing a first round of the NUSAs, covering all four of the distinct cap-and-trade programs for emissions from power plants of nitrogen oxides (NOx) and sulfur dioxide.

    Under CSAPR, states are allocated emissions “budgets,” within which power plants are given trading allowances. A portion of each state's budget is reserved as a NUSA to allow for new plants to enter into the program, creating allowances that are allocated to eligible units on an annual basis. New electrical generating units are defined as those units commencing commercial operation on or after January 1, 2010.

    The new NODA allocates NUSAs for one of the four CSAPR trading programs -- the summertime ozone season program for NOx -- for power plants in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma,

    Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.

    EPA says it will take public comment on the preliminary NODA, which links to a spreadsheet on EPA's website listing the NUSAs for each state, until Oct. 14.

    “EPA will consider timely objections to the lists of eligible units contained in the spreadsheet and will promulgate a document responding to any such objections no later than November 15, 2015,” EPA says.

    The agency is now moving to implement CSAPR after years of litigation held up the rule. But the agency and states supportive of the regulation still face a challenge implementing it following a ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit July 28 that invalidated state emission budgets for several states. The court found that EPA “overcontrolled” these states, and hence set their allowances too low.

    While EPA is working on its response to the D.C. Circuit's remand of the state budgets, the agency is also preparing to issue a more up-to-date rule that like CSAPR would seek to address interstate air pollution.

    CSAPR is aimed at helping the states meet the 1997 national ambient air quality standard (NAAQS) for ozone, expressed as 84 ppb, but EPA is now implementing a tougher NAAQS set in 2008 at 75 ppb.

    State sources say the agency is on track to release a new rule to address interstate emissions under the 75 ppb NAAQS in November, and EPA has indicated this rule will include federal “backstop” provisions for the agency to regulate interstate emissions directly if states do not submit adequate emissions reduction plans to EPA.

    Further, EPA must under a court-ordered deadline issue a new NAAQS rule by Oct. 1, which would either leave the 75 ppb standard unchanged or make it more stringent. The agency proposed toughening the standard to a level between 65 ppb and 70ppb. According to industry sources, the agency is leaning toward 70 ppb.

    If EPA tightens the standard, this will again trigger the need for states or EPA or both to issue measures to address interstate pollution. 

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30. RGGI Carbon Allowance Price Hits Record High

    Sep 11, 2015 | BNA Environment Daily

    By By Gerald B. Silverman

    Carbon allowances sold by the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) reached a new high of $6.02 each in the latest auction, triggering a cost-containment reserve mechanism, RGGI announced Sept. 11.The price for allowances in the auction held Sept. 9 was 9.4 percent higher than the $5.50 price in RGGI's previous auction, continuing an upward trend over the past year. The latest auction was the third held in 2015 and the 29th overall; the next auction will be Dec. 2.The latest auction, which was the first since the Environmental Protection Agency released its Clean Power Plan on Aug. 3, raised $152.7 million for the nine states participating in the program—Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, New York and Vermont.The steep price increase was probably due to the impact of the Clean Power Plan, according to William M. Shobe, director of the Center for Economic & Policy Studies at the University of Virginia.“If you look at underlying factors within the RGGI region itself, you wouldn't really expect a big run-up in RGGI allowance prices,” Shobe told Bloomberg BNA in an e-mail.“The strong allowance market could be due to the strong emphasis that EPA places on interstate cooperation in its revised rule,” he said. “Since RGGI states are already on a path towards compliance, the high allowance price probably reflects an anticipation that RGGI states will be net sellers of allowances to other states.”Power Plan Seen as CatalystShobe said the Clean Power Plan “may have raised the value of RGGI allowances” by creating an easy path for interstate allowance trading. “RGGI allowances are ‘pre-qualified’ for participation in a national emissions market,” he said. “In states that are likely to join in allowance trading, RGGI allowances may seem like a relative bargain.”The goal of the EPA's Clean Power Plan (RIN 2060-AR33) is to reduce overall carbon dioxide emissions from the power sector by 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. The reductions will be phased in between 2022 and 2030 (149 DEN B-1, 8/4/15).“The $6.02 clearing price shows the continued progress of the RGGI program,” Jordan Stutt, a policy analyst at the Acadia Center, told Bloomberg BNA in an e-mail. “As the price per ton of CO2 rises, there is an increasing incentive to transition to cleaner sources of power generation.”Stutt said “the biggest takeaway” from the auction is the need to change the cost containment reserve (CCR) mechanism, which was designed to prevent a large spike in prices by releasing an additional 10 million allowances for sale (174 DEN A-4, 9/9/15).He said the continued release of additional allowances from the reserve could prevent the RGGI states from meeting the Clean Power Plan's emissions cap (93 DEN A-12, 5/14/15).“While the RGGI states are justified in incorporating a price mitigation mechanism, both the structure and the price triggers of the CCR need to be revisited,” he said. “By minting these additional allowances, the 2015 RGGI allowance budget has been inflated by 15 percent, diminishing the program's otherwise impressive environmental performance.”The reserve was triggered once before in March 2014, when allowance prices hit $4. The trigger price will be $8 next year.Participants, Sale Signal Robust MarketDan Scarbrough, president of CTX USA, told Bloomberg BNA that the number of auction participants and the sale of all the allowances were an “encouraging sign of the depth and robustness of the primary RGGI market.”CTX will launch a spot market for the electronic trading of RGGI allowances Sept. 28, according to Scarbrough. The market “will fill an important void in the secondary RGGI market by providing market participants with daily price discovery and a streamlined vehicle to efficiently manage physical allowance inventory,” he said in an e-mail.“Today's auction results show the steady rise in the price of allowances as RGGI becomes an increasingly effective way of placing a price on carbon,” Kenneth Kimmell, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists and a former RGGI chairman, told Bloomberg BNA in an e-mail.“It will be important to look at the auction price in December because reserve allowances for 2015 were all used during this auction, and are no longer available for the rest of this year,” he said.Among the firms eligible to bid in the auction were Consolidated Edison Co., Koch Supply and Trading, Morgan Stanley Capital Group, National Grid, Dominion Energy Marketing LLC, Vitol Inc., DTE Energy Trading Inc., EDF Trading North America LLC, Calpine Energy Services LP, CE2 Carbon Capital LLC, DRW Commodities LLC, GDF SUEZ Energy Marketing NA Inc. and NRG Power Marketing LLC. The identities of actual bidders are masked by RGGI.Key Results of AuctionAmong the key results of the Sept. 9 auction were:• a total of 25.3 million allowances were sold;• bids were submitted to purchase 3.4 times the number of allowances initially offered for sale before the cost-containment reserve was triggered;• 74 percent of allowances were purchased by electricity generators known as “compliance entities”; and• 45 bidders were awarded allowances, including eight bidders who purchased at least 1 million allowances.

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31. Emissions Reduction Targets Bill Falters in California

    Sep 11, 2015 | BNA Environment Daily

    By By Carolyn Whetzel

    California State Sen. Fran Pavley (D) has abandoned efforts during this legislative session to pass legislation (S.B. 32) that would set statewide greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets beyond 2020.“Unfortunately, the state Assembly and the administration were not supportive, for now, and we could not pass this important proposal,” Pavley said in a Sept. 10 statement after referring the measure back to the Assembly's Natural Resources Committee where it now becomes a two-year bill.S.B. 32 was the second key climate bill to falter in the last few days of the current session following intense lobbying from oil companies. Gov. Jerry Brown (D) and Democratic leaders decided Sept. 9 to drop provisions in S.B. 350 that would have required the state to cut vehicle-related petroleum use 50 percent by 2030.Amended in the Assembly's Natural Resources Committee late Sept. 10, S.B. 350 now heads to the Assembly floor Sept. 11 with provisions in tact to increase the state's renewable portfolio standard from 33 percent to 50 percent and double the energy of existing buildings, both by 2030.S.B. 32 builds on the climate policies the state has implemented under the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 (A.B. 32) and other laws and regulations, Pavley said.As initially introduced, the bill would have required the California Air Resources Board to approve limits and measures to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030 and codify into state law the long-term goal of 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050 that former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) included in an executive order.S.B. 32 failed on the Assembly floor, 30-35, Sept. 8, with 15 Democrats voting against it and 15 Republicans and Democrats not voting, even after amendments were added to give lawmakers more oversight over CARB decisions. The bill, however, was still eligible for reconsideration this session.On Sept. 9, Pavley amended the bill to drop the 2050 emissions reduction goal.“The Administration was supportive of the legislation as introduced, but later amendments could have weakened the state's existing ability to fight climate change,” the governor's deputy press secretary, Gareth Lacy, told Bloomberg BNA in a Sept. 11 e-mail. “We can't trade what is already being done to reduce greenhouse emissions to get a new bill.”

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32. Northeast Cap-and-Trade Program Nets $2.2 Billion Since 2008

    Sep 13, 2015 | AP (In the Washington Post)

    The latest auction in the Northeast’s cap-and-trade program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants brought in $152 million to be distributed to the nine participating states including New York.

    The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative sets a cap on carbon dioxide emissions and requires power producers to buy allowances for every ton of carbon they produce. The cap was reduced in 2014, driving up the price per credit in subsequent auctions.

    Program officials say revenue from all auctions since 2008 is $2.2 billion, which states use mainly to promote energy efficiency and renewables.

    New York got $59 million from the latest auction Wednesday, bringing its total to about $841 million.

    Conor Bambrick of Environmental Advocates of New York said the cap-and-trade program is the most effective tool we have to fight climate change.

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33. EDF's Symons Says EPA Likely to Change Methane Plan Before it's Final

    Sep 14, 2015 | E&E Energywire

    Last month, U.S. EPA released its proposed rule for the regulation of methane emissions and volatile organic compounds for new and modified oil and gas operations. The industry has taken significant steps on its own to reduce methane emissions, so why does regulation remain necessary? During today's OnPoint, Jeremy Symons, senior director of climate policy at the Environmental Defense Fund, discusses the future of the rule and the impact it could have on the strength of the natural gas industry in the U.S. Today's OnPoint will air on E&ETV at 10 a.m. EDT.
    

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34. Greens Sue Obama Admin Over Utah Lease

    Sep 11, 2015 | E&E PM News

    By Manuel Quiñones

    An environmental group sued the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service today for approving the Utah lease of 40 million tons of coal.

    WildEarth Guardians is accusing the agencies of leasing the 2,692-acre Flat Canyon tract in central Utah based on a 15-year-old environmental analysis.

    The group, which filed its complaint in Colorado U.S. District Court, said the Obama administration failed to adequately weigh mining's climate impacts.

    Bowie Resource Partners LLC offered a $17.2 million bid for the tract in June, with sights on expanding its Skyline mine. Operations would occur under the Manti-La Sal National Forest.

    WildEarth Guardians has had mixed results in fighting federal coal leases. Earlier this year, the group joined others in objecting to the leasing of 60 million tons of coal in the Greens Hollow tract under Manti-La Sal and Fishlake national forests. Last month, the Forest Service dismissed the objections.

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35. GOP Gropes for Way to Kill Climate Rule

    Sep 13, 2015 | The Hill – E2 Wire

    By By Devin Henry

    Republicans and industry groups are intensifying their search for a way to beat back President Obama’s new climate rule for power plants. 
    
    When the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released its finalized Clean Power Plan in early August, it added a new sense of urgency to opponents’ efforts to stop it. 
    
    On Capitol Hill, Republicans revived their complaints about the plan during a House hearing on Friday. 
    
    They deride the plan — designed to cut carbon emissions by 32 percent before 2030 — as a broad expansion of federal power destined to raise energy prices around the country, criticisms they’ve leveled since the EPA proposed the rule last year.
    
    The House passed a bill to delay the plan this summer, and a Senate panel approved a similar measure in August.
    
    But the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) said this week that the Senate isn’t likely to consider the measure any time soon. Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), the chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, told Greenwire that an overhaul of chemical safety legislation is likely to hit the floor first.
    
    “Well I think I saw where the chairman said — and we talked about this — how TSCA is the first thing up out of committee,” Capito said Thursday. “It definitely won’t be this month.”
    
    Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), an outspoken critic of the Clean Power Plan, told constituents last week that he’s still considering a legislative path forward on the rule. 
    
    In a newsletter, he reiterated that he’s considering a Congressional Review Act resolution of disapproval against the rule, something Capito said could come soon.
    
    McConnell also plugged his work to block the rules through policy riders on appropriations bills. 
    
    “I’ll keep up the fight against this administration and this EPA through the many tools at Congress’s disposal to rein in out-of-control bureaucrats,” he said in his newsletter. 
    
    But even the rules’ biggest detractors acknowledge a legislative approach isn’t likely to undo the rule, since anything would have to win either a signature from President Obama or enough votes to override his veto 
    
    “You don’t think the president will ever sign a bill that will do anything, do you?” Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.) the lead sponsor of the House’s Clean Power Plan bill, said. 
    
    “The reality is that, obviously, the appropriation process is a good way that you could go. But Congress is pretty non-functional right now for a lot of reasons, and appropriations bills are not being passed or signed, so you end up with a CR, then you get down to the government shutdown, and then politics overrides everything. Personally I don’t see the appropriations process as a very effective way of accomplishing any goals.”
    
    That means the plan’s opponents are increasingly looking to the courts for relief.
    
    In August, a slate of states asked for an emergency stay against the rule, but a federal judge rejected their request on Wednesday.
    
    Jeff Holmstead, an environmental lawyer with Bracewell and Giuliani and the former head of the EPA’s air and radiation office during the George W. Bush administration, said the timing of that request made it especially unlikely that the states would win.
    
    Would-be litigants are now left waiting for the administration to formally publish the rule in the Federal Register before filing suit, something that will likely come before the end of October. 
    
    When that happens, the floodgates will open: states, utilities, industry groups and trade associations are likely to file suit to stop the plan from going forward.
    
    “I expect that there will be a line of people waiting to file their legal challenges the next morning,” Holmstead said. 
    
    Many of their complaints will center on arguments that the EPA overstepped its bounds by releasing such an extensive rule, Holmstead said, and that the agency doesn’t have the right to tell states to shut down certain types of power plants and replace them with others.
    
    Holmstead said he expects litigants — from those suing against the rule to the EPA itself — will want a relatively quick decision on the rule before the appeals process begins (and potentially culminates at the U.S. Supreme Court).
    
    “When it comes to this rule, really all the parties want an expedited decision,” he said. 
    
    Sean Donahue, counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund, said the EPA built the rule to withstand any major legal challenges, especially injunction requests.
    
    “We think there's just no basis for staying the rule with an implementation schedule like this,” he said. “We think we're on very strong ground on opposing any future stay motions.”
    
    Donahue is bullish on the administration’s case against the underlying lawsuits as well, saying its challengers will have to overcome EPA arguments about the rule’s implementation flexibility for states and the way the agency rewrote the rule to incorporate public comments on it.
    
    “There will be challenges and people will raise a lot of issues,” he said. “The EPA has been able to craft this program in a way that makes sense. ... All that is going to be played out in court over the next year or so.” 
    
    Opponents are also working to convince states to refuse to comply with the plan, arguing they should opt out of the rule until its legality has been determined by judges.
    
    Under the terms of the Clean Power Plan, the EPA will write implementation plans for states that decline not to do so on their own, something that might lead to federalism-based complaints in the courts.
    
    Donahue, though, said that “there's a lot of political rhetoric, but not a lot of basis for that” argument. Even so, Republicans say it’s one of the few tools they have to bat back against the EPA. 
    
    “The only options we have are the states saying, we’re not going to cooperate and, number two, pursuing the legal remedies, at least until the next presidential election,” Whitfield said. “And I wouldn’t know what’s going to happen there.”
    

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36. Funding Bill Expected to Be Energy, Environment Rider-Free

    Sep 11, 2015 | BNA Environment Daily

    By Ari Natter

    Short-term government funding legislation that could be brought to the House floor as soon as this week likely will be free of energy and environment policy riders, a senior House Appropriations Committee member told Bloomberg BNA.“It will probably be as clean a [continuing resolution] as we can make it,” Energy and Water Subcommittee Chairman Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) said. “There will be some anomalies, I'm sure. I don't know what they are yet.”Simpson said he expects the measure to fund the government until the middle of December, and then lawmakers would negotiate a longer-term omnibus funding measure.Policy riders that would limit the federal government's ability to regulate ozone pollution and hydraulic fracturing are among the provisions House Republican attached to a $30.2 billion fiscal year 2016 Interior and Environment appropriations bill that never made it off the House floor.The House voted in May to pass a $35.4 billion fiscal year 2016 energy and water spending bill (H.R. 2028) that included provisions that would restrict a rulemaking to clarify the jurisdiction of the Clean Water Act.Other policy riders in that bill included a measure that would have barred the Army Corps of Engineers from redefining mining “fill material.”The measure, which also was included in the Senate's version of the bill, is supported by organizations representing mining companies such as Peabody Energy Corp. and Alpha Natural Resources Inc., which fear a revised definition could force mountain top removal mining activities to be regulated under a more stringent section of the Clean Water Act.The bill also would appropriate funds to the Energy Department and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission specifically for the purpose of continuing work on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada, a move opposed by the Obama administration.Some of those riders could return when Congress begins crafting longer term omnibus funding legislation.

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37. Fossil Fuel Use Endangers Antarctic Ice, Study Says

    Sep 11, 2015 | BNA Daily Environment

    By By Nora Macaluso

    The unabated burning of fossil fuels eventually could melt enough Antarctic ice to raise sea levels to a point where cities like Hong Kong, Hamburg and New York would be underwater, according to a study from the Carnegie Institution for Science.The study, published Sept. 11 in the journal Science Advances, is the first to address Antarctic ice melt in its entirety, the institute said. Most studies have focused on the West Antarctic ice sheet, which has been shown to be threatened by climate change.“Our study demonstrates that burning coal, oil and gas also risks loss of the much larger East Antarctic ice sheet,” said Ken Caldeira, senior scientist at Carnegie's Department of Global Ecology.“If you want to maintain the ice sheet, you have to leave most of the carbon in the ground,” Caldeira told Bloomberg BNA.Modeling done by the team predicted that the West Antarctic ice sheet would become unstable if carbon emissions were to continue at current levels for 60 to 80 years. That would represent the use of 6 percent to 8 percent of the carbon that could be released if all accessible fossil fuels were used.‘Manageable' Sea-Level RiseIf global warming is kept below the 2 degrees Celsius rise that international climate negotiators are aiming for, Antarctic ice melt would result in only “a few meters” of sea level rise, which is “manageable,” the researchers said.But if all the Earth's remaining fossil fuel resources were to be burned, then the carbon dioxide released would be enough to raise sea levels by 50 or 60 meters, eventually threatening populated areas including New York and Washington.While that wouldn't happen in this century, during the next 1,000 years, average sea levels could rise about 3 centimeters a year, for a total of 30 meters, or 100 feet, by the end of the millennium, under a continued-fossil-fuel-use scenario, the researchers said.The study was supported by the Fund for Innovative Climate & Energy Research (FICER) and a Carnegie Institution for Science endowment. The researchers were Ricarda Winkelmann and Anders Levermann of the Postdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, and Andy Ridgwell of the University of California at Riverside.

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38. Lawmaker Seeks Impeachment of EPA Chief

    Sep 12, 2015 | Washington Examiner

    By By Daniel Chaitin

    A Republican lawmaker from Arizona wants the head of the Environmental Protection Agency impeached.

     

    A resolution introduced Friday by Rep. Paul Gosar calls for the removal of Gina McCarthy as EPA administrator for making false statements on multiple occasions during congressional testimony. The resolution has 20 co-sponsors.

     

    "Perjury before Congress is perjury to the American people and an affront to the fundamental principles of our republic and the rule of law," Gosar said. "Such behavior cannot be tolerated. My legislation will hold Administrator McCarthy accountable for her blatant deceptions and unlawful conduct."

     

    The congressman accuses McCarthy of committing perjury on three occasions concerning the EPA's new Waters of the U.S. rule, also known as the Clean Water Rule. The rule, which Gosar and other Republicans oppose, gives the federal government control of various types of waterways — such as ditches and tributaries — normally under the jurisdiction of the states.

     

     

    The resolution is the latest saga in the battle between congressional Republicans and the EPA, which many Republicans accuse of executive overreach.

     

    Agriculture groups, mining companies and other groups in rural regions have expressed concerns that the water rule might pile unwanted regulations on them.

     

    During multiple hearings spanning from February to July, Gosar said McCarthy testified that regulations on previously non-jurisdictional waters were developed based on scientific data. However, memos between officials at the Army Corps of Engineers, which is helping implement the water rule, indicate that was not necessarily true.

     

    Gosar also said McCarthy provided false statements under oath when she claimed that the EPA had met all of the rule's legal and scientific deficiencies raised by the Army Corps of Engineers. Gosar said memos and testimony from Army Corps officials dispute those claims.

     

    "Administrator McCarthy committed perjury and made several false statements at multiple congressional hearings," Gosar said, "and as a result, is guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors — an impeachable offense."

     

    The EPA declined to comment.

     

    This is the third time Gosar has tried to impeach an official from the Obama administration, the first two being former Attorney General Eric Holder and Internal Revenue Service Commissioner John Koskinen. Holder left office in April, while Koskinen is still heading the IRS. Gosar, a three-term congressman, hails from a district in Arizona that includes large swaths of rural land. He will be up for re-election in 2016.

     

    The Clean Water Rule rule went into effect Aug. 28. A federal judge in North Dakota placed a temporary injunction against the EPA the day before the water rule was set to be enforced, after 13 states filed a lawsuit in North Dakota citing concerns it would harm states. The EPA worked around the ruling and went ahead with enforcing the water rule in all states except those included in the lawsuit.

     

    "The Clean Water Rule is fundamental to protecting and restoring the nation's water resources that are vital for our health, environment and economy," the EPA wrote in a litigation statement in response to the temporary injunction

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39. Oil-Sands Producers Seek New Ways to Get Their Crude

    Sep 13, 2015 | The Wall Street Journal

    By By Chester Dawson

    High costs and pressure to shrink a vexing environmental footprint are finally pushing western Canada’s oil-sands producers out of the steam age.

    The extraction of crude in Alberta’s oil-sands region has long been considered one of the energy industry’s biggest challenges, due to the material’s consistency: somewhere between a hockey puck and peanut butter. Oil-sands crude is typically either strip-mined as ore and then mixed with hot water, or is melted in place with steam injections and then piped out of the ground.

    While about half of current production is on or near the surface, an estimated 80% of remaining reserves are too deep for strip mining, so companies rely on processes such as steam-assisted gravity drainage, or SAGD, involving two parallel wells drilled horizontally. First, steam is injected into the higher of the two wells over a period of weeks or months. Then melted crude seeps into the lower well, and is pumped up to the surface.

    The trouble is, the newest SAGD projects need oil prices in excess of about $65 a barrel to make a profit, and market prices for crude are well below that level now. This has forced the closure of many startup SAGD projects and suspension of others still in development by multinationals.Environmental toll

    Even before crude prices tanked, various critics questioned the sustainability of a business model that required construction of steam plants in some of Alberta’s most remote areas that burn up to 1,000 cubic feet of natural gas to produce a single barrel of oil. Environmentalists, meanwhile, have complained that oil-sands extraction methods add to high levels of greenhouse gases and have an unacceptable impact on wildlife in surrounding forests.

    In response, oil-sands producers have invested in alternative methods, including the use of low-temperature chemical solvents, subterranean combustion of oil deposits and beaming electromagnetic waves underground to heat the oil. Suncor Energy Inc., the largest Canadian oil producer, announced plans in July for a pilot project combining two of these new technologies and hinted at commercial-scale production within the decade.

    Suncor’s pilot project, which is being developed with four other partners, is designed to cut on-site energy consumption by 75% and reduce the surface disruption from today’s plants by half. Mark Bohm, the Calgary-based company’s project manager, says, “We may end up using this technology as a replacement for SAGD, if it proves to be more economic and more environmentally friendly.”

    The technology in question uses radio frequencies, which Suncor says is the first such production test on subterranean oil-sands deposits. Much like how a microwave oven works, electromagnetic waves are beamed underground to melt crude deposits, which are then diluted with a recyclable chemical solvent.

    The pilot consortium, which includes oil-sands producers Devon Energy Corp. andCnooc Ltd. unit Nexen Energy ULC, along with Melbourne, Fla.-based Harris Corp. and the Alberta provincial government, will start small-scale test production at Suncor’s Dover, Alberta, site and continue for about two years.

    If successful, the roughly $34 million project will set the stage for a decision whether to move ahead on full-scale commercial production at Suncor’s adjacent McKay River site.

    “We expect to be in a reasonable position over the next year or 18 months to understand whether the technology is economic,” Suncor’s Mr. Bohm says.

    In another innovation, Cenovus Energy Inc., based in Calgary, plans to introduce the industry’s first large-scale commercial SAGD project using butane as a solvent. That promises to extract crude at a lower temperature, which will cut steam volumes and reduce natural-gas and water consumption.Narrows Lake

    The company deferred work on the project earlier this year due to the collapse of crude prices, but it ultimately expects the facility, dubbed Narrows Lake, to produce up to 130,000 barrels of crude a day.

    Harbir Chhina, Cenovus’s executive vice president for oil sands and a widely recognized SAGD industry expert, predicts solvents will eventually replace steam altogether. Beyond that, he sees controlled ignition of small underground deposits of oil to melt larger deposits as the next oil-sands frontier.

    “That will really reduce the energy intensity, reduce our greenhouse-gas emissions and reduce our surface footprint on the landscape,” Mr. Chhina says. “But it’s in its infancy,” he adds. “I don’t see a project like that being commercial anytime in the next decade.”

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Transportation News

40. (ACC Mentioned) PTC Showdown Looms for Government, Railroads

    Sep 11, 2015 | Argus

    The largest railroads serving North America this week warned Congress and federal regulators of widespread freight and passenger rail disruptions next year if the 31 December deadline to implement positive train control (PTC) is not extended.

    All seven of the Class I railroads wrote US Senate Commerce Committee chairman John Thune (R-South Dakota), other members of Congress and heads of federal transportation agencies to warn of harsh impacts to the travelling public and US businesses if the deadline for installation of the $9bn safety system is not extended. The railroads are Union Pacific, BNSF, CSX, Norfolk Southern, Kansas City Southern, Canadian National and Canadian Pacific.

    US railroads have said for several years they will be unable to meet the deadline to install PTC, a technology designed to prevent train-to-train collisions, but so far only the Senate has passed an extension. This week the railroads also warned customers of the situation.

    While ultimately unlikely, stopping freight movements would severely disrupt the flow of critical commodities such as coal, crude, petroleum products, fertilizers and agricultural products such as corn and soybeans. It would also halt passenger trains that move on many lines owned by freight railroads and serve many of the major metropolitan areas in the US.

    "Commuters, hazardous commodities and other freight in large cities like New York, Chicago and Boston would move back to already congested highways," CSX said in its 9 September letter. "Without proper development and testing, in the laboratory and in the field, the congressional mandate for PTC implementation by 31 December places the US economy in jeopardy."

    The Rail Safety Improvement Act of 2008 required railroads to have the PTC system functional on lines that carry passengers and toxic inhalants by the end of 2015, but carriers say they are years behind on meeting that deadline. The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) has promised to begin levying fines if railroads operate out of compliance with the law.

    The railroads also face contractual and legal liabilities if they allow trains to run on non-PTC compliant lines after the deadline, but their common carrier obligation requires them to provide service upon reasonable request from shippers.

    Berkshire Hathaway-owned BNSF said that it is "concerned that it is not reasonable to operate in violation of a legal safety requirement in order to fulfill its common carrier obligation." The carrier said that even if the government forced it to continue operating, there are other federal laws that protect employees who refuse to violate or assist in violating federal laws.

    "Operations across our entire network will likely be compromised by congestion and effectively shut down," BNSF said. The carrier said it would do whatever is reasonably possible to mitigate this impact, but warned "consequences for the economy and for our company would be substantial."

    Norfolk Southern said it "is considering taking legal action to invalidate the deadline as a violation of due process given its arbitrary nature and the potential to deprive the railroad of cash through fines imposed by FRA. This deadline appears to have been selected with no analysis or feasibility inquiry."

    Major shippers including the American Chemistry Council have asked Congress for assurances their products will still move once the PTC deadline has passed. They have urged Congress to pass an extension.

    But Congress faces possible public criticism if it extends the deadline, as PTC is seen as an imperative safety measure in light of recent passenger and crude train derailments that the National Transportation Safety Board has said would not have happened if PTC were installed. The 12 May derailment in Philadelphia of Amtrak Train 188 running between Washington, DC, and New York that killed eight people and injured more than 200 is among the accidents that recently brought back PTC to the forefront of public attention.

    Congress also faces a packed legislative schedule through the end of this year, with other major issues to consider such as addressing a multi-year surface transportation funding bill.

    A long-time industry observer and railroad consultant told Argus that he does not think the railroads would halt traffic to the extent they have described, but added that "I think that it is a good threat."

    "The railroads do not want this to happen," he said of the service curtailments. "They are posturing just the way people on Capitol Hill posture." He called the railroads' warnings "part of an orchestrated Kabuki."

    CSX said that it is formally notifying Amtrak and commuter agencies and warning customers of embargoes on hazardous materials traffic. Norfolk Southern also said its ability to operate on the Amtrak-owned Northeast Corridor is uncertain. Amtrak told Argus today no railroads have notified it of any service suspension.

    Union Pacific said it anticipates issuing an embargo notice by Thanksgiving, and "all passenger operations on Union Pacific lines will be discontinued by year's end."

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41. (ACC Mentioned) Drone Trespassing Bill Shot Down In California

    Sep 11, 2015 | Information week

    By Thomas Claburn

     California bill to outlaw trespassing drones has been vetoed by Governor Jerry Brown.

    Senate Bill 142, introduced by State Senator Hannah-Beth Jackson (D-Santa Barbara) in January, sought to prohibit drones from trespassing over private property without the property owner's permission, with exemptions for drones operated by government agencies and other organizations with land access rights.

    California law already bans trespassing by people. SB 142 would have extended the law to apply to drones, effectively creating a no-fly zone below 350 feet.

    The FAA classifies recreational drones (less than 55 pounds) as model aircraft, which means they must fly below 400 feet. Commercial drones (less than 55 pounds) are currently required to fly below 500 feet, but the FAA's commercial drone rules have yet to be finalized.

    A 2013 Oregon law prohibits drone flights up to 400 feet over privacy property without permission.

    In a statement explaining his decision, Brown wrote:

    Drone technology certainly raises novel issues that merit careful examination. This bill, however, while well-intentioned, could expose the occasional hobbyist and the FAA-approved commercial user alike to burdensome litigation and new causes of action.

    The bill was supported by the American Chemistry Council, the California Police Chiefs Association, the City of Camarillo, and the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. It was opposed by a handful of technology and industry groups, including the California Chamber of Commerce, the Consumer Electronics Association, CSAC Excess Insurance Authority, DJI Technologies, GoPro, and TechNet.

    Opponents of the bill argued that lawsuits could be brought under SB 142 even if a drone's trespass was unintentional.

    Jackson, in a statement posted to her Facebook page, expressed disappointment in the decision while noting that the bill has prompted further discussion of how drones affect privacy and property rights. "Obviously, the public wants some action on this issue," she said. "I hope to continue this discussion and continue working on this issue next year."

    Last month, US Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) said he wants to amend the FAA Reauthorization Bill with a requirement that drone makers supportgeofencing, to make UAVs respect lawful boundaries.

    Drone sightings by aircraft pilots have been increasing. Last month the FAA said that pilots reported more than 650 drone sightings between January and August 9. That's up from just 238 sightings in all of 2014.

    As drones have become more common, they've caused conflict and controversy. Over the summer in California, firefighters had to call off several water drops over a wildfire in San Bernardino Country due to the presence of civilian-operated drones.

    In New Jersey last year a man shot down a drone, claiming it had been flying over his parent's property. The drone owner sued the man, who had to pay $850 in damages. The shooter was fortunate not to have been charged to the full extent of the law -- the FAA considers drones aircraft, so shooting at one could be charged as a felony, subject to up to 20 years in prison.

    Technology companies, led by Amazon, Facebook, and Google, see drones as a promising delivery platform for goods and services and have been investing to develop UAV systems. A report published in February by CB Insights found that drone industry investments in 2014 increased 104% year-over-year, exceeding $108 million across 29 deals.

    [Read about weaponized drones in North Dakota.]

    Companies, along with government groups, also see potential demand fordrone defenses. One such company is Dedrone, which makes a multi-sensor drone detection system designed to alert users to the presence of a drone.

    Brian Edmonds, president of Dedrone, said in an email that preventing drones from flying over one's property is difficult. "Today's drones are relatively quiet, and their cameras are powerful, capable of 4K images that can be zoomed in for great up-close views," he said. "One could be hovering outside of your house right now and you wouldn't know."

    But Edmonds advises against taking steps to down a drone. "At this time, identification and threat evidence for law enforcement is the best defense," he said. "When you see a drone around your property, your first instinct may be to bring it down. But you should consider the consequences and potential liability of doing so under today's laws. ... There are ways to bring them down, but they are not legal, at least yet."

    Edmonds expects laws offering protection from drones to pass in the future, but cautions that there will be people who willingly break those laws. Enforcement will be a challenge, he said.

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42. Senate Subcommittee to Hold Pipeline Field Hearing

    Sep 11, 2015 | BNA Daily Environment

    A Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation subcommittee will hold a pipeline safety field hearing Sept. 18 in Montana, the subcommittee announced Sept. 11. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration Administrator Marie Therese Dominguez will be a witness at the Surface Transportation and Merchant Marine Infrastructure, Safety, and Security Subcommittee hearing in Billings, Mont. The hearing comes weeks before the agency's pipeline safety programs' authorization is set to expire and will focus on inspection and management issues and challenges for pipelines, the announcement said. “Families across the country expect our government to conduct robust oversight and ensure our pipelines are safe,” said Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.), chairwoman of the subcommittee. “That's why I am eager to join [Sen. Steve] Daines [(R-Mont.)] for this important field hearing, where we will examine pipeline safety successes and concerns—particularly as it relates to rural areas.” Other witnesses will be Todd Denton, president of Phillips 66; John Ostlund, a commissioner for Yellowstone County, Mont.; and Michelle Slyder, a representative for the Montana Liquid & Gas Pipeline Association.
    

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