Preview Newsletter
PM ACC 8/16/2016
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EPA Proposes Snurs for Two Substances
Aug 16, 2016 | Chemical Watch
The US EPA has proposed issuing significant new use rules (Snurs) for two substances which were the subject of pre-manufacture notices (PMNs). -
(ACC Mentioned) Plastic Alternatives: More Environmentally Costly?
Aug 16, 2016 | Greener Package
By Anne Marie Mohan
A new study by Trucost finds the environmental cost of using plastics in consumer goods and packaging is nearly four times less than if plastics were replaced with alternative materials. -
Flame Retardants: Why They’re in Our Homes and How to Avoid Them
Aug 16, 2016 | Environmental Working Group
By Johanna Congleton
Americans have been exposed to potentially harmful flame retardant chemicals for decades. -
Their Hair Fell Out. Should the F.D.A. Have the Power to Act?
Aug 15, 2016 | New York Times
By Eric Lipton and Rachel Abrams
When the Los Angeles hairstylist Chaz Dean pitched his almond mint and lavender-scented hair care products — endorsed by celebrities like Brooke Shields and Alyssa Milano — he sold millions. But his formula got an unexpected result: itching, rashes, even hair loss... -
True Botanicals' Product Line Meets US NGO's Safety Criteria
Aug 16, 2016 | Chemical Watch
By Tammy Lovell
Personal care firm True Botanicals has become the first brand to be approved by the Made Safe labelling certification. -
Lawmakers Press ATSDR for PFCs Study, Explanation on Blood Tests
Aug 16, 2016 | Inside EPA
By Suzanne Yohanan
Three Pennsylvania Congressmen are urging the Agency for Toxic Substances & Disease Registry (ATSDR) to study the long-term health effects of two perfluorinated chemicals (PFCs) that have contaminated drinking water in their districts, and to explain the agency's... -
Flint’s Water Crisis and the ‘Troublemaker’ Scientist
Aug 16, 2016 | New York Times Magazine
By Donovan Hohn
Near the railroad tracks on the outskirts of Flint, Mich., there is an old pump house, the walls of which have long served as a kind of communal billboard. The Block, people call it. People paint messages there — birthday wishes, memorials for the dead. -
Too Big to Frack? Oil Giants Try Again to Master Technology That Revolutionized Drilling
Aug 16, 2016 | Wall Street Journal
By Bradley Olson and Sarah Kent
The oil-and-gas well BP PLC is drilling here in the Texas Panhandle looks ordinary enough from the surface. Yet a mile-and-a-half underground, horizontal pipes shoot off for at least a mile in three directions, like a chicken’s foot. -
How Producing Clean Power Turned Out to Be a Messy Business
Aug 16, 2016 | New York Times (In Real Clear Energy)
By David Gelles
On the edge of a bucolic field in Princeton, N.J., an eco-friendly office building recently opened its doors. Plants festoon the roof, a living wall is planned for the lobby, and rainwater storage tanks supply the building’s needs. -
Enviros, Industry Clash over NASA Research
Aug 16, 2016 | E&E Greenwire
By Hannah Hess
Environmentalists have latched onto a federal satellite study of methane emissions to bolster their case for stronger rules to limit releases of the potent greenhouse gas from oil and natural gas wells. -
Shell Securing Land For Ethane Pipeline System to Supply Pennsylvania Cracker
Aug 16, 2016 | Natural Gas Intelligence
By Jamison Cocklin
An affiliate of Royal Dutch Shell plc started acquiring rights-of-way this month for a 94-mile ethane transport system that would feed the company's proposed multi-billion dollar cracker in Western Pennsylvania. -
Cantwell Grills Moniz over Train Derailments
Aug 16, 2016 | E&E Greenwire
By Hannah Northey
Washington Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell warned Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz yesterday of the growing grass-roots anger bubbling up across the Pacific Northwest as the nation's rails, loaded with crude oil, creep closer to populated areas. -
Railroads Get Funding Boost for Accident Prevention
Aug 16, 2016 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Melanie Zanona
Amtrak and other rail systems around the country have been selected to receive federal grants to install a technology that can help prevent deadly train accidents, the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) announced Tuesday.
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EPA Proposes Snurs for Two Substances
Aug 16, 2016 | Chemical Watch
The US EPA has proposed issuing significant new use rules (Snurs) for two substances which were the subject of pre-manufacture notices (PMNs).
The proposal calls for the substances – hydrochlorofluoropropane and hydrochlorofluoropropene (generic) –to be subject to consent orders, under section 5(e) of TSCA. This is based on the EPA’s finding that they may present an unreasonable risk of injury to human health.
The consent order issues several requirements on the substances’ use, including use of personal protective equipment, engineering controls, and that they only be used as chemical intermediates.
The Snur designates as a “significant new use” the absence of these protective measures.
Anyone intending to manufacture, import or process a substance subject to a Snur, for an activity that is designated as a significant new use, must notify the agency at least 90 days before starting. This enables the EPA to evaluate their intended use, and determine if a prohibition or limitation of such activity is necessary.
The proposed rule has been issued via a pre-publication notice. The official version will appear in the Federal Register.
A 30-day comment period will commence from the publication date.
https://chemicalwatch.com/49152/epa-proposes-snurs-for-two-substances
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(ACC Mentioned) Plastic Alternatives: More Environmentally Costly?
Aug 16, 2016 | Greener Package
By Anne Marie Mohan
A new study by Trucost finds the environmental cost of using plastics in consumer goods and packaging is nearly four times less than if plastics were replaced with alternative materials. The study is based on natural capital accounting methods, which measure and value environmental impacts—such as consumption of water and emissions to air, land, and water—which are not typically factored into traditional financial accounting.
Previous reports, such as “Valuing Plastics” (2014) by Trucost and “The New Plastics Economy: Rethinking the Future of Plastics” (2016) by the World Economic Forum, only examined the environmental costs of using plastics.
Trucost’s latest study, “Plastics and Sustainability: A Valuation of Environmental Benefits, Costs, and Opportunities for Continuous Improvement,” builds on earlier research by comparing the environmental costs of using plastics to alternative materials and identifying opportunities to help lower the environmental costs of using plastics in consumer goods and packaging.
These results disrupt a common misperception around plastics. Trucost found that replacing plastics in consumer products and packaging with a mix of alternative materials that provide the same function would increase environmental costs from $139 billion to $533 billion annually. That’s because strong, lightweight plastics help do more with less material, which provides environmental benefits throughout the life cycle of plastic products and packaging.
The study also concluded that the environmental costs of alternative materials can be lower per ton of production but are greater in aggregate due to the much larger quantities of material needed to fulfill the same purposes as plastics.
In addition, the report’s authors recommend steps to help further reduce plastics’ overall environmental costs, such as by increasing the use of lower-carbon electricity in plastics production, adopting lower-emission transport modes, developing even more efficient plastic packaging, and increasing recycling and energy conversion of post-use plastics to help curb ocean litter and conserve resources.
“We are very excited to present ‘Plastics and Sustainability,’ the largest natural capital study ever conducted for the plastics manufacturing sector,” says Libby Bernick, Senior Vice President North America for Trucost. “This report provides the clearest picture to date of the relative costs and benefits of plastics compared to alternative materials as well as important opportunities to enhance the environmental performance of using plastics in consumer goods.”
“We now have a fuller picture of the environmental benefits of using plastics,” says Steve Russell, Vice President of Plastics for the American Chemistry Council, which commissioned the study. “From lighter, more fuel-efficient cars to smart packaging that helps our favorite foods last longer, our industry is committed to ongoing innovations that will advance sustainability across major market sectors and the globe.
“Now is an exciting time for plastics and for sustainability. Emerging economies around the world are creating opportunities for more people to have access to health and hygiene products, good nutrition, and the things that help us get more out of life. Making smart choices about what we produce and how we produce it will benefit people and the planet.”
“By leading in innovation and performance, the world’s plastics industry has demonstrated its ongoing commitment to help create a more sustainable future,” says Jeff Wooster, Global Sustainability Director for Dow Packaging and Specialty Plastics and chair of ACC’s Packaging Team. “This report provides a new tool to explore opportunities to further enhance plastics’ environmental performance with brand owners, shippers, recyclers, and other value chain partners.”
http://www.greenerpackage.com/metrics_standards_and_lca/plastic_alternatives_more_environmentally_costly
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Flame Retardants: Why They’re in Our Homes and How to Avoid Them
Aug 16, 2016 | Environmental Working Group
By Johanna Congleton
Americans have been exposed to potentially harmful flame retardant chemicals for decades.
A big reason why? In California, a misguidedfurniture flammability regulation led furniture makers to use large amounts of flame retardant chemicals in polyurethane foam cushioning. Because manufacturers didn’t want to make one set of products for the California market and another set for the rest of the country, they put flame retardants in foam products sold nationwide – furniture, carpet padding, baby products, and even the foam cubes in gymnastics pits. These chemicals started showing up in people’s bodies.
But the PBDE phase-out didn’t solve the flame retardant problem. Some chemicals that replaced PBDEs may be just as bad. Although manufacturers are producing some new furniture and baby products without flame retardants, the chemicals are likely still present in older items such as:
You and your children may also be exposed to flame retardants in the items below:
Flame retardants migrate from products to air, house dust and the outdoor environment. You can inhale them, ingest them, or absorb them through your skin. Kids often have higher levels of flame retardants in their bodies because they put their hands and household items in their mouths, and swallow contaminated dust.
EWG’s important milestone studies have helped lay the groundwork for regulatory changes that will improve public health protection. Recent biomonitoring studies, showing that PBDE replacements are in Americans’ bodies, support state and federal legislative and regulatory initiatives to ban some flame retardant compounds, and reexamine the necessity of flame retardants in products such as baby items and furniture. We intend to continue our groundbreaking work until everyone is safe from toxic flame retardants.
http://www.ewg.org/enviroblog/2016/08/flame-retardants-why-they-re-our-homes-and-how-avoid-them
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Their Hair Fell Out. Should the F.D.A. Have the Power to Act?
Aug 15, 2016 | New York Times
By Eric Lipton and Rachel Abrams
When the Los Angeles hairstylist Chaz Dean pitched his almond mint and lavender-scented hair care products — endorsed by celebrities like Brooke Shields and Alyssa Milano — he sold millions. But his formula got an unexpected result: itching, rashes, even hair loss in large clumps, in both adults and children.
More than 21,000 complaints have been lodged against his Wen Hair Care, and Mr. Dean, the blue-eyed, golden-haired stylist to the stars, has found himself at the center of a fierce debate over the government’s power to ensure the safety of a cosmetics industry with about $50 billion in annual sales.
The Santa Monica, Calif.-based national distributor of Mr. Dean’s hair care line is part of a beauty care trade association that has been aggressively lobbying Congress to block the passage of tough new legislation that would give the Food and Drug Administration the authority to test ingredients used in cosmetics and issue mandatory recalls for products found to be unsafe.
The fight has pitted smaller independent players against the giants of the beauty products industry, which back the proposed regulations, seeing them as an avenue toward regaining public trust, and have the size and muscle to comply with them.
Each side has its champions in Congress: Senators Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, and Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, for the larger companies, and Representative Pete Sessions, Republican of Texas, coming to the aid of his home-state company, Mary Kay, which joined theIndependent Cosmetic Manufacturers and Distributors to fight the Feinstein-Collins legislation. Mr. Sessions has introduced competing legislation backed and largely drafted by Mary Kay and the independent companies.
“If you are in business and are not involved in politics, then politics will run your business,” explained a presentation prepared by Mary Kay last summer for sales representatives and obtained by The New York Times.
The face-off comes amid growing consumer concern about the safety of beauty care products and follows a string of other scares, including the discovery of hair products and skin creams containing hazardous ingredients such as formaldehyde and mercury.
“People don’t realize there is effectively no regulation of cosmetics,” said Representative Frank Pallone Jr., Democrat of New Jersey. He, along with Ms. Feinstein and Ms. Collins, has pushed to strengthen a 1938 law that was passed to regulate the pharmaceutical industry but contained two pages that addressed cosmetics, leaving it essentially unregulated.
Joe Hixson, a spokesman for Guthy-Renker, the distributor of Wen, said the company has “evidence and studies that we believe demonstrate Wen is safe and does not cause hair loss.”
Mr. Dean’s hair care product does not actually lather. Instead, Mr. Dean promotes it as “a revolutionary way to cleanse” the hair without the use of traditional detergents or sulfates, chemicals some consumers have objected to.
“In addition to it sounding like ‘Zen,’ the system is a completely reverse way of looking at cleansing the hair,” the product’s website boasts. “Thus, ‘Wen’ is ‘new’ spelled backwards.” The company also sells what it calls “unique formulations gentle for pediatric use.”
Miriam Lawrence of Denver said she used Wen’s Sweet Almond Mint Cleansing Conditioner on the hair of her daughter, Eliana, then 9, about three times in late 2014. Within days, her daughter’s brush was full of hair. Three weeks later, Eliana was bald.
“It changed our life in just a couple shampoos. It’s ridiculous,” said Ms. Lawrence, whose daughter has grown back most of her hair and eyebrows. “It was marketed to be extra gentle, no harsh chemicals.”
Mr. Pallone, in a letter to the F.D.A. and Guthy-Renker, has pressed for answers about the Wen case. And in an interview he cited it as an example of why current law is failing and more rigorous regulation is needed.
For legal reasons, the government’s hands are tied.
That is in part because unlike pharmaceutical companies, cosmetic companies are not required to notify the government of “adverse reaction” reports — even if someone dies.
The F.D.A. instead has had to depend on consumers stepping forward, and as of July 7, only 127 reports had been filed to the agency detailing problems with the Wen hair care line. But inspectors sent to the company’s facilities dating back to 2011 learned that complaints to the company and distributor total more than 21,000, the agency said last month.
“You know how the stars were saying it was so good and it made your hair more manageable, more shinier?” said Bonnie Iqbal, 55, of Albany, who last year was among those who sued the company after her hair began falling out. “So I figured, you know, I’d try it.”
Patricia J. Zettler, a health law and policy expert at Georgia State University and a former F.D.A. lawyer, said that under existing law, the agency could take action against the company only if it could prove a product had been mislabeled or contaminated. If the product turns out to be dangerous but legal, the government has no recourse.Continue reading the main storyRELATED COVERAGEBan on Microbeads Proves Easy to Pass Through Pipeline DEC. 22, 2015Senate Votes to Overhaul Chemical Safety and Ban Beads in Beauty ProductsDEC. 19, 2015SKIN DEEPHow Anti-Aging Creams Get Old Too FastSEPT. 2, 2015RECENT COMMENTSTerry Nugent 18 minutes ago
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“The bottom line is, if the company has not violated the law, there isn’t really anything F.D.A. can do,” Ms. Zettler said.
Even in the absence of federal action, Guthy-Renker, in a “business decision,” agreed in late June to a $26.25 million legal settlement — still not approved by a federal court judge — that would repay up to $25 to every person who has bought a bottle since Wen products were introduced and as much as $20,000 to individuals claiming hair loss or other injury. Yet the product is still being sold, and the F.D.A., other than issuing a notice saying it is looking at the matter, has taken no action.
The Feinstein-Collins bill is intended to eliminate such stalemates. It would, for the first time, require that cosmetics manufacturers report “serious adverse” reactions to their products to the F.D.A. as they come in, as well as create an annual report of all “adverse events.” It would also give the agency the power to order companies to recall products found to be dangerous.
The bill would collect about $20 million in fees annually from beauty care companies to help cover the cost of confirming the safety of about five ingredients each year that are suspected of causing problems, such as lead acetate, a color additive in hair dyes, and quaternium-15, a preservative used in certain shampoo and cosmetics.
The legislation has won the endorsement of heavyweights including Estée Lauder, whose brands include Clinique, Origins, MAC, La Mer, and Bobbi Brown; Johnson & Johnson, maker of Neutrogena and Aveeno; and Procter & Gamble, whose brands include Pantene, Head & Shoulders, Herbal Essences and Olay. Industry officials said they decided to embrace the legislation after becoming increasingly concerned that a decline in consumer confidence could hurt their sales.
“The Feinstein-Collins bill is supported by a vast and diverse group of people and groups who all want the same thing — cosmetic regulations that best serve the public health and give consumers confidence in the products and ingredients they choose for their families,” Darrel Jodrey, atop federal lobbyist at Johnson & Johnson, said in a statement.
Major national environmental, consumer and health nonprofits, such as the American Cancer Society, the Environmental Working Group and the Good Housekeeping Institute, have also backed the plan.
But even before Ms. Feinstein formally introduced her legislation in April 2015, the Independent Cosmetic Manufacturers and Distributors, in which Guthy-Renker has been a dues-paying member for over a decade, moved to defeat it, internal documents obtained by The Times show.
During a March 2015 strategy session in the New York law offices of a trade association legal adviser, Locke Lord, industry executives were briefed by their lobbying team, who explained that it had already approached the office of Representative Fred Upton of Michigan, the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, with jurisdiction over the F.D.A.
Michael Lunceford, a senior vice president at Mary Kay overseeing the company’s lobbying and public affairs divisions, had done groundwork through the Direct Selling Association, where he is on the board, to help Mr. Upton’s 2012 re-election effort. The organization bought billboard, radio and newspaper ads “to gain the attention of the candidate in order to cultivate a champion for the direct selling industry,” according to an industry newsletter.
Guthy-Renker hired its own well-connected Washington help: William R. Nordwind, a lawyer and lobbyist who spent a dozen years working as a staff member and campaign aide to Mr. Upton. Mr. Hixson, the Guthy-Renker spokesman, said the company had not publicly taken a position on the Feinstein-Collins bill, although it financially supported the independent cosmetics industry association. Mr. Nordwind’s team, from the Venable lobbying firm, has contacted Capitol Hill on behalf of the company, Mr. Hixson said.
“They have got a bad story out there right now,” Robert Harmala, a former House aide who lobbies for the Independent Cosmetic Manufacturers and Distributors, said regarding Guthy-Renker and its Wen product line. “They don’t want to be the face of the industry for having done this.”
Mary Kay claims credit for persuading Mr. Sessions, whose Dallas-area district is near its headquarters, to sponsor alternative legislation. Mr. Sessions’s proposal still would require beauty care companies to notify the F.D.A. of “serious cosmetic adverse events,” but it would not grant the agency the power to order a recall or collect industry fees to pay for new programs, such as the safety evaluation of cosmetics ingredients. Most important for direct sellers like Guthy-Renker, Mary Kay and other members of the independent cosmetics group, it would broadly and retroactively pre-empt any tougher state laws.
“We can’t just be out there saying, ‘No, we don’t like Feinstein’s bill,’” Mr. Harmala said in an interview.
Mr. Sessions, after introducing the legislation, became a favorite of the cosmetics industry, campaign finance records show, emerging as the top recipient in Congress of donations from Mary Kay employees, and taking donations from at least 10 other industry executives, including Pam Busiek, the president of the Independent Cosmetic Manufacturers and Distributors. Executives at Guthy-Renker were not among the donors.
More industry donations were sent to Representatives Eddie Bernice Johnson, Democrat of Texas, and Bill Flores, Republican of Texas, the only other two House lawmakers to help sponsor the bill.
Crayton W. Webb, a spokesman for Mary Kay, said the company was committed to helping pass a law that increased the federal government’s oversight of the industry, but opposed Ms. Feinstein’s bill because “it falls short in providing one clear national and uniform safety standard.”
Ms. Busiek added, “We want something that is not overreaching.” Mr. Dean declined to comment.
The F.D.A. would not comment on the proposals. So far, the agency said, it has found no evidence of contamination or misbranding in Wen products, the only two product flaws it can use to press a company to agree to a voluntary recall. The agency has requested the results of safety tests and other manufacturing data, but it cannot compel the company to release any information.
“That’s why it is so critical that we get information directly from consumers and their health care providers,” said Susan Mayne, the director of the F.D.A.’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition.
For consumers dealing with thinning hair, itchy scalps and other problems, the additional responsibility of bringing their case to the government can be a tall order — and certainly a confusing one. The government should be helping them, they say.
“I think it would be great for the F.D.A. to step in a little bit more,” said Melanie Guitzkow, a 20-year-old student, who said her hair began to fall out when she used Wen in high school. “Some things, like, shouldn’t be on the market because they’re damaging.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/16/us/politics/cosmetics-industry-congress-regulation-wen.html?_r=0
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True Botanicals' Product Line Meets US NGO's Safety Criteria
Aug 16, 2016 | Chemical Watch
By Tammy Lovell
Personal care firm True Botanicals has become the first brand to be approved by the Made Safe labelling certification.
To become a ‘Made Safe Brand’, a company’s entire product line, and all future products, must meet the US NGO’s product safety criteria.
The NGO says the labelling indicates that products are made without ingredients known to be toxic to humans or the environment. Rather than relying on companies self-reporting, Made Safe uses a team of scientists to analyse products.
The non-profit organisation works with companies under a non-disclosure agreement during the research and development stage of formulation and reformulation. This way they can see what goes into the products, how ingredients are sourced and where the products are made.
True Botanicals founder Hillary Peterson told Chemical Watch that meeting the criteria had added more time to the formulation process.
"We learned a few things along the way, such as that some of our third party ingredients contained hidden preservatives that manufacturers weren't disclosing," she said.
The greatest challenge, Ms Peterson added, was developing preservation systems for water-based formulations.
"We are constantly looking for new preservation systems and were recently able to identify several new options that are working very well for us," she said.
To gain certification, products must be free from:
· behavioural toxins;
· carcinogens;
· developmental toxins;
· endocrine disruptors;
· fire retardants;
· genetically modified organisms (GMOs);
· heavy metals;
· neurotoxins;
· pesticides;
· reproductive toxins;
· toxic solvents; and
· harmful volatile organic compounds (VOCs).
Made Safe founder and executive director, Amy Ziff said that a number of other companies have had their entire product line approved. They could therefore potentially follow True Botanicals in having their brands certified. These include Pura Stainless, Naturepedic and Meliora Cleaning Products.
https://chemicalwatch.com/49125/true-botanicals-product-line-meets-us-ngos-safety-criteria
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Lawmakers Press ATSDR for PFCs Study, Explanation on Blood Tests
Aug 16, 2016 | Inside EPA
By Suzanne Yohanan
Three Pennsylvania Congressmen are urging the Agency for Toxic Substances & Disease Registry (ATSDR) to study the long-term health effects of two perfluorinated chemicals (PFCs) that have contaminated drinking water in their districts, and to explain the agency's rejection of calls for the Navy to fund blood tests of affected residents.
Reps. Brendan Boyle (D-PA), Patrick Meehan (R-PA) and Michael Fitzpatrick (R-PA) wrote to ATSDR Director Patrick Breysse July 29, asking the agency to study the long-term health impacts of exposure to perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) - two common PFCs that were found in drinking water sources in communities they represent that neighbor military bases believed to be the cause of the contamination.
The lawmakers also question ATSDR's advice to the Navy to not support blood testing of the communities exposed to the chemicals.
Gov. Tom Wolf (D) had pressed the Navy and Air Force in June to assist the state with blood testing of nearly 70,000 residents potentially exposed to the two PFCs in private and municipal drinking water sources in three communities neighboring Horsham Air Guard Station in Horsham, PA, and Naval Air Warfare Center in Warminster, PA. The appeal appeared to be the first time a state signaled it is hard-pressed for resources to pay for such testing in response to EPA's recently released drinking water health advisories for the two PFCs.
"[W]e believe blood testing is critical to addressing the concerns of private citizens who may have been exposed," the governor's letter said.
But the Navy in a July 8 letter to Wolf turns down his request to fund blood testing, referencing advice it received from ATSDR officials. ATSDR gave the Navy several reasons against such testing, among them that test results cannot be "clinically interpretable," meaning they will not aid people or their doctors in determining potential future health problems stemming from the exposures.
Further, the Navy says, EPA in its recent development of drinking water health advisories estimated that exposure to the two chemicals is estimated to be 20 percent from drinking water and 80 percent from other sources, which can include food, air and consumer and industrial products. EPA did not set health-based screening levels for these chemicals that scientists can compare to measured blood concentrations, the letter notes.
"While a blood test can measure the level of PFOS and PFOA in a person's body at the time of the test, the blood test cannot tell a person where or how the exposure occurred, or what, if any, health problems might occur or have occurred because of exposure," it says. The Navy notes it is being proactive in cleaning up the public and private drinking water well contamination near its bases in eastern Pennsylvania.
Advisory Levels
The attention to PFCs in drinking water in areas around the bases comes after EPA in May set lifetime exposure health advisory levels at 0.07 micrograms per liter for PFOA and PFOS, which translates to 70 parts per trillion (ppt). EPA also recommends that the combined concentrations of PFOA and PFOS, if found together in drinking water, not exceed 70 ppt. The nonstick chemicals, which have been linked to adverse health effects, including particular cancers, were used in a host of consumer and industrial applications and in firefighting foam used by the military and others.
In addition, the Navy says in its response that "[b]ecause PFOA and PFOA contamination is a large and complicated topic requiring further research, discussions of blood sampling for PFOA and PFOS should include [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] and ATSDR in the context of a carefully planned health research study."
The trio of congressmen in their July 29 letter to ATSDR's Breysse argue that basic testing and monitoring of base employees and area residents is needed to determine long-term effects from the exposures, "particularly in light of evolving science." They ask, "What are the ATSDR's reasons for not recommending these blood tests? Under what circumstances would ATSDR recommend such testing and monitoring in our communities?"
Further, they say they agree with the Navy in its suggestion for a "carefully planned health research study," with the lawmakers saying it is ATSDR's responsibility to raise public awareness of the potential adverse health effects from exposure to these two chemicals. "Does the ATSDR plan to study the long-term human health effects of PFOA and PFOS?" they ask, requesting that the agency do so.
In addition, they ask ATSDR to conduct a new health assessment on the bases and surrounding area to address the PFC contamination issue.
They also ask Breysse to provide an update on the agency's final toxicological profile for PFOA and PFOS.
http://insideepa.com/daily-news/lawmakers-press-atsdr-pfcs-study-explanation-blood-tests
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Flint’s Water Crisis and the ‘Troublemaker’ Scientist
Aug 16, 2016 | New York Times Magazine
By Donovan Hohn
Near the railroad tracks on the outskirts of Flint, Mich., there is an old pump house, the walls of which have long served as a kind of communal billboard. The Block, people call it. People paint messages there — birthday wishes, memorials for the dead. In January, after Gov. Rick Snyder declared a state of emergency in response to Flint’s water crisis, a new message appeared, addressed implicitly to Snyder but also to the world: YOU WANT OUR TRUST??? WE WANT VA TECH!!! In the history of political graffiti, “We want Va. Tech” may sound like one of the least stirring demands ever spray-painted on a wall, but in the context of Flint, it was charged with the emotion and meaning of a rallying cry.
By “Va. Tech,” the message’s author meant a Virginia Tech professor of civil and environmental engineering, Marc Edwards. Edwards has spent most of his career studying the aging waterworks of America, publishing the sort of papers that specialists admire and the rest of us ignore, on subjects like “ozone-induced particle destabilization” or the “role of temperature and pH in Cu(OH)₂ solubility.” Explaining his research to laypeople, he sometimes describes it as “the C.S.I. of plumbing.” Edwards is a detective with a research lab and a Ph.D. In 2000, after homeowners in suburban Maryland began reporting “pinhole leaks” in their copper pipes, the water authority there brought in Edwards. In 2002, after receiving a report that water in a Maui neighborhood had mysteriously turned blue and was giving people rashes, Edwards took on the case.
Until last year, the most famous case Edwards investigated was the lead contamination of the water supply in the nation’s capital — still the worst such event in modern American history, in magnitude and duration. In Washington, lead levels shot up in 2001, and in some neighborhoods they remained dangerously elevated until 2010. Edwards maintains, and spent years working to prove, that scientific misconduct at the Environmental Protection Agency and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention exacerbated the D.C. crisis. A congressional investigation culminated in a 2010 report, titled “A Public Health Tragedy: How Flawed C.D.C. Data and Faulty Assumptions Endangered Children’s Health in the Nation’s Capital.” It confirmed many of his allegations, but the experience was for Edwards a decade-long ordeal that turned him into a reluctant activist — or as he prefers to say, “a troublemaker.”
For television appearances, Edwards will put on a suit and tie, and the tie almost always bears a picture of some endangered animal: a giant panda, for instance, or a water buffalo. But on the morning we met, in his lab at Virginia Tech, he was dressed in a black track suit and a pair of running shoes — the uniform he prefers. At 52, he has the youthful yet slightly skeletal good looks of an avid long-distance runner, which he is. “Before Flint, I was running 50 miles a week,” he told me. “Now I’m down to 27.” Running keeps him sane, he says, or at least saner than he would be otherwise. More than once during his investigations into D.C. and Flint, he wondered if he might be losing his mind.
“Before D.C.,” he told me, “I think I was a normal professor.” In the sciences, normal professors with tenure do not maintain websites on which they publish incriminating emails obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. Or habitually refer to unethical bureaucrats as “pathological lying scumbags.” Or allude frequently to Orwell’s “1984,” Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism” and Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People,” an 1882 political drama about polluted water contaminating the profitable baths in a Norwegian town. Of his fellow tenured scientists, a normal professor doesn’t say things like, “We are the greatest generation of cowards in history.”
The poisoning of Flint can be traced to the moment on April 25, 2014, when, with the push of a button, the city stopped buying treated water from Detroit and began drinking from its own notoriously polluted river. In the year after the switch, the city violated the Safe Drinking Water Act four times — for increases in E. coli, coliform bacteria and trihalomethanes, a class of carcinogenic “disinfection byproducts.” The switch also probably contributed to an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease that has killed at least 12 people. And for reasons that are still in dispute and under investigation, workers at Flint’s hastily refurbished and understaffed treatment plant failed to add corrosion inhibitors, chemicals that coat the interior of pipes, providing a prophylactic barrier. Stop adding them, and the coating wears away, the pipes corrode, lead leaches into the water.
Edwards himself didn’t discover the corrosive chemistry of Flint’s water. LeeAnne Walters, a mother of four, did that after her children broke out in rashes. In early 2015, Walters began investigating. A test conducted by the city at her request detected dangerously elevated lead levels in her tap water. After obtaining the list of chemical ingredients that the Flint treatment plant was using, Walters shared them with an E.P.A. drinking-water expert named Miguel Del Toral. Notably absent from the list: corrosion inhibitors. “I couldn’t believe that they didn’t have corrosion control,” Del Toral told me. Untreated, nearly all water will corrode metal, but some water sources are more corrosive than others, and the water from the Flint River, Del Toral says, “was corrosive as hell.” He had corresponded with Edwards before; now he had Walters collect water samples from her house and send them to Edwards’s lab for analysis. In one sample, the lead levels were so high that the water qualified as hazardous waste.
Last summer, when Walters went public with an E.P.A. memorandum that Del Toral wrote and sent her, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality tried to discredit it. In statements to reporters, a department spokesman, Brad Wurfel, called Del Toral “a rogue employee” and said Michigan officials had found no evidence of a citywide lead contamination. Wurfel’s advice to Flint residents: “Relax.” Walters, whose son had already received a diagnosis of lead poisoning, enlisted Edwards, who began conducting, with the help of Walters and other volunteers, what he claims was “the most thorough independent evaluation of water in U.S. history.”
Last September, at a news conference on the lawn of City Hall, encircled by activists, Walters by his side, Edwards announced what he had found: that lead levels in the tap water of “about 5,000 Flint homes” exceeded the safety standard — 10 parts per billion — of the World Health Organization. In October, the city switched back to Detroit water. In December, Flint’s newly elected mayor, Karen Weaver, presented Edwards with a commemorative plaque. “We had cried out for a year and a half, and it wasn’t until you came that you gave our voice some validation,” she told him. “It wasn’t until you came, and we got those Virginia Tech results, that we knew: People couldn’t say we were crazy. They couldn’t say we didn’t know what we were talking about. They couldn’t say it was our imagination.”
Edwards’s decision to champion the cause of activists is not one scientists typically make; they avoid political controversies for a reason. This year, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the largest scientific society in the world, published a report on the “standards, benefits and risks” of advocacy. “When scientists become advocates, they become ‘partisans’ and are no longer neutral conveyors of scientific information,” the report stated. “While the line between neutral and partisan, between dispassionate and passionate, is not easily drawn, it nonetheless exists.” Scientists who transgress that line tend to have their credibility impugned. Just ask the climatologists. Or think of Rachel Carson, who was a scientist with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service before she became an author. Upon the publication of “Silent Spring” in 1962, critics accused her of hysteria and Communism.
Consider the case of Clair Cameron Patterson, the geochemist who first determined the age of the planet from lead isotopic data. While working with that data, Patterson discovered, in the early 1960s, that scientists had grossly underestimated the amount of lead we were adding to the environment. There was lead in our gasoline, in our paint, in canned tuna, in our plumbing. The lead levels in the bodies of postwar Americans were 700 to 1,200 times as high as those of their preindustrial ancestors, Patterson estimated. For more than 20 years, the lead industry resisted his campaign to ban the metal from consumer products. The United States didn’t remove the last of the lead from gasoline until 1996. Though our lead levels are still around 10 to 100 times as high as those of our preindustrial ancestors, they have, on average, been coming down ever since. But in 1965, when Patterson first began sounding the alarm about lead, prominent toxicologists dismissed him as a “zealot” who had abandoned science for “rabble rousing.”
Edwards considers Patterson a role model. He would prefer to remain dispassionate, he says, but his experiences in D.C. and Flint taught him that neutrality carries its own risks. If, as surveys suggest, Americans are less willing to defer to the authority of scientific experts than they once were, scientists themselves are partly to blame, Edwards believes. In the academy, competition over a dwindling pool of funding and the pressure to publish have created “perverse incentives,” he said in a recent interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education. As a result, “the idea of science as a public good is being lost,” and along with it, the “symbiotic relationship” between the scientific community and the public. For him, his intervention in Flint was a kind of demonstration project, a case study of how to conduct science ethically, in the public sphere and for the public good.
Michigan officials initially tried to discredit him, too, trotting out the rabble-rousing charge. Although the state “appreciates academic participation in this discussion,” Wurfel, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality spokesman, wrote in an email to a local reporter last September, “offering broad, dire public-health advice based on some quick testing could be seen as fanning political flames irresponsibly.”
A scientist following the advice of the American Association for the Advancement of Science would have responded to Wurfel dispassionately, perhaps by conveying his data in a peer-reviewed journal. Instead, Edwards fought back like some 21st-century pamphleteer. On a website one of his graduate students built, flintwaterstudy.org, he posted, along with incriminating documents and helpful tips for Flint residents, acerbic commentaries condemning Wurfel and other officials he considered culpable. “You wish they’d listen to reason, scientific facts, the truth,” he told me. “But if they’re corrupt, the only weapon you’ve got is ridicule.”
In Flint, Edwards’s pugilistic brand of advocacy seemed to work. Last winter, Wurfel and other officials resigned. In February, Congress invited Edwards to testify at hearings devoted to the Flint crisis, and in a rare display of bipartisanship, Democrats and Republicans alike solicited his opinions not only on matters of science but also on matters of policy and morality and the law, treating him as a sort of oracle or ombudsman. It was hard to recall a scientist who had received a warmer reception on Capitol Hill. Gov. Rick Snyder had by then acceded to the demand spray-painted on the Block, appointing Edwards to the task force overseeing the state’s response to the emergency in Flint. The E.P.A. awarded Virginia Tech an $80,000 grant to retest the city’s water. Edwards had done as much as anyone to expose the betrayal of public trust in Flint. Who better than him to restore it?
With his son and daughter, both teenagers, and his wife, Jui-Ling, Edwards lives at the border of a national forest, atop Brush Mountain, one serration in the Appalachian chain. They heat their three-story house entirely with firewood that Edwards scavenges from the forest, and they draw their water from a well. Throughout the house, Edwards keeps gym equipment strategically placed — dumbbells in his living room, a treadmill and barbells in the basement.
He grew up in Ripley, N.Y., a rural town on the shore of Lake Erie. As a teenager, he worked menial jobs, picking grapes in the local vineyards and cleaning rooms at a motel, saving for college. He attended SUNY-Buffalo, majoring in biophysics because it was reputed to be the hardest major, combining the curriculums of biology, physics, chemistry and math. In his senior year, he applied successfully to the graduate program in civil engineering at the University of Washington, in Seattle. In his application’s personal statement, he wrote that the restoration of Lake Erie, which he witnessed in the 1970s after the passage of the Clean Water Act, had given him his life’s purpose: to improve “the future of water supplies.”
The director of his dissertation at U.W. was an environmental engineer named Mark Benjamin. The two grew close, and have remained close, despite differences of temperament and politics. In the acknowledgments section of his dissertation, Edwards says of Benjamin, “I will do well to follow his sterling example in future professional activities, while at the same time attempting to shake the aftereffects of his Stanford socialistic drivel.
“As you probably know, since you’ve spent a lot of time with him, Marc has strong political views,” Benjamin told me. It was true. Edwards had made his political views clear. In Virginia, when I visited him in February, we had watched the returns of the South Carolina presidential primaries together in his living room, Edwards in gym shorts lifting 27-pound weights. He is a Republican, a fiscal conservative with a libertarian bent, as well as an environmental-justice warrior. “The crack about ‘Stanford socialistic drivel’ had become a running joke by then,” Benjamin says. “But absolutely there was more than a grain of serious resentment at people feeling entitled by having gone to the best schools, as the world sees those rankings. Given his SUNY-Buffalo background, I’m sure he felt disrespected.”
Edwards and Benjamin believe that, adhered to rigorously, the scientific method provides some protection from bias, political or otherwise, and by all accounts Edwards is a brilliant scientist. “Really, he’s almost unique in the field right now, how much he’s admired,” Benjamin says. Other scientists I spoke to said the same, affirming the wisdom of the judges who in 2007 awarded Edwards a MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called Genius Grant. (In its citation, the foundation praised him for “playing a vital role in ensuring the safety of drinking water.”)
Outside the realm of science, Edwards has strong differences of opinion with many of his admirers. In the written statement he submitted with his congressional testimony in February, he included a somewhat cryptic sentence. “While misconduct has always been a problem, at some level, since the earliest days of the scientific revolution,” he wrote, “the rise of institutional scientific misconduct is a relatively new phenomenon.”
When I asked him what he meant, he referred me to a 2014 book for which he wrote the foreword, “Science for Sale,” by David L. Lewis, an E.P.A. whistle-blower. Lewis defines “institutional scientific misconduct” as “the fraudulent manipulation of science by government agencies, corporations and academic institutions to support government policies and industry practices.” In his foreword, Edwards commends Lewis but quibbles with his definition. It’s the misconduct of public institutions, not private ones, that worries Edwards most. “In my opinion,” he writes, “the abuses and dangers of institutional scientific misconduct,” where no profit motive appears, “far exceed those arising from misconduct in industrial science.”
Edwards’s cynicism about the public sector was deeply shaped by the “D.C. saga,” Benjamin told me. In Washington, when Edwards started leveling allegations against the E.P.A. and the C.D.C., he was treated by some as a pariah in his field, the scientist who cried “Lead!” in a crowded metropolis — or “the engineering equivalent,” Benjamin says, “of an ambulance chaser.”
Bruce Lanphear, a public-health physician who has studied environmental lead poisoning since the 1990s, shares Edwards’s concern about the failures of regulatory agencies but attributes them mainly to the institution that invited Edwards to testify: Congress. He pointed out that in the last two decades Congress has cut the E.P.A.’s budget by 30 percent, even as the agency’s regulatory mandates have increased.
“We’re still using children as biological indicators for substandard housing,” Lanphear says. “Everything is focused on short-term solutions, crisis thinking, the bottom line.” The crisis in Flint has led to congressional hearings and criminal charges against nine Michigan officials but not yet to the kind of action Lanphear believes the nation needs to take. “Within the next 30 years, we’re going to need to have replaced our entire water infrastructure,” Lanphear says. “So what’s the plan?”
This winter and spring, whenever Edwards went to Michigan, television cameras tended to follow. One morning, a team sent by RT, the Russian news network, trailed him to an elementary school — not in Flint but just outside it, in the comparatively affluent, majority-white suburb Grand Blanc. Joining Edwards on his classroom visit was Mona Hanna-Attisha, a pediatrician at Hurley Medical Center in Flint. Like many people in Michigan, she first heard of Edwards last summer. At the time, she was working on a study of her own, an analysis of pediatric blood data that would confirm what the Virginia Tech water study had implied — that blood-lead levels in Flint had shot up after the city seceded from Detroit’s water system. Edwards had identified the cause, Hanna-Attisha the effect. She wasn’t sure why state agencies had missed the blood-lead increase she had found. Trying to explain their failure, their collective blindness, she mentioned an aphorism she learned in medical school: “The eyes don’t see what the mind doesn’t know.”
In a second-floor classroom, the pair sat in tiny red chairs, Edwards in an ill-fitting suit, Hanna-Attisha in an ankle-length parka, drinking cocoa from mugs and taking questions from small interrogators — the fourth-grade version of a congressional hearing. Edwards testified that something “governments don’t do very well is fix the problems they create.”
“Do you blame the government for what happened?” a boy in the front row asked.
“Yes, I do,” Edwards said. “Did you pick up on that?”
Another child wanted to know what happens to officials who break the law.
Hanna-Attisha joked that they get a “timeout.”
Edwards liked this. “A really bad timeout!” he said. All the grown-ups laughed.
“And everyone gets fired!” the boy in front said.
“We can also have stronger laws and stronger rules,” Hanna-Attisha said once the laughter died down, “to prevent this from happening in other cities.”
Grand Blanc and Flint have a tangled history. A half-century ago, during the days of white flight, General Motors executives pushed to combine suburbs and city into a single metropolis — New Flint — with shared government services and a shared tax base. In 1958, opponents in the suburbs blocked the plan. People in parts of Flint now have a life expectancy 15 years lower than those in some neighboring suburbs, and even before the water crisis, children in Flint had higher blood-lead levels than their suburban counterparts. “Our Flint kids have every obstacle to success,” Hanna-Attisha told me back at her office. “We have a 42 percent poverty rate here; it’s about 16 percent in the state. We have one of the highest crime rates. We don’t have full-service grocery stores.”
Flint’s plight, in other words, predated the water crisis and will outlast it. At the time of Edwards’s classroom visit, four months after Flint rejoined Detroit’s water system, Edwards’s research team and the citizen scientists who volunteered to assist it were preparing to resample the same 271 taps that Virginia Tech sampled last summer. The results would reveal how far lead levels had fallen. Knocking on doors, they encountered an unanticipated obstacle: Many of the occupants of those 271 homes had moved away, locking their doors behind them. Civil engineers refer to the time that water spends in pipes as “water age.” Flint’s loss of population meant that fewer people were opening their taps, which meant that Flint’s water was getting older. The older the water, the longer it would take for corrosion inhibitors to work their way through all the pipes.
Of the 271 homes that Virginia Tech tested last summer, the lead levels in Elnora Carthan’s house — 1,050 parts per billion, 70 times as high as the E.P.A. limit — were the highest. When Edwards visited Carthan’s tiny yellow bungalow in the spring, scraps of copper piping lay coiled in the grass, the remnants of the service line that a construction crew sent by the city had just ripped out. The crew was still there, putting a new copper service line in, threading it under the asphalt to the water main across the street.
“It’s a big C.S.I.-of-plumbing case,” Edwards said, “because why does she have so much lead but no lead pipe?” He crouched on the lawn, peered into a length of pipe and blew into one end of it. Having found no clues, he tagged a few scraps to take back to his lab for further study.
In Carthan’s basement, he inspected the plumbing with a flashlight. Traditionally, civil engineers have concerned themselves with public works, leaving household plumbing to plumbers. But in the 1990s, Edwards realized that the distinction between private property and public works had everything to do with legal liabilities and nothing to do with chemistry. Legally, a homeowner is responsible for what happens after water crosses the property line, which is one reason water companies are keen to attribute lead poisoning to household sources. But what happens to water at the municipal treatment plant, or on its subterranean journey, can have unintended side effects within the home. Depending on its chemistry, water can eat pinholes into copper pipes. It can turn a basement water heater into an incubator of legionella or other bacteria. And if its chemistry is corrosive, it can leach lead from the solder or from brass faucets. Old plumbing fixtures made of brass were often as much as 20 percent lead by weight, and until 2014 even brass faucets advertised as lead-free could contain up to 8 percent lead by weight in the United States. Solder, brass fixtures or maybe a chunk of lead obstructing a pipe — those, Edwards hypothesized, were the likely sources of the lead in Carthan’s water. To test his hypothesis, he hired a local plumber for the day to replumb Carthan’s house with PVC. From her old plumbing, he collected samples and added them to the heap of evidence destined for his lab.
Out in her driveway, Carthan stood by, watching the scientists at work. Born in Arkansas, she moved to Flint in 1976 and had been there ever since, even though her children and grandchildren had all moved away. She herself had never drunk the poisoned water or served it to guests. “When they first switched,” she said, “it had an odd smell. A really odd smell. You knew something was wrong. You turn the shower on, and you could smell it. You take a shower, five or 10 minutes later, you begin to itch. You knew there was something wrong. That’s why people were complaining. But nobody was listening” — until Virginia Tech arrived. Carthan signed up to participate in last summer’s water study as soon as she heard about it.
Edwards credited much of the success of his intervention in Flint to an anthropologist named Yanna Lambrinidou. Lambrinidou had helped organize a coalition of activists during D.C.’s lead crisis. It was their work, and Lambrinidou’s in particular, that brought his D.C. research to the attention of Congress, Edwards told me. Without her efforts, the congressional investigation that vindicated him might never have happened.
Collaborating on the D.C. crisis, Edwards tutored Lambrinidou in the chemistry of lead corrosion. In turn, she taught him about the value of “vernacular” knowledge and the ethical hazards of scientific hubris. For several years, Edwards and Lambrinidou together taught a course at Virginia Tech called Engineering Ethics and the Public, in which students studied cases of scientific misconduct and practiced ethnographic methods — what Lambrinidou calls “learning to listen.” In Flint, Edwards told me, he tried to apply everything he had learned from her.
Lambrinidou was at first reluctant to speak to me. Eventually, she explained why. Although she considered “Marc’s contribution in Flint and D.C. absolutely essential,” on his website and in the news media, Edwards had contributed to a simplistic “hero narrative” about Flint. This was a complaint I heard from other environmental-justice advocates — that Edwards had cast himself, or been cast by the news media, as Flint’s white knight. A number of people I spoke to, Lambrinidou among them, referred to a comment that Irma Muñoz, the president of an advocacy group called Mujeres de la Tierra, had made at a recent conference on citizen science: “We don’t want our day saved,” Muñoz said. “We want to save our own day.”
Paul Schwartz, a water activist who worked with Edwards and Lambrinidou in D.C., told me there were times when Edwards “would be helpful and supportive, and there were times when he shoved us aside and inserted himself right into the middle of the story.”
In an email to me, Lambrinidou wrote: “We are all capable of outstanding courage (even if at times we have been ‘cowards’) and of outstanding wrongdoing (even if at times we have been ‘heroes’). This is what it means to be human, no? This is what it means to be a parent, a teacher, a doctor, a president. We all know that at times we’ve shined beyond even our own greatest expectations, and at times we’ve failed spectacularly to the point of self-shock. I think that Marc, not unlike many individuals and institutions embracing ‘hero’ narratives, struggles sometimes to hear this.”
She described an alternative situation that might have played out in Flint, one she had seen play out in other collaborations between citizens and scientists. What if Edwards had stayed in Virginia, or at least away from the cameras? What if he had supported the activists in Flint with technical expertise but let them announce the findings of the study they conducted with his help? I wasn’t sure. If LeeAnne Walters had presented the evidence on the lawn of City Hall last September, would people outside Flint have taken the evidence as seriously?
This spring, a new outsider began making trouble in Flint, the actor Mark Ruffalo, who founded an environmental group called Water Defense. Ruffalo had hired a man named Scott Smith to serve as Water Defense’s chief water scientist. When Smith went to Flint, he took what he called Water Defense Waterbugs, colorful sponges of “open-cell elastomeric foam technology.” They looked like Koosh balls made from shredded swimming-pool noodles. Smith tossed them into the Flint River. He tossed them into bathtubs and shower stalls. In a video that Water Defense posted online, Smith claimed that the research carried out by others was fundamentally flawed, because it relied entirely on “grab samples” that collect “a split second” of water, and people don’t “bathe for a split second.” (In fact, Edwards says, Virginia Tech used an array of proven sampling methods.)
In April, at a meeting of the Flint City Council inside City Hall, Smith issued a warning that bore an uncanny resemblance to those Edwards issued last September. “It is irresponsible and incomprehensible for anyone to declare or suggest that the water in Flint is safe to bathe or shower in,” Smith said. No one had tested the showers and bathtubs of Flint for “the full spectrum of chemicals, including but not limited to chemicals that volatilize or aerosolize in the air and pose a direct inhalation risk into the lungs.” It was a convincing performance, not only because Smith sounded scientific but also because his assessment helped explain symptoms that residents of Flint continued to report even after they stopped drinking the poisoned water — rashes, hair loss, difficulty breathing, a burning in the lungs. In February alone, there were so many complaints from Flint residents that state and federal public-health officials opened a new investigation. (Asked to comment for this article, the C.D.C. said that “results from the investigation have not yet been released.”)
“This is exactly the danger of having untrustworthy government science,” Edwards wrote me in an email in May. “A Hollywood fraud rolls into town, and they cannot even call him out.” Concerned that Water Defense would scare even Flint residents who reported no adverse symptoms, he decided to go after Ruffalo and Smith the way he went after government officials last fall. “A-List Actor but F-List Scientist: Mark Ruffalo Brings Fear and Misinformation to Flint” read the headline of a blog post he published on flintwaterstudy.org.
“Not everyone who challenges the claims of the E.P.A., C.D.C. and State of Michigan are automatically correct,” he wrote. Smith had no degrees in the sciences, Edwards noted, and appeared to be a businessman of dubious accomplishment who was now trying to market his sponges. Edwards made the case that Water Defense’s meddling would do harm. A recent increase in gastrointestinal infections in Flint, Edwards speculated, could have been caused by the poor hygiene that Smith’s “fear-mongering” had encouraged. The disinfection byproducts, or DBPs, that Water Defense had detected in showers — produced by reactions between chlorine and organic matter — had been reviewed by a scientist Edwards recruited, Dr. David Reckhow of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, “one of the foremost authorities on DBPs in the world.” Reckhow’s assessment: “There is nothing at all unusual or abnormal in the Flint DBP data.”
Water Defense, though, made its own appeal to authority. Smith was not a credentialed scientist, it was true, but all his samples were being tested by an independent lab and reviewed by Judith Zelikoff, a toxicologist in the environmental-medicine department at New York University. (Water Defense is “producing data in an ethical and transparent manner,” Zelikoff told me, “and I will continue to support them.”) Once again, Flint residents were left to wonder whom to believe.
This time, Edwards’s pugilistic brand of advocacy proved less effective than it had last fall. Among the activists who fought to expose Flint’s water crisis, a schism emerged. There were those, led by LeeAnne Walters, who kept faith in Virginia Tech, and those, led by another Flint mother, Melissa Mays, who placed their trust in Water Defense. Mays helped conduct the fieldwork for the Virginia Tech water study and, like LeeAnne Walters, she appeared alongside Edwards at his news conference last September. Now, after his denunciation of Water Defense, she renounced him. “You aren’t listening anymore,” she wrote in an email that Edwards shared with me. “We’ll go back to doing the work on our own with those willing to work WITH us in the community as we discover more and vindicate what the residents here already know by THE PAIN WE ARE IN, that it is not safe to bathe.”
On a hot May afternoon, Mays and other Flint residents drove to Ann Arbor to protest outside the condominium on Main Street where Gov. Rick Snyder lives when he isn’t in Lansing. They wore bathrobes and carried signs calling for Snyder’s impeachment. “Tricky Ricky, you can’t hide! We can see your dirty side!” the protesters chanted. I spotted a woman in a pink bathrobe and a FLINT LIVES MATTER T-shirt whom Edwards had introduced me to in the winter. Her name was Nayyirah Shariff, and she was a community organizer with the Flint Democracy Defense League. When we first met, Shariff expressed gratitude and admiration for what Virginia Tech had done, but her opinion of Edwards had since changed. “Now it feels like, intentionally or unintentionally, he’s filling the role of the State of Michigan and how they felt about our experiences back in the summer of 2015.”
When I caught up with Melissa Mays, she said, “What broke my heart the most is that when we brought Marc Edwards in last August, the state did the same thing to him, called him a fear-monger. That’s the same thing that Marc just did to Water Defense.” Edwards’s remarks about hygiene, moreover, were offensive. People in Flint hadn’t stopped bathing despite their adverse reactions. “You’re saying that we’re dumb and dirty,” Mays said. “That’s what’s wrong with us.”
At the end of May, Edwards returned to Michigan to hold yet another news conference, at which he and other scientists would try to allay the fears and doubts that Water Defense had fueled. For this occasion, Edwards toned down his rhetoric, presenting the latest data neutrally. Lead levels were still too high, but they were coming down. The disinfection byproducts were comparable to the national average. Sounding weary, he continued: “I understand that the trust will never be there for some people. If the residents in Flint, given their journey, decide they never want to drink tap water again, never want to take a bath or shower again, I’m not going to try to talk them out of it, because they went through hell for 18 months.”
After the news conference ended, Edwards visited the home of Mari Copeny, the 9-year-old known as Little Miss Flint, whose letter to President Obama prompted him to visit. From LeeAnne Walters, Edwards had learned that Water Defense had collected samples in Mari’s home. She was at school, but her mother, Lulu Brezzell, let Edwards in. Even after the city returned to Detroit’s system, the water gave her family bad rashes, Brezzell said. She showed him pictures — angry red splotches on hands and arms and legs. Washing the dishes made the skin on her knuckles blister and split. She and her children were still doing their best to practice good hygiene, but they had learned to take “speed showers” — no more than two minutes. Water Defense had found high levels of chloroform in her water. Another scientist, with Hydroviv, a company that sells water filters, told her that her chloroform levels were “comparable to other municipal water sources.” Like many people in Flint, she didn’t know what or whom to believe, but she was inclined to trust her symptoms and her senses. Her water smelled “like a swimming pool,” and it had acquired a mysterious blue tint.
“So I do a lot of work with blue water all over the country,” Edwards said. About 80 percent of blue-water cases are “natural,” a trick of the light, he explained. In the remaining 20 percent, the tint comes from dissolved copper, and unlike lead, a little copper is harmless. To figure out whether Brezzell’s blue water was natural or chemical, all you had to do was place a bottle of it and a bottle of store-bought water against a white background.
Upstairs in her little bathroom, he filled the tub. As the water rose, it took on a tint. “Can you see it?” Brezzell asked. “Nice and blue?”
“Oh, yeah, that’s blue,” Edwards said.
She was relieved to hear him say this. “People were saying: ‘You’re crazy. The water’s not blue.’ I’m like, ‘Yes, it is!’ ”
“So now the question, though: Is it bluer than normal water?” Edwards said. He performed his test, filling a bottle from Brezzell’s tub and comparing it with a bottle of store-bought water.
“They’re a different color!” Brezzell said hopefully.
Edwards held the bottles up to a fluorescent light above the sink.
“That is blue water,” Edwards said. “But it’s light blue.” He took the two bottles outside. In natural light, they were harder to distinguish. Compared with other blue water he had studied, on a blueness scale of 1 to 10, hers was low, around a 1.5, he estimated. He meant this to sound reassuring: The 1.5 was close to normal, most likely indicative of a little copper, but nothing to worry about.
“It’s still darker, though,” Brezzell said, and you could tell from the insistence in her voice that she was neither comforted nor convinced.
Edwards was not surprised by her reaction, he later told me. She had horrible rashes and so did her children. She was in pain. “And when you’re in pain, you want an answer, even if it’s wrong,” and he had no firm conclusions to offer, only data and hypotheses. All he knew for certain was what the lab tests eventually told him: that contrary to what Water Defense had told her, the chloroform levels were typical for American cities. The same was true of the disinfection byproducts and copper. Her chlorine levels, though well below the E.P.A. limit, were a bit high. Perhaps this explained the rashes. Perhaps she and her children were sensitive to chlorine. Perhaps a filter for her shower head would help.
Early this month, I spoke to Edwards one last time. A year ago, he was the troublemaking outsider whom the authorities were accusing of “fanning the political flames irresponsibly.” Now he was the authority making that case about others, and if many of the activists now considered him an untrustworthy agent of the state, there was nothing he could do about it. In both roles, he said, he had been the advocate for “sound science.”
“This is what a ‘dark age’ looks like,” he wrote me in an email the morning after our conversation. “When science is no longer a source of enlightenment, people still need to believe in something.” The people of Flint had been betrayed, and the betrayal had pushed some of them “into the anti-science camp.” He continued: “We lost our authority and the public trust with good reason. After Flint kids were protected, I took off my activist suit and put on my lab coat. Some people assumed my motives could be changed just as easily. Not so, but arguing about it is not productive. Our energies have to be focused on not betraying the public in the first place.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/21/magazine/flints-water-crisis-and-the-troublemaker-scientist.html?_r=0
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Too Big to Frack? Oil Giants Try Again to Master Technology That Revolutionized Drilling
Aug 16, 2016 | Wall Street Journal
By Bradley Olson and Sarah Kent
The oil-and-gas well BP PLC is drilling here in the Texas Panhandle looks ordinary enough from the surface. Yet a mile-and-a-half underground, horizontal pipes shoot off for at least a mile in three directions, like a chicken’s foot.
The idea, part of an experiment by BP executive David Lawler, is to make three wells from one. It also is designed to help turn the London-based energy giant into a shale-oil innovator that can better compete with the entrepreneurial outfits that pioneered the business of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.
Big oil companies like BP are in need of a jolt. The multibillion-dollar projects they specialize in—giant offshore oil rigs and gas-export projects—are often prohibitively expensive in a world of $40-a-barrel oil. U.S. wells are a tempting option, but major oil companies have yet to prove they can master the techniques pioneered by shale drillers, whose innovations fueled a rebirth in U.S. energy production.
If BP, Exxon Mobil Corp. and others can figure out how to coax enough oil out of fracked wells cheaply enough to make it profitable, it could help them maintain production levels. Failure could make it harder to replace the oil from declining older megaprojects, and leave them further behind on innovations transforming the industry.
Six years after the Deepwater Horizon accident in the Gulf of Mexico caused the worst offshore spill in U.S. history, BP is turning again to America. Mr. Lawler, a former college football linebacker turned engineer, is in charge of the push into shale oil and gas. If the Perryton well succeeds, Mr. Lawler could try the same thing with drilling leases BP has in Oklahoma, Texas and beyond, potentially yielding oil and gas on a large scale.
He isn’t the only Lawler in the fracking business. His older brother, Robert, known as Doug, is chief executive of Chesapeake Energy Corp., the trailblazer founded by fracking pioneer Aubrey McClendon, who died in a car crash in March.
The Lawler brothers are part of the second wave of the fracking revolution: a move away from debt-fueled drilling mania to what they hope will be a more financially sustainable future.
Doug’s challenge is to take debt-laden Chesapeake and its attractive drilling leases and turn it into a profitable business. David’s mission is to crack the code of shale drilling for BP, something that the world’s biggest energy companies haven’t been good at.
Processes designed for huge offshore platforms are a poor fit for fracking, which requires endless tinkering to be successful. Frackers must also develop a substantial tolerance for failure. They often must drill dozens of wells to figure out the best techniques for particular locations.
So far, big oil companies have compiled a poor record in U.S. fracking. Their fracked wells don’t produce as much as those of industry leaders because they haven’t mastered the technology. They have taken more than $20 billion in write-downs, some stemming from top-of-the-market acquisitions of fracking companies, and the plunge in crude prices has made things worse. Exxon has lost money in its U.S. drilling business for six straight quarters.
In 2014 and 2015, shale wells drilled by BP, Royal Dutch Shell PLC, Exxon and ChevronCorp. were one-third less productive, on average, than the top 10 operators, according to data from analytics firm NavPort. Their wells have improved each year, but so have those of the top operators. Many big companies—often called “integrated” firms because they have production and refining operations—say they are getting better and have drilled some profitable wells.
“You have to be quick, you have to be nimble, you have to be flexible,” says shale pioneerMark Papa, former chief executive of EOG Resources Inc. “The track records of the integrateds is really not very pretty.”
David Lawler, 48 years old, acknowledges the challenges BP faces trying to go small. Exxon, Shell and Total SA all notched losses or write-downs from their shale businesses, even before oil prices began falling two years ago.
Yet Mr. Lawler says he is optimistic that BP can make shale profitable at today’s prices, even if it isn’t blessed with what others in the industry see as good rock—land in the country’s most prized oil-and-gas basins. “It’s about how fast we can change,” he says.
If he succeeds, it would bolster the view that the shale age could last decades as the drilling bonanza extends to new areas, not just in the U.S. but around the world.
So far, BP has managed to slash its shale production costs, and it believes it can produce as much as 7.5 billion barrels economically. While some analysts see only about half that as viable at today’s prices, it still amounts to enough drilling locations to last 30 years.
Some of its Colorado wells each have produced enough natural gas to power 9,000 U.S. homes for a year. A well in a Wyoming field that no one had tapped in eight years yielded the equivalent of almost 50,000 barrels of oil in its first month. An earlier test in Texas, he says, suggested BP’s land could hold the equivalent of 400 million barrels of oil.
Currently, most of BP’s planned growth is coming from nonshale production in places such as Azerbaijan, Oman and Egypt. The U.S. shale business is responsible for only about 13% of its production.
“The point for us is that it’s an optionality,” said Bernard Looney, BP’s head of exploration and production, adding that shale has “the potential to be a material source of growth.”
BP initially was unsure about the prospects of shale. As smaller competitors began demonstrating the magnitude of the oil and gas trapped in shale rocks, other big companies piled in with costly acquisitions, such as Exxon’s $31 billion purchase of XTO Energy in 2010. BP signed smaller transactions to jointly develop wells with Chesapeake—deals not struck by the Lawlers.
When the Deepwater Horizon accident took place in April 2010, BP’s shale ambitions took a hit. The company needed cash to pay tens of billions of dollars in cleanup costs and legal penalties. It sold off holdings in West Texas, home to the Permian basin, which some analysts and executives see re-emerging as one of the most important oil formations in the world.
The company underwent a major restructuring after the spill. Executives were divided over how to improve the U.S. shale unit’s middling record. In the end, they decided to give the business freedom to run almost as an independent.
“We’ve chosen a model to separate the business, and it’s working,” said Mr. Looney, who was involved in the discussions. “Not just sort of working, but really working.”
Mr. Looney attributes much of the success to Mr. Lawler, who took over BP’s shale operations in 2014.
Mr. Lawler’s brother Doug, who became Chesapeake’s chief executive in 2012 and has slashed that company’s near-term liabilities roughly by half, says David “attacked” the opportunity with zeal.
Doug Lawler predicts that his brother will help extend the life of the shale revolution at BP as engineers expand the areas that can be considered prime drilling turf. “There are definite sweet spots,” he says. “But through technology, ingenuity, innovation, those can be expanded.”
Part of David Lawler’s challenge upon taking over was teaching BP employees that some failures were acceptable. At major oil companies such as BP, executives are used to tackling multibillion-dollar projects. In deep-water exploration, a dry hole can cost $100 million or more. In shale, it is just $5 million in many areas.
“If we drill a well and it doesn’t work, no one is blamed,” Mr. Lawler says. “We had to fight back against an unwillingness to try new things.”
Mr. Lawler outsourced less work to contractors so BP could gain from any advantage gleaned from experimentation, and he gave individual managers control of how they drilled wells in different areas—a common approach among successful shale producers.
BP says it has seen improvement. In Oklahoma and Texas, it has reduced well costs by almost two-thirds, and is now drilling wells in 37 days on average, compared with 67 in 2012. The wells are on track to produce 44% more natural gas than those drilled three years ago.
Although the wells of big companies have lagged behind those of top shale operators, the big companies are getting better. Exxon, Chevron, Statoil ASA, ConocoPhillips andOccidental Petroleum Corp. are among the top 20 in terms of U.S. well performance so far in 2016, according to NavPort.
BP has high hopes for its “multilateral” wells—the “chicken-foot” type—which involve drilling horizontally in more than one direction from one vertical well bore. Doing so would allow the company to tap more than one layer at about half the cost of drilling multiple wells.
After a test proved the concept with two horizontals, Mr. Lawler decided to go for three in the Texas Panhandle on the King Harry lease, and to do it six times—18 horizontal wells from six vertical well bores, draining 3 square miles. The wells are expected to begin flowing this month.
A two-lateral well drilled late last year produced the equivalent of 1,040 barrels a day, mostly natural gas. That is much less than some of the biggest natural-gas wells in Ohio and Pennsylvania, but it is more than three times the average in the basin, an area that most other operators have abandoned.
At the current price of $2.59 per million British Thermal Units, about half that of two years ago, the wells have a rate of return between 10% to 20% over their productive lives, Mr. Lawler says. The results, he says, point to the viability of 500 potential new wells across the area.
“We had to create a way to make money,” he says, “and we’re doing it.”
http://www.wsj.com/articles/too-big-to-frack-oil-giants-try-again-to-master-technology-that-revolutionized-drilling-1471362741
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How Producing Clean Power Turned Out to Be a Messy Business
Aug 16, 2016 | New York Times (In Real Clear Energy)
By David Gelles
On the edge of a bucolic field in Princeton, N.J., an eco-friendly office building recently opened its doors. Plants festoon the roof, a living wall is planned for the lobby, and rainwater storage tanks supply the building’s needs. In the parking lot there are wind turbines, solar panels and electric vehicle charging stations.
It is the picture of a sustainable future, one in which society’s insatiable demand for electricity can be met without polluting the planet.
The same cannot be said of the building’s tenant, NRG Energy.
The biggest independent power producer in the country, NRG sells electricity to utilities, companies and individual homes. To generate all that wattage, it burns enormous amounts of natural gas, coal and oil, making NRG one of the country’s biggest polluters.
It isn’t trying to muck up the planet; that’s just the nature of the business NRG is in. The electricity industry is the biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. In 2014, NRG was the fourth-largest emitter of carbon dioxide among the country’s power producers.
The business of providing Americans with electricity hasn’t evolved much in a century. But today, growing concerns about climate change, affordable wind and solar power, and the potential for distributed generation are pressuring utilities and power producers like NRG to clean up their acts, and fast.
“Our industry is going though massive transformation, the likes of which we’ve never seen,” said Mauricio Gutierrez, the recently installed chief executive of NRG. “The industry has never seen this much turnover.”
All this transformation has been particularly tumultuous for NRG, which has weathered more than its share of mishaps and unintended consequences: In May, for example, a fire knocked out a crucial tower at a cutting-edge but troubled solar power plant that the company manages in the Southern California desert. Its big bets on residential solar and on a national charging network for electric vehicles were ahead of their time and fizzled.
The shale and fracking booms in the United States made natural gas cheap and abundant, pulling down the price of electricity and making power sources that NRG still depends on heavily — including coal, nuclear and renewables — less profitable. Investors lost faith in the company, NRG’s stock plummeted, and its previous chief executive was summarily fired, replaced by Mr. Gutierrez.
Far from emerging as an industry pioneer, NRG has become a cautionary tale. A power-hungry nation needs to change the way it is fueled, but as NRG shows, transitioning to clean power is messy business.
“The power producers and utilities are the canaries in the coal mine,” said Aron Cramer, C.E.O. of Business for Social Responsibility, a consulting firm. “And there’s a lot of road kill in the midst of this transition to a lower-carbon energy system.”
No two companies face the exact same set of challenges. But at some level, the quandary preoccupying NRG is one that all power producers and utilities will ultimately face: how to make more electricity while emitting fewer greenhouse gases.
NRG wasn’t always a clean-energy proponent. Until recently, it was just another power producer, burning fossil fuels to electrify the grid.
In 2003, it tapped David Crane to be its chief executive. Mr. Crane, who previously ran a traditional London-based power company, set about expanding NRG’s core business. He acquired Reliant Energy, which sells electricity to homes and businesses in Texas, as well as GenOn Energy, a rival based in Houston. These moves vastly expanded NRG’s scale, and its emissions.
By 2006, Mr. Crane began to respond to the climate crisis and became one of the country’s most unlikely environmentalists.
At first, he made modest changes. NRG bought a wind power company, which it later sold. Soon, though, Mr. Crane made large investments in wind and solar plants and spent heavily on pet projects like a national network of electric-car charging stations.
Seemingly overnight, the fossil fuels executive became a champion of renewable energy. He wanted to turn the hub-and-spoke utility model — with big power plants sending electricity out to homes and businesses — inside out.
Instead, in Mr. Crane’s vision, solar panels and wind turbines would blanket the country, heralding an era of distributed energy production. He called environmental protection a “moral imperative.” Last year, NRG said it would slash carbon emissions in half by 2030 and reduce them by 90 percent by 2050.
“It’s the destiny of NRG to be a leader,” Mr. Crane said at the groundbreaking of the new headquarters, “to create a more sustainable and prosperous future while winning the fight against climate change.”
Mr. Crane was channeling the spirit of the time. In December, world leaders in Paris pledged to combat climate change. The United States said it would cut its greenhouse gas emissions by more than a quarter in 10 years. With wind and solar power cheaper than ever and consumers starting to embrace energy-saving technologies, these targets could be within reach.
But the climate crisis won’t be solved with more Teslas alone. If the goals set in Paris are to be met, big electricity producers like NRG will need to reduce emissions while increasing power production. So Mr. Crane set about trying to retool NRG’s fleet of dirty power plants while building a new generation of utility-scale wind and solar projects.
NRG’s dual personality — fossil fuel giant and clean energy pioneer — is on display at two relatively new facilities on opposite ends of the country.
Just south of Los Angeles International Airport, four smokestacks punctuate the sandy coastline. There in one form or another since the 1950s, they are part of the El Segundo Energy Center, which produces enough electricity to power nearly 450,000 homes.
At first glance, it is just another power plant burning cheap and abundant natural gas. Yet the El Segundo plant is among the most sophisticated of its kind. The two operational units, which came online in 2013, replaced inefficient relics constructed a half-century ago. Wastewater is recycled, emissions controls minimize the production of nitrogen oxide and carbon monoxide, and a mix of combustion and steam turbines greatly enhance the amount of energy derived from the gas.
And perhaps most critically, the El Segundo Energy Center is only occasionally generating power.
A generation ago, it operated almost constantly, feeding the vast energy needs of Los Angeles. But over the last several years, big power companies — including NRG — have constructed enormous solar power plants in Southern California, supplying a growing share of daytime electricity.
When the sun is shining, NRG’s new high-tech gas-fired power plant is often dormant, coming alive only when demand ramps up and the sun has dimmed. In that sense, the El Segundo plant is a big leap forward. Yet the very need to pour millions of dollars into retrofitting this gas-fired plant on the picturesque shore of the Pacific Ocean shows just how much work has yet to be done.
Across the country, in Spencer, Mass., NRG is putting the final touches on a community solar project on the grounds of St. Joseph’s Abbey, a Trappist monastery. There, on rolling green hills near the monks’ quarters, hundreds of hard-hatted workers are busy erecting thousands of solar panels.
The electricity generated from those panels will flow through new transmission lines, which were required because the existing grid infrastructure could not handle the influx of solar energy. The project will power about 2,000 nearby homes, which should have lower and more reliable electricity bills.
By NRG’s standards, the solar plant is relatively small, but more are in the works. With enough such plants on the grid, they could help NRG achieve its ambitious emissions reductions targets.
This is exactly the kind of change that Mr. Crane championed. And yet he is no longer the chief executive of NRG. He was abruptly fired in December, after NRG stock plummeted 63 percent in a year.
Earnings fell as cheap natural gas made NRG’s coal-fired plants less competitive, and investors had grown weary of Mr. Crane’s focus on clean energy. Even as NRG’s core business was losing money, Mr. Crane devoted much of his quarterly earnings calls to discussions about clean-power projects.
“We all believe in renewables,” said Shahriar Pourreza, an analyst with Guggenheim Partners. “But there was such a change in the message of the company that investors lost confidence in the management team.”
The NRG board named the company’s chief operating officer, Mr. Gutierrez, as the new leader. He had grown up in Mexico City, where electricity was sometimes spotty. Mr. Gutierrez joined his family’s engineering company, then worked for Dynegy, a power producer in Houston, before joining NRG. Yet he says that like his predecessor, he is committed to environmental stewardship.
He drives a red Tesla and uses a Nest thermostat to remotely manage the temperature in his solar-paneled home in New Jersey. A Catholic, Mr. Gutierrez says he draws motivation from Pope Francis, who last year released “Laudato Si,” an encyclical on the environment.
“When a spiritual leader like the pope calls out our moral responsibility toward the environment, it’s a pretty big thing,” Mr. Gutierrez said. “It transcends science and policy.”
He was engaged in efforts to combat climate change well before Paris. As Mr. Crane’s C.O.O., he led an NRG task force that recommended that the company adopt ambitious targets for emissions reduction. Mr. Gutierrez recently recommitted to those goals. “Renewables is something that’s very important for our portfolio,” he said. “It’s good business.”
Mr. Gutierrez has a tricky balancing act. He must appease demanding investors and a skittish board, which most likely means reining in some of Mr. Crane’s clean-energy ventures. Yet he must also fill the shoes of a chief executive who had raised hopes among environmentalists that a big energy producer was getting serious about climate change. He must profitably manage gas and coal assets — which still make up most of the company’s power generation, sales and profits — while also preparing for a future that is more dependent on solar and wind.
Analysts are pleased with Mr. Gutierrez’s performance so far. He has simplified the corporate structure, played down some of Mr. Crane’s side projects and focused on the balance sheet. NRG shares have risen 40 percent since Mr. Gutierrez took over.
“With the old management, there was such a change in message, the company started to lose credibility,” Mr. Pourreza said. “Mauricio is leading this company in the right direction.”
But how NRG will actually achieve vast reductions in its carbon footprint is unclear. As long as it is burning so much gas and coal, it will remain a major emitter of greenhouse gases. And while Mr. Gutierrez speaks hopefully of developments in carbon-capture technology and utility-scale battery storage, practical solutions remain elusive. “Do we have a perfect line of sight on how we’re going to get there? No,” he said. “Do we have a road map? Yes.”
Complicating matters, the Obama administration’s signature effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the power sector — the Clean Power Plan — is tied up in the courts. (NRG was among the companies that petitioned the E.P.A. to modify the plan, arguing that it made the power sector too reliant on natural gas.) The ambiguous fate of that plan has added regulatory uncertainty to an industry already in flux.
“You have these goals set in Paris, you have a framework for getting there through the Clean Power Plan, and you have the judicial branch saying stop,” said Ralph Izzo, chief executive of Public Service Enterprise Group, a New Jersey utility. “You can’t make economic decisions in that environment.”
Even NRG’s big renewable projects — installations that are supposed to one day replace coal- and gas-fired plants — are mired in problems. In the Southern California desert, NRG oversees operations at Ivanpah, the world’s largest solar thermal installation, where thousands of mirrors reflect the sun at enormous towers and water is converted to steam that powers turbines. NRG owns the plant along with BrightSource Energy and Alphabet, the parent company of Google.
Heralded as a beacon of clean energy when it opened in 2014, Ivanpah has been continually troubled.
From the outset, it produced less electricity than expected. Over the last few years, the cost of solar panels fell sharply, making Ivanpah’s power comparatively expensive. In March, the consortium that owns the plant nearly defaulted on a contract with Pacific Gas & Electric, the Northern California utility.
Then in May, a fire at the plant knocked out one of the towers, raising new questions about the project’s viability. Last week, when NRG reported quarterly earnings, it said that revenue from its renewables businesses was down 14 percent to $57 million, largely the result of problems at Ivanpah.
This isn’t the first time that a big energy company has made ambitious plans to become a leader in green energy, only to be reined in. In 2000, BP introduced its “Beyond Petroleum” tagline and began investing heavily in renewable energy. It committed billions of dollars to wind and solar projects, and made investments in carbon capture and biofuels.
After a decade of investment, BP largely backed off its renewables program. Most of its money was still coming from oil and gas, and the company set about selling its solar and wind power assets. They simply weren’t profitable enough.
“It’s difficult to recall that 10 years ago BP was one of the darlings of the green movement,” said Justin Adams, managing director of global lands for the Nature Conservancy and a former executive at BP working on renewables.
“Through that period, some investors were interested, most were ambivalent at best and some downright skeptical at worst,” he said. “What on earth was BP doing, taking its eyes off its core business and tinkering around with renewables?”
At NRG, Mr. Gutierrez has already backed away from residential solar and electric-vehicle charging projects that Mr. Crane held so dear. So far, however, there are no signs that NRG will completely reverse course. Mr. Gutierrez is still pushing community solar power, and NRG provides solar installations to big companies like Whole Foods. Last week, NRG spent nearly $200 million to acquire more solar and wind assets.
Today, NRG generates about 9 percent of its electricity from renewable assets, up from less than 1 percent in 2008, and that figure is likely to grow. Across the industry, a majority of power plants being built today use renewables, not fossil fuels.
Mr. Crane has not gone quietly into the night. In a letter to NRG employees shortly after his ouster, he said there was “no growth in our sector outside of clean energy; only slow but irreversible contraction following the path of fixed-line telephony.” Soon after that, he wrote a blog post titled “If I Was Right, Why Was I Fired?”
“The sad moral of this story is that it’s very hard to be a C.E.O. for tomorrow, when the markets only care about being a C.E.O. for today,” said Mr. Cramer of Business for Social Responsibility. “I don’t think anyone really questions his vision, but he wasn’t given any opportunity to put it into action.”
Mr. Gutierrez says he shares his predecessor’s vision. By 2050, he envisions enormous batteries storing solar power generated during the day, allowing people to use it at night. Distributed energy will be more common, as Mr. Crane predicted. Carbon-capture technology will make the burning of fossil fuels much less environmentally destructive, Mr. Gutierrez hopes. Perhaps coal-fired power plants will be gone altogether.
“We are a part of the problem,” he said. “But we are also a big part of the solution.”
It’s an appealing vision of a green energy system, one that could fulfill the needs of an electricity-hungry world without spoiling the environment. But how NRG gets there — especially with investors and a board that seem intolerant of bold steps — remains vague at best. For now, Mr. Gutierrez is caught in the middle: hoping to arrive at a cleaner future while still satisfying today’s investors, rolling out fields of solar while also burning tons of gas and coal.
“Let’s all acknowledge that we can’t change our energy system overnight,” Mr. Cramer said. “But how do we start making meaningful progress? Saying 90 percent by 2050 is the easy part. We need to start making progress now.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/14/business/energy-environment/how-producing-clean-power-turned-out-to-be-a-messy-business.html?ref=energy-environment&_r=0
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Enviros, Industry Clash over NASA Research
Aug 16, 2016 | E&E Greenwire
By Hannah Hess
Environmentalists have latched onto a federal satellite study of methane emissions to bolster their case for stronger rules to limit releases of the potent greenhouse gas from oil and natural gas wells.
NASA researchers last year used infrared technology to determine the source of a methane "hot spot" over the southwestern United States. The study, published yesterday in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, attributed the plumes to a small percentage of fossil fuel industry emitters in the Four Corners region near where New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Colorado meet (ClimateWire, Aug. 16).
The study drummed up support for a proposed rule from the Bureau of Land Management that would require well operators to use off-the-shelf technologies to reduce flaring, or burning off excess gas, and would require companies to conduct periodic leak inspections and replace outdated equipment that vents large amounts of gas (Greenwire, Jan. 22).
Ramon Alvarez, a senior scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund, said BLM rules "must be completed and implemented quickly — to better protect the Land of Enchantment and federal and tribal lands across the U.S."
Similarly, Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) pointed to the information as an aid that would enhance efforts to find the most effective way to reduce pollution and protect the air in the state.
"I believe these results should inform all parties — regulators, industry and the public — as we work to significantly improve air quality," Udall said.
"Natural gas waste has already cost New Mexico taxpayers and oil and gas producers more than $100 million in revenue during a time when the state is hurting financially," he added.
Critics of the regulations — a key part of the Obama administration's effort to maximize domestic energy production and reduce greenhouse gas emissions — pushed back on the research, raising questions about data that might have been omitted.
Though the authors note the distribution of the methane emissions suggests that roughly half of the gas came from about 10 percent of the sources, the study does not provide the data showing exactly what sources produced which volumes of methane.
"This finding confirms earlier assumptions that most of the enhanced methane is related to natural gas extraction as well as coal mining but also that there is not a single source explaining most enhancements," the authors wrote.
The research and campaign arm of the Independent Petroleum Association of America said the authors "don't have their story straight" on the phenomenon of natural methane seepage in the San Juan Basin, noting conflicting quotes from University of Michigan and NASA researchers.
"Without a full accounting of how much methane is emitted from each point source researchers identified, the study raises more questions about why that data were not included," Randy Hildreth wrote in a post for IPAA's Energy in Depth.
"While it may be convenient for news outlets to blame fracking, the study simply does not have the data to justify such a claim," Hildreth added, referring to the hydraulic fracturing oil and gas production technique.
EPA methane regs challenged
Oil and gas groups, as well as 16 states, have separately filed court challenges over U.S. EPA's regulations to limit methane emissions from new industry sources. The agency's Clean Air Act New Source Performance Standards require companies to periodically check for and repair leaks.
A coalition of nine states plus the city of Chicago yesterday moved to defend EPA in the litigation in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit (ClimateWire, Aug. 16).
The Natural Resources Defense Council, EDF, the Sierra Club, the Clean Air Council, Earthworks and the Environmental Integrity Project are also seeking to enter the lawsuit in defense of the regulations. The groups filed a motion to intervene late yesterday evening.
Nullifying, weakening or delaying the regulations would threaten the health and welfare of their members, the environmental groups will likely argue in the case.
http://www.eenews.net/greenwire/2016/08/16/stories/1060041675
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Shell Securing Land For Ethane Pipeline System to Supply Pennsylvania Cracker
Aug 16, 2016 | Natural Gas Intelligence
By Jamison Cocklin
An affiliate of Royal Dutch Shell plc started acquiring rights-of-way this month for a 94-mile ethane transport system that would feed the company's proposed multi-billion dollar cracker in Western Pennsylvania.
The common carrier pipelines would be located in Southwestern Pennsylvania and extend into West Virginia and Ohio. Shell Pipeline Company LP plans to begin construction of the Falcon Ethane Pipeline System in late 2018, spokesman Ray Fisher said.
The two-leg system would have three source points within the rich-gas portions of the Marcellus and Utica shales. It would collect ethane from MarkWest Energy Partners LP's Houston Processing and Fractionation facility in Washington County, PA, and from its Cadiz Complex in Harrison County, OH. The system would also receive ethane from Utica East Ohio Midstream's nearby Harrison Hub fractionation plant in Scio, OH.
Shell announced in June that it would build the ethane cracker on a 400-acre site near the Ohio River in Potter and Center townships in Beaver County, about 30 miles northwest of Pittsburgh (see Daily GPI, June 8).
If built, it would mark the first time in more than 20 years that such a facility has been constructed in the United States outside of the Gulf Coast. NGI recently took a deeper dive into what Shell’s decision could mean for the Appalachian Basin and the rest of the country in a special report, Release The Cracker.
The facility would have the capacity to produce 1.6 million metric tons/year (mmty) of polyethylene and 1.5 mmty of ethylene, which are key building blocks for plastics. Capacity of both the cracker and the pipeline system, Fisher said, would be a little more than 100,000 b/d.
That makes the Falcon system comparable in size to the Appalachian Basin's limited natural gas liquids (NGL) infrastructure. The Appalachia-to-Texas Express pipeline, which carries Marcellus and Utica ethane to Mont Belvieu, TX, has an expandable capacity of 125,000 b/d. The Mariner East 1 pipeline, which carries ethane and propane from Western Pennsylvania to the Marcus Hook Industrial Complex near Philadelphia for domestic and international distribution, has a capacity of 70,000 b/d. The Mariner West pipeline carries 50,000 b/d of ethane from the basin to Michigan and Canada.
"That's a big cracker, but that is only one cracker, whereas on the [Gulf Coast] you're more on the billion total barrels per day order," said BTU Analytics LLC analyst Marissa Anderson of the Falcon system's proposed size. "For the Northeast, it's more material demand. For the U.S. overall, it's not.
"It helps with demand in the region; it helps with ethane recovery," she added. "The Northeast is kind of an island where there's no real local demand for ethane. It all needs to get transported via pipe either to the Gulf or Canada or the East Coast. What this does is it provides a local source of ethane demand, which helps the market locally."
Ethane is a major part of the gas stream in Appalachia, accounting for more than 50% of the typical NGL barrel there. With exports now leaving Marcus Hook and more infrastructure online, ethane production has been increasing in the region. The cracker and other projects that are planned, such as Kinder Morgan Inc.'s Utopia Pipeline Project, which would carry ethane to the Canadian petrochemical market, are expected to drive more production.
"With incremental ethane takeaway projects and the projected completion of a regional cracker facility, we anticipate reaching full utilization of our existing facilities," MPLX LP CEO Gary Heminger said during the company's second quarter earnings call. MPLX LP is the midstream master limited partnership of Marathon Petroleum Corp. The company acquired MarkWest last year (seeShale Daily, Dec. 1, 2015).
The company operates a majority of the de-ethanization capacity in the Appalachian Basin. Based on current utilization, MPLX and MarkWest can support the production of an additional 70,000 b/d of ethane, according to its latest investor presentation. Shell's plan to tap MarkWest facilities for ethane, however, will support additional investment for ethane recovery over the coming years.
Kevin Hawkins, MPLX's senior manager of investor relations, said the company was not yet ready to provide specifics about how it might meet Shell's demands. The company highlighted plans to invest between $500 million to $1 billion in ethane solutions over the next fives years on its second quarter earnings call. Management said there will likely be a "number of de-ethanization facility investment opportunities" and added that those would go beyond Shell's cracker.
Just because Shell announced the cracker "doesn't alleviate the need to also move ethane to either the Gulf Coast or the East Coast," Heminger said. "I mean, I think there's going to be large volumes of ethane that need to find a home. And so the announcement of an ethane cracker, I don't think, would suggest that these solutions are being put on hold or being deferred."
MPLX said ethane volumes in the region reached a new record of 116,000 b/d during the second quarter, up 76% from the year-ago period. For example, Antero Resources Corp., one of the basin's most active operators and liquids producers, only began recovering ethane in December. Its ethane volumes have spiked sharply since then, going from 11,884 b/d in 1Q2016 to 17,373 b/d in the second quarter (see Shale Daily, Aug. 9).
Ten natural gas producers have signed 10-20 year agreements to anchor Shell's cracker. The company has been approaching landowners in the region about the ethane system, but Fisher said Shell began securing land this month for the pipelines. The cracker isn't expected to be operational until the early 2020s, and the Shell affiliate has not yet made any filings for the pipeline system with state and federal agencies, according to regulatory officials. No cost estimate for the project was provided.
http://www.naturalgasintel.com/articles/107423-shell-securing-land-for-ethane-pipeline-system-to-supply-pennsylvania-cracker
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Cantwell Grills Moniz over Train Derailments
Aug 16, 2016 | E&E Greenwire
By Hannah Northey
Washington Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell warned Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz yesterday of the growing grass-roots anger bubbling up across the Pacific Northwest as the nation's rails, loaded with crude oil, creep closer to populated areas.
"Just about everybody in Spokane lives about two blocks from the railroad tracks," Cantwell told Moniz at a field hearing in Seattle. "That's their view of how close the tracks are."
The Spokane City Council unanimously voted last month to call for a ban on crude oil trains running across the city, highlighting frustrations over what some say is a long wait for tougher federal protections (EnergyWire, July 29).
Cantwell's comments came at a field hearing featuring Moniz and other utility executives and regional planners that touched on cybersecurity threats, the potential for a mega-earthquake along the West Coast and the need to increase investment in the nation's critical infrastructure. Moniz yesterday announced more than $30 million in funding for cybersecurity research and development and education.
Moniz acknowledged fast-paced changes in the system are stressing infrastructure, noting that trains are being used to ship crude where pipelines have not yet been built. "These are big strains on the system," he said.
Cantwell agreed, saying she's concerned about oil trains from the upper Midwest being routed through Spokane and into the Columbia River Gorge and surrounding scenic areas to refineries in northern Washington state. At one point in the hearing, she accused companies of shipping Bakken crude "on the cheap" without prioritizing safety.
While many producers might assume oil is transported through remote, rural parts of the Pacific Northwest, Cantwell said that's not the case in Washington. "It's hitting every major city on those 20 trains per week," she said, adding that the issue has come front and center as a security concern with every major city council and community in the state.
Last month, 16 cars on a mile-long Union Pacific Railroad oil train jumped the tracks near Mosier, Ore., sparking a fire and leaking nearly a thousand barrels of highly flammable Bakken crude oil (Greenwire, June 30).
Cantwell and her Democratic colleagues, including New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, have urged the Department of Transportation to use its emergency authority to curb vapor pressure levels of crude before it gets clearance to move by rail.
Vapor pressure is one way to measure oil's explosive potential. The energy industry, however, has claimed there is not enough evidence to show that capping vapor pressure levels would lessen the consequences of a derailment.
Yesterday's discussion highlighted tension over ongoing research and a call on Capitol Hill for swift new rules.
When asked what DOE is doing to look into the level of volatility in Bakken crude making its way through the Northwest, Moniz pointed to a study his agency is conducting with DOT on flammable liquids and transport. Sandia National Laboratories is leading the effort. DOE, he noted, doesn't have direct regulatory authority over oil trains.
"I certainly wish I could give you the final results of the study today, but that's still probably about a year away," Moniz said.
In a June 15 letter to Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx, a group of 10 senators, including Cantwell, claimed the study had gone on long enough.
Moniz said that understanding the qualities of the oil could also shed light on sampling protocols, noting North Dakota has done work in the area. That remark drew a sharp rebuke from Cantwell.
"I don't think anybody in the Northwest wants to leave it up to the state of North Dakota to figure out what the standard is," she said.
Moniz acknowledged the tension between "getting the science done right and doing it as fast as one can." He pointed to a national decrease in the number of shipments of crude by rail in recent years. A number of railroads, he said, have made substantial investments in improving their systems during the past year.
Indeed, BNSF Railway Executive Chairman Matt Rose in an Aug. 12 letter to Cantwell defended the railroad's safety record, saying it had invested more than $3.5 billion in the northern lines over the last three years alone.
Yet an unmoved Cantwell pushed Moniz to find out how states like Washington, California and Oregon could build consensus around the issue while DOE continues its work.
The senator acknowledged the administration's push to improve the nation's infrastructure but said the question must be asked whether hazardous materials are safe enough to transport.
"We wanted energy independence, we got it, now we have our own safety issues right here in the Northwest with a 10,000 percent increase in the amount of oil train traffic coming through here," she said.
http://www.eenews.net/greenwire/2016/08/16/stories/1060041651
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Railroads Get Funding Boost for Accident Prevention
Aug 16, 2016 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Melanie Zanona
Amtrak and other rail systems around the country have been selected to receive federal grants to install a technology that can help prevent deadly train accidents, the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) announced Tuesday.
The FRA awarded $25 million to 11 projects in six states and the District of Columbia to implement positive train control (PTC), a system that automatically slows a train that is going over the speed limit.The technology, which will eventually be mandatory for railroads, can prevent derailments, collisions and improper track switching.
Congress has already provided over $650 million in grants since 2008 to assist passenger railroads with installing the technology, and the FRA is currently accepting applications for an additional $199 million in competitive grant funding.
The latest round of grants was made available through fiscal 2016 spending legislation as railroads continue to push toward compliance.
President Obama sought $1.25 billion in his fiscal 2017 budget request to help railroads install PTC systems.
“These grants get us a bit closer to implementing Positive Train Control — a long overdue technology that prevents accidents and saves lives,” Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said in a statement.“We will continue to do everything in our power to help railroads install this technology. We encourage Congress to fully fund the President’s request for significant funds to help more railroads activate PTC.”
Some of the new grants include $2.6 million for Amtrak in D.C. to secure PTC wireless communication between a train’s point of origin and targeted receivers on the Northeast Corridor and $3 million for the Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit District in California to install PTC and new grade crossing warning systems.
PTC is now equipped along a large portion of the Northeast Corridor, and a number of rail systems around the country are also rolling out the technology. But some critics say it is not being installed fast enough.
Congress extended the original PTC implementation deadline from the end of 2015 to at least Dec. 31, 2018.
Federal investigators attributed the deadly Amtrak derailment in Philadelphia last year to a distracted train operator who sped around a sharp curve.
Railroads will be required to install the automated system in areas where certain hazardous materials are transported and areas that support regularly scheduled intercity passenger or commuter services.
PTC is expected to be equipped along more than 70,000 miles of track, the FRA said.
“Every dollar we invest in implementing Positive Train Control as quickly as possible is money well spent because ultimately it means fewer accidents and fewer fatalities,” FRA Administrator Sarah Feinberg said. “Today’s grants inch us closer to a safer rail network with PTC.”http://thehill.com/policy/transportation/291589-railroads-get-funding-boost-for-technology-to-prevent-train-accidents
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