Preview Newsletter
AM ACC 10/4/2017
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(ACC Mentioned) Trump's Pick for EPA Pollution Czar Says Kids Are Less Sensitive to Pollution than Adults
Oct 3, 2017 | Boing Boing
By Cory Doctorow
The Intercept's Sharon Lerner is the best journalist on Trumpian science appointees going, and her piece on Michael Dourson, whom Trump wants confirmed as the EPA's second most powerful executive as Director of the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention is a scorcher. -
(ACC Mentioned) Oil Lawyer Gets Waiver from Trump Ethics Pledge
Oct 3, 2017 | E&E News PM
By Kevin Bogardus
Erik Baptist, formerly a top oil and gas industry attorney who is now working at U.S. EPA, has secured a limited waiver from President Trump's ethics pledge. -
Chemical Pick's Books Hint at Faith-Based View of Science
Oct 4, 2017 | E&E Daily
By Corbin Hiar
Michael Dourson, President Trump's pick to lead U.S. EPA's chemical safety office, who faces a Senate confirmation hearing today, has drawn intense criticism from environmentalists and public health activists for his ties to the industry he would oversee. -
Udall, Blumenthal Join Activists Against Chemicals Pick
Oct 3, 2017 | E&E News PM
By Corbin Hiar
Democratic senators are calling on their colleagues to oppose the environmental health professor President Trump nominated to head U.S. EPA's chemical safety program. -
EPA Launches Industry Partnership Program for Regulating
Oct 3, 2017 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Timothy Cama
The Trump administration wants to work more closely with industrial sectors in formulating the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations that affect them. -
(ACC Mentioned) EPA Urged to Add Community Representative to TSCA Advisory Panel
Oct 3, 2017 | Inside EPA
By Maria Hegstad
An academic group is urging EPA to carefully follow requirements in the revised Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), as well as federal advisory committee law, to include a representative from a local community adversely impacted by chemical pollution on a new TSCA... -
(ACC Mentioned) EPA Chemical Analysis Reforms on Target, Advisers, Utility, Say
Oct 4, 2017 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Pat Rizzuto
The EPA's initial plans to examine chemicals used as fertilizers will appropriately examine a range of health problems the nutrients may cause, says Bill Stowe, the head of an Iowa water utility. -
(ACC Mentioned) Chemical Ban Impacts Bedding, Furniture
Oct 4, 2017 | Providence Journal
By Mark Reynolds
Legislation that bans the sale of certain types of bedding and furniture treated with a controversial flame retardant chemical became law in Rhode Island at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday, making its way into the General Laws without the signature of Gov. Gina Raimondo. -
Fighting CERCLA Preemption, Citizens Defend PFAS Medical Monitoring Suit
Oct 3, 2017 | Inside EPA
By Lara Beaven
Residents near two military bases in Pennsylvania that are contaminated with perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are urging a federal appellate court to overturn a lower court ruling that dismissed their suit seeking medical monitoring for exposure to the chemicals... -
Toddler Cups Added to Proposed EU Ban on BPA in FCMs
Oct 4, 2017 | Chemical Watch
By Clelia Oziel
A European Commission proposal to ban bisphenol A (BPA) in food contact materials intended for infants and babies has been extended to plastic drinking ‘sippy cups’. These are widely used ‘spill-proof’ cups designed for one to three-year-olds. -
(ACC Mentioned) How Fracking Is Upending the Chemical Industry
Oct 4, 2017 | Nature
By Mark Peplow
As the Ineos Intrepid cruised slowly through the sapphire waters of Norway's Frierfjord, chaperone tugboats sprayed jets into the sky to herald her arrival. -
Exclusive-Trump EPA to Propose Repealing Obama's Climate Regulation: Document
Oct 4, 2017 | Reuters (In The New York Times)
By Valerie Volcovici
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will propose repealing the Clean Power Plan - the Obama administration's centrepiece regulation to fight climate change - and plans to solicit input on a rule to replace it, according to an EPA document seen by Reuters. -
Panel Mulls Appalachia Gas Storage Hub, Other Bills
Oct 4, 2017 | E&E Daily
By Nick Sobczyk
West Virginia lawmakers advanced their push to build an ethane storage facility in Appalachia yesterday, as a Senate panel considered a pile of energy legislation. -
Energy Grid Rule Moving Fast, Despite Industry Pushback
Oct 4, 2017 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Rebecca Kern
A proposal that could prop up failing coal and nuclear plants was put on fast forward by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, despite concerns among renewable energy, natural gas and oil trade industries that it will greatly distort the wholesale energy markets. -
CBD Cites Pending EPA Ozone Designations To Halt Oil, Gas Lease Sale
Oct 3, 2017 | Inside EPA
By Dawn Reeves
In an early sign of the effects of EPA's pending ozone designations, environmentalists are protesting a massive planned Bureau of Land Management (BLM) oil and gas lease sale slated for Utah in December, alleging in part that the bureau failed to analyze the emissions.... -
These Suburbanites May Have No Fracking Choice
Oct 4, 2017 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Catherine Traywick
When Bill Young peers out the window of his $700,000 home in Broomfield, Colo., he drinks in a panoramic view of the Rocky Mountains. Starting next year, he may also glimpse one of the 99 drilling rigs that Extraction Oil & Gas Inc. wants to use to get at the oil beneath his home. -
US Northeast Gas Pipeline Capacity Increasing, Easing Flow Beyond Region
Oct 3, 2017 | Platts
By Harry Weber
Natural gas pipeline constraints are easing in the US Northeast as its traditionally high-demand winter heating season approaches, with new infrastructure coming online and better positioning operators to move Appalachian Basin supplies out of the region... -
Lawsuit: Arkema Harmed Residents Before Fires, Blasts
Oct 3, 2017 | Houston Chronicle
By Matt Dempsey
Even before explosions at the Arkema chemical plant shook the Crosby area, the battering from Hurricane Harvey had led to the release of more than 20,000 pounds of toxic chemicals into floodwaters, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday. -
Greens Will Sue Pruitt over Missed Ozone Deadline
Oct 3, 2017 | PoliticoPro - Whiteboard
By Alex Guillen
Ten environmental groups say they plan to sue EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt for missing the Oct. 1 deadline to decide which parts of the U.S. do or do not meet the 2015 ozone standard, a critical step toward implementing the rule and curbing pollution. -
Undermining the Rule of Law at the E.P.A.
Oct 4, 2017 | New York Times
By David M. Uhlmann
In the more than seven months since he became administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt has been on a reckless mission to dismantle public health safeguards and environmental protections. -
New York City Climate Plan Calls for Efficient Buildings, Electric Cars
Oct 4, 2017 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By John Herzfeld and Dean Scott
New building standards and more electric vehicle fast chargers are part of New York City's new three-year plan to meet Paris Agreement greenhouse gas reductions—even if the country as a whole does not. -
Puerto Rico a Tragic Reminder of Why Climate Action Cannot Wait
Oct 3, 2017 | Environmental Defense Fund
By Ilissa Ocko
The disaster unfolding in Puerto Rico is heartbreaking – and a call for action.
Industry and Association News
LCSA News
Chemical Management News
Energy News
Chemical Security News
Transportation and Infrastructure News - There are no clips to report at this time.
Environment News
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Oct 3, 2017 | Boing Boing
By Cory Doctorow
The Intercept's Sharon Lerner is the best journalist on Trumpian science appointees going, and her piece on Michael Dourson, whom Trump wants confirmed as the EPA's second most powerful executive as Director of the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention is a scorcher.
Even by Trumpian standards, Dourson is a piece of shit work. He currently runs the high-profile greenwashing consultancy Toxicology Excellence for Risk Assessment (TERA) whose clients are a rogue's gallery of the country's most lethal polluters: Dow Chemical, CropLife America, the American Chemistry Council, the American Petroleum Institute, Koch Industries and more.
TERA's stock in trade is manufactured sciencey numbers showing that pollution isn't harmful. In that regard, TERA excels, routinely asserting the harmlessness of industrial waste products that every independent researcher considers dangerous and/or deadly.
For example, Dourson asserted that the pesticide chlorpyrifos was safe at concentrations 5,000 times higher than the EPA recommended dose, despite well-documented causal links between the substance and "memory, intelligence, attention, and motor problems in children." Dourson also asserted that children over six months old are less susceptible to toxic chemicals, despite the widespread, experimentally verified consensus that children are more susceptible -- something that has been verified through ghastly industrial accidents through the ages.
Dourson's rap sheet goes on for pages (you should read Lerner's piece), but here's the kicker: in his new job, he'll be in charge of deciding which industrial pollutants are safe, and at which concentrations. He is not a fox in the henhouse, he's a serial killer in the nursery.
In these dark Trumpian times, it's easy to get inured to the callous disregard for evidence, decency, safety, and humanity on display in Washington, but Trump's ability to find extremely vicious gators to fill the DC swamp with always manages to shock.
After reversing the proposed ban, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt recently delayed the evaluation of both chlorpyrifos and other organophosphates, the chemical class to which it belongs, which had been scheduled to begin in 2017. Dourson would have input on the timing of those evaluations, as well as the research considered in them. About two dozen organophosphate pesticides are commercially available, all of which are neurotoxins.
Environmental scientists have long recognized that children are especially vulnerable to chemicals, including organophosphates, throughout their development. But in a 2002 paper paid for by the American Chemistry Council and the pesticide industry group CropLife America, Dourson suggested that after six months, most children are no more sensitive to chemical toxicity than adults and that in some cases, they are even less sensitive. This idea places him well outside the scientific mainstream and suggests how he might approach not just these pesticides but all chemicals affecting children.
https://boingboing.net/2017/10/03/murderous-michael-dourson.html
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(ACC Mentioned) Oil Lawyer Gets Waiver from Trump Ethics Pledge
Oct 3, 2017 | E&E News PM
By Kevin Bogardus
Erik Baptist, formerly a top oil and gas industry attorney who is now working at U.S. EPA, has secured a limited waiver from President Trump's ethics pledge.
In a memo posted online by the Office of Government Ethics, White House Counsel Don McGahn said he waived restrictions on former lobbyists joining the administration for Baptist.
McGahn issued the waiver so Baptist could participate in EPA discussions regarding the renewable fuel standard, which the agency oversees.
"The facts that Mr. Baptist had not been a registered lobbyist for fourteen months prior to his appointment and signing the Ethics Pledge and that the activities that triggered his obligation to register as a lobbyist were limited, coupled with his deep understanding of the RFS program and the regulated industry, make him an ideal person to assist the Administrator and his senior leadership team to make EPA and its renewable fuel programs more efficient and effective," McGahn said in his memo, dated Aug. 25.
Baptist was senior counsel for the American Petroleum Institute before joining EPA earlier this year as the agency's senior deputy general counsel (E&E News PM, June 27).
At API, Baptist was registered to lobby for four years up until 2016. Disclosure records show he was one of the oil and gas group's several lobbyists working on legislation dealing with the RFS, including bills that would eliminate the program.
In his memo, McGahn said he authorized Baptist "to participate personally and substantially in matters regarding" the RFS program and that he understood that Baptist will otherwise fully comply with the president's ethics pledge.
Liz Bowman, an EPA spokeswoman, told E&E News, "Erik has received his ethics training, knows his responsibilities and is committed to serving professionally."
Ethanol supporters have grown frustrated with EPA over its handling of the RFS under the Trump administration. The agency has recently hinted it may reduce the program's required volumes for some biofuels next year and in 2019 (E&E News PM, Sept. 27).
Other political appointees at EPA have also avoided being held to Trump's ethics pledge.
Nancy Beck, the deputy assistant administrator in EPA's chemicals office, joined the agency not as a political appointee but in an "Administratively Determined" position.
Consequently, Beck, who used to work for the American Chemistry Council, did not have to sign the pledge, according to ethics documents (Greenwire, Aug. 8).
https://www.eenews.net/eenewspm/2017/10/03/stories/1060062475
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Chemical Pick's Books Hint at Faith-Based View of Science
Oct 4, 2017 | E&E Daily
By Corbin Hiar
Michael Dourson, President Trump's pick to lead U.S. EPA's chemical safety office, who faces a Senate confirmation hearing today, has drawn intense criticism from environmentalists and public health activists for his ties to the industry he would oversee.
But there are also some experts on religion who question whether Dourson's devout Christian beliefs might get in the way of his regulatory decisions.
The environmental health professor has written three books in his "evidence of faith" series that he says attempt "to integrate science concepts with Biblical text."
Passages of those books flagged by E&E News worry Raymond Barfield, a professor of Christian philosophy at the Duke Divinity School and a professor of pediatrics at Duke's medical school.
"I don't see any evidence that he is concerned about people dying of cancer from secondhand smoke, or kids having asthma from secondhand smoke, or people getting injured from poorly regulated or poorly constructed protections from chemical poisoning," Barfield said in an interview.
Particularly troubling, he said, is a section of "The Linen Cloths: ... Jesus left behind," Dourson's 2016 book about the scientific controversy over the Shroud of Turin — the purported burial cloth of Jesus — in which Dourson dismissed evidence of health risks posed by flame retardants that conflicted with his industry-funded research.
The book refers to "an older medical scientist," who resembles Dourson, working on a study that showed flame retardants caused high toxicity in animals.
"But actual exposures from consumer products were much lower than this, he thought, and would not cause any harm, even in sensitive people, like his four-year-old grandson, Finn, who had just spied him from across the room and who was even then making a beeline to run into his arms," the book says. "Besides, he thought as he raised up Finn for a sweeping hug, I will take the flame retarding benefits of these chemicals any day because destruction of lives and property by fire was a daily occurrence throughout his country."
Dourson, who made $10,000 last year consulting for a flame retardant industry group, goes on to cast doubt on a study that warned of harm at current exposure levels because it hadn't yet been repeated (E&E News PM, Sept. 15).
Said Barfield, "That is pure utilitarianism." He compared the nominee's reasoning to financial calculations Ford Motor Co. made before putting its cheap, subcompact Pinto on the market in 1971. Some Ford executives knew the Pinto's rear-mounted gasoline tank could cause deadly infernos after rear-end collisions.
Dismissing evidence that flame retardants can harm children is "questionable because there are so many other aspects to mature moral decisionmaking," Barfield said. "That's probably not what Jesus would do."
The Consumer Product Safety Commission, an independent federal agency, last week urged manufacturers, retailers and consumers to avoid exposing pregnant women and children to organohalogen flame retardants (Greenwire, Sept. 28).
That class of chemicals is commonly added to foams, textiles and plastic in a bid to improve resistance to fire. But the flame retardants are often released by the products they're applied to, leading to exposures that have been linked to reproductive impairment, decreased IQ in children, diabetes, obesity, cancer and immune disorders.
Science and faith
Dourson attends the Mount Zion Lutheran Church in Lucas, Ohio, and has taught at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine since 2015. He began his career at EPA, where he worked from 1980 until 1995.
Between his time in the agency and academia, Dourson led Toxicology Excellence for Risk Assessment, a nonprofit consulting firm that often downplayed chemical hazards for tobacco companies and chemical manufacturers and other industry interests (E&E Daily, July 18).
Dourson's writing on Christianity embraces scientific uncertainty.
In the epilogue to his 2016 book on the shroud, he said Wikipedia "has a vast amount of information on the Shroud, much of which seems well researched." Yet in the same paragraph, he adds that "a web search will also uncover any number of websites that offer credible, and sometimes conflicting, information. Such is the life of a walk in either science or faith or both."
That comment troubles Mitch Hescox, the president and CEO of the Evangelical Environmental Network, a nondenominational Christian group dedicated to biblically based environmentalism.
"There is difference between science and faith," the former Methodist pastor said in an interview.
"Faith is a matter of belief," Hescox said. "Science, on the other hand, is hopefully viewed with a rational mind and an unbiased measuring the numbers and measuring of the chemicals and then making an informed decision by what the results tell you, not on a personal belief structure."
Dourson's writing also seems to suggest a belief in the theory of intelligent design, which uses God to explain phenomena for which scientists haven't found definitive answers.
In "The Beginning: Let There Be Light," Dourson's 2015 book on the creation of the world, he writes that God's hand set in motion a period of rapid evolutionary advancement in which the diversity of life on Earth first began to resemble today's complex ecosystems.
Jesus explained to Satan, the book says, that because animal life "'thinks, God had to nudge its evolution along.' And nudge it God did."
"Humans would later refer to this era as the Cambrian explosion of life," Dourson wrote. "But before humans, the angels looked down on Earth during this time and were dumbfounded at the diversity of swarming, swimming, chasing, eating, mating and evolving life forms that developed after God's command."
Intelligent design "strikes me as a bad frame for interpreting the data," Duke's Barfield said. "It's a theological and philosophical assessment of the meaning of the data as it shows up" rather than an impartial review of it.
Dourson didn't respond to a request for comment about his embrace of scientific uncertainty around the chemicals he was paid to evaluate or apparent support for intelligent design.
EPA spokeswoman Liz Bowman told E&E News that Dourson's nomination to become assistant administrator for chemical safety and pollution prevention is supported by "experts across the country." Some scientists who praised his nomination sit with Dourson on the same editorial boards of scientific journals (E&E Daily, July 18).
Religion reinforcing pragmatism
Public health groups, which have come out strongly against Dourson, say they fear he would use industry-funded studies as justification for blocking action on chemicals that most independent scientific research has found are harmful (E&E Daily, Sept. 20).
Barfield said he believes Dourson's reading of scripture could make him less open to reconsidering such moves.
"My sense is that, he makes pragmatic decisions in the same way that" most other conservatives do, the Duke professor said. "But then for some reason, he needs to do religious calculus to show why this is consistent with his faith, and after that I presume his faith bolsters his decision — gives it forward momentum and makes it resistant to change."
Dourson has used religion to defend his industry-funded research. In 1999, he co-authored a study paid for by the tobacco industry that downplayed the health impacts of secondhand smoke. Responding to questions about that work in 2014, he said, "Jesus hung out with prostitutes and tax collectors. ... Why should we exclude anyone that needs help?"
That explanation is troubling for Barfield, who works as a pediatric oncologist in addition to teaching courses on theology, medicine and culture.
"In the spirit of Jesus, I would want to be generous and hope that that was just a really bad reach and a bad decision to make that connection," he said. "But it bothers me that someone would draw on their religious tradition to justify something that is clearly not motivated by their religious tradition."
Hescox of the Christian environmental group said he hopes Environment and Public Works Committee members will seek to answer a key question about Dourson before voting on his nomination: "Does his faith guide his judgment of science, or does science guide his judgment of faith and his proving of faith?"
https://www.eenews.net/eedaily/2017/10/04/stories/1060062509
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Udall, Blumenthal Join Activists Against Chemicals Pick
Oct 3, 2017 | E&E News PM
By Corbin Hiar
Democratic senators are calling on their colleagues to oppose the environmental health professor President Trump nominated to head U.S. EPA's chemical safety program.
Outside the Capitol this afternoon, Sens. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) joined more than a dozen people from across the country who believe their families were harmed by chemicals that Michael Dourson studied for industry clients before joining the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine.
"Dr. Dourson has made a career of creating junk science for industry," Udall said. "His work on chemicals like PFOA and TCE has been used to justify weak safety standards that put people's health and safety at risk."
The New Mexico Democrat played a key role in passing the first major update to the four-decades-old Toxic Substances Control Act, which established a new effort to evaluate new and existing chemicals.
"Michael Dourson is the wrong person to run that new program," said the senator.
Both Udall and Blumenthal vowed to vote against Dourson's bid to become assistant administrator for EPA's Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention if his nomination is approved by the Environment and Public Works Committee.
Dourson is set to appear before the panel tomorrow for a confirmation hearing with several other Trump EPA picks, along with a member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (E&E Daily, Oct. 2).
Udall declined to weigh in on a reporter's question about Dourson's ethics agreement, which requires him to not participate in "any particular matter" involving any of his recent employers (E&E News PM, Sept. 15). He shouldn't be confirmed in the first place, the senator said.
https://www.eenews.net/eenewspm/2017/10/03/stories/1060062473
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EPA Launches Industry Partnership Program for Regulating
Oct 3, 2017 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Timothy Cama
The Trump administration wants to work more closely with industrial sectors in formulating the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations that affect them.
The EPA announced Tuesday that it’s reviving a Smart Sectors program to more formally cooperate with industries like oil and natural gas drilling, mining, steelmaking and agriculture for regulating.
It’s part of the administration’s efforts to be more industry-friendly while still protecting the environment, the EPA said.
“When we consider American business as a partner, as opposed to an adversary, we can achieve better environmental outcomes,” EPA head Scott Pruitt said in a statement.
“The Smart Sectors program is designed to effectively engage business partners throughout the regulatory process. The previous administration created a narrative that you can’t be pro-business and pro-environment. This program is one of the many ways we can address that false choice and work together to protect the environment,” he continued.
“When industries and regulators better understand each other, the economy, public, and the environment all benefit,” he said.
The EPA is assigning a handful of employees to act as liaisons to trade associations and companies for the effort.
The initial industries involved will be aerospace, agriculture, automotive, cement and concrete, chemical manufacturing, construction, electronics and technology, forestry and paper products, iron and steel, mining, oil and gas, ports and marine, and utilities and power generation.
No environmental, health or conservation groups are initially included, although the EPA left the door open for inclusion in the future.
Smart Sectors is a reincarnation of efforts under the Clinton and Bush administrations to establish lines of cooperation with industry. The Obama administration stopped the program in 2009.
http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/353703-epa-launches-industry-partnership-program-for-regulating
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(ACC Mentioned) EPA Urged to Add Community Representative to TSCA Advisory Panel
Oct 3, 2017 | Inside EPA
By Maria Hegstad
An academic group is urging EPA to carefully follow requirements in the revised Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), as well as federal advisory committee law, to include a representative from a local community adversely impacted by chemical pollution on a new TSCA advisory panel that EPA is forming.
"EPA's proposed list does not include all relevant perspectives needed to ensure a robust" Science Advisory Committee on Chemicals (SACC)," write leaders of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment.
"EPA should include one or more members from directly impacted communities that represent the 'public interest' as included in the" reformed TSCA, the group says.
The group also says that the agency has a "professional and legal duty" to select panelists who are free from conflicts of interest and provide advice that is in the public interest, a stance that could be at odds with calls from industry groups to appoint their preferred representatives.
The new SACC is required by the 2016 overhaul of TSCA. New language added to TSCA at section 26(o) requires EPA to set up by June 2017 an advisory committee known as the SACC "to provide independent advice and expert consultation, at the request of the Administrator, with respect to scientific and technical aspects of issues relating to the implementation of" the reformed TSCA.
As UCSF's Sept. 17 comments state, the statute also describes the committee's composition. "The Committee shall be composed of representatives of such science, government, labor, public health, public interest, animal protection, industry, and other groups as the Administrator determines to be advisable, including representatives that have specific scientific expertise in the relationship of chemical exposures to women, children, and other potentially exposed or susceptible subpopulations."
UCSF argues that the list of SACC candidates -- which the Trump EPA sought to expand beyond the 29 candidates identified last December by the Obama EPA -- remains without any representatives of public interest. "Though EPA's augmented list contains qualified candidates from NGOs, members from directly impacted communities are notably missing," the comments state. "We do not believe that any of EPA's proposed candidates meet these criteria. We would be happy to provide recommendations of such nominees if requested..."
UCSF offers as an example, Nayamin Martinez, the director of the Central California Environmental Justice Network. "We strongly recommend EPA consider expanding their nominees considered to include such representation to expand the diversity and perspective of committee membership," the group adds.
Committee Candidates
Meanwhile, industry trade associations have submitted comments recommending certain individuals on the list of candidates for elevation to serve on the new advisory committee.
The American Chemistry Council (ACC), for example, "believes it is critical that the SACC consist of industry representatives who have a comprehensive understanding of the technical and scientific underpinnings of the business of chemistry -- the very industry that will be most directly impacted by the regulatory actions EPA takes under TSCA and its LCSA amendments," according to its Sept. 15 comments.
ACC recommends for SACC membership Richard Becker, an ACC senior toxicologist; Steven Bennett, senior director of scientific affairs at the Consumer Specialty Products Association; Sheri Blystone, regulatory affairs director at SNF Holding Company; and Stuart Cagen, a senior toxicologist with Shell Health.
Similarly, the National Stone, Sand and Gravel Association is urging EPA to select Ann Wylie, a University of Maryland geology professor emerita to the SACC, noting the presence of asbestos in the list of the first 10 chemicals that EPA is assessing in the reformed approach to regulating existing chemicals.
"Accordingly, with the publication of EPA's preliminary scoping document on asbestos Dr. Wylie's appointment to the SACC is vital," the association writes in its Sept. 5 comments. "None of the current SACC members or any of the other 92 candidates identified by EPA match Dr. Wylie's specific expertise and administrative experience as a geologist and a nationally renowned expert on mineralogy and its intersection with human health."
https://insideepa.com/daily-news/epa-urged-add-community-representative-tsca-advisory-panel
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(ACC Mentioned) EPA Chemical Analysis Reforms on Target, Advisers, Utility, Say
Oct 4, 2017 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Pat Rizzuto
The EPA's initial plans to examine chemicals used as fertilizers will appropriately examine a range of health problems the nutrients may cause, says Bill Stowe, the head of an Iowa water utility.
The Des Moines Water Works chief executive officer says with EPA now accepting public comment on the plans, he will continue to watch the methods the Environmental Protection Agency will use to evaluate these and other chemicals and the conclusions it draws.
“But it looks like they're paying greater attention to issues other than blue baby syndrome,” Stowe told Bloomberg BNA.
The syndrome, a phenomenon recognized since the 1950s, can result from nitrates in water—for example water used to make baby formula—blocking oxygen from reaching tissues.
Stowe and other professionals in consulting, cleanup, state government, air policy and other environmental fields are closely tracking EPA efforts to make it easier to understand how the agency reaches conclusions about toxicity values for chemicals in its primary database. Public health officials use this information to make decisions. For example, research in recent decades suggests nitrates may play a role in cancer and in altering thyroid function.
While the agency's current drinking water standards are designed to prevent the syndrome, other health concerns may not be addressed if EPA is slow or opaque in how it updates agency toxicity values for chemicals. Updating EPA's analysis could help determine whether current exposure limits protect against health concerns other than blue baby syndrome.
Three Plans, Broader Strategy
The draft chemical assessment plan for two oxides of nitrogen—nitrates and nitrites—was one of three new chemical analysis plans the EPA presented to an agency Science Advisory Board committee Sept. 27-28 and released for public comment through Oct. 18. The other two analysis plans address chloroform, used to make refrigerants and other chemicals, and ethylbenzene, a component of petroleum also used for industrial purposes.
The agency used the three plans to illustrate elements of its broader strategy to keep improving the long-criticized—yet widely used—Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) program, which is comprised of consensus EPA toxicity values for chemicals that underpin environmental policies across state agencies and the EPA.
The primary goals for the reform effort include making it easier for diverse audiences to understand:
• IRIS assessments generally,
• the selection of scientific studies used to support toxicity values, and
• the bases of EPA toxicity conclusions.
Federal and state agencies also want archived IRIS toxicity information to be updated more quickly. In addition, they would like more chemicals assessed beyond the several hundred completed to date as the number of chemicals in active commerce is in the tens of thousands. The toxicity information in IRIS assessments is a vital toolkit used to set cleanup levels and other chemical exposure limits in air, water, and waste programs in states, regions and even internationally.While the new analysis plans look promising, it will likely take years before the IRIS information is finalized and affects water regulations, Alan Roberson, executive director for the Association of State Drinking Water Administrators, told Bloomberg BNA. “The likelihood, as well as the timing, for any potential revisions to any drinking water regulations is not clear at this time,” he wrote in a recent blog.
Industry Criticism
Industries, however, want to understand the basis for IRIS’ toxicity values, Neera Erraguntla, director of the American Chemistry Council's Chemical Products & Technology Division, told Bloomberg BNA.
The program has been known to pick the lowest, most health-protective number, Erraguntla said. The lower the value the more stringent the regulatory standard. “Industry is asking for the most scientifically justified value,” she said.
While IRIS has critics in industry, other groups also have weighed in on how the program should be reformed. Environmental groups have supported a point the National Research Council made in a 1996 report. Chemical assessments should not only be about “getting the science right” but also “getting the right science.” Helping people understand what scientific information was used and what was marginalized helps all parties discuss the extent and quality of the science supporting regulations.
Kenneth Ramos, chairman of SAB's Chemical Assessment Advisory Committee and a physician teaching at the University of Arizona, summarized the advisers’ reactions to the EPA's broad strategy. “I heard tremendous promise in the proposed revisions, the expansions in what the IRIS program does,” he said.
“They're a real move forward,” said Lorenz Rhomberg, a committee member and toxicological consultant with Gradient. “We've been seeing a lot of improvements over the last few years,” he said.
Computer-Aided Assessments
The broader, systematic strategy EPA is adopting combines scientific expertise with specialized software programs that can search multiple databases for scientific information more quickly than people can.
The programs document agency decisions to use particular studies or not. That type of documentation is just one example of the many electronic decision-making records the new software tools provide. They provide insight into the EPA's thought processes that IRIS users and critics have long wanted.
The agency also is using a “modular,” or “portfolio,” approach that can analyze specific, tailored questions about a chemical, said IRIS Director Kris Thayer. The approach allows the agency to evaluate a narrower set of the chemical's hazards as opposed to all of them.
Tracey Woodruff, director of the Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment at the University of California-San Francisco and, like Thayer, a trailblazer on the use of “systematic review” for chemical assessments, discussed the changes with Bloomberg BNA.
The machine-learning and other tools the IRIS program is beginning to use “will revolutionize how we look at the data and understand what the science says,” Woodruff said.
The modular approach will “avoid the obsessive-compulsive nature of risk assessment to be all encompassing,” said Ramos.
The Wish List
The EPA needs to describe in plain language the types of problems its IRIS assessments are intended to solve, said committee member Abby Li, a senior managing scientist and consultant with Exponent Inc.
As the committee discussed the ethylbenzene assessment plans, for example, it became clear that airborne exposures in certain parts of the country are a primary concern. Yet EPA's draft plan emphasized ethylbenzene's use to make styrene which is typically in a closed loop system, limiting exposure, Li said. Yet the air concentrations pollution monitors detect more likely are from ethylbenzene's presence in fuel, she added. Putting the airborne measurements or other exposure information up front to explain context “helps direct where you go with your assessment,” Li said.
Another approach would be for the IRIS program to explain its general goal upfront in its chemical analysis plans, said Alan Stern, a committee member and risk analyst with New Jersey's Department of Environmental Protection. If the goal is to provide a toxicity value that protects public health without being unduly strict, the agency should say that, Stern said.
“Admit you're not trying to do a Cadillac assessment,” he said. Sometimes a “Chevy” will do, several committee members added.
States also may need training and guidance in how they can apply their more limited resources while using the chemical databases and other new approaches the agency is developing, Stern said.
IRIS Budget Challenge
The agency's scientific advisers generally supported the IRIS chemical analysis reforms presented, but it's unclear whether the agency will get sufficient resources in the fiscal year 2018 budget to satisfy the program's critics.
In March, the president's fiscal year 2018 budget request proposed to eliminate IRIS, although the final budget request included it.
Thayer touched on how the program's uncertain future is affecting planning. The program is hesitant to hold public meetings to discuss assessment plans unless it knows it has the resources to complete those evaluations, she said.
http://news.bna.com/deln/DELNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=121680810&vname=dennotallissues&fn=121680810&jd=121680810
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(ACC Mentioned) Chemical Ban Impacts Bedding, Furniture
Oct 4, 2017 | Providence Journal
By Mark Reynolds
Legislation that bans the sale of certain types of bedding and furniture treated with a controversial flame retardant chemical became law in Rhode Island at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday, making its way into the General Laws without the signature of Gov. Gina Raimondo.
Despite strong opposition from the chemical industry’s chief trade group, the American Chemistry Council, Raimondo opted against vetoing the proposed law.
The law basically bans the sale of any bedding or furniture containing more than the tiniest amount of a fire retardant chemical known as organohalogen. It carries a fine of $5,000 for the first violation and $10,000 for each subsequent violation, but does not take effect until July 1, 2019.
Supporters of the ban say that organohalogens do little to reduce fire risk but when they flake off they are easily inhaled and harmful. Meanwhile, when the chemical burns, they say, the resulting toxins pose potentially severe breathing hazards, especially to firefighters.
Critics argue that the retardants have value in preventing serious fires in the first place.
“This law will remove a critical layer of fire protection and could increase the vulnerability of the citizens of Rhode Island when fires occur,” said Bryan Goodman, a spokesman for the chemistry council’s North American Flame Retardant Alliance (NAFRA).
Rhode Island is the second state to ban these particular flame retardants, following the lead of Maine, according to Goodman.
But Rhode Island, he said, was already among 13 other states to ban some other types of flame retardants.
In testimony before the Senate’s Judiciary Committee in March, representatives of firefighters, including union representatives and the president of the Rhode Island Fire Chiefs Association, gave verbal support for the law.
A toxicologist who chairs an advisory council for NAFRA, Thomas G. Osimitz, asserted that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is assessing various types of flame retardants. He also argued that there is no scientific evidence of a link between fire retardants and long-term adverse health effects to firefighters.
A researcher at the University of Miami, Hannah Gardener, argued that the proposed regulation of the fire retardants would protect children from increased cancer risk and impaired brain development.
The enactment of the law in Rhode Island follows recent action by a federal agency, the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
The agency voted on Sept. 20 to immediately warn the public about the dangers of organohalogens in baby and toddler products, mattresses, upholstered furniture and electronics enclosures, according to the Chicago Tribune, which has investigated the flame retardants.
Some of the chemicals have been forced off the market after independent scientists determined they were accumulating in people and posed serious health risks, says the Tribune.
But advocates and scientists note that the chemical industry has a long history of replacing harmful flame retardants with chemically similar compounds. Later on such compounds have been found to be just as worrisome, if not more so.
The Tribune’s “Playing with Fire” investigation in 2012 showed how a deceptive campaign by the tobacco and chemical industries led to the widespread use of toxic, ineffective flame retardants in American homes.
http://www.providencejournal.com/news/20171004/chemical-ban-impacts-bedding-furniture
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Fighting CERCLA Preemption, Citizens Defend PFAS Medical Monitoring Suit
Oct 3, 2017 | Inside EPA
By Lara Beaven
Residents near two military bases in Pennsylvania that are contaminated with perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are urging a federal appellate court to overturn a lower court ruling that dismissed their suit seeking medical monitoring for exposure to the chemicals under state law, arguing the lower court erred in finding the Superfund law barred the claims.
The suit, Kristen Giovanni, et al., v U.S. Department of the Navy, poses high stakes for citizen groups that may seek similar monitoring, especially given growing concerns about the presence of PFAS chemicals after EPA in 2016 set health advisory levels for two such compounds.
If the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit rejects the citizens' appeal and rules to uphold the lower court decision, it would create a circuit split with the 9th Circuit -- opening the door for Supreme Court review of the issue and additional uncertainty for regulators and citizen groups seeking to address such contamination.
The plaintiffs are seeking an order requiring the Navy to provide medical monitoring for themselves and their minor children and to perform a health assessment and health effects study of the plaintiffs and other individuals exposed to perfluorooctanoic acid and perfluorooctane sulfonate, the two PFAS chemicals for which EPA set health advisory levels. Both chemicals have been linked to several latent and serious diseases, including cancer.
The residents are seeking to overturn a July 6 ruling from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, which held that it lacked jurisdiction to hear the plaintiffs' claims because section 113(h) of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA), the Superfund law, bars judicial review of cleanup decisions.
The lower court agreed with the Navy that state law medical monitoring claims are disputes about who is responsible for contamination that should be dealt with after the site is cleaned up and that the claims constitute judicial interference that would hinder EPA's efforts to promptly remediate sites.
But in their Sept. 28 opening brief, the residents argue the lower court was wrong to find that federal Superfund law preempted their medical monitoring claims.
“There are many reasons why [the] lower court's interpretation is reversible error,” the residents say, including “it is unsupported by the text, purpose, and structure” of CERCLA, “failed to consider how granting the requested relief would interfere with the cleanup,” would render prior 3rd Circuit case law “null and void,” and “conflicts with fundamental rules of statutory construction by effectively preempting an important state law claim without any of the required Constitutional safeguards.”
The appeal says the lower court erred when it held the Giovanni family's state law claim for medical monitoring and a health effects study was a “challenge” to an EPA-directed plan under section 113(h) of CERCLA, “thereby stripping the federal court of jurisdiction and putting the family's state law claims on hold indefinitely. That interpretation, which stands alone among all the courts that have addressed this issue, finds no support in the statutory text, purpose or structure of CERCLA.”
Among the courts that have found state law medical monitoring claims are allowed under CERCLA are the 9th Circuit in its 1995 ruling in Durfey v. E.I. DuPont De Nemours & Co., the District of Arizona in its 1993 ruling Yslava v. Hughes Aircraft Co., and the Southern District of Ohio in its 1993 ruling Stepp v. Monsanto Research Corp.
'Removal' or 'Remedial Action'
But the Eastern District of Pennsylvania rejected the reasoning in those decisions as flawed for finding that medical monitoring is not included within the meaning of “removal” or “remedial action” under CERCLA.
In their appeal, the plaintiffs also point to the 3rd Circuit's rulings in the In re Paoli RR Yard PCB cases, which dealt with state law claims from a group of residents exposed to toxic chemicals leaking from a Superfund site. Federal jurisdiction was originally conferred under CERCLA, but when the CERCLA action was dismissed, the court exercised its discretion to continue to hold jurisdiction over the plaintiffs' exclusively state law claims, the appeal says.
“If the lower court's interpretation is correct, no medical monitoring claim can be brought on behalf of persons exposed at a Superfund site in either federal or state court until the site is cleaned up, with the exception of cases subject to diversity jurisdiction,” the brief says.
“If that were true, then that would mean that the district court and this Court in the In re Paoli RR Yard PCB cases spent nearly ten years adjudicating state claims for medical monitoring that the court had no power to adjudicate.”
The plaintiffs also argue that CERCLA is not a complete preemption statute, but the interpretation of the law reached by the district court amounts to implied federal preemption and violates fundamental principles of federalism and state sovereignty.
“Under the lower court's interpretation, the Giovanni family is not entitled -- until the cleanup of the property is complete -- to the testing that would enable them to know, prepare for, and respond to any emergence of the serious illnesses for which the Navy's polluting activities put them at risk,” the appeal says.
At the district court's hearing on the Navy's motion to dismiss, “government counsel conceded they had no idea how or when the cleanup at the site would be concluded, but that it was their position 'that if that means that the Giovannis have to begin their lawsuit when they're four and turn it over to their grandchildren in a nursing home, that's what Congress wanted,'” the brief continues.
“Not only is that completely contrary to the purpose and structure of CERCLA, it effectively allows the federal government to nullify the State's well-recognized interest in providing tort remedies for its residents. This trampling of State sovereignty is equivalent to preemption without any of the Congressional intent, power, or statutory clarity necessary to support such a bending of the Constitutional balance,” the plaintiffs say.
While CERCLA section 113(h) generally bars challenges to a Superfund cleanup before remediation is complete, a suit is not a challenge “if granting the relief requested would not affect the selection of remedial action or the ongoing cleanup efforts,” the plaintiffs say.
And they note that other courts have found that “not every suit that is related to an EPA-mandated cleanup under CERCLA is a 'challenge to the removal or remedial plan,' even if it increases the cost of a cleanup or diverts resources or personnel from it.” But the lower court failed to conduct a careful fact-based inquiry of whether the Giovanni family's claim, if granted, would interfere with the sites' cleanup plan, the appeal says.
https://insideepa.com/daily-news/fighting-cercla-preemption-citizens-defend-pfas-medical-monitoring-suit
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Toddler Cups Added to Proposed EU Ban on BPA in FCMs
Oct 4, 2017 | Chemical Watch
By Clelia Oziel
A European Commission proposal to ban bisphenol A (BPA) in food contact materials intended for infants and babies has been extended to plastic drinking ‘sippy cups’. These are widely used ‘spill-proof’ cups designed for one to three-year-olds.
The proposed ban, which targeted migration from varnishes and coatings used in FCMs, has been extended to reflect the views of stakeholders during a consultation period, a Commission spokesperson said.
In its consultation feedback, NGO CHEM Trust said that the ban on BPA migration from specific FCMs "did not go far enough" to protect consumers from the endocrine disruptor.
Calling for a prohibition on all uses of BPA in FCMs, including paper and card, it said young children might still be exposed to the substance through FCMs "which are not designed for them".
The original proposal had referred to the baby food Regulation to describe the packaging material, and this did not include sippy cups.
Last week, the Standing Committee on Plants, Animals, Food and Feed (SCoPAFF) - an advisory committee to the Commission - endorsed the amended proposal by a qualified majority.
"In practice, this means that BPA cannot be used for FCM intended for children 0-3-years-old," Mette Holm, senior scientific adviser at the Danish Ministry of Environment and Food, said.
As well as the ban on FCMs for children, the Commission's draft amending Regulation proposes a tighter limit on the amount allowed to migrate from plastic FCMs, varnishes and coatings used for other groups. For the latter, this is set at 0.05mg of BPA/kg of food, instead of the existing 0.6mg.
The amended text will now be sent to European Parliament and the Council for a three-month scrutiny period. The Regulation should be adopted early 2018, the Commission said.
Trade body PlasticsEurope described the proposal as a positive science-based step to "resolve the distortion" of the single market. It added that swift implementation of this new harmonised Regulation throughout the EU is important.
But NGO CHEMTrust’s Michael Warhurst said it is "yet another restriction" of a BPA use, which comes nearly seven years after the ban on BPA in baby bottles was agreed. The ban should cover all bisphenols with similar properties, such as bisphenol S, he added. "Where is the action to control their use? The EU's regulations controlling chemicals in food contact materials are not fit for purpose."
The Commission has, however, mandated the European Food Safety Authority (Efsa) to undertake "a full re-evaluation of BPA again in the future" on the basis of the results of anticipated new studies, the Commission said.
https://chemicalwatch.com/59684/toddler-cups-added-to-proposed-eu-ban-on-bpa-in-fcms
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(ACC Mentioned) How Fracking Is Upending the Chemical Industry
Oct 4, 2017 | Nature
By Mark Peplow
As the Ineos Intrepid cruised slowly through the sapphire waters of Norway's Frierfjord, chaperone tugboats sprayed jets into the sky to herald her arrival. In giant refrigerated tanks below decks, the ship carried 27,500 cubic metres of liquid ethane — enough to fill 11 Olympic swimming pools. Intrepid also brought a message, painted in giant capital letters along her side: “SHALE GAS FOR PROGRESS”.
The vessel's arrival in March 2016 brought the first ever shipment of shale gas from the United States to Europe — and marked the start of a burgeoning business. More of these 180-metre-long 'Dragon'-class vessels have followed in her wake, forming a 'virtual pipeline' for ethane across the Atlantic Ocean. This gas, which is extracted from the ground through the hydraulic fracturing of shale deposits, isn't destined to fuel power stations or domestic stoves. Instead, it will be transformed into the chemical building blocks needed to make a panoply of products, including plastics, clothes, adhesives and medicines.
Intrepid's voyage is a striking demonstration of how cheap US shale gas is reshaping the chemical industry and changing the origin of countless manufactured objects. For decades, the industry's raw ingredients have mostly come from crude oil. Chemical plants break down long hydrocarbon molecules in crude to produce a smorgasbord of smaller molecules, such as ethene, propene and benzene — all important precursors to polymers.Related storiesCan fracking power Europe?Natural gas: The fracking fallacyWasted energy
More related stories
But shale gas, which is composed mainly of methane, ethane and propane, is turning that pathway on its head. The abundance of the gas has slashed the costs of these molecules. As a result, some are now usurping large hydrocarbons as the preferred starting point for industrial synthesis.
This shift from oil to gas brings enormous opportunities. According to the American Chemistry Council, a trade group based in Washington DC, the shale boom has attracted about US$160 billion in investment from the US chemical industry since 2011, and will help to create half a million jobs in plastics manufacturing over the coming decade1. But it also poses huge challenges. Some of the main techniques that are used to turn the components of shale gas into more valuable compounds — processes generally known as upgrading — are decades-old, dirty and energy-intensive. And they rarely produce the same mix of chemicals as conventional oil-based routes, which means that some relatively minor, yet valuable, chemicals such as butadiene, an ingredient of synthetic rubber, are becoming scarcer.
These challenges are driving an intensive research effort, spanning industry and academia, to develop catalysts and reactors that can transmute small hydrocarbons in cleaner, cheaper and more efficient ways.
Translating that research into commercial production will depend on the finely balanced economics of a changeable market. It will also require a reliable supply of gas. The US Energy Information Administration predicts that natural-gas extraction in the United States will continue to grow until at least 2040, but that might be too optimistic (see Nature 516, 28–30; 2014). Meanwhile, concerns that fracking can contaminate groundwater — along with the broader climate implications of extracting fossil fuels — continue to dog the technology. If the glut does persist, however, it could usher in technologies that would form the foundations of a much more sustainable chemical industry. “We could totally redesign our chemical plants,” says Bert Weckhuysen, a chemist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.The ethane revolution
Shale gas is extracted from kilometres below ground, and typically contains about 70–95% methane, less than 15% ethane and less than 5% propane. After traces of oil, water and other impurities are cleaned out, the gas is chilled so that ethane and propane can be separated in liquid form, leaving methane behind.
Although ethane makes up a small proportion of shale gas, it has so far had the biggest impact on the chemical industry. That's because chemists can easily use it to make ethene, also known as ethylene. Ethene is used to make various types of polyethylene and the precursors to other plastics, such as polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and polystyrene. So voracious is the world's appetite for these plastics that the chemical industry produces roughly 150 million tonnes of ethene every year, more than any other chemical building block.
Most processes in the chemical industry use catalysts. But ethene can be produced simply by steam cracking ethane or larger hydrocarbons. First developed in the 1920s, steam cracking is a blunt, energy-intensive process that requires little more than water and 850 °C temperatures. “You basically just heat the snot out of it,” says Jeffrey Plotkin, an industry analyst at IHS Markit in New York City. “The heart and soul of the thing is this gigantic furnace, that's where all the chemistry happens.”
The boom in shale-gas-derived ethane has driven the chemical industry to invest nearly $45 billion in extra steam-cracking capacity2. But the transition to this feedstock is also creating a headache. When steam crackers are fed with mixtures of long hydrocarbons from crude oil, they make an array of useful by-products. But when they are supplied with ethane, the output is almost entirely ethene. “So there is a shortage of other building blocks,” says Weckhuysen.
One of those building blocks is propene, arguably the second most important product of the chemical industry after ethene. Propene is turned into polypropylene, a plastic used in packaging and textiles, along with other polymer ingredients such as acrylic acid. But by one estimate, propene production by US steam crackers dropped by almost half between 2005 and 2014, even as global demand rose (see 'Dwindling supply').
To combat the shortfall, the industry is rolling out alternative ways to make propene. One of the leading routes starts with the shale-gas component propane. A combination of heat and a catalyst to remove two hydrogen atoms can be used to turn it into propene.
The conversion is becoming more profitable: more than 20 of these propane-dehydrogenation units are already operating worldwide, and at least 40 more have been ordered since 2011. But Weckhuysen says that there is much scope to improve the process, which tends to chew up catalysts quickly, requires a time-consuming and costly catalyst-regeneration step, and can use harsh reagents.
The methane question
Although ethane and propane are already making waves as commercial feedstocks, the big prize for chemists is to upgrade the most abundant component of shale gas: methane.
Most of the world's methane is currently burnt as fuel, its lowest-value application. The gas can also be used as a chemical feedstock, but it contains strong carbon–hydrogen bonds that are difficult to break in a controlled way. When methane is converted into other molecules, it is done mainly through an inefficient sledgehammer of a process called steam reforming. First commercialized in the 1930s, this involves smashing methane and water together at up to 1,100 °C, over a metal catalyst. It produces an extremely useful mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen called syngas — and also emits several hundred million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year, accounting for roughly 3% of all industrial emissions3.
Syngas is the world's principal source of hydrogen, much of which goes to make the ammonia in fertilizer. Syngas can also be used to produce longer hydrocarbons, such as basic components of diesel and waxes.
Such upgrading is typically done through a technique called the Fisher–Tropsch (FT) process, which uses cobalt or iron catalysts and heat to create daisy-chains of carbon atoms. FT was developed in Germany in the 1920s to make petrol and a wide range of other hydrocarbons from syngas derived from coal.
Producing transport fuels in this way is generally more expensive than refining oil. There are just six large-scale FT plants in the world, made economical only thanks to their proximity to huge coal or gas fields and the mind-boggling scale of the plants themselves: the world's largest, in Qatar, cost $19 billion to build and munches through 45 million cubic metres of methane every day, on a par with the natural-gas consumption of Belgium.
But the shale boom has prompted chemical engineers to take a fresh look at the FT process. Shale-gas wells typically don't produce enough gas to support a conventional FT plant, so research teams and companies have been developing smaller reactors that can process modest gas flows. One of those is Velocys, based in Houston, Texas, which developed a 5-metre-long reactor that can convert syngas into substances such as naphtha, diesel and wax. Its reactor technology is being used in Oklahoma City in the first commercial mini-FT plant in the United States. The plant, which is owned by ENVIA Energy, started production earlier this year.
Temperature control is a big challenge for the FT process: the reaction kicks in at about 180 °C, then generates huge amounts of heat. If not carefully controlled, it will run away with itself, turning carbon atoms into useless soot. To address this, Velocys's reactor contains corrugated layers of channels that are alternately stuffed with catalyst or filled with water. This keeps the reaction running at a steady 200 °C, so that the reactor can use an efficient catalyst without risking a runaway reaction. “It allows you to pack a lot of reaction in a very small space,” says Neville Hargreaves, business-development director for Velocys in Oxford, UK.
The reactor in Oklahoma City pulls methane from a landfill site, an activity that comes with renewable-energy credits. But Hargreaves thinks companies could ultimately profit by tapping remote and relatively small natural-gas reserves that are unlikely to get a pipeline. Another potential target is unwanted gas from oil wells, which is often simply burnt off. Such 'flaring' puts about 350 million tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere every year. According to the World Bank, it carries enough energy to meet Africa's entire current electricity requirements.
The direct route
The high temperatures involved in producing syngas will always make it a costly way to create complex chemicals — as well as a major source of CO2 emissions. Researchers have spent decades looking for ways to convert methane directly to methanol or other products, cutting syngas out of the route altogether. The shale boom has given this effort fresh urgency, along with a burst of investment in research and development in both academia and industry.
Turning methane into methanol — itself a key precursor to a wide range of other compounds — involves adding only a single oxygen atom. But first, one of methane's strong carbon–hydrogen bonds must be broken, and the high temperatures or strong oxidants needed to do that can set the molecule on a one-way journey down a thermodynamic roller coaster with a messy end. Methanol sits on a brief crest about halfway down, but it is all too easy to race downhill as the reaction goes too far, producing a mixture of other molecules, including formaldehyde, formic acid or carbon monoxide.
In 2005, however, a team led by Robert Schoonheydt at the University of Leuven in Belgium, found4 that copper seeded onto a porous material called a zeolite could unite oxygen and methane to make methanol at less than 200 °C. Crucially, the methanol became trapped in the zeolite's pores, preventing further reactions. But extracting methanol from the pores and reactivating the catalyst would have proved expensive and impracticable in a commercial setting.
Since then, research groups have developed a range of copper–zeolyte catalysts that are more industry-friendly. Others have focused on completely redesigning chemical reactors. The European Union-funded project Adaptable Reactors for Resource- and Energy-Efficient Methane Valorisation, for example, aims to build small reactors that use renewable electricity, rather than heat generated from fossil fuels, to turn methane into compounds such as ethene and methanol. One approach uses microwaves to generate intense hotspots in the catalyst, lowering the heating requirements for the incoming gas.
Another approach to direct methane upgrading aims to couple pairs of the molecule together to make ethene. Since 2015, Siluria Technologies, a start-up in San Francisco, California, has been running a demonstration plant for this process in La Porte, Texas. It relies on a catalyst made of metal-oxide nanowires that collectively offer a surface area of about 200 square metres per gram of catalyst, hundreds of times more than a bulk catalyst could offer.
The company builds its catalysts in a unique way, based on a technique5 developed by co-founder Angela Belcher, a materials scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. First, viruses are genetically engineered to express proteins that bind to dissolved metal ions. The ions form orderly arrangements as they stick to the surface of the virus. When the biological template is burned away, it leaves behind a highly stable, crystalline nanowire.
Rahul Iyer, Siluria's vice-president of corporate development, says that the process is cost-competitive with steam cracking ethane, and produces far fewer CO2 emissions than steam reforming methane. Siluria has already licensed the technology to some chemical companies, and expects the first commercial facilities to be operating in 2019.
Plotkin says that Siluria is currently in the lead in the race to commercialize direct methane upgrading, and is backed by multimillion-dollar investments from big players in the industry. “People are keeping a watchful eye on it,” he says.Gas that's greener
The shale-gas boom is credited with spurring a major renaissance in the US chemical industry, which has invested heavily in chemical plants and other infrastructure, as well as research and development. Enthusiasm for shale-gas upgrading has fostered major collaborations between academia and industry.
Translating laboratory results into commercial production is an ongoing challenge, although the trend towards small, modular reactors is helping to make it less daunting. The chemical industry is notoriously conservative: if a process succeeds in the lab but fails at commercial scale, tonnes of catalyst can be wasted and a plant shut down for months. “Industry will not take the risk unless they are sure it will work,” says Weckhuysen.
Despite these challenges, he is optimistic that gas upgrading could have a huge impact — not only on the chemical industry's processes, but also on its environmental footprint. Some of the reactor technologies being developed to feed on shale gas could be adapted to use bio-based feedstocks, such as methane from landfills, as Velocys has found. Meanwhile, shortages in some compounds caused by the shift to shale gas could improve the economic case for starting with ethanol from crops, or lignin from wood6. There has already been movement along these lines. In 2013, for example, French tyre-maker Michelin and partners launched a €52-million (US$61-million) project to make butadiene from bioethanol.
But for now, US shale ethane continues its relentless march around the world. More chemical companies are commissioning ships to transport the gas to destinations in Europe, Brazil and India. By 2022, according to one estimate, about 8 million tonnes of ethane will flow through these virtual pipelines each year. They will carry this revolution in the US chemical industry to the rest of the globe — both its challenges and its opportunities.
http://www.nature.com/news/how-fracking-is-upending-the-chemical-industry-1.22753
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Exclusive-Trump EPA to Propose Repealing Obama's Climate Regulation: Document
Oct 4, 2017 | Reuters (In The New York Times)
By Valerie Volcovici
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will propose repealing the Clean Power Plan - the Obama administration's centrepiece regulation to fight climate change - and plans to solicit input on a rule to replace it, according to an EPA document seen by Reuters.
The decision marks the agency's first formal step to sweep away the rule intended to cut carbon emissions from power plants, after President Donald Trump signed an executive order in March launching the EPA's review.
The Republican president has expressed doubts about the science of climate change and has blamed former Democratic President Barack Obama's efforts to cut carbon emissions for hurting the coal mining and oil drilling industries.
The Clean Power Plan, or CPP, was challenged in court by 27 states after Obama's administration launched it in 2015. It is currently suspended by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which set a deadline of Friday for a status report from the EPA on how it plans to proceed.
The EPA document, distributed to members of the agency’s Regulatory Steering Committee, said the EPA “is issuing a proposal to repeal the rule.” Continue reading the main story
The agency now intends to issue what it calls an Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to solicit input as it considers “developing a rule similarly intended to reduce CO2 emissions from existing fossil fuel electric utility generating units.”
The document did not provide any details of the potential new rule.
The EPA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The CPP was designed to lower carbon emissions from existing U.S. power plants by 2030 to 32 percent below 2005 levels.
It was seen as the main tool for the United States to meet emissions cuts it promised in the Paris Climate Agreement, a global pact to fight climate change.
The Trump administration has announced it will withdraw the United States from the Paris deal - which it said would cost the U.S. economy trillions of dollars without tangible environmental benefits - in a process that could take years.
Industry sources following the rulemaking process expect the proposal to repeal and replace the Clean Power Plan to be released as soon as the end of this week.
Janet McCabe, who headed the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation under Obama, said an advanced notice of proposed rulemaking could take years - meaning the replacement for CPP could be a long way off.
"It certainly will draw the process out," she said.
Some conservative groups have urged the EPA to scrap the CPP without replacing it, effectively ending U.S. regulation of carbon emissions. But some industry groups want a replacement to give utilities regulatory certainty and avoid possible lawsuits by environmental groups.
https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2017/10/04/us/04reuters-usa-epa-carbon.html
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Panel Mulls Appalachia Gas Storage Hub, Other Bills
Oct 4, 2017 | E&E Daily
By Nick Sobczyk
West Virginia lawmakers advanced their push to build an ethane storage facility in Appalachia yesterday, as a Senate panel considered a pile of energy legislation.
The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Subcommittee on Energy heard from officials from the Department of Energy and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on a list of bills, some of which have been awaiting a hearing since the beginning of the year.
Among them was West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin's "Capitalizing on American Storage Potential Act," S. 1337, which would aim to make the natural gas liquids storage hub eligible for funding through DOE's loan guarantee program.
West Virginia Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito is co-sponsoring the measure, as both look to push energy development in their distressed region.
"West Virginia is a state that is rich in natural resources, and I believe the Appalachian storage hub offers an excellent chance for geographic diversification of our manufacturing sector," Manchin said yesterday.
"The hub will help insulate our nation from supply disruptions due to ongoing extreme weather events in the Gulf [of Mexico]," he added.
Manchin floated the proposal to President Trump last month at a dinner over tax reform, and the president was reportedly excited by the idea (E&E Daily, Sept. 14).
The panel also examined Arizona Republican Sen. Jeff Flake's S. 1457, the "Advanced Nuclear Energy Technologies Act," to direct DOE to carry out demonstration projects relating to advanced nuclear reactor technologies.
· S. 186, from Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), to amend the Federal Power Act to allow challenges to rate decisions that take effect without an official decision by FERC.
· S. 1059, from Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), to renew the authorization of a uranium disposal site in Mesa County, Colo.
· S. 1799, offered by Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), to facilitate the commercialization of energy technologies developed at DOE facilities.
· S. 1860, from Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), to adjust the FERC process for approving public utility mergers and acquisitions.
· H.R. 1109, offered by Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.), which is a House version of S. 1860.
https://www.eenews.net/eedaily/2017/10/04/stories/1060062519
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Energy Grid Rule Moving Fast, Despite Industry Pushback
Oct 4, 2017 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Rebecca Kern
A proposal that could prop up failing coal and nuclear plants was put on fast forward by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, despite concerns among renewable energy, natural gas and oil trade industries that it will greatly distort the wholesale energy markets.
FERC set an expedited three-week public comment deadline of Oct. 23 on an Energy Department proposal directing FERC to address market challenges facing coal and nuclear plants. The Energy Department gave FERC 60 days to act—a time period that will not begin until a notice is published in the Federal Register.
An unusual set of energy industry bedfellows, including renewable, gas and oil, has joined to oppose the DOE proposal and urge FERC to take more than 60 days to seek public comment and decide whether to pursue a rule.
FERC, as an independent agency, has the authority to choose how to address the market challenges identified in the proposal; it can choose do so by a rule or other action, regulators and legal experts told Bloomberg BNA.
“This is one of the most significant proposed rules in decades related to the energy industry and, if finalized, would unquestionably have significant ramifications for wholesale markets under the commission's jurisdiction,” 11 energy industry groups, including the American Wind Energy Association, the Solar Energy Industries Association, the American Petroleum Institute and the Natural Gas Supply Association, said in a joint motion to FERC Oct. 2.
They urged the agency to deny the request for an interim final rule, initiate a technical conference, and allow for at least a 90-day comment period for initial comments in this proceeding.
On Sept. 29, the Energy Department invoked rarely used authority under Section 403 of the Department of Energy Organization Act to direct FERC to issue a final rule within 60 days that would allow generators with a 90-day supply of fuel on site—which would include coal and nuclear facilities—to recover their operating costs at “a fair rate of return.”
The proposed rule is the first concrete outcome from the Energy Department grid reliability studyissued in August, which said that wholesale energy markets need to do more to compensate plants with on-site fuel supply for their ability to operate around-the-clock and in extreme weather.
FERC to Act in 60 Days
James Danly, FERC's general counsel, said Oct. 3 at a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing that FERC will act within 60 days of the publication of the DOE proposal in the Federal Register. The proposal has not yet been published.
What action FERC will take will be up to the three sitting FERC commissioners: Chairman Neil Chatterjee (R), Commissioner Cheryl LaFleur (D) and Commissioner Robert Powelson (R), Mary O'Driscoll, FERC's spokeswoman, told Bloomberg BNA Oct. 3.
Public groups also have until Nov. 7 to reply to any other public comments submitted to FERC's docket on the DOE proposal, according to the agency's Oct. 2 notice.
Supported by Coal, Nuclear Groups
Meanwhile, the coal and nuclear industry groups praised the Energy Department rulemaking Oct. 3 during a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on grid reliability.
Paul Bailey, president and CEO of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, called the DOE proposal a “major step toward achieving long overdue wholesale electricity market reforms.”
—With assistance from Alan Kovski.
http://news.bna.com/deln/DELNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=121680805&vname=dennotallissues&fn=121680805&jd=121680805
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CBD Cites Pending EPA Ozone Designations To Halt Oil, Gas Lease Sale
Oct 3, 2017 | Inside EPA
By Dawn Reeves
In an early sign of the effects of EPA's pending ozone designations, environmentalists are protesting a massive planned Bureau of Land Management (BLM) oil and gas lease sale slated for Utah in December, alleging in part that the bureau failed to analyze the emissions impact of the leasing on EPA's expected nonattainment designation for the area.
The Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) and other groups Oct. 2 formally protested BLM's planned Dec. 12 lease sale of 75 parcels of land covering 94,000 acres in Utah, charging that the environmental assessment (EA) the bureau conducted under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) failed to adequately assess air quality impacts and failed to demonstrate conformity with the Clean Air Act.
In addition, the groups charge the assessment failed to adequately address climate impacts in the EA and that it failed to adequately address impacts to endangered and sensitive species.
The protest also calls for a full environmental impact statement, rather than a less-detailed EA.
To address their emissions concerns, the groups suggest that BLM can control the emission “in a number of ways including, but not limited to, choosing not to lease certain areas or by including stipulations that require limits on emission or emitting practices.”
The protest comes on one day after EPA missed its legal deadline to issue new designations indicating which areas are -- or are not -- in attainment with the Obama administration's 2015 ozone national ambient air quality standard (NAAQS).
The ozone NAAQS is set at 70 parts per billion (ppb), more stringent than the prior NAAQS, which was establsihed at 75 ppb in 2008.
According to EPA, dozens of areas are likely to be found in nonattainment with the standard, requiring stricter controls in those areas.
Earlier this year, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt took steps to delay the designations nationwide, but he later abandoned that plan, suggesting he may delay select designations.
“Under previous Administrations, EPA would often fail to meet designation deadlines, and then wait to be sued by activist groups and others, agreeing in a settlement to set schedules for designation,” Pruitt said in an Aug. 3 statement. “We do not believe in regulation through litigation, and we take deadlines seriously.”
Despite Pruitt's assurances, the agency has now missed its Oct. 1 legal deadline to issue the designation decisions, saying it had “no further information” about when it will issue the designations for the 2015 NAAQS. It is already facing a threatened lawsuit from environmentalists over the delay.
But even before EPA issues its decisions, expected nonattainment designations are already playing a role in pending resource and other decisions, such as BLM's planned lease sale.
'Reasonably Foreseeable'
According to environmentalists' protest notice, EPA is expected to approve Utah requests to designate part of the leasing area in non-attainment and, as a result, BLM must assess that as a “reasonably foreseeable” action in its NEPA review.
The failure to identify the air quality impacts also violates the Clean Air Act, the group says, noting that the Uintah Basin in northeastern Utah has experienced hazardous ozone levels exceeding the NAAQS in recent winters, with exceedances lasting up toe 39 days at individual stations and readings higher than summertime levels in smog-plagued Los Angeles.
“Numerous studies show that the majority of ozone precursor emissions come from oil and gas operations,” the letter says, with volatile organic compounds and methane being the most prevalent.
Yet the groups note that BLM in its response to comments in the EA “continues to ignore the state of Utah's actual measurement of ozone levels” in the area” as well as “the state's recommendation to designate both as nonattainment for ozone under the Clean Air Act. The EPA is scheduled to take action on the State's recommendation this coming October, officially designating the Uintah Basin as nonattainment.”
The letter notes the revocation of EPA's effort to delay designations by a year to note, “EPA will very likely approve” the state's non-attainment recommendation, which “will then trigger the BLM's obligation to undertake a 'conformity' analysis” -- to demonstrate the new activity will not cause additional NAAQS exceedances - “before approving any new oil and gas leasing” as required by the air law for non-attainment areas.
“BLM must fully comply with these obligations before approving the December 2017 lease sale because the EPA's ultimate approval of nonattainment is a reasonably foreseeable action under” NEPA, the groups argue.
And they seek to preempt BLM's argument that leasing does not cause direct emissions. “Leasing is clearly a cause of future project emissions -- if there are no leases, there are no new emissions. . . . They originate in the same proposed nonattainment area, but simply at a later time.”
Climate Impacts
In addition to the ozone issue, the protest -- which in addition to CBD includes Elders Rising, the Green River Action Network, Living Rivers, the Sierra Club and Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment -- argues that BLM “failed to adequately analyze and assign significance to climate change impacts form this leasing decision, in violation of NEPA.”
It says that the EA's assessment of the direct and indirect greenhouse gases from the lease sale
are “still inadequate as it fails to adequately acknowledge and report direct, indirect and cumulative [GHGs] from this project, and fails to adequately disclose the impacts from those emissions.”The EA says that the GHGs would be 2,284 tons per year for a single oil well and 2,415 tons per year for a gas well.
Yet the groups say it is unclear how those estimates were derived, and that BLM continues to provide estimates only for development and production “rather than the cumulative total [GHGs] from development and production activities that would be produced over the lifetime of the wells.”
The EA also ignores fugitive methane emissions that escape from wells, storage and processing equipment, and it “still fails to report the downstream emissions from end-use combustion of oil and gas produced by the wells” -- an estimate the protest provides, extrapolating from BLM's estimate, to conclude that “downstream emissions from 135 projected wells would equal [about] 4.5 million metric tons of [carbon dioxide].”
The EA must provide estimates of methane and nitrogen dioxide emissions as well, it says.
Finally, it notes that the EA concluded it was not possible to assign a “significance” value to the GHG estimates and that the United States does not have a carbon budget.
The groups note, however, that as a signatory to the United Nations Paris Agreement, the U.S. has committed to keeping global average temperature rise to well below 2-degrees Celsius. The protest does not address the fact that President Donald Trump has said he would withdraw from that agreement.
“The more than 4.5 million metric tons of CO2 that would result from the lease sale comprise a measurable 0.012 percent of the remaining U.S. carbon budget for staying well below” 2-degrees C, “which is clearly significant in the scope of national, state and local level commitments to implementing rapid GHG emission reductions.
“At a time when the U.S. must rapidly ratchet down GHG emissions to avoid the worst dangers of climate change, the BLM should not be committing to new fossil fuel development and infrastructure on our public lands that locks in carbon intensive oil production for years into the future.
https://insideepa.com/daily-news/cbd-cites-pending-epa-ozone-designations-halt-oil-gas-lease-sale
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These Suburbanites May Have No Fracking Choice
Oct 4, 2017 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Catherine Traywick
When Bill Young peers out the window of his $700,000 home in Broomfield, Colo., he drinks in a panoramic view of the Rocky Mountains. Starting next year, he may also glimpse one of the 99 drilling rigs that Extraction Oil & Gas Inc. wants to use to get at the oil beneath his home.
There's little that Young and his neighbors can do about the horizontal drilling. Residents of the Wildgrass neighborhood own their patches of paradise, but they don't control what's under them. An obscure Colorado law allows whole neighborhoods to be forced into leasing the minerals beneath their properties as long as one person in the area consents. The practice, called forced pooling, has been instrumental in developing oil and gas resources in Denver's rapidly growing suburbs. It's law in other states, too, but Colorado's is the most favorable to drilling.
Now fracking is coming to an upscale suburb, and the prospect of the Wildgrass homeowners being made by state law to do something they don't want to do has turned many of them into lawyered-up resisters. “It floors me that a private entity could take my property,” says Young, an information security director.
Many states require 51 percent of owners in a drilling area to consent before the others have to join. Pennsylvania doesn't allow forced pooling at all in the Marcellus, one of the most prolific shale gas regions in the country. Texas, the center of the nation's oil production, has strict limits on the practice. Despite its founding cowboy ethos of rugged individualism, Colorado has one of the lowest thresholds. “There's a tension in oil and gas law between allowing private property owners to develop their mineral estates on their own and the state's desire to ensure that ultimate recovery of oil and gas is maximized,” says Bret Wells, a law professor at the University of Houston.
The rise of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing over the past decade has ushered in a modest oil boom on Colorado's Front Range by enabling companies to wring crude more cheaply from the stubborn shale that runs beneath Denver's northern suburbs. From 2010 to 2015, Colorado's crude output almost quadrupled. This year the state is pumping more than 300,000 barrels a day, most of it from the Wattenberg oil field beneath Wildgrass and beyond.
Colorado's population is booming, too. As Denver's suburbs bloom northward into oil and gas territory—Wildgrass is about 20 miles north of Denver, not far from Boulder—housing developments are erupting where once there were only drilling rigs and farmland. And because horizontal drilling can reach as far as 2 miles in all directions from a well, companies need underground access to more land to maximize production from each site. The Colorado Oil & Gas Conservation Commissionissues hundreds of pooling orders every year. “It's an entirely new issue,” says David Neslin, former director of the commission, now an attorney at Davis Graham & Stubbs in Denver. “That's creating some understandable friction with local governments and local communities.”
Denver-based Extraction Oil & Gas is at the epicenter of that friction. Almost all its acreage is in populated areas. So the company, like others in the region, has put a lot of energy—and cash—into making its operations more palatable to suburbanites who fear the prospect of a drilling rig sprouting up within sight of their kiddie pools. Extraction almost exclusively uses electric drills, which are quieter than diesel-powered, and a new generation of hydraulic fracturing equipment that cuts noise. “It's incumbent upon us to learn to live with these communities,” says Extraction spokesman Brian Cain. “Where we can go the extra mile to minimize impacts, we wish to do so.”
The company's latest project involves drilling 99 horizontal wells in Broomfield. That means leasing mineral rights from Wildgrass residents. Letters went out to some of them last year offering a 15 percent royalty and a $500 signing bonus. Some signed, others demurred, and still others organized a campaign aimed at blocking the project. Extraction hasn't applied for a forced pooling order, but Young and his neighbors have come to believe it's inevitable.
The suburb's agitation prompted the city to create a special task force to evaluate Extraction's proposal. The company responded by taking members of the task force on a tour of oil and gas country. It wanted to show how its operations are less disruptive than traditional drill sites.
Ultimately, the company agreed to more stringent environmental standards than the state requires. It will move some wells 1,300 feet from neighborhoods, almost three times farther than the law mandates. It will reduce the number of wells per site, monitor air emissions as well as water and soil quality, and build pipelines to transport oil immediately off-site instead of storing it in the city. “I can see Broomfield turning out to be a new model for how large-scale development gets done,” says Matt Lepore, director of the state commission, which will rule on Extraction's applications for siting the wells this month.
Such concessions have smoothed the path for development in many communities. But for some Wildgrass residents, any leasing is unacceptable. They say they fear accidents, such as the April pipeline explosion that killed two people and destroyed a home in Firestone, 20 miles away. Some simply find the terms of the initial lease offer laughable.
“The money is so negligible,” says Elizabeth Lario, a health coach who's lived in Wildgrass since 2005. And then there are property values: Homes in Wildgrass range from $500,000 to more than $1 million. “The royalties won't offset the drop in property value,” says Stephen Uhlhorn, an engineer who's lived in Wildgrass for four years. Oil development “is now hitting affluent neighborhoods where people have assets and livelihoods that exceed the value of any royalty they're offered.”
The bedrock of Colorado's oil and gas policy is a 1951 law that says responsible fossil fuel development is in the public interest. The state, the law says, must protect the public from “waste”—industry parlance for oil that's left in the ground. While Colorado has some of the strictest environmental regulations of any oil-producing state, it gives companies latitude in choosing where to drill. The Colorado Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the state's interest in developing mineral resources preempts any local law that would curb drilling.
Efforts to change the statute have fizzled. State Representative Mike Foote, a Democrat whose district is adjacent to Broomfield's, introduced a bill earlier this year to raise the pooling threshold to 51 percent. It passed the House by a slim margin but died in a Senate committee in a party-line vote, with Republicans opposed.
“The oil and gas industry pretty much controls the capital, particularly in the Senate,” Foote says. “Operators can do whatever they want.” Lepore, the head of the state oil commission, concedes the pooling threshold is low compared with other states. “I have no philosophical objection to a 51 percent requirement,” he says. “There are intelligent changes that could be made to the forced pooling law.”
Young, the Wildgrass resident, received a lease offer last year. Since then he's been working with a lawyer to consider his options, and so far he doesn't like them. “You couldn't put a Walmart where they're putting these wells—no one would approve that zoning,” he says. “But for some reason, the industry is completely exempt from everything.”
http://news.bna.com/deln/DELNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=121680821&vname=dennotallissues&fn=121680821&jd=121680821
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US Northeast Gas Pipeline Capacity Increasing, Easing Flow Beyond Region
Oct 3, 2017 | Platts
By Harry Weber
Natural gas pipeline constraints are easing in the US Northeast as its traditionally high-demand winter heating season approaches, with new infrastructure coming online and better positioning operators to move Appalachian Basin supplies out of the region, according to an S&P Global Platts market outlook released Tuesday.
The balancing of supply and demand will help keep a lid on prices over the long term, though there still may be volatility during the coldest months even under normal weather conditions if stockpiles in storage together with existing output are not enough to keep up with consumption.
Researchers and analysts gathered Tuesday at Platts' Houston Energy Forum highlighted the importance of being able to move more gas from key producing areas to market as demand increases for exports to Mexico via pipeline and as LNG shipments to other countries via tanker. Pipeline operators, producers and midstream companies will be issuing their own winter forecasts over the next several weeks as they report third-quarter financial results.
"The constraints we have had in the past are kind of behind us, and we feel we will be able to get the gas out of the market to the Southeast and also to the Midcon," Beth McKay, manager, North America natural gas, for Platts' PIRA Energy Group, said at the forum.
The Northeast for several years has been impacted by pipeline capacity constraints, which occur when pipelines reach their upper flow limits and must therefore curtail, in certain cases, significant nominated quantities. This in effect reduces the optionality for where gas from the region may flow, and adds a risk discount to the price of gas as buyers devalue a product that's not guaranteed to be delivered.
This has been a primary driver behind deep price discounts at US Northeast supply pools in recent years, and has been on full display this month. Next-day gas at the Tennessee Zone 4-300 leg, for example, settled at just 62 cents/MMBtu for gas day Tuesday, a discount of $2.185 to benchmark Henry Hub, data compiled by Platts Analytics' Bentek Energy show.
ANOTHER 4.57 BCF/D OF TAKEAWAY CAPACITY
Adding further pipeline capacity, in particular to the Northeast's outflow corridors, has the effect of de-bottlenecking existing pipeline constraints, but only to the extent that the new capacity does not fill one-for-one with incremental production volumes. Should a new production-takeaway pipeline fill immediately with incremental production, existing pipeline constraints would find no relief.
That is not expected to be the case this winter and generally going forward for the region, however.
Producer guidance and current drilling activity in the Northeast region indicate that pipeline capacity additions in the near future are likely to fill with a mix of new production and existing volumes, thereby pulling volumes away from existing constraint corridors. As a result, basis futures at Dominion South are seen tightening significantly through the upcoming winter, with the November-March contract strip last trading at a 58.5-cent discount to Henry Hub, according to data from the IntercontinentalExchange.
By the end of the winter season, an additional 4.57 Bcf/d of regional takeaway capacity is scheduled to enter service across three major projects, including the 520 MMcf/d Access South and Adair Southwest projects on Texas Eastern Transmission, the 1.5 Bcf/d Leach XPress project on Columbia Gas Pipeline, and the rollout of the remaining 2.55 Bcf/d of capacity on Rover Pipeline, which began flowing 700 MMcf/d of its total 3.25 Bcf/d of design capacity in September.
At the same time, production forecasts by Platts Analytics show production growing at a lesser rate than pipeline capacity additions, implying underutilization and therefore de-bottlenecking of existing constraints. Production is forecast to grow from an average 24.9 Bcf/d in September this year to a winter-ending average of 27.3 Bcf/d in March 2018, an incremental 2.4 Bcf/d of production from the region.
Due to a massive wave of pipeline expansions on the horizon, the region is expected to continuously produce at volumes less than regional takeaway capacity accumulations. An estimated 12.8 Bcf/d of pipeline expansions are scheduled to enter service over the course of 2018, while production is forecast to grow by about 2.6 Bcf/d over that period.
However, many of the pipeline projects scheduled to enter service next year so far have not received Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approval or begun construction, putting some risk around the total capacity added by the end of 2018.
In a research note Monday, Societe Generale analyst Breanne Dougherty said her firm was bullish on US gas prices in the near-term with a forecast for the first quarter of 2018 at $3.48/MMBtu and second quarter 2018 at $3.27/MMBtu. However, she said Societe Generale sees renewed downside pressure in 2019/2020, pushing Henry Hub prices back below $3/MMBtu.
Platts' price forecast, too, is bullish in the short-term, but moderating over the longer term.
"We expect based on normal weather that these prices aren't high enough to motivate the producer community," McKay said. "We have already seen rig counts level off and drop a little bit."https://www.platts.com/latest-news/natural-gas/houston/us-northeast-gas-pipeline-capacity-increasing-21137599
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Lawsuit: Arkema Harmed Residents Before Fires, Blasts
Oct 3, 2017 | Houston Chronicle
By Matt Dempsey
Even before explosions at the Arkema chemical plant shook the Crosby area, the battering from Hurricane Harvey had led to the release of more than 20,000 pounds of toxic chemicals into floodwaters, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday.
The complaint, filed in federal court on behalf of 14 residents, seeks compensation from Arkema for health care expenses and damage to homes during the period when residents were evacuated, as well as punitive damages.
Arkema lost control of its Crosby facility after floodwaters cut power and wiped out its back up generators. With the power out and cooling systems failing, volatile organic peroxides exploded multiple times over the course of a week, producing towering pillars of fire and thick plumes of black smoke.
A 1.5-mile evacuation zone was established after government officials got access to the company's chemical inventories. About 300 households were evacuated during the crisis.
The lawsuit is the first to accuse Arkema of causing environmental damage separate from the fires and explosions.
The suit cites a report the company filed with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, disclosing details of the chemical spill, which occurred Aug. 28. Released into flood waters were potential carcinogens such as volatile organic compounds and ethylbenzene, and toxins such as tert butyl alcohol, which irritates skin and can cause vomiting and dizziness. The company report wasn't released to the public for more than a week because Gov. Greg Abbott had suspended TCEQ reporting rules before Harvey's arrival.
The federal lawsuit says residents living more than 6 miles from the Arkema facility were exposed to toxins and argues that the evacuation zone was not large enough to protect the public.
Health issues cited
Environmental lawyer Kevin Thompson, who represents the 14 plaintiffs, said his firm has conducted tests of ash, soil and water miles from the chemical facility, and that the results show his clients were harmed. According to the suit, some residents experienced respiratory problems, and one suffered burns and blisters on his legs after wading through contaminated flood waters.
Arkema rejected the suit's claims.
"Based on testing results received to date, Arkema has not detected chemicals in off-site ash, soil, surface or drinking water samples that exceeded … levels established by TCEQ for soil and groundwater," said company spokesperson Janet Smith. "We are cooperating with authorities in ongoing investigations, and we will not comment further on these lawyers' accusations."
Thompson's firm is seeking class action status for anyone within a seven-mile radius of the company's Crosby facility.
The case is the latest in Arkema's legal troubles since Hurricane Harvey.
Almost 30 residents and first responders have sued the company in Harris County, seeking more than $1 million in damages. Also named as a defendant in that suit was Bureau Veritas, a global environmental testing company hired by Arkema to conduct air monitoring around the facility. The company was accused of not disclosing critical information about chemical hazards to the public.
Criminal investigation
In addition, Harris County commissioners have approved a civil suit contending that Arkema violated the Texas Clean Air Act and created a public nuisance. Rock Owens, managing attorney for the county attorney's environmental group, said the suit likely will be filed later this week or early next week, after county lawyers meet with counterparts at Rusty Hardin's law firm, which is representing Arkema in Harvey-related legal matters.
Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg's office is conducting a criminal investigation. In addition, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the federal Chemical Safety Board are all investigating Arkema.
Officials at the county attorney's office plan to meet with CSB officials next week and will share documents the county has acquired about Arkema, Owens said.
No sign of documents
He said the company has not provided the county with documents showing where and how it disposed of debris from the fire and explosions. Nor has it told the county how it tested drinking water or surface water near the plant, or what toxins were produced when its chemical inventory burned, Owens added.
Arkema did not respond to a request for comment on Owens' assertions.
The company has also refused to disclose its chemical inventories to the public and the media.
An investigation by the Houston Chronicle in 2016 found that Arkema was one of 55 facilities in the Houston area that pose a high potential for harm to the public, based on an analysis performed in conjunction with Texas A&M University. The study assessed potential harm based on the amount and type of dangerous chemicals on site and their proximity to the public.
The Arkema plant lies within the 500-year flood plain, according to a Chronicle analysis.
http://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Lawsuit-Arkema-harmed-residents-before-fires-12251005.php
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Greens Will Sue Pruitt over Missed Ozone Deadline
Oct 3, 2017 | PoliticoPro - Whiteboard
By Alex Guillen
Ten environmental groups say they plan to sue EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt for missing the Oct. 1 deadline to decide which parts of the U.S. do or do not meet the 2015 ozone standard, a critical step toward implementing the rule and curbing pollution.
“It’s an outrage that Scott Pruitt just willfully ignored his legal and moral obligation to keep American communities safe from dangerous air pollution that sends children to the hospital,” Matthew Gravatt of the Sierra Club said in a statement.
Pruitt earlier this year announced plans to delay the designations by one year, citing trouble with data collection from states. Following lawsuits from green groups and Democratic attorneys general, EPA reversed course and said Pruitt would work to meet the deadline. But the deadline passed this week without any word from EPA on any designations.
The underlying 2015 standard is itself under review at EPA, along with a host of other Obama-era regulations. EPA in recent weeks also sent for White House review what appears to be a proposal setting new thresholds for which areas would have to take action to improve their air quality.
EPA on Monday had no comment on when the agency plans to issue the designations.
Groups suing include the Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, American Lung Association and National Parks Conservation Association.
WHAT’S NEXT: The Clean Air Act requires anyone suing EPA over a missed deadline to give the agency at least 60 days’ notice. The lawsuit could be filed as soon as early December.
https://www.politicopro.com/energy/whiteboard
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Undermining the Rule of Law at the E.P.A.
Oct 4, 2017 | New York Times
By David M. Uhlmann
In the more than seven months since he became administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt has been on a reckless mission to dismantle public health safeguards and environmental protections. Mr. Pruitt’s E.P.A. wants to postpone or roll back dozens of rules that save lives and provide clean air and water, including efforts by the Obama administration to combat climate change and to protect rivers and streams from pollution.
Last week brought more bad news: Mr. Pruitt is proposing to end a decades-long agreement with the Justice Department that funds the E.P.A.’s lawsuits against polluters responsible for creating hazardous waste sites. Neither Congress nor the courts will have the final say. The decision rests with the Trump administration.
Since the Reagan administration, the E.P.A. has reimbursed the Justice Department for the cost of suing companies as part of the Superfund hazardous waste site cleanup program. In communities like the Love Canal neighborhood in Niagara Falls, N.Y., and Times Beach, Mo., the Justice Department sued polluters to force them to pay the cost of relocating residents. More recently, the E.P.A. covered the upfront costs of suing the W. R. Grace chemical conglomerate in the small town of Libby, Mont., where hundreds have died from asbestos poisoning, and compelling General Electric to clean up decades of PCB pollution that ravaged the Hudson River.
But in its budget proposal, the E.P.A. said it no longer intended to reimburse the Justice Department for Superfund litigation costs.
These lawsuits are expensive, with Justice Department lawyers doing battle, often for years, with the largest law firms in America. But the return on the agency’s investment is substantial. The Justice Department recovers hundreds of millions of dollars every year in cleanup costs to replenish the Superfund program’s coffers, which enables the E.P.A. to conduct more hazardous waste cleanups, including emergency responses to chemical releases like those that occurred after Hurricane Harvey.Continue reading the main story
For the Environment and Natural Resources Division at the Justice Department, which represents the E.P.A. and other federal agencies in court, funding from the E.P.A. is essential. In its budget proposal for 2018, the Justice Department indicated that it expected to receive approximately $25 million from the E.P.A., enough to pay for 69 lawyers as well as support staff, nearly 20 percent of the division.
If the E.P.A. stopped paying for Superfund work, significant layoffs would be likely at the Justice Department. But that would be just the beginning. More than half of the Environment Division’s work is defensive, meaning it represents the E.P.A. and other agencies in lawsuits brought by regulated industries, environmental groups and state attorneys general. That work is considered nondiscretionary — the Justice Department must represent the government when federal agencies like the E.P.A. are defendants — so the spending cuts and layoffs would have to come from elsewhere in the Environment Division.
As a result, there could be cuts exceeding 40 percent from the Environment Division offices that prosecute environmental crimes like the Volkswagen emissions cheating scandal, seek civil penalties and natural resource damages in cases like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and sue polluters that are responsible for Superfund hazardous waste sites.
Mr. Pruitt’s proposal is a breathtakingly bad idea, giving polluters license to do their dirty work with less fear of punishment and a greater ability to outlast an understaffed Justice Department in court. The victims would be ordinary Americans, many of them poor and minorities, who often live closest to where environmental violations occur and where the worst Superfund sites are located.
Yet blocking Mr. Pruitt will depend on opposition from Attorney General Jeff Sessions and intervention by the White House, which so far has shown no inclination to curtail the E.P.A. administrator’s anti-environmental zeal.
For decades, Republican and Democratic administrations alike have prosecuted environmental crimes and sued polluters to recover the cost of cleaning up their messes. Vigorous enforcement of the environmental laws has been nonpartisan, because it protects our communities from harmful pollution and ensures that polluters don’t get a free ride at the expense of taxpayers.
Prosecuting polluters also makes sense for American businesses, most of which are committed to meeting their legal obligations and conducting their affairs in a responsible, ethical manner. Why should good companies that invest in environmental compliance be at a competitive disadvantage against the lawbreakers that would be harder to bring to justice under Mr. Pruitt’s cynical ploy?
Mr. Pruitt, a former Oklahoma attorney general, claims state governments can fill the void created by a diminished E.P.A. His argument ignores the fact that most states lack the resources to take on big polluters.
Before the E.P.A. was created in 1970, the United States saw what happens when the federal government does not protect our communities from pollution: the Cuyahoga River on fire in Cleveland, a devastating oil spill sullying the beaches in Santa Barbara, Calif., and thousands of drums of hazardous waste, many leaking toxic chemicals, at the Valley of the Drumsin Kentucky.
The system of environmental laws in the United States resulted from bipartisan consensus about the need to protect public health and the environment from harmful pollution. Previous E.P.A. administrators, in Republican and Democratic administrations, have supported strong enforcement of those laws, recognizing that laws are only as good as their enforcement.
By weakening E.P.A.’s commitment to bringing polluters to justice, Mr. Pruitt abandons communities scarred by pollution and undermines the rule of law.
David M. Uhlmann is a law professor at the University of Michigan and was chief of the environmental crimes section at the Justice Department from 2000 to 2007.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/04/opinion/contributors/epa-rule-of-law-pruitt.html
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New York City Climate Plan Calls for Efficient Buildings, Electric Cars
Oct 4, 2017 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By John Herzfeld and Dean Scott
New building standards and more electric vehicle fast chargers are part of New York City's new three-year plan to meet Paris Agreement greenhouse gas reductions—even if the country as a whole does not.
Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) issued the plan Oct. 3, calling it “the first Paris Agreement-compliant plan from any city in the world.”
Covering energy, transportation, buildings, and solid waste, the plan aligns with the international agreement's goal of pursuing policies to help limit warming to a 1.5 degree Celsius increase (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) this century.
For new buildings, the city would work to set advanced energy codes in 2019, with energy-use targets growing stricter with each subsequent code cycle. In its procurement and purchasing, the city would aim to use 100 percent renewable electricity for municipal operations as soon as a sufficient supply becomes available.
The plan follows an executive order de Blasio issued in June committing the city to the Paris goals, in response to President Donald Trump's announcement that the U.S. would pull out of the international climate agreement. Advocates for action on climate change have turned to states, cities, and private companies and organizations to take leadership roles in the aftermath of Trump's withdrawal.
New York a First
New York is the first among the world's large “megacities” to unveil a plan to ratchet up municipal actions on climate consistent with the Paris climate pact. The city's plan serves as a template for those other large cities, Jeff Deyette, state policy director for climate and energy for the Union of Concerned Scientists, told Bloomberg BNA.
But he cautioned that local, state, and corporate efforts can only go so far in filling the vacuum of U.S. policy action under the Trump administration.
“Ultimately, we need a comprehensive climate strategy at the federal level so all sectors of the economy are moving toward those reductions,” he added, including regulatory limits on methane from the oil and gas sector and carbon pollution limits from power plants that Trump has targeted.
Andy Darrell, the Environmental Defense Fund's New York regional director, said city efforts also are no substitute for federal policies to encourage renewable energy. That “would of course be achieved more easily and quickly without Washington trying to slam on the brakes,” he told Bloomberg BNA.
‘Existential Threat to a Coastal City’
“In the Trump era, cities have to lead the way when it comes to fighting climate change,” de Blasio said in a statement on the city's plan. “Hotter summers and powerful storms made worse by climate change are an existential threat to a coastal city like ours, which is why we need to act now.”
Other components of the city's climate plan include a rollout of citywide single-stream recycling by 2020, which would do away with sorting recyclables from other trash. Composting of organic trash would be made available citywide by 2018, the mayor said, with some of the waste possibly destined for wastewater treatment plants.
The plan says increased recycling, reduced waste and removing organics from the waste stream will reduce truck traffic and associated emissions from waste collection.
The previously announced electrical vehicle expansion is meant to foster a goal of having those vehicles account for 20 percent of new car registrations by 2025. The city also plans to boost its infrastructure support for bicycles.
That approach of looking at all municipal emissions sources and policies to reduce them is key, Bob Perciasepe, a former acting EPA administrator under the Obama administration, told Bloomberg BNA.“These are the right policies, looking at transportation, increasing demand for clean energy, and other” issues together, he told said, adding that New York's approach could be applied to “all cities, big and small.”
New Council Members
De Blasio rounded up statements of support from city council members and other elected officials, but it remains to be seen how the components of his plan requiring legislation will fare with a reconstituted council. Many term-limited council members, including Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito (D), a de Blasio ally, are due to be replaced in the November election.
New York has had a long-term sustainability plan including carbon reduction goals since 2007, but de Blasio stepped up the city's targets soon after taking office in 2014 to call for an 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gases from 2005 levels by 2050.
http://news.bna.com/deln/DELNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=121680807&vname=dennotallissues&fn=121680807&jd=121680807
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Puerto Rico a Tragic Reminder of Why Climate Action Cannot Wait
Oct 3, 2017 | Environmental Defense Fund
By Ilissa Ocko
The disaster unfolding in Puerto Rico is heartbreaking – and a call for action.
Our focus as a nation must be to help our fellow citizens as quickly as possible, but also to do what we can to prevent similar catastrophic events in the future.
With three Category 4 hurricanes – undoubtedly worsened by climate change – making landfall and wreaking havoc in the United States in just a few weeks, we’ve had three wake-up calls. Climate change is an urgent issue that must be addressed now.
By continuing to ignore the fundamental threat that global warming poses today, however, the Trump administration is setting up Puerto Rico and the rest of the Hurricane Alley region for more disasters and tragedies.
It’s akin to a doctor who treats the symptoms of a patient while ignoring a dangerous, underlying disease. It makes for a bad doctor – and America expects more than that.Puerto Ricans are living climate change
Considered a “canary in the coal mine” for climate change, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico has been feeling the consequences of a warming world for some time already.
Its beaches are retreating with some homes in the capital of San Juan and in Rincón, a popular surfing town, actually falling into the ocean amid rising seas – and coastal flooding is getting worse.
That’s not all: The island is also challenged by intensifying tropical heat, heavier downpours and – as we just saw with Hurricane Maria – its location in the path of stronger hurricanes.
When rebuilding Puerto Rico, we need to help the island become more resilient to such impacts of climate change – while doubling down on curbing emissions that cause the problem in the first place.Island’s economy hangs in balance
A vast majority of the Puerto Rico’s population of 3.4 million, more than 85 percent, lives within five miles of a coast that is threatened by the rising ocean.
Like islands in the South Pacific, it’s seeing sea level rise of about half a foot on average from melting land ice and warmer ocean waters. This trend, which is accelerating, has made roads, ports and other infrastructure that are key to Puerto Rico’s economy more vulnerable.
As we’ve seen over the past few weeks, sea level rise compounds the impacts of hurricanes when worsened storm surge causes flooding in communities along the coast. The resulting damage from this and other climate impacts has a direct effect on Puerto Rican daily life as well as on tourism, which accounts for 8 percent of the island’s economy.Climate impacts are getting worse
Scientists predict Puerto Rico will see a sea level rise of 22 inches by 2060. That translates into a lot more storm surge, more destroyed property and even bigger hits to the nation’s tourist economy.
Research also suggests more heat, rainfall, and stronger hurricanes are in the future [PDF] for Puerto Rico.
The science is clear: Rising temperatures and heavier rainfall both play a key role in intensifying hurricane strength and destruction.
Ninety percent of excess heat is absorbed by the oceans and this warming water energizes hurricanes and evaporates more water into the atmosphere, increasing the amount of rainfall in storms – just like we’ve seen in recent weeks.
All these challenges will escalate in coming decades.These fellow Americans deserve our help
As we see in Puerto Rico today, it’s the most vulnerable among us who feel the impacts of climate change the most. They need our help to build a better and stronger future.
Treating the symptoms of climate change is absolutely essential. We must come together quickly as a nation and help our fellow Americans through this crisis.
But treating the underlying disease – heat-trapping gas emissions – is equally essential. Or the devastation we’re witnessing in Puerto Rico will keep happening.
https://www.edf.org/blog/2017/10/03/puerto-rico-tragic-reminder-why-climate-action-cannot-wait
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