Ozone & Mega Fields
Smog and ozone in Wyoming
On September 2, 2011, President Barack Obama announced that he had instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to abandon its plan to update and strengthen air-quality rules related to ozone pollution, better known as smog.
Exposure to ground-level ozone, even at relatively low concentrations, can cause permanent damage to the lungs. The EPA’s own expert advisory council of air quality scientists and medical professionals had recommended the changes, for at least the fifth time, because the current federal standards are not good enough to protect the public health. The EPA’s experts unanimously agree on this point, as well as the American Lung Association, American Thoracic Society, American Academy of Pediatrics, American Public Health Association, American Heart Association, and American Medical Association.
The day Mr. Obama made the announcement, the New York Times reported that his decision came “after an intense lobbying campaign by industry, which said the new rule would cost billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of jobs.”
The American Lung Association and others have since sued the Obama administration for, as the ALA put it in a media release in October 2011, “rejecting stronger ozone smog standards that scientists say are needed to save lives and prevent thousands of hospital visits.”
It’s a decision that has very real implications for the citizens of Wyoming, our health, and our quality of life. And as the shale gas (and shale oil) revolution promises to bring yet another drilling boom to Wyoming—a proposed 25,000 new gas wells in western Wyoming alone in just the next few years--it’s going to be an enormous task to try to protect air quality and the people of Wyoming.
The eight “mega fields” described below, for example, will pose big challenges for those working to protect Wyoming’s air quality
If state and federal regulators don’t start taking an effective, big-picture approach to air quality protections in Wyoming--and fast--we could witness a precipitous degradation of the air we breathe.
Clean air in Wyoming has perhaps been taken for granted over the years. But, as unbelievable as it may seem, in the second decade of the 21st century, Wyoming is facing a smog problem.
'It's not enough just to have jobs'
The EPA’s professional air quality advisory panel has asserted for more than half a decade now that the federal standards for ozone allow for dangerous levels of pollution—levels that harm people, especially children, the elderly, and those with asthma and other respiratory ailments.
This under-regulation adds significantly to the cost of health care for families and the nation, according to America’s leading health advocacy groups.
“This decision is distressing,” said the Wyoming Outdoor Council’s Bruce Pendery, the day Mr. Obama made his announcement.
The Wyoming Outdoor Council has worked for years, along with citizens in the Pinedale area, to raise awareness about dangerous levels of ozone pollution there, and about the need to strengthen protections for the people who live and work in the area.
“You’ll hear people try to make the argument that these regulations will hurt the economy and cost jobs, etc.” Pendery said. “Industry lobbyists have made these same arguments about every commonsense pollution control since the Nixon administration--and the sky has never fallen like they claimed it would. And we’ve all benefited from cleaner air and water.
“But more importantly, and our members remind us of this all the time, it’s not enough just to have jobs,” he said. “We also have to make sure those workers, their families, and their communities are safe and are not being harmed by the industrial development.”
On the day of the announcement, medical professionals had similar reactions.
“For two years the administration dragged its feet by delaying its decision, unnecessarily putting lives at risk,” said Charles D. Connor, president and CEO of the American Lung Association. “Its final decision not to enact a more protective ozone health standard is jeopardizing the health of millions of Americans, which is inexcusable.”
This reaction from America’s most respected medical organizations is telling. It belies many of the currently popular claims—often repeated by Wyoming’s own congressional delegation--about how environmental regulations cost too much and cost jobs. The fact is, the lack of appropriate environmental protections costs the nation even more. Scientists with the EPA released a draft research report in March of 2011 that indicates that short-term spikes in ground-level ozone can cause premature death, and long-term exposure could lead to more health problems and shortened life spans.
Lax environmental regulations might make some industries more profitable in the short term, but they cost the American people a great deal in terms of added medical expenses, increased medical insurance premiums, lost days at work, shorter, sicker lifespans for many citizens, and shorter, sicker lifespans for many loved ones and dependents.
In Wyoming, ozone has so far been the most obvious pollution fallout from the rise in mega field development. But, among other things, this large-scale drilling is also contributing to regional haze and is leading to the deposition of nitrogen compounds in Wyoming’s national forests and wilderness areas, all of which is raising concerns about lake acidification and what’s called “ecosystem fertilization” (which might sound promising to some but is truly damaging to these ecosystems).
“We don’t only have an ozone problem in western Wyoming, we have an air pollution problem,” Pendery said when interviewed for this story.
More careful regulation and better planning of oil and gas development can begin to address all of these issues.
Smog in Rural America
Folks who live in the small mountain towns of Pinedale and Boulder, Wyoming have had to deal with dangerous wintertime ozone spikes since at least 2008.
Former Governor Dave Freudenthal--in a belated attempt to bring some relief to residents--requested toward the end of his second term that the EPA declare Sublette County to be out of compliance with the current, albeit weak, federal standard. The pollution has been dangerous enough that residents in and around Pinedale and Boulder have been warned by state officials repeatedly to stay indoors on numerous days in recent winters.
This hard-to-believe story has gone national. Major news outlets—including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, NPR, and PBS—have reported from the tiny rural towns in Wyoming’s Upper Green River Valley about how these places, once with pristine air, now have big-city-like smog.
The Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality has recorded ozone spikes in Boulder, Wyoming, that have been more dangerous than the worst days in Los Angeles. These extraordinary ozone spikes happen in the Upper Green because of pollution from the nearby mega gas fields: the Jonah Field, the Pinedale Anticline, and the Big Piney--LaBarge fields.
Some Wyoming officials and industry representatives continue to suggest that the source of the pollution is at least partly unknown, and that some of the pollution in Pinedale might be coming from Salt Lake City. This is simply wrong. The Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality has determined, unequivocally, that the drilling and related activities in the mega fields have caused the ozone problem.
Poorly Paced Development
In the most basic sense, the pollution in the Upper Green River Valley has been created by the incredible amount of activity in the existing natural gas fields there: the drilling rigs, motors, pumps, diesel engines, natural gas engines, trucks, gas flares, leaking pipes, leaking fixtures, hydraulic fracturing fluids, and evaporation of other chemicals used in the fields. These pollutants--which include volatile organic compounds and nitrogen oxides--float in the air, interact with the sunlight, and this interaction changes them into poisonous ozone and smog.
Better pacing, or phased development, as well as other controls, could help solve this smog problem. Rather than drilling the entirety of a field as fast as possible, as has been the norm in Wyoming, companies could be required to drill a field in phases to make sure they’re not making nearby residents sick.
In the Pinedale area the smog has been forming in the winter when there has been snow cover throughout the valley. The snow reflects the sunlight back up, so the light has two chances (once on the way down and once on the way back up) to chemically react with the pollution from the gas fields and create ozone. When the valley gets a temperature inversion, which is common in the winter (a cold air mass sits atop a relatively warmer air mass and squishes it downward), this concentrates the pollution closer to the ground and holds it in the valley, where the residents live and breathe.
In 2009, the Outdoor Council--representing a local group called Citizens United for Responsible Energy Development--petitioned the state Environmental Quality Council to set a new ozone standard for Sublette County that is better than the federal standard, one strong enough to protect the public health. The Environmental Quality Council denied this petition, but we still consider it an important step toward a necessary end: getting regulators to set the right target for protecting people. This is a fight we believe we’ll eventually win.
How to Make Things Right
The Outdoor Council has learned the hard way that federal smog standards indeed matter to the people of Wyoming. This is why the Council continues to engage in this issue year after year. We’re hoping our tenacity will pay off.
One of the Outdoor Council’s goals now is to lay the groundwork necessary to help convince the EPA to adopt a responsible standard in 2013, when the agency is required to reassess the regulations. For those interested in the technical details, we’re advocating a new primary standard of 60-65 parts per billion for ozone in order to protect the public health. The existing, inadequate, standard is 75 ppb.
On a parallel track, the Council is working on multiple levels to help give the Department of Environmental Quality, the BLM, and the EPA the leverage necessary to require, cajole, and persuade operators to adopt better practices that will lead to significant improvements in the nearby mega fields, and right away.
“We’re currently living with a system that relies largely on voluntary compliance by operators in the oil and gas fields,” Pendery said. “We need to give regulators some teeth to actually take a bite out of the problem.”
The state of Wyoming, for example, could require that all operators use natural gas-fired drilling rigs (or better) in all current and future development. The regulatory agencies could also perform more frequent, unannounced inspections of the field operations. And the companies could be required to more quickly find and fix the leaks and the seepage that lead to a significant amount of the smog-causing pollutants currently floating in the air. They could also be required to minimize vehicle emissions.
With forward-looking leadership by the state of Wyoming and strong air quality enforcement by the regulatory agencies, Wyoming’s smog problems could be fixed. Fixing the smog problem would not only be good for the health of the people of Pinedale, but it would also save the huge costs (social, medical, political, and economic) that are always incurred when a nation allows industries to make its citizens sick.
A note from Bruce Pendery
Our efforts to address the ozone and smog problems in the Upper Green River Valley are by no means the extent of our efforts to ensure that air pollution from the mega projects are kept in check.
We have also been heavily engaged, for years, in the EPA’s efforts to regulate regional haze. We've also worked to improve the EPA’s proposed new general regulations for the control of air pollution from the oil and gas industry. We’re also continuing our efforts to help the Forest Service consider and work to mitigate the potential problems caused by the deposition of air pollutants in the Wilderness Areas it manages.
--Bruce Pendery