jack sequim wa wrote:
Fracking does not cause earthquakes. Your right, it's the drilling that causes the weak points that the energy seeks out.
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This news from CA today. Keep in mind that Ridgecrest is east of Bakersfield.
Good morning, and welcome to the Essential California newsletter from the L.A. Times. It’s Wednesday, July 17, and I’m writing from Los Angeles. - Julia Wick
California as a paragon of environmentalism is a loud narrative — one that has shaped headlines and stereotypes and even attitudes, especially in the big cities. The state has been a pioneer on vehicle emissions standards, air pollution legislation and efficiency standards, to name just a few areas of national leadership.
But oil has also played an integral role in the California narrative for nearly a century and a half, since the state’s first real oil well struck “black gold” in 1876. That black gold shaped early 20th-century Southern California, powering the growth of Los Angeles and making fortunes for many of the families whose names still adorn streets and buildings around the state. And that importance is far from confined to history books.
State oil production has been steadily arcing downward since the mid-1980s, but California remains one of the nation’s top petroleum-producing — and gasoline-consuming — states. Until recently, we still produced more oil than any other state but Texas and North Dakota (the Golden State has since slipped to sixth place). Oil and gas companies are also potent political forces that wield major influence in the state Capitol.
[See also: The Center for Investigative Reporting’s 2017 look at “Big Oil’s grip on California”]
The duality of the “two Californias” is a shopworn cliché, but, like many clichés, it prevails for a reason. There is the California of electric cars, kitchen compost bins and vocal opposition to President Trump’s climate policies. Then there is the California of Kern County, where oil and gas production remain a pillar of the local economy and more than 70% of California’s oil and natural gas is produced. The reach of that latter California extends far beyond the southern tip of the San Joaquin Valley — in the first quarter of 2019, the top two spenders on lobbying at the statehouse were Chevron and the broader trade group that represents oil companies.
The constant push-and-pull between California environmentalism and its oil fields came to a public head late last week. On Thursday, Gov. Gavin Newsom fired the state’s top oil regulator after learning that fracking permits had doubled without his knowledge since he became governor, and some of the supervisors tasked with regulating the industry owned shares in major oil companies.
On Friday, news broke that a Chevron oil well in Kern County had leaked nearly 800,000 gallons of crude petroleum and water into a dry creek bed about 35 miles west of Bakersfield over the past two months. The mixture was about one-third oil and two-thirds water, and the flow has since ceased, according to the state Department of Conservation. The seep occurred in an oil field where Chevron uses a process called steam injection to extract underground crude oil.
Ted Goldberg, an editor at KQED News who often reports on Bay Area refineries, uncovered the spill while searching a government database for updates on an entirely separate incident at Chevron’s Richmond refinery in Northern California. “In May, Chevron officials began noticing that oil and water started coming up from the ground when it shouldn’t,” Goldberg explained. “It lasted for a little while and then it stopped. And then on two other occasions since then, it started [again]. The agency that’s responsible for regulating this stuff has been criticized, basically, for doing not an aggressive job in general.”
[Read “Chevron Well at Center of Major Oil Spill in Kern County Oil Field” by Ted Goldberg in KQED]
“Chevron and the state agency that regulates oil and gas and the state water regulators have all emphasized that there’s no drinking water supplies in the area, that there’s no harm to wildlife,” Goldberg said. “And as you can probably expect, environmentalists disagree with that.”
Hollin Kretzmann, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit environmental group, said the damage potentially caused by the spill “still remains to be seen.” Kretzmann characterized the spill as a larger failure of government regulation, calling it “the end result of regulations that are completely inadequate to prevent these accidents from happening and protect the public and the environment.”
“We can’t be a leader in climate change and protecting the environment if we’re one of the biggest oil and gas producers in the country,” Kretzmann said, touching on the two competing visions of California at play.
The long-term future of oil and gas production in the state remains to be seen. Many environmental groups have been hopeful that Newsom may move to curtail it. The state budget that the new governor signed last month did include a $1.5-million item to study ways to reduce petroleum supply and demand, which certainly seems promising to their cause. But nothing — especially in California — is ever black and white, and an environmentalist victory would also probably deliver deep economic blows to the oil towns of Kern.