Howdy y’all! In June we were in the field, in the media and continuing to work on educational efforts about the realities of oil and gas production and consumption.

Charlie doing fieldwork in Oklahoma

Our Work in the Media

In May, Sharon and Justin went to Memphis with the optical gas imaging camera and captured footage of the extensive emissions coming from the natural gas-fired generators at the xAI datacenter. Gas Outlook covered our findings:

A new video, recorded by Oilfield Witness, an environmental group, shows vast plumes of pollution coming from those gas turbines.

“It’s a power plant. That’s what it is,” Sharon Wilson, director of Oilfield Witness, told Gas Outlook.

Wilson has extensive experience documenting methane emissions from oil and gas facilities. But the pollution coming from the xAI site, she said, was remarkable.

“I have shot video all over the U.S., all over the UK, and in Japan. I’ve never seen anything that bad [at a power plant],” Wilson said. “The amount, the size of the plume…it’s really, just horrible.”

We appreciate Nick Cunningham at Gas Outlook running this story. The reason it took us a month to get the story out is that we initially shared it with several major media outlets and reporters. They also said it was powerful video and said they would publish. We had a promise of it being on the national evening news. Another from one of the other major networks. Interest from both a major newspaper and a major periodical. In our discussions with these outlets we heard concerns about being sued for reporting this video. None of the these outlets ever published anything.

The video from Memphis.

When we were in Memphis we were joined at the xAI facility by state representative Justin J. Pearson. He spoke to his constituents about the pollution we found which was featured in this article.

Video provided by Oilfield Witness, a pro-climate group, provided images of pollution emitted from xAI’s methane gas turbines.

“Shelby County still got an ‘F’ in air pollution using the other people’s monitors,” Pearson said. “That is how bad it is.”

Last year Miguel met Billy Randel of Truckers Movement for Justice at an event in Texas. That started a collaboration to join forces on issues including this recent letter sent by Earthjustice to the Department of Transportation highlighting the risks to truckers and workers from hazardous oil industry waste. Inside Climate News reported on the issue.

Oil and gas waste is generally not legally considered hazardous in the United States because of an exemption in the federal Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA). But Randel and environmental activists say the waste created in the fracking process is often toxic enough to exceed the legal thresholds for hazardous materials—it’s just not being classified that way.

Sharon was quoted in a Japanese article on methane and LNG.

Fieldwork

Sharon and Miguel conducted fieldwork in the Texas Permian Basin in June.

We documented a purposeful dumping of potentially radioactive and toxic produced water directly into soil. 

A private landowner in West Texas requested we conduct fieldwork on their ranch where oil companies were operating. We arrived to find a battery tank which looked rusted and unattended. We found an open-ended pipe hooked up to a wastewater tank. (The industry wants us to call it produced water because that sounds like something good. It is waste that is toxic and potentially radioactive.) The pipeline allowed a steady stream of greenish wastewater to flow directly into the top soil of the property. “This is not a spill,”  Sharon clarifies, “this is intentional dumping.” Intentional dumping is widespread but large ranches where oil and gas is far from public roads (and public oversight) make it easier.

Oil and gas waste facility pollutes directly onto children’s retreat center in the Permian. 

Last year, the Railroad Commissioners approved Martin Water corporation’s permit to build an oil and gas waste recycling facility directly adjacent to the Circle 6 Baptist Camp–despite the retreat center’s legal opposition to the permit. As if that’s not bad enough, Miguel created this video analyzing the RRC’s bizarre ruling. This June we documented a video of the inevitable: Martin Water’s facility polluting a plume of cancer-causing emissions directly into the children’s retreat center.

Charlie was in Oklahoma at the end of the month with the Tulsa Area Arkansas River Advocates.

We were surveying sites along a 7 mile stretch of the Arkansas River in Tulsa, Oklahoma. These sites are all located in low income communities along the river near downtown Tulsa. The Public Service Company of Tulsa, HF Sinclair, as well as the animal agriculture industry actively dump waste in the river.

Education

Sharon was featured on a “workshop for the citizens” in France.

Sharon also took part in a webinar in Germany as part of the 50th anniversary activities for Environmental Action Germany (DUH).

We also continue to raise awareness on social media.

Our Writing

Justin wrote about the economic realities facing the U.S. LNG export industry making the case that U.S. LNG is likely to not be competitive on the global markets in the near future.

“Seb Kennedy at EnergyFlux recently summed up the reality for U.S. LNG and its Henry Hub indexed business model saying, ‘Combined with an enduringly soft oil market, selling US LNG in Asia is about to become a tough gig.’”

Summer Intern

Grace Conuel is joining us for the summer as a research assistant. Grace will be starting her senior year at Temple University in the fall where she is studying economics. Grace is Vice President for Women in Economics at Temple and also works as a student instructor for microeconomics.

That was a lot to read. If you made it this far you deserve a cookie!

– Till the end of oil

The Oilfield Witness Team