California’s Dirty Little Secret: Oil Wells in the Backyard

October 14, 2021

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by Alexandria Herr (Capital & Main) Even Texas and Wyoming do a better job protecting communities from oil and gas drilling. -- As a child, Ashley Hernandez remembers pretending that the oil pumpjacks that loomed over her neighborhood were dinosaurs. Other children in her community called them giraffes, or horses. The strange metal animals pecked rhythmically at the earth, sandwiched between homes, next to playgrounds, in the parking lots of grocery stores, sucking the oil from the sediments beneath her neighborhood of Wilmington in southern Los Angeles.

Hernandez also remembers the nosebleeds. She would get them at night, and they were intense — not a trickle of blood, but so heavy that her mom would often tell her to try not to bleed through her pillows.

The nosebleeds weren’t the only thing. Kids and teachers at her school would get cancer diagnoses — a lot. She remembers being scared of the noise that was made by the strange device that her mom would use at night — a nebulizer, to treat her asthma. Adults would tell her not to drink the tap water. And there were periodic warnings to stay inside because of explosions at nearby refineries.

It wasn’t until she was in high school that Hernandez started to learn about the possible connections between the nosebleeds, the cancer, the asthma, the undrinkable water, and the oil.

Despite California’s reputation as an environmentally friendly state, neighborhood drilling is a distinctly Californian phenomenon.

Wilmington and the neighboring community of Carson are home to five oil refineries, as well as the Wilmington Oil Field — the third-most productive patch in the United States.

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In 2015, a coalition of youth and advocacy groups, including Communities for a Better Environment, sued the city of Los Angeles over its practice of rubber-stamping residential oil drilling projects. The groups ultimately settled with the city, which agreed to make changes in the well permitting process.

Oil and gas extraction spews a soup of toxic substances into the air, including nitrogen oxide, formaldehyde, volatile organic compounds, hydrochloric acid, and other chemicals known to be dangerous to human health. Unsurprisingly, living in proximity to oil wells has been linked to a range of health issues — including nosebleeds like Hernandez experienced, as well as migraines, rashes, respiratory problems, and longer-term impacts on health.

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More than 7 million Californians live within a mile of oil and gas drilling operations.

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When people think of oil country, they don’t often think of California. Yet oil played a major role in the state’s development, and oil money is entangled in California’s political system. That’s particularly true in Los Angeles, the city where the state’s oil boom first took off.

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California is the nation’s seventh-largest oil-producing state. And as with any top oil-producing state, it has an active and powerful oil lobby.The Western States Petroleum Association, or WSPA, an oil industry group, is one of the largest lobbying forces in California by expenditure. WSPA argued in opposition to both A.B. 345 and S.B. 467, and Democratic senators who voted against both bills received thousands of dollars in contributions from the industry.

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The agency was known as the Division of Oil, Gas, and Geothermal Resources, or DOGGR, until 2019. That summer, DOGGR became embroiled in scandal when it came to light that regulators were issuing permits for risky drilling projects without reviewing them first and that they held stock in the very companies they were supposed to be regulating.

In response to the scandal, the California legislature passed a law changing the agency’s name to CalGEM and updated its mandate to more explicitly include the protection of public health. READ MORE

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Excerpt from Politico's Morning Energy: THE KERN COUNTY CASE: The fate of a majority of California’s oil drilling will be the subject of a state court hearing today, with environmentalists challenging Kern County’s environmental review on oil projects in its boundaries, POLITICO’s Colby Bermel reports. The county contains 80 percent of California’s oil production and has sought to make itself the lead on environmental reviews on the industry within its borders rather than the state government. But environmentalists contend doing so violates state law.

The county has had some influential forces backing it, including the Western States Petroleum Association. Today’s hearing likely won’t result in a decision, but the case could have a major hand in California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s goal of phasing out all oil extraction by 2045. Read more from Colby here. READ MORE

Excerpt from Inside Climte News: Gov. Gavin Newsom often touts California’s role as a global climate leader. Yet it’s hard to defend that claim as long as California remains one of the nation’s top oil-refining states, experts argued at a recent webinar calling for a phaseout of refineries.

The state has made major strides implementing policies to support the transition away from fossil fuels in the transportation and energy sectors, yet has largely ignored oil refineries.

This is an egregious oversight, policy experts and community advocates on the panel said, because refineries are the largest source of industrial fossil fuel pollution and one of the biggest threats to both health and the climate.

“There are significant acute and chronic public health and climate impacts from refiners,” said Woody Hastings, a policy expert at The Climate Center, a nonprofit that hosted the webinar and is working to rapidly reduce climate pollution. “There is no plan to phase them out.”

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All the other major fossil fuel sectors—electricity, transportation and oil drilling—have some form of phaseout requirements and plan to lower emissions, said Alicia Rivera, an organizer with the nonprofit Communities for a Better Environment who works in Wilmington, a Los Angeles neighborhood dominated by oil wells and refineries. “Refineries have none.”

The costs of inaction are clear, she said. Almost all the census tracts near refineries are communities of color forced to endure very high toxic releases and other health harms, Rivera said.

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One refinery can cover thousands of acres, with massive heaters and boilers superheating the crude and separating the liquids that will become gas and other fuels. The refining process, storage tanks and flaring—the burning of excess hydrocarbons—all emit pollution and toxic gases like lung-damaging sulfur dioxides and cancer-causing benzene.

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The oil industry and its allies, which were not part of the panel, believe such a plan is unnecessary.

California policy is headed toward no more oil production, which will significantly reduce refining capacity in the state, said Kevin Slagle, spokesperson for the Western States Petroleum Association, which represents oil extractors and refiners.

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That phaseout needs to be managed in a way that doesn’t leave workers behind, the panelists argued. And that requires understanding that the phrase “just transition” means different things to different people, said Brian White, a longtime union leader and policy director for Eduardo Martinez, mayor of Richmond, home of the Chevron refinery, where a catastrophic fire and explosion in 2012 sent 15,000 people to the hospital.

White’s union, the United Steelworkers, coined the term “just transition,” he said. For refinery workers it means making sure they can shift to a job with dignity, benefits and pay. For environmentalists, he said, it’s moving from a dirty, dangerous industry to a cleaner, greener world. And for local governments, it means replacing revenue lost by closing refineries in order to continue providing the services communities need.

The different groups need to recognize that they’re working toward the same goals, White said. On that note, he added, the Richmond City Council recently voted to place a “polluters tax” on the November ballot. READ MORE