Tweet
Cross-Posted from DeSmogBlog
A huge report was published on Oct. 10 by Los Angeles County that’ll likely open the floodgates for hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) for unconventional oil and gas in the Monterey Shale basin. The report, as it turns out, was done by LA County in name only.
As the Los Angeles Times explained, the study found “no harm from the method” of fracking as it pertains to extracting shale gas and oil from the Inglewood Oil Field, which the Times explains is “the largest urban oil field in the country.”
In the opening paragraphs of his article, Ruben Vives of the Times wrote,
A long-awaited study released Wednesday says the controversial oil extraction method known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, would not harm the environment if used at the Inglewood Oil Field in the Baldwin Hills area.
The yearlong study included several issues raised by residents living around the field, such as the potential risks for groundwater contamination, air pollution and increased seismic activity.
It’s not until the middle of the story that Vives says the study wasn’t done by LA County itself, but rather what he describes as a “consulting firm that conducted the study” by the name of Cardno Entrix.
Cardno Entrix isn’t any ordinary “consulting firm.”
It’s the third party contractor that conducted the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), ran the public hearings and made the website all on behalf of the Obama State Department’s review process for the controversial Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. Cardno Entrix, in turn, was hired by TransCanada to do the EIS, a conflict-of-interest blatant enough that it’s yielded an ongoing Office of the Inspector General investigation of State’s entire review process.
Study By and For Gas Industry, Connected to SUNY Buffalo Shale Resources and Society Institute
Though published under the auspices of LA County, the study wasn’t even paid for by the County at all. Rather, as Vives explained in his Times article, the oil and gas industry paid for the entire enchilada:
Plains Exploration and Production Co., the owner and operator of the oil field, paid for the review as part of a settlement agreement with Culver City and environmental and community groups. The report was reviewed by two independent firms selected by the company and Los Angeles County.
Vives never identified the “independent firms” serving as the peer reviewers, but the study itself, which contains the five-page peer review paper, reveals two reviewers: JP Martin Energy Strategy LLC and Peter Muller.
JP Martin Energy Strategy is a consulting firm run by John Martin. Martin also serves as Director of the increasingly controversial SUNY Buffalo Shale Resources and Society Institute (SRSI). He is credited with publishing “the initial research on the natural gas potential of New York’s Utica Shale that helped stimulate significant industry investment in this resource,” according to the biographical sketch on his consulting firm’s website.
Muller formerly served as a Senior Geologist for Alpha Geoscience, where from Jan. 2010-March 2012, he researched “shale gas development issues” including “flowback treatment, stray gas, [and] permitting,” according to his LinkedIn page. He now serves in a consulting capacity for various hydraulic fracturing projects for the shale gas industry.
Miller and Muller closed their five-page peer review paper by writing, “Upon review, we both feel, based on information provided us and our own experience, that the report is adequate, complete and accurate and reflected thoughtful consideration for our comments and suggestions.”
This situation parallels what DeSmog wrote about in our first ever article on the SRSI, as the “peer review” panel for its first ever study had four out of five members on the payroll of the oil and gas industry.
Stars Aligning for Shale Gas Industry’s California Dreamin’
Concerned that the Inglewood study was conducted by and for the shale gas industry, Damon Nagami of the Natural Resources Defense Council wrote, “we need additional review from independent experts who have no financial stake in the study’s outcome.” But the recent history of the Keystone XL pipeline review process shows that’s highly unlikely.
The stars, it seems, are aligning quickly in the City of Angels for the oil and gas industry, with “this area…quietly becoming the hottest potential investment in the West,” according to an August 2011 story in San Luis Obispo’s New Times, which reported that the Monterey Shale has upwards of 15 billion barrels of recoverable oil.
It’s “California Dreamin‘” for the oil and gas industry in the Monterey Shale. Will that mean a “California Nightmare” for everyone else?
Update: In an interview with DeSmogBlog, Paul Ferrazzi, Co-Founder of Citizens Coalition for a Safe Community, stated the following:
“Unfortunately, given the Settlement Agreement terms acceptable to all parties involved and the history of the implementation of the agreement by both the County and PXP one could only assume the results would be favorable to the oil operator and industry. We wish we could have some confidence in this study but given the study preparing company’s as well as the peer reviewer’s direct advocacy for the industry we do not feel it was adequately conducted, properly reviewed, or that the public should take comfort in the conclusions of the study.
If anything, this study raises more questions than it answers. The public should be able to ask for clarification and further support for the authors’ contentions. CCSC urges the County to use the study as a starting point for further discussion, and allow public participation and informative responses to test the validity, assumptions and conclusions of the study.”
8 Comments
What is it going to take for us citizens to have our nation restored to its old insistence on environmental standards?
It is obvious that fracking is wrong. Just the sheer magnitude of the potential for harm to our aquifers. yet the new “Corporate owned” science says that we basically must have a couple of extra planets like earth for experimentation – one we would frack and one we wouldn’t. and then att he end of the experiment, they could compare results, oh, say in 500 years, before there would be the required “science” to say that fracking is wrong. How did it get to this point? Where did Common Sense go?
YOU WILL ALL DIE if you allow the fracking to continue where you live. WHY? Here is what you do NOT understand! It is PHYSICS! Petroleum distillates R-I-S-E. Petrolem distillates DO mix with water under temoerature and pressure – it’s called EMULSIFICATION.
The resultant KILLER WATER will “WICK” everywhere and because it’s density is LESS than plai water, IT WILL RISE. So as ground water falls downward from rainfall, KILLER WATER will rise. An soon, you will be drinking KILLER WATER.
But wait! It doesn’t stop there.
1. the pimped out EPA chief (if appointed by preublican pimps) will at first deny any contamination and site fraudulaent studies
2. the pimped out FDA chief (if appointed by a republican pimp) will claim that any amount of pollution is either insignifican or is acceptable since you can drink a glass of water and not immediately keel over
3. After a decade from now, when three-toe’d children are being born also with brain damage, and children are coming down with digestive tract cancerous lesions, the WATER WARS will begin and suddenly the price of good fresh water willl be in the DOLLARS PER GALLON!
WELCOME TO HELL.
oh, lest i forget, your property calues will GO TO SHIT QUICK and your mortgage difference will be called in and then you will be foreclosed on. That would be a return to a prior hell.
Rrepublicans will never tell you what they believe. They lie for a living. Quality of YOUPEOPLE life means nothing. What ehy believe is “YOU ARE EXPENDABLE”.
The Baldwin Hills, named after the Baldwin family (yes those famous Baldwins), are going to be upset if their oil royalties get cut.
Fracking geologists — how good are they at predicting earthquakes?
Although I totally agree with you, your set of physics corollaries means nothing to those who are running are world.
The problem with what you are saying is that inside our new world order, citizens are told that only science counts. Corporate owned science. So because we don’t have a set of other planet earth’s on which to demonstrate that the petroleum distillates do rise, etc the “bought and paid for” corporate science crowd will scream to the high heavens if anyone tries to bring forward the notion that the mere laws of physics should be pre-empting the rights of corporations to demand that corporate scientists PROVE or DISPROVE that these laws are true.
Back in the mid nineties, the people of the state of California, all thirty one million of us, were appalled by MTBE, the gas additive. Although those of us who understood organic chemistry knew that one of the inherent properties of MTBE meant that the substance would eat away the polymers that are part of the structure of the linings and hoses of the gas tanks, and that therefore MTBE would get into our aquifers, the Oil Industry demanded PROOF! So the governor of the state of California had to carefully select a group of top nothch and HONEST scientists who would prove that MTBE was dangerous. You can read about it here. I forget if this version of events at this link: http://www.dailyykos.com/story/2008/06/22/540267/-The-TRUTH-Versus-the-Mainstream-Media
I forget if the above tales includes the fact that for his time and trouble, Big Oil saw to it that Gov Davis was recalled! Yet another proof of the fact that “no good deed goes unpunished.”
Nothing has changed since that era. People have now come to accept that for instance, in the recent vaccine controversy issue, it is oklay to simply COUNT UP how many industry-sponsored, published reports show something is A-Ok, vs the total count of how many independent accounts of how something is BAD. Whichever group has had the more studies published (and let’s face it – it is always going to be industry that has more studies.) is considered the scientific winner of the PROOF that something is good or bad. If this approach had been applied to MTBE, we would still have it in our gasoline, and by now it would be in all the drinking water of the nation. After all, Gov Davis’ Blue Ribbon Panel’s results were the ONLY AMERICAN study that showed that the risk to benefit of MTBE use was nil. Meanwhile, thousands upon thousands of industry studies showed that MTBE was fine.
Until we can indeed throttle the heck out of the proponents of “It has to be shown in a lab, using a control,” group of corporate science spokespeople and their hold on our legislation, the planet is done and we might as well stick a fork in it.
I am not at all sure how this is a Republican vs Democratic issue. After all, there is a Democratic Governor in Pennsylvania, Rendell, and fracking has been given his approval there. There is also a Democratic governor here in California, Jerry Brown, but he often sides with industry.
I know that because I was one of his victims back in the early eighties when he allowed a civilian population to be aerially sprayed with malathion so that a Japanese trade agreement regarding California exporting fruit would go through without any hitch for the Big Farmers.
That is why it is imperative that people wake the F up and start voting for third party, non-corporate-owned elected officials.