Flying into the airport in Midland last October, I gazed out my window at the Permian Basin as the plane began its descent.
The flat earth below looked like a massive birthday cake with oil and gas wells blazing like candles as far as the eye could see. Unlike a birthday party, these flares are nothing to celebrate.
Flaring of methane and other gas into our atmosphere has become an all-too-common practice that ignites our skies while wasting valuable gas and harming the health of our community.
Air quality in Midland-Odessa – home to one of the largest oil and gas producing regions in the world – stinks, and it’s time to do something about it. As drilling in the Permian Basin has expanded, so has dangerous pollution. Some call it the smell of money. If that’s you, I want to know: what price tag do you put on clean air and vibrant health?
Pollution from natural gas facilities disproportionately hurts people who look like me — people of color. In 2017, the NAACP reported that 10 percent of Texas’s African American population resides within a half-mile radius of oil and gas facilities. That’s more than 330,000 people. The report also revealed that Texas cities rank among the highest in the nation for asthma attacks and lost school days among African American children. Pollution from oil and gas wells is costing our kids their health.
The good news is there are solutions.
One way we can better understand how pollution harms our health is through air monitoring. In 2019, an air survey by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) found that Midland and Odessa are burdened by toxic hydrogen sulfide and sulfur dioxide, pollutants that irritate the respiratory tract. Inhaling these poisons causes headaches and asthma at low levels. At high levels it can kill you. While TCEQ has recently installed hydrogen sulfide monitors in Ector County and Midland, the Midland-Odessa region remains dangerously short on monitors given the large footprint of the oil and gas industry here.
We also need oil and gas regulators — TCEQ and the Texas Railroad Commission in Texas — to use their full authority to enforce pollution protections. A recent report found that more than 69 percent of methane flares in Texas lacked permits from the Railroad Commission. That’s a systemic failure in enforcing rules designed to protect people. I won’t hold my breath waiting for the Railroad Commission to take on the issue of venting and flaring given the commissioners’ close ties to the industry they purport to oversee.
Here’s the truth: Even small wells and oil and gas extraction facilities can create a lot of pollution. According to a recent report from the Environmental Integrity Project, industry in the Midland region reported nearly 31 million pounds of unauthorized illegal emissions, the largest amount emitted anywhere in Texas. And that only includes the illegal emissions local industry bothered to report. The volume of unauthorized emissions in the Midland area surpassed even Houston, the second largest emitter, by more than 25 million pounds. That’s despite the vast number of refineries and chemical plants in the Houston area.
Texas and other states that allow widespread flaring can do better. How about they follow the lead of New Mexico and eliminate routine flaring altogether?
We have another opportunity; a chance to provide relief to communities along the fence lines of the oil and gas industry by reducing pollution and creating quality jobs. The Environmental Protection Agency is now taking comments on a proposed Biden Administration rule that will control methane emissions from the oil and gas industry. This rule could help eliminate 41 million tons of methane pollution, a reduction that’s desperately needed to protect our health and combat climate change. The EPA’s rule is a good start to tackling methane, which warms the atmosphere much faster than most other greenhouse gases. But the proposed rule needs to go even further. EPA must require more monitoring of smaller, high polluting wells. So-called marginal wells may not be prolific producers of oil and gas, but they make up 80 percent of our nation’s active wells. They may seem like minor sources of pollution, but they pack a punch. Even wells that produce less than three tons per year of methane should be subject to regular leak monitoring.
EPA must also eliminate routine flaring, a practice that wastes valuable product by burning it off rather than capturing it and sending it to market. Not to be confused with safety flaring, routine flaring needlessly exposes nearby communities to pollution. An economic analysis from Rystad found that more than 80 percent of the routine flaring in the Permian Basin could be eliminated at no net cost to companies. Ending routine flaring eliminates waste and protects health. That sounds like a good deal to me.
Over the years, I’ve worked hard to defend the health of my community from polluters that put children, the elderly and the infirm at risk. Today, I implore you to join me in telling the EPA that you support their new rules and want them strengthened so that we in the Permian Basin can breathe clean air, too.
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Gene O. Collins is president of the Odessa NAACP and a longtime environmental advocate in the Permian Basin region.
