Oil and Gas Watch

Brendan Gibbons

Even with Gulf drilling down, Trump Administration weighs expanding drilling to new coasts

The number of oil and gas drilling rigs operating in the Gulf of Mexico today is about half of what it was a year ago, with 10 rigs working on June 27, compared to 19 a year earlier. In the face of this slump, the oil and gas industry is lobbying the Trump Administration to expand drilling rights into new coastal areas where it has been banned for years. These include the Atlantic Coast from the Carolinas to Florida, and the Eastern Gulf of Mexico, off Florida and Alabama.

Opposition mounts to aging oil & gas pipeline threatening Great Lakes drinking water

The Enbridge Line 5 Pipeline, which carries oil beneath Lake Michigan and Lake Huron, is notorious for a 2010 accident that was one of the worst inland oil spills in U.S. history. More than 20,000 barrels of heavy crude oil spilled into a tributary of the Kalamazoo River near Marshall, Michigan. This messy history weighs heavily on the future of the old pipeline, which is facing lawsuits from the Bad River Band of the Lake Superior Tribe of Chippewa Indians and the Michigan Attorney General's office.

Brendan Gibbons

A new EPA rule is meant to prevent chemical disasters, but safety advocates say loopholes remain

The U.S. experiences a chemical disaster on average once every two days, including at least 45 so far in 2024, according to the nonprofit Coalition to Prevent Chemical Disasters. However, a new safety rule the Biden administration recently released is meant to avoid such catastrophes. Advocates also say EPA should have done more, such as required air monitoring at the fence lines of major facilities and adding ammonium nitrate, an explosive material used in fertilizer, to the hazardous chemical list.

Brendan Gibbons

Thousands of abandoned wells in Louisiana threaten to leak carbon dioxide from storage projects

Louisiana is one of the hotspots in the U.S. for sequestration projects that trap carbon dioxide (CO2) underground to protect the climate. Companies are planning 58 storage wells at 24 sites across the state. However, experts say a century of oil and gas drilling has left thousands of pathways for CO2 to squeeze its way back out into the atmosphere, potentially eroding any climate benefits and creating a safety threat for nearby residents in the event of a massive rupture or leak. Two recent reports examine the threat from the more than 186,000 abandoned oil and gas wells in Louisiana.

Texas plastics factory shows how companies take public subsidies while breaking pollution laws

The Formosa Point Comfort plastics manufacturing plant on the Texas Gulf Coast, which makes plastics and other chemicals out of oil and gas, received nearly $69 million in school district tax breaks over a decade. But despite the public support, the plant has routinely violated water and air pollution control laws – without ever losing its subsidies, as a consequence. In a new report, the Environmental Integrity Project examined 50 plastics plants built or expanded in the U.S. since 2012 and found that 64 percent of them received taxpayer subsidies worth a total of almost $9 billion over a decade.

EPA’s new rule will slash planet-warming methane emissions from oil and gas industry, but it could be stronger

According to the EPA, the final rule will avoid an estimated 58 million tons of methane emissions from 2024 to 2038. That’s nearly 80 percent less than projected methane emissions without the rule. But the EPA could have been stronger in requiring oil and gas flares to destroy 98 percent of emissions, rather than the 95 percent destruction rate included in the final rule. It also also failed to require relatively low-cost monitoring needed to make sure that flares are burning cleanly and efficiently.