Shell

Maine Photo by Stephen Crane on Unsplash

November 26, 2024

Citing “catastrophic climate effects,” Maine joins in litigation against oil companies

By Dana Drugmand

Maine on Tuesday became the latest government entity to bring legal claims against several major oil and gas companies, alleging the companies and their chief trade association, the American Petroleum Institute, have deliberately misled the public about the climate consequences of burning fossil fuels.

Maine is the ninth US state to take legal action against the industry over climate concerns, joining other states that include New Jersey and California in similar lawsuits. In all, more than two dozen climate deception lawsuits have been brought against fossil fuel companies by cities, counties, states, and Tribal governments over the last seven years.

“For decades, big oil companies have made record profits, taking billions out of the pockets of Maine people while deliberately deceiving them about the harmful impacts of fossil fuels – impacts that Maine people see and feel every day,” Maine Governor Janet Mills said in a statement.

The lawsuit details the costly climate change impacts the state is already experiencing, such as more frequent flooding and warming ocean waters. These impacts have become more costly and severe, according to the state, due to the “successful climate deception campaign” orchestrated by the industry as a strategy to delay the transition away from their products and protect their profits.

October 13, 2024

Deadly refinery leak adds to US toxic accident toll

By Dana Drugmand

A Texas oil refinery with a history of environmental violations was the site of a deadly hydrogen sulfide leak last week, killing two people and injuring more than two dozen others and adding to a long list of US industrial accidents US regulators say they are trying to rein in.

The chemical release is also the latest accident at the Houston refinery. The facility has been cited for nearly 2,000 environmental violations over the past decade.

Located in Deer Park, Texas along the Houston Ship channel, the 1500-acre refinery complex is owned by the Mexican oil company PEMEX, which took over full ownership of the facility from Shell in 2021.

The incident at the refinery, which occurred on the afternoon of October 10, killed two PEMEX employees, and at least 35 others were treated on the scene or transported for further medical attention, according to officials.

Hydrogen sulfide is a colorless, extremely flammable, highly toxic gas that gives off a rotten egg odor. Exposure at lower concentrations can cause headaches, dizziness, nausea, irritation of the eyes, throat and respiratory tract and loss of smell, and acute exposure at high concentrations can result in unconsciousness and even death.

“Unfortunately, Texas has a poor track record of forcing petrochemical facilities to take safety and compliance seriously,” Luke Metzger, executive director of Environment Texas, said in a statement. “It makes me wonder if this awful incident could have been prevented.”

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August 1, 2024

Legal battle over fossil fuels and climate heats up

By Dana Drugmand

As climate change fuels increasingly damaging extreme weather events across the United States, litigation is growing against fossil fuel companies accused of being to blame for the devastation. But a series of recent legal moves by the industry and mixed judicial decisions underscore the challenges that local and state government plaintiffs face in the multi-billion-dollar battle.

Just last month, the industry scored a significant win when a Maryland circuit court judge tossed out a six-year-old climate liability case against more than two dozen of the world’s largest fossil fuel companies. The case, filed in 2018 by Baltimore officials, accused the companies of hiding the climate-harming impacts of their products, causing rising sea levels, severe storms, flooding, heatwaves and other “dire effects on the world.”

The fossil fuel companies successfully argued, however, that because the legal claims center on global greenhouse gas emissions, they stretch beyond the bounds of state laws. Greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels are regulated by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and federal law – particularly the Clean Air Act – preempts state law claims pertaining to those emissions, according to the industry.

“Regulation of interstate and international greenhouse gas emissions is beyond the role of state law,” Phil Goldberg, special counsel for an industry initiative working to combat climate litigation, said in a statement.

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May 29, 2024

Postcard from California: Are corporate “climate offsets” just greenwashing?

By Bill Walker

Apple touts the newest model of the Apple Watch as its first “carbon neutral” product – made with “100% clean energy” and “recycled and renewable materials” and shipped by “lower-carbon modes” instead of by air. But a close look at the watch’s environmental specs shows that reducing emissions of greenhouse gases in its manufacturing and supply chain only goes so far.

More than one-fifth of the claimed savings in emissions are attributed to Apple’s purchase of so-called climate offsets, including shares in a project to plant eucalyptus timber plantations in eastern Paraguay, far from its Silicon Valley headquarters or its factories in China.

The project’s backers say the climate offsets it is buying reflect a reduction in eastern Paraguay’s emissions from cattle ranching, a leading source of planet-heating methane. But human rights groups say the scheme is driving peasant farmers from their land for little actual climate gain as most of the newly planted trees will be harvested quickly for consumer products.

Apple is but one of many corporate giants that has pledged to cut its company-wide emissions to “net zero” by 2030, joined by Google, Disney, Netflix and many more brands.

Even ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, and Chevron – the multinational oil companies that are the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases in the last decade – say they will be net zero by 2050.

According to the nonprofit Net Zero Tracker, more than 1,000 of the world’s largest companies have publicly declared goals of net zero by midcentury or before.

To get there, most plan to claim their purchases of climate offsets, also known as carbon credits, as emissions reductions. Through exchanges called verifiers or certifiers, companies buy, sell and trade shares in schemes that promise to reduce emissions, supposedly offsetting the climate pollution the companies can’t, or won’t, eliminate from their own operations.

February 16, 2024

Plastics industry engaged in 50 years of fraud over recycling, report alleges

By Dana Drugmand

Plastics makers and petrochemical industry players have engaged in a decades-long fraud aimed at deceiving the public about plastic recycling, according to a new report that spotlights freshly uncovered industry communications and internal documents.

The report comes as the global plastic waste crisis deepens, and as environmental advocacy organizations are increasingly calling for major fossil fuel and petrochemical companies to be held responsible for plastic pollution that poses a threat to human and planetary health.

“Despite their long-standing knowledge that recycling plastic is neither technically nor economically viable, petrochemical companies—independently and through their industry trade associations and front groups—have engaged in fraudulent marketing and public education campaigns designed to mislead the public about the viability of plastic recycling,” asserts the new report, released by the Center for Climate Integrity (CCI) on Thursday.

In detailing the plastics industry’s campaign of deception that dates back more than 50 years, the report reveals how the industry deployed a familiar strategic playbook to push back on threats of regulation by promoting a misleading narrative and false claims pertaining to plastics and recycling, despite knowing all along that plastics’ recyclability was more of a public relations message than an effective solution to the waste management problem.

“This evidence shows that many of the same fossil fuel companies that knew and lied for decades about how their products cause climate change have also known and lied to the public about plastic recycling,” CCI President Richard Wiles said in a statement. “When corporations and trade groups know that their products pose grave risks to society, and then lie to the public and policymakers about it, they must be held accountable.”

January 17, 2024

Postcard from California: Idle oil wells threaten health, climate and will cost billions to plug

By Bill Walker

Last June, at commencement ceremonies in the small, heavily Latino town of Arvin, Calif., proud graduates threw their caps in the air. But those gathered at the Arvin High School football field didn’t know there was something else in the air: potentially explosive levels of noxious methane gas leaking from an idle oil well only 400 feet away.

A week before, state inspectors had found that 27 idle wells around Arvin were leaking methane, the main constituent of so-called “natural” gas. More than half – including the well near the football field, which hadn’t produced oil since 1979 – were spewing concentrations of the combustible, colorless, odorless gas. But the community wasn’t told about the leaks until a meeting almost two weeks after graduation.

State regulators’ “woeful lack of enforcement led to the inevitable leaks in our neighborhoods that our communities have warned about for years,” Cesar Aguirre, an organizer with the Central California Environmental Justice Network, said in a press release. He said officials “callously told residents . . . not to worry, leaving them feeling defenseless and willfully put in harm’s way.”

Arvin is in Kern County, the center of California’s oil industry. But idled and leaking oil and gas wells are a statewide crisis whose scope – and the looming cost of closing them – is mind-boggling:

California has more than 35,000 idle wells – wells not in use for at least two years, but not properly plugged and closed – according to the state Geologic Energy Management Division, known as CalGEM. Scientists from Stanford University and the University of California estimate that two-thirds of idle wells are leaking.
A study for CalGEM by the California Council on Science and Technology (CCST) estimated that more than 5,500 wells are not only idle but may be “orphaned”: Their operators have gone bankrupt and walked away, leaving no one responsible for maintaining or plugging them. The group warned an additional 69,425 wells were in danger of becoming orphaned in the future.
A report last year by the nonprofit Carbon Tracker Initiative estimated the cost to plug and clean up California’s current and future idle and orphan wells at $13.2 billion to $21.5 billion.

September 20, 2023

Postcard from California: State takes on Big Oil for decades of climate lies

By Bill Walker

California fired its opening salvo against the oil and gas industry two years ago, with Gov. Gavin Newsom’s order banning the sale of new gasoline-powered cars and trucks after 2035. In April, the offensive escalated, as the California Air Resources Board (CARB) ordered a phaseout of diesel trucks and locomotives starting in 2036. The state opened another front in June, establishing a watchdog agency to investigate gasoline-pump price spikes and recommend fines for oil companies deemed guilty of gouging customers.

Now the state has dropped its biggest bombshell yet: a monumental lawsuit against five of the world’s largest petrochemical companies for their “decades-long campaign of deception” about the harm of their products to the planet’s climate, and the disastrous and costly impacts of the climate crisis on California.

The 135-page lawsuit, filed last week in San Francisco County Superior Court, alleges that Exxon Mobil, Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and BP (formerly British Petroleum) knew since the 1950s that burning fossil fuels would heat up the climate with devastating consequences, but covered up the truth instead of alerting the public. The suit also names as a defendant the American Petroleum Institute (API), the industry’s trade association. The defendants are accused of fraud, negligence, product liability, false advertising and creating a public nuisance.

“Oil and gas companies have privately known the truth for decades — that the burning of fossil fuels leads to climate change — but have fed us lies and mistruths to further their record-breaking profits at the expense of our environment,” state Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a news release. “From extreme heat to drought and water shortages, the climate crisis they have caused is undeniable. It is time they pay to abate the harm they have caused.”

May 25, 2023

Shell hit with $10 mln penalty over air pollution

By Dana Drugmand

Pennsylvania state regulators have ordered a Shell subsidiary to pay nearly $10 million to resolve multiple air permit violations committed by the company’s new petrochemical facility located about 30 miles northwest of Pittsburgh.

The move comes amidst mounting frustration and outrage from area residents and environmental organizations over the plant’s release of hazardous chemicals and foul odors and disruptive flaring – a process designed to burn up invisible harmful hydrocarbons produced through plant operations – in recent months.

Shell’s 386-acre facility, located on the banks of the Ohio River in Beaver County, Pennsylvania near the town of Monaca, is the largest plastics production plant in the Northeast and Shell’s largest petrochemical facility outside of the Gulf Coast. The plant uses a process called “cracking” to convert the natural gas liquid ethane into the petrochemical ethylene, a building block for fossil fuel-derived plastic production.

Since Shell announced the startup of operations in November, the $6 billion plastics production facility has racked up 11 notices of violation – all pertaining to air quality – from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), including four last week alone.

On Wednesday the state announced a consent order and agreement with Shell Chemicals Appalachia, the subsidiary operating the plant. Under the arrangement, the company has formally acknowledged its violations of the state’s Air Pollution Control Act and agreed to pay $4.9 million as a civil penalty plus another $5 million for projects to “benefit community environment and health.” Shell also agreed to make equipment repairs and take “all reasonable and feasible measures” to mitigate excess emissions, along with paying monthly civil penalties for future exceedance of emissions limits for the rest of 2023.

May 11, 2023

After repeated air pollution violations, Shell plastics plant hit with federal lawsuit

By Dana Drugmand

A unit of the British multinational Shell plc is repeatedly violating state and federal air pollution rules and harming the health of area residents, according to a lawsuit filed Thursday in federal court by an environmental group after a series of air permit violations at the company’s new plastics production plant in Pennsylvania.

The lawsuit, filed in the US District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania by the Clean Air Council against Shell Chemical Appalachia, seeks monetary penalties and demands an end to the plant’s release of illegally high levels of pollutants that include nitrogen oxides (NOx) and volatile organic compounds (VOCs).

Breathing VOCs can cause difficulty breathing and nausea and damage the central nervous system and other organs, according to the American Lung Association. Some can cause cancer.

“Illegal air emissions, smoking flares, and malfunctions at the Plant have resulted in excess emissions of VOCs, NOx, particulate matter (“PM”), benzene, and other harmful pollution,” the complaint states.

Shell did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The filing comes six months after Shell announced the start of operations at the plant in November and one month after a malfunction at the facility’s waste water treatment system caused a chemical leak that released a foul odor and sent cancer-causing benzene and other toxins over the fence-line and into the surrounding community.

Residents reported experiencing headaches, nausea, irritated throats and watery eyes during the April 11 chemical leak incident. Shell’s passive air monitors recorded benzene levels of up to 110 micrograms per cubic meter that week, far exceeding the 29 micrograms per cubic meter minimal risk level under federal guidelines.

In addition to the benzene release, uncombusted emissions documented by optical gas imaging spewed from the plant’s ground flare on April 13 and 14, according to video released by the environmental organization Earthworks. These incidents were just the latest in a series of what the groups say are major pollution events at Shell’s Pennsylvania facility.

May 2, 2023

Outrage over fresh chemical leak at Shell plastics plant

By Dana Drugmand

When Shell Chemical Appalachia announced the start of a massive plastics manufacturing facility last November in western Pennsylvania, the subsidiary of oil major Shell described it as “world-class,” and touted the company’s “strong and innovative safety focus.”

But now, just six months later, the plant has been the site of multiple malfunctions, including the leakage of benzene, a known carcinogen, along with other pollutants last month. The events come with putrid chemical odors and have area resident fearing for their health and calling on state officials to shut the plant down.

“We’re being told everything is ok, everything is safe, and it’s not,” said Hilary Flint, a cancer survivor who said she worries daily about how the malfunctions at the Shell plant may be affecting her health. Though she lives several miles away, she often spends time visiting her partner in Monaca, the community neighboring the Shell plant. Flint said both she and her partner contracted respiratory illnesses the week of the Shell plant’s chemical leak.