Texas repeatedly raises pollution limits for Cheniere LNG plant
reuters.com
reuters.com
Salient quote:
Cheniere’s massive LNG plant, on the outskirts of the Gulf Coast city, has exceeded its permitted limits for emissions of pollutants such as soot, carbon monoxide and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) hundreds of times since it started up in 2018, according to a Reuters review of regulatory documents.
Instead of levying penalties for such violations, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) has responded by granting Cheniere big increases in the plant’s pollution limits, the documents show. The facility is now allowed to chuff out some 353 tons per year of VOCs, double the limit set out in its original permit eight years ago. The state raised limits on four other pollutants by more than 40%.
If one could summon @dang, the story link should be replaced with the reuters article.
You need to speak a little louder and enunciated. Let me help
Oh DAAAAANNNNNNGGGGG. Sitkack needs some HEEEELLLLLPPPPP
You're welcome
The word "standards" should probably be replaced with "limits".
"Texas repeatedly raises pollution limits for Cheniere LNG plant"
The environmental regulator in Texas is currently being re-evaluated as part of a regular process to determine if it's effective. The state agency that did the review came up with the conclusion "no, it isn't."
From what I've read, the regulating agency is widely seen as a rubber stamp operation for the petrochemical industry. Part of the codified process involves issuing a draft pollution permit before public input is even sought. Very backward from almost every other state I've studied.
Also interesting, there have been dozens and dozens of articles about massive methane discharges all around the state from various pipelines. Until recently, it's been impossible to see methane dumps in near-real-time. But now that there are satellites that can see the plumes, they're being detected all the time. Rather than flush the methane out of a pipeline into storage before maintenance, the pipeline companies have been just venting it into the atmosphere.
Amazingly, even though the methane dumps coincide exactly with the pipeline maintenance schedules, and the satellites document the plumes, the pipeline companies maintain their stance of, "Oh, yeah? Prove it."
My observation over the last 20 years is that while Texas is slowly getting greener, as the process progresses and technology improves, we're learning just how dirty it was to start with.
"we're learning just how dirty it was" speaks from the calm policy podium, but is not sufficient in this case of environmental crime.
This is such a sloppy take, backed by no data. If anyone would spend 10 minutes analyzing GHG and other emissions they would find that BURNING / USING these products is what produces the most emissions. So 40 million+ tons per year easily (in the US) of JUST carbon monoxide. FAR worse globally. Billions of tons of CO2. And heads up, LNG is much CLEANER than many other fuels currently in use, particularly coal.
"We are defending our communities from being obliterated,” says John Serna, a resident of Portland, Gregory, and Ingleside.
Hardly - look at ukraine for what the word "obliterated" means.
More guberment? Feh! Just let The Market™ decide. /s
For context, the facility liquefies 15 million tons of methane per year [1].
Also for context, the annual US VOC emissions in 2021 were 12 million tons [2].
353 tons is 0.003% of that.
[1] https://www.cheniere.com/where-we-work/ccl
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/501310/volume-of-volatil...
Europe has been playing the blind green eye politics for a decade - all pretending to be green and environmentally friendly, while in fact largely replacing locally sourced coal with imported Russian gas. North America has been doing the same with declaring many industries too dirty, and happily moving them out to China along with the jobs, knowledge and capital.
The planet doesn't give a damn which meridian that CO2 comes from. The effect is global and cumulative, and there are many ways to actually lower it without killing local jobs - nuclear, biodiesel, decentralized production requiring less transportation. But the media never considers that - instead the public is weaponized against the remaining local businesses, largely ignoring the big picture.
It's almost like they are owned by the people heavily benefiting from moving production overseas...
That sounds perfect actually but how do you plan to actually check. China will can just lie, but I guess if they do get caught lying there can be penalties.
So you would need to bring together the board of local manufacturers interested in making imports prohibitively expensive, and a board of importers interested in making local production economically unviable. And you would need to have a process where they would need to come out with a compromise satisfying both parties. Both parties should have respect for each other and be willing to find a middle ground. That's how democracies work, that's why U.S. managed to become the #1 economy.
Except, this mechanism is broken. Whoever owns the media can point the finger at the prospective manufacturer, scream "climate change denier" and the public won't listen. Because the public sentiment is that some opinions, depending on the identity/affiliation of their sources, are just too dangerous to be heard. And this is heavily abused by those who know how to play the system.
The public gets screwed long-term. It's already prohibitively expensive to raise kids in the U.S. (good luck competing against 5-people-per-room countries), it's unviable for most people to have retirement savings, or even own their place of residence. But the public doesn't connect it with the fact that the remaining local jobs have zero economic leverage and are made to easily replace people on a whim. We keep screaming at the next "enemy of the people" and stubbornly refuse to notice how wealth and economic leverage is being siphoned away from us.
Yeah, but the point is to get it in some places and then in other places later. Leading by example. Also, there are many things that can't be done abroad.
> Europe has been playing the blind green eye politics for a decade - all pretending to be green and environmentally friendly, while in fact largely replacing locally sourced coal with imported Russian gas.
I don't understand what you're saying because natural gas is much better than coal. This is pretty well known... The point is that it's temporary until actual renewables are rolled out.
You seem to want everything to be perfect already and hand-wave away any improvement whatsoever. I agree they're going way to slow but it's incorrect to say we've made no progress and that all of this is worthless.
It has to start somewhere.
Leading by example in this context would be continuing to meet demands domestically while doing The Hard Work of cleaning up the processes.
Instead the example being set is to simply perform the same (or worse) dirty process somewhere else and make it someone else's problem in the short-term.
Europe is currently working on a carbon adjustment mechanism which would deal with this kind of problems [1]. It is an extremely complex mechanism to build but it could address the main problem with local carbon taxation.
Even better: such mechanism, once implemented, could also be used to twist the arm of countries without a carbon tax of their own or countries are not committed to reduce their emissions by penalizing them harder than other countries.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/qanda_...
Additional context: multiple European countries are backsliding to coal power right this week [3]. And Biden has waived federal air pollution regulations, to decrease reliance on imported oil [4]. It's not only Texas. This is a no-win scenario: we can't escape the tradeoff between air quality, climate goals, and the immediate war.
[0] https://www.ft.com/content/c1b8c308-b189-4a24-af67-6d18902e4...
[1] https://archive.ph/UZlCv (mirror of [0])
[2] https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-germany-government...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?&query=coal&dateRange=pastWeek
[4] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-epa-issues-waiver-allow-...
Instead of we, how about you move right next to this plant..
But if the only consequence is price, I agree with you. I speculate that the Freeport LNG fire was sabotage. Of course I have no evidence, but many interests are served.. Russia, but also industrial natural gas users in the USA trying to limit the price..
The fire reduced our exposure to the global natural gas market, and the price in the USA immediately plunged:
The people being exposed to all this aren't being compensated in any way, any medical problems or other issues they have to fully pay for themselves.
Might be different if they got taken care of.
It's very likely the people being exposed to this are marginalized and have little power to respond.
Yes, minorities are proportionally more likely to be in low-income communities, but the actions taken to harm these low-income communities hard the entire community, not just certain ethnicities within it.
If the intent was specifically to do this in black neighborhoods, regardless of that neighborhoods comparative wealth, then it would be racism. As is, it's a lot more complicated than that.
Russia doesn't have a 'closed-cricuit' economy, it's fully dependent on western imports for their technology. Why have all auto plants shutdown? Why are tank factories shut down? Only in a pre-1917 way are they self reliant.
The relaxed standards suggest this plant is being allowed to operate dirtier than need be.
The epitome of Hacker News and one of the reasons I find myself laughing enjoyably so much here.
I picture this marathon and the first one trips out of the gate with everyone piling up behind them.
When you read that the engineering practices in some company are of a high standard, do you also get confused as to if the company operates well or not well? I used to get confused from the meaning too but started thinking about it like this.
It does indeed. And the title does not comport with that derivation.
In terms of petro-chemical plants one operating to a "high standard" is clean, and one operating to a "low standard" is polluting. And the plant in the article is polluting. Instead of fixing the plant they decided to raise the emission limits. That is the legal equivalent of "eh, fine I guess" shrug.
Does that sound like operating to a "high standard"? So are these people raising the standard?
The confusion originates from the fact that in the case of pollution, smaller numbers are better. So "raising the standard" means "lowering the limits". And "raising the limits" are "lowering the standard".
Therefore they did not choose the right words. We might as well say that they phrased the title in a confusing way.
> I used to get confused from the meaning too but started thinking about it like this.
It really sounds like in a rush to educate us you just illustrated how confusing the title is.
But here is the thing. It can be worded in such a way to avoid this confusion altogether. They should just wrote "Texas raises emission limit ..." and it is avoided. Or even better, they could write "Polluting plant will avoid fines", or "Plant allowed to pollute".
(Could be worded better.)
It's certainly possible something's amiss here, but the detail is scant.
Key info is missing from this article - that’s Cheniere is the only US company permitted to export LNG.
With the global energy crisis underway due in part to the Russian / Ukrainian war, it’s expected law makers would allow Cheniere to exceed thresholds in order to satisfy global demand.
Is it possible they've also increased the production capacity of the plant?
The story is very short, so I can't tell what they are saying. Is it producing more emissions per "unit" than expected, or just producing more output?
Edit: Answering my own question, they have increased capacity significantly over time:
https://www.gem.wiki/Corpus_Christi_LNG_Terminal
https://www.offshore-energy.biz/cheniere-starts-lng-producti...
And regionally related to Texas (but more about EPA) on poisons in the air: https://www.propublica.org/article/toxmap-poison-in-the-air
That’s not to say they shouldn’t care because it’s going to matter, but is it some kind of special cognitive dissonance?
If part 2 is ever yes, then part 1 is allowed to go forward.