ESG & Industry Updates

(Photo: Alexa Rogals, The (Farmington, N.M.) Daily Times)

Earlier this week, while an EPA team worked to stem a leak from the Gold Medal mine in Colorado, an abandoned mine not operational since the 1920s, a pressure fluctuation caused hundreds of thousands of gallons of contaminated water to spill into the Animas River. This river feeds into the Colorado River – a main water supply source for the West.

All eyes are on the river now, but the Federal government has been working to cleanup and stop mine runoff for decades. An estimated 40% of waterways in the region have some level of heavy metals contamination from such runoff. In fact, the ruptured mine was being worked on in the first place because testing by the EPA showed that contamination levels were rising to a level that impacted aquatic life.

It turns out that there are an estimated 20,000 abandoned mines in Colorado and up to 500,000 throughout the West. Surprisingly, until late into the 20^th century (1970) there weren’t many regulations on mining – meaning essentially anyone could start mining anywhere. As a result, when there were mining booms throughout the West, once a mine either didn’t yield or was exhausted, it was simply left there. As time goes on, water builds up within the mines and leaks into waterways and the surrounding environment, carrying with it, heavy-metal contaminants that could be dangerous in high concentrations.

One of the issues that has made mine cleanup such a slow process is that under the Clean Water Act, you’re legally and financially liable for spills even if it happened inadvertently in a cleanup effort, so stemming the pollution from the mines and handling the arduous process of decontamination has fallen solely on the EPA, and there are simply too many mines to fully decontaminate them all quickly.

It’s also an issue of cost – fully neutralizing the mine involves treating the trapped water to safe levels then releasing it, repeatedly, to the tune of about a million dollars a pop, essentially forever.

A “Good Samaritan” provision has been repeatedly proposed as an addition to the Clean Water Act, so other environmental groups can begin working on mine decontamination as well. Ironically, it sounded like a better idea before the spill than after. It’s hard to imagine an immediate pond containment system to control damages going in as quickly as the EPA was able to do. 

The release has certainly put the EPA and their cleanup response in the spotlight.

On Monday (August 3^rd), President Obama unveiled his latest initiative to combat Climate Change, in the form of new proposed regulations on power plant emissions. The plan would reduce emissions from power plants to 32% below the 2005 benchmark levels by 2030 (by 870 megatons). This is the first time federal limits on this type of emissions would be enacted, and the EPA’s Clean Air Act is cited by the administration as allowing for said federal limits.

From the EPA press release on the new regulations:

“By 2030, the plan will cut carbon pollution from the power sector by nearly a third and additional reductions will come from pollutants that can create dangerous soot and smog, translating to significant health benefits for the American people. By 2030, emissions of sulfur dioxide from power plants will be 90 percent lower and emissions of nitrogen oxides will be 72 percent lower, compared to 2005 levels”

(You can read the full EPA Press Release here: EPA Newsroom )

The estimated cost of the program is $8.4 billion annually, according to an EPA spokesperson, and the benefits are projected to be between $34 and $54 billion per year, including health benefits.

Under the rule, individual states must draft and adopt compliance plans by 2018 and meet initial projected targets by 2022.

Industry groups and officials are obviously not thrilled with the new rule, citing potential billions in infrastructure costs associated with moving away from coal power generation. Additionally, the plan includes a target of the US generating 28% of its power via “renewable” sources versus the current 13% level – this does not include natural gas, and further complicates how exactly states and utilities can make changes to hit these targets.

The earlier draft in 2014 included more assumptions that the move would be from coal to natural gas (which generates around a 50% reduction in carbon emissions), this ruling in that regard is even more cumbersome, with the additional costs and difficulty of going from coal to wind, solar, or nuclear – when it's already expensive to go from coal to natural gas.

Critics are citing this as another example of the “War on Coal” and Legislators from coal heavy states cite job and revenue hits they believe the new rule will cause. Some Attorneys General have already signaled they are filing suit, arguing the rules go far beyond the Clean Air Acts provisions, and some states have declared they will refuse to follow the guidelines.  Of note however, is that recently the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the EPA re: the Clean Air Act and methane regulations, and it may very well do so again on this case.

We shall see - stay tuned!

In November the EPA announed it would not be able to finalize on the RFS volumes for biofuels until 2015. The 2014 and 2015 volumes will be set soon,, in theory. But there has been a lot of stress out there in the industry over the fact that the delay will essentially mean refiners and producers need to be retroactively compliant with the volumes the EPA sets.

The biofuels industry is pushing for an increase in biofuel requirements, to 18.15 billion gallons. This is probably not happening, but the uncertainty overall has had a serious impact on bio producers, many of whom have scaled operations way back over 2014 as compared to 2013.

On the other hand most refiners argue that the EPA should lower the standard by 16% given the drop in demand year on year since the RFS' inception in 2007. Additionally the cellulosic ethanol standard should be scrapped, its argued, since its not available for use and its therefore impossible to comply with that portion of the mandate.  

The implication the EPA gave was that it was looking at reducing volumes, and would almost certainly not be increasing the ethanol mandate over the 10% current level - ie that it wouldnt break the so called "blend wall". We will have to see how it plays out over the next month or so. 

I wrote a more in depth piece on the RFS for January's Oil & Energy Magazine, if you want to dive into the topic a little deeper, you can read that article here: "Rethinking the Renewable Fuel Standard"

How will the 2014 Midterm Election results cause a shift in the Energy Agenda?

Keystone XL:

Prior to the midterm elections, Congress sent numerous bills to the Senate to push approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, none of which were brought to the Senate floor. That all likely changes with a Republican Majority Leader. Most likely we will see a vote happen on Keystone, and with Republicans controlling the Senate there are solidly enough votes to pass. Whether the President will sign it or not is up for debate, but in late October during a visit to Canada, Secretary of State John Kerry said he would like to "see a decision, sooner rather than later", maybe signaling that the President won't veto the bill once it hits his desk. 

Crude Exports

Less of a change expected here with the party shift. Exports were expected to be a big consideration in 2015 regardless of party control. Republican Lisa Murkowski and Democrat Mary Landreiu were both expected to move the issue forward. As of this morning Landreiu is locked in a runoff contest, but Murkowski will be stepping up as Chair of Senate Energy and Natural Resources Comittee next year, and has vowed to push the issue on LNG and Crude exports. 

Other Issues

Other issues that may come to the fore include addressing the EPA's proposed regulations on pollution generated from coal fired plants. This is probably too late to be relevant in the New England region, where we are seeing skyrocketing electricity costs and Natural Gas supply issues as a result of retiring older plants. 

It will be interesting to see if other items come to the floor as the legislative session advances. Perhaps RFS issues, blendwall issues, or indications of a reversal of the prohibition of fracking on Federal Land. We shall see.

 We talked before about the White House's proposed new regulations on Methane emissions, which came on the heels of the Administration supporting increased natural gas exports in response to the Russia/Ukraine debacle. Well the EPA whitepapers have come out now outlining proposed changes on each of the industries involved - you can check those out here: EPA Methane Whitepapers 

The Admin proposed changes cite the Agricultural sector as the largest methane producer, followed by Nat Gas. The difference however, is changes proposed for Agriculture are "voluntary" versus regulatory changes for the Nat Gas sector. As usual, environmental groups cheered and said too little too late, while the industry said given it's in their financial best interest to control leakage (their main source of environmental methane), new regulations are an uneccessary burden. 

As we said before, it's hard not to infer from the timing that increasing regulations on methane is at least in part due to environmental and consumer backlash on exports over environmental and supply/pricing concerns. However, given that exporting should increase revenue greatly for the industry it's a pretty savvy time to introduce regulations that may be costly. 

On the consumer side, news has been breaking recently on the number of gas leaks in communities. In the wake of several explosions,  there has been some digging into just how big a problem neighborhood leaks may be, and the news is not good. Some estimates (including a Boston University Study) peg the number of neighborhood leaks in the City of Boston alone at over 3400, and over 20,000 statewide. (You can read the Boston Globe article on the BU Study here: "Boston Riddled with Mostly Small Natural Gas Leaks" )

The issue with these leaks goes beyond the obvious safety and environmental concerns as well. Gas that escapes en route to the consumer is paid for by the consumer. Its estimated that Massachusetts ratepayers are paying an average of $39 million dollars a year for leaked gas ($640 million-1.5 Billion from 2000-2011 according to a study by Senator Ed Markey's Office)