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%.
This original title also used "limits" which is more correct for the content, this link and the original title should be substituted. A "raised standard" would imply lower limits allowed by conventional use of the word/phrase.
"Texas repeatedly raises pollution limits for Cheniere LNG plant"
Lots of articles in the Texas newspapers over the last few years about these big petrochemical complexes being habitual, and flagrant polluters.
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.
insights welcome on the regulatory capture in TX; spin addition on the story from me might be -- that "we're learning just how dirty it was" is not the case in a system of systems. News stories somehow imply a common, collective understanding with a collective voice of discovery, but this is an illusion maintained for civil progress. Multiple individual researchers in every generation, and some institutions and business interests, not only knew how dirty it was, but went to great lengths to tell anyone, do something, make it stop or change. It is a particular brand of militant, obstinate and dominant management style, cherished in Texas politics, that repeatedly ignore and in fact mock opposition. It is a sport among them to bait and goad environmentalists, undermine the agenda, and lay blame on ordinary economic and political trends on greens.
"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.
> 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."
More guberment? Feh! Just let The Market™ decide. /s
Sounds like Texas technology on CC (Comission Capture) is "the best available". Is there an open data feed on this? Where is the grafana dashboard showing graft?
If one could summon @dang, the story link should be replaced with the reuters article.
The current HN title is, "Texas raises emission standards for the Cheniere LNG project on a regular basis". I thought I would be reading and reading about a process of moving the approved standards to "better" levels, which in the case of pollutants, would be lower levels. I imagined that maybe the builders of the plant were facing goal post movement every time they got close to completing the plant or something, moving the date of opening of this useful plant ever further into the future.
The word "standards" should probably be replaced with "limits".
This seems fairly reasonable unless someone can provide evidence that it would be commercially reasonable to further reduce those 353 tons emitted. 0 is an unlikely number, but I would be interested in seeing what the emissions reductions costs are between 0 and 353.
More nuclear would not prevent this. This is a political problem. It's also the same kind of problem that makes nuclear undesirable. Can you imagine what kind of mess regulatory capture of nuclear power would lead to?
Things seem hopeless right before the hockey stick goes vertical. Spend a few minutes of what renewables are going to look like in the next 10 years. Terrawatts of capacity are in the works.
The whole concept of emission standards and carbon taxes only makes sense if it's applied and enforced globally and uniformly. If an extra tonne of CO2 costs $1 in U.S. and $0 in China, the incentive isn't to reduce pollution - the incentive is to move business to China.
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...
You don't necessarily need to enforce it globally.
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.
I wonder whether a carbon taxes with tariffs, from countries which don't have them, could solve this. Let's say a product get produced in China and imported into the EU. If it's not carbon-neutral, slap a tariff on.
> I wonder whether a carbon taxes with tariffs, from countries which don't have them, could solve this
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.
Make the companies importing the products responsible with heavy fines. I assume it would take a week until there are multiple companies run and overseen by non-Chinese employees which would certify how much carbon was created during production.
Kinda, but you need to set the incentives right. Both the importer and the overseas manufacturer will have the incentive to underreport the emissions and overreport the paid carbon tax (China could easily collect it on paper, and then offer some rebates).
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.
While it's true, I think you're going too extreme with "only makes sense if it's applied and enforced globally and uniformly". This still applies pressure, because: a) importing takes time and money - it's not a free solution, b) there's some limit to what China can take in terms of pollution - at some point they will have to respond even if the threshold is way higher than in the us.
> The whole concept of emission standards and carbon taxes only makes sense if it's applied and enforced globally and uniformly. If an extra tonne of CO2 costs $1 in U.S. and $0 in China, the incentive isn't to reduce pollution - the incentive is to move business to China.
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.
> 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.
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.
You didn't address anything I said. Someone has to go first. Simultaneity is impossible. Some production cannot be exported. They did improve by moving from coal to gas. You're just hand-waving all this away.
This is talking about actual carcinogens, not CO2. Over 100,000 Americans die due to pollution every year, and it would be even higher if we didn't outsource our manufacturing. This is one of the reasons why China stopped accepting plastic waste imports. It's impossible to recycle lower grade plastic economically without causing a lot of health problems.
How can we expect to fight and win wars if we can't bear trivial negative consequences? US LNG from this port ships to Europe, it replaces the boycotted gas from the Russian pipelines [0,1]. The gas shortage is potentially going to be really bad this winter [2]. If these plants don't keep running, either many people will freeze to death (and the EU economy plunges into recession), or the boycott collapses (and Russia comes back to the negotiating table with extreme leverage).
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.
I wish people qould stop conflating "racism" with negative actions impacting low-income communities.
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.
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:
Europe needs to stop the energy sanctions with immediate effect.
It has both a European and global effect that hurts us western people much more than Russia.
Russia has prepared for this situation and has built a closed-circuit economy since 2014. Not to mention they have lost their trade partners suddenly in 1993, so they have rehearsed for this.
Ruble hit strongest level for the past 7 years. The sanctions are _not_ working.
There are no energy sanctions, your Kremlin PR is obvious and boring.
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.
What do you mean there is no energy sanctions? https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insight...
I just read an article today that 1 in 7 Belgian missed a meal in the last two weeks due to the inflation and elevated energy prices.
Why do we need to suffer because of an agressive state attacked another one thousands of miles from me?
You are right they might be pre-1917 but they don't seem to mind it. Us in Europe can't exist with pre-1917 tech/mindset.
I don't know, but what I do know is that in Hungary you can just buy 50 liters max, because there is a shortage already. If this situation has not affected your livelihood yet, that's great. But sh*t will hit the fan real hard come autumn in Central Europe.
I guess you are right, seems like I was mislead by reading the headlines on Reddit. That just shows the power of media distorting facts.
But semantics aside the situation starts to get a lot worse in some countries, like in Hungary there is a fuel shortage already.
A "high standard" has a known meaning, so raising and lowering can be derived from there.
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.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say, but the title of the OP is clearly confusing here and could be made less ambiguous to people who have not started thinking about it like you think about it.
> A "high standard" has a known meaning, so raising and lowering can be derived from there.
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".
Weirder to me is that the limit being quoted is an absolute limit of tons/year, when the plant has doubled LNG output over time, and has plans to expand further.
It's certainly possible something's amiss here, but the detail is scant.
I've worked with clean air agencies before at both the state and federal level and this information is useless without context. Sometimes you can exceed short term thresholds for emergency reasons and still stay within your long term thresholds. If you have added capacity or other reasons why you aren't under current permit limits then you can get a new limit. The last 2 years of COVID have slowed every response down...that includes official testing (which is a joke really), changes to what is being checked as well as permit reviews (our normal routine permit lapsed because the agency is so far behind). We self reported an overflow spill on the ground of ~10K gallons of water that had come directly from city water (this is a violation...it is not allowed in our waste water permit) over 18 months ago and it still hasn't been reviewed.
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.
Question that might not have an answer: do people in places that are already unbearably hot not care about global warming? kind of like telling a fish it’s wet.
That’s not to say they shouldn’t care because it’s going to matter, but is it some kind of special cognitive dissonance?
In general I think people probably care about global warming but specifically this is Texas and in Texas everything is a 2 part question.
1. Will this be terrible for us?
2. But if we let it happen will it own the libs?
If part 2 is ever yes, then part 1 is allowed to go forward.
What a bad headline. “Raises emission standards” sounds like a good thing, i.e. making the standard more strict, but actually the article is about Texas raising emission limits.
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%.