“Methane is a health precursor, which means that it never shows up alone,” Aguirre said. Methane itself is usually non-toxic to humans, but a 2021 report from the United Nations points out ozone pollution is tied to methane emissions. In the days following discovery of the leaks, Cesar Aguirre, senior community organizer for the Central California Environmental Justice Network, canvassed the neighborhood surrounding the wells to notify residents.Īguirre said he was warning residents about the potential of an explosion or fire in their community, but also about other possible pollution, like acute levels of ozone or smog, that might be forming around the leaking wells. “The response… (shows) complete disrespect for the safety of this community,” said Nayamin Martinez, director of the Central California Environmental Justice Network and a resident of the area, in a statement.ĬalGEM said there was no reason to alert the public of the leaks, but advocates in the region disagree. But environmental advocates in the region said the response by regional and state authorities did not go far enough. Riley Duren, an international methane expert and research scientist at the Arizona Institute for Resilient Environments and Societies and Research, Innovation and Impact, said that methane concentrations of 50,000 ppm can imply “an extreme and potentially hazardous event.”ĬalGEM said in their report on the four additional leaks that they were notifying the owner/operators of the wells, Sunray Petroleum, to repair the leaks and that they briefed the Bakersfield Fire Department. Methane is potentially explosive at air concentrations of 50,000 ppm, according to federal guidelines. The other well had a methane concentration of 6,000 ppm. Three of the four wells had methane concentrations of 50,000 ppm in the air surrounding them, according to a report from the state. Those two wells have since been sealed, Ntuk said in a statement on Friday, but while inspectors were checking to make sure the seals on those wells stopped the leaks, they found four more idle wells leaking. But a letter sent to the state’s oil and gas regulators by a coalition of environmental groups said the inspector found that methane levels in the air around one of the wells was 20,000 parts per million (ppm) and at least 50,000 ppm around the other well. The agency wouldn’t confirm the concentrations of methane they found. On May 17, an inspector from the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District measured the concentrations of methane in the air surrounding the leaking wells, Jaime Holt, chief communications officer with the district, said in a statement to the Associated Press. “And I was like `what the hell is going on?’ I thought these things were supposed to be essentially sealed.” “One of them was leaking, it was making an audible hiss,” Williams-Derry told the Associated Press. He was visiting the area on May 10 with a French documentary crew that’s working on a film about cleaning up oil and gas infrastructure around the globe. Residents and environmentalists in the region first became concerned when they were alerted by Clark Williams-Derry, an energy analyst, that two wells were hissing within a few hundred feet of homes. But Uduak-Joe Ntuk, head of the California Geologic Energy Management division of the California Department of Conservation, the agency that oversees wells and confirmed they were leaking, said in a statement that the leaks were “minor in nature and do not pose an immediate threat to public health or safety.”
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