MCKITTRICK, CA—California regulators on Thursday revealed that a mixture of oil and gas continues to seep at the oil drilling site in Kern County where a massive spill of over 800,000 gallons of combined oil and water took place over the past two months.
In both the map of the incident (Cymric Surface Expressions) and the update on their website, they refer to the oil spill as a “surface expression” or “surface expressions.”
On July 18, the Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources (DOGGR) of the California Department of Conservation issued a statement that on Wednesday, July 17, “DOGGR field inspectors reported a small seepage of oil and water from one of three surface expression vents where the flow had previously ceased.”
“DOGGR notified Chevron, and the Acting Oil and Gas Supervisor amended the July 1, 2019 Notice of Violation to expand the well shut-in radius from 600 to 1,200 feet. The Acting Oil and Gas Supervisor and DOGGR field engineers were on site Thursday,” reported DOGGR.
Also on Thursday, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) released a statement on Chevron’s oil spill outside Bakersfield, criticizing the oil giant for keeping the spill unknown to the public for two months:
“I’m extremely concerned by Chevron’s huge oil spill outside Bakersfield and that it remained unknown to the public for two months.
“The company states that most of the spill has been recovered, but that still leaves oil and contaminated water in the soil and surrounding environment. The full toll to the area is not yet known, although we’re lucky the spill didn’t take place during a rainy period or the effects on our environment and wildlife would have been even more tragic.
“Almost as troubling as the spill itself is that it occurred at multiple times for two months, but we just learned about it. Media reports say there have been at least three significant spills at this site since May. This is something the public should have been alerted to earlier. Proper oversight can’t occur if incidents like these are kept under wraps.
“The company and the state need to ensure that this spill is contained and cleaned up as quickly as possible and that another spill doesn’t occur.”
The huge oil spill should be no surprise, according to environmental justice advocates. The agency responsible for regulating the fossil fuel industry in California, (DOGGR), “adopted weaker restrictions on the practice earlier this year, making these operations even more dangerous,” according to at the Last Chance Coalition.
The news of the spill came just hours after Governor Newsom fired DOGGR head Ken Harris for doubling the fracking permits issued during his time as governor — without his knowledge, according to Newsom - and reports of conflicts of interest among eight senior officials, as documented in my reporting on a groundbreaking report by Consumer Watchdog and the Fractracker Alliance: www.dailykos.com/…
From January 1 to June 3 of 2018, the State’s Division of Oil, Gas, and Geothermal Resources (DOGGR) approved 2,365 new oil and gas well permits and 191 fracking permits, according to Department of Conservation data analyzed by Consumer Watchdog and the FracTracker Alliance.
The data shows that this year regulators have increased the number of permits granted for drilling new wells by 35.3%, well reworks by 28.3%, and fracking by 103.2%, as compared to the permitting rate during the final year of the Brown administration in 2018.
Even more alarming, of the 2,365 well permits issued, 1064 or 45% of them benefitted oil companies invested in by DOGGR officials, the groups reported.
On Friday, July 12, Jason Marshall, the acting oil and gas supervisor at DOGGR, ordered Chevron to immediately “take all measures” to the stop the flow and “prevent any new surface expressions” near the oil well site.
This latest disaster takes place in a state where Big Oil and Big Gas have captured the regulators from top to bottom. The oil industry is the largest and most powerful corporate lobby in Sacramento and the Western States Petroleum Association (WSPA), the trade association for the oil industry in California and other Western states, is the largest and most powerful corporate lobbying organization.
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