If you read the papers or listen to the news you know that California has huge problems with lack of water. For decades the state has allowed farmers to irrigate with process water from fracking. The state does not even know what chemicals are in the process water because frackers are exempt from disclosing “trade secrets.” This BS nonsense is allowed because of the petroleum industry’s powerful lobby.
Why is this pertinent to Florida?
Because we are fast headed to the same place. Our governor (under influence from industry lobbyists) and our water management districts (under orders from the governor) do not think ahead. They see the water there and mindlessly use it as if there were no end to the supply. Even those in government who are smart enough to realize that our water resources are diminishing prostitute themselves in order to keep their jobs.
So here we have a flawed (meaning lack of good research/science) report submitted by a group tainted with special interests. Does that situation remind us of Florida’s water management districts? Don’t everyone speak at once.
Here is the link to the white paper saying these foods are safe, but note the following excerpt (pp 19-29:)
6.0 Data Gaps
Throughout the Food Safety Project, the Panel, Science Advisor, and GSI have
identified data gaps related to the work and findings of Tasks 1 through 3. These data
gaps describe items of interest that (1) have limited data available by private or public
entities, (2) would require an extensive study to evaluate, or (3) pertain to specific
information that was not available to the Panel and GSI due to industry claims of trade
secret. Data gaps identified by the Panel, Science Advisor, and GSI include:
• Mass Data of Chemicals – Mass data with regard to the make-up of oil field
additives would provide pertinent information related to specific chemicals and
constituents that may influence the Chemicals of Interest designated under
Task 1.
• Chemical Uptake in Plants – Limited information is available concerning plant
uptake of organic chemicals. There is a limited understanding of plant physiology
concerning the uptake and translocation of both organic and inorganic chemicals
in crops used for food. A better understanding of how Chemicals of Interest and
plants interact would reduce uncertainty and improve evaluation of irrigation
practices.
• Potential Long-Term Impacts to Soil and Plants – The potential accumulation
of Chemicals of Interest in the soil was not evaluated in the Food Safety Project
and the potential for recurring reuse of produced water for irrigation to adversely
impact the soil and / or plants is not known.
• Chemicals with No Toxicity Data or Analytical Method – Chemicals or
constituents that do not have toxicity data or an approved analytical method may
have the potential to pose a threat to crop safety and human health. Since these
chemicals or constituents cannot be analyzed or do not have a known toxicitythreshold, there are potentially significant unknowns associated with these
chemicals or constituents. Section 8 of this White Paper includes more
information regarding this data gap.
• Transformation Products of Chemicals – A thorough assessment of all
potential transformation and daughter products was not completed under the
Food Safety Project due mostly to the scale of work needed to accomplish this
task. Therefore, there is some potential for additional chemicals and constituents
to be present in the produced water, reused for irrigation, that may not be
included in the 399 chemicals and constituents identified in Task 1.
The data gaps identified here are discussed in more detail in the Data Gaps Related to
the Food Safety Project memorandum available in Appendix B of this White Paper. As
discussed in the memorandum, the purpose of identifying analytical data gaps is to
acknowledge the limitations of the study and highlight potential areas of interest for
future studies.
The data gaps identified in the Food Safety Project were not investigated further due to:
• Technology or analytical methods are not currently available,
• Scope and funding far exceeds that of the Food Safety Project, or
• Scientific information needed to close the data gap is not available at this time.
From what is written in the above excerpt it is clear that this report can in no way assure safety in consuming these products.
Read the original article with photos here in Inside Climate News.
Comments by OSFR historian Jim Tatum.
jim.tatum@oursantaferiver.org
– A river is like a life: once taken,
it cannot be brought back © Jim Tatum
Yet a review of the science and interviews with a public health scientist affiliated with the project and other experts show that there is scant evidence to support the board’s safety claims.
The “neutral, third-party consultant” the board retained to conduct the studies, GSI Environmental, has regularly worked for the oil industry. That work includes marshaling evidence to help Chevron, Kern County’s biggest provider of produced water, and other oil giants defend their interests in high-stakes lawsuits around the country and globe.
GSI did not tell water board officials about its ties to the oil industry, which shared the roughly $3.4 million in costs for the firm’s studies and related work with the water districts that benefit from the distribution of wastewater from oil extraction, known as “produced water.”
One member of the board’s Food Safety Expert Panel that reviewed GSI’s studies was nominated by Chevron and initially paid by the oil industry, and a second panel member worked as a consultant for an oil company selling produced water.
Still, the expert panel’s own review concluded that GSI’s studies could not answer fundamental safety questions about irrigating crops with produced water.
Thomas Borch of Colorado State University, a leading expert on treating and reusing produced water for crop irrigation who was not involved in the project, said that based on the data GSI had and the way they designed the experiments, “they were not able to draw the conclusions they did. Period.”
Robert Scofield, who led the work for GSI, said in a statement via email that his firm agreed with the water board that the studies were performed in “the most technically sound manner.”
Clay Rodgers, the water board official who oversaw the Food Safety Project, said he promised the board that if any evidence were ever discovered that produced water was harming people consuming crops, “we would stop it immediately.”
Under the water board’s direction, GSI compiled a list of hundreds of chemicals used in oil operations, then focused on those that might pose health risks. But an absence of information to assess safety dogged the project from the start. Many of the chemicals had never been studied before, or lacked critical details about their use, the board’s panel of experts noted, because the oil companies said doing so would reveal trade secrets.
“Already there was a data gap there because some of those chemicals don’t have reliable toxicity information,” said John Fleming, senior scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute.
The findings of the board and its expert panel found no food safety or public health concern, said David Ansolabehere, general manager of the Cawelo Water District, which has taken produced water from Chevron for decades. “Cawelo will continue to test the water based on the regional board’s permit requirements.”
Chevron tested for all additives used in the Kern River field for which a testing method approved by the Environmental Protection Agency exists, said Jonathan Harshman, communications advisor for Chevron’s San Joaquin Valley Business Unit.
Yet more than a fifth of the chemicals GSI identified—and 60 percent of those deemed most likely to pose a health risk—lacked both toxicity information and approved testing methods. The water board conceded that the data gaps left “potentially significant unknowns” about the chemicals’ safety.
“When they say this is safe,” Fleming said, “it’s based on what chemicals they were able to test.”
That means the “no identifiable increased health risks” assertion applies to just a fraction of potential chemicals in produced water applied to crops.
Oil’s Profligate Water Use
In early August, during one of the driest summers on record, Wasco farmer Nate Siemens received a troubling notice from his irrigation district, which is regulated by the Central Valley water board. “Please be aware that this water includes some amount of reclaimed oilfield production water,” it said.
Siemens, an organic agriculture consultant with the Rodale Institute, was shocked. Siemens needed that water. But he’s transitioning his family’s Fat Uncle Farms to organic and wasn’t keen on using the oil industry’s wastewater to irrigate his almonds.
Siemens’ farming roots in the region predate the rise of Kern County’s oil industry, which produces more than 70 percent of the state’s oil. He was well aware that climate-polluting pump jacks operate among corporate farms growing miles of water-intensive almonds and pistachios, California’s most valuable export crops. But he had no idea just how entrenched oil operations had become in the county’s $7.6 billion agricultural industry until he received that notice.
About 30 miles southeast of Siemens’ farm, thousands of densely packed pump jacks stretch as far as the eye can see toward the horizon, bobbing robotically as they suck oil and water from wells carved into the denuded landscape of the Kern River Oil Field.
Pump jacks have pried more than 2 billion barrels from the field since oil was discovered here in 1899. But wresting Kern’s notoriously viscous crude from receding oil reserves requires injecting ever increasing amounts of water and hot steam underground.
That water returns to the surface along with groundwater. The mixture contains arsenic, uranium and other naturally occurring toxic elements, along with potentially hundreds of chemicals used in the extraction process. Since 1985, the ratio of water to oil recovered has more than doubled, from seven barrels of water per barrel of oil to 18 barrels today.
In a region with less than nine inches of rain in a normal year—the definition of a desert—getting enough water is a perennial concern. Nearly 30 years ago, Chevron struck what a former Cawelo Water District manager called a “win-win” deal to deliver some of the massive amounts of wastewater produced every day to farmers’ fields.
Every year, more than 38,000 acre-feet of produced water from Chevron and other oil companies hydrates California farmland, including roughly 11 percent of Kern County’s irrigated farmland. That’s enough to cover about 38,000 football fields with a foot of water, or more than 12.4 billion gallons.
Chevron treats produced water from its Kern River Oil Field by removing oil from water through gravity separation, then skimming off solids and residual oil before filtering it through walnut hulls. The water then travels several miles by pipeline to a Cawelo holding pond, where it’s blended with surface and groundwater and sent to irrigation canals.
The first time Seth Shonkoff, a public health scientist with the nonprofit Physicians, Scientists and Engineers (PSE) for Healthy Energy and a member of the expert panel, visited the Cawelo holding pond several years ago, he smelled an “extraordinarily strong” whiff of asphalt and crude oil. The same odors were much less offensive when he visited the pond with the panel a few years later.
Either there’s natural variability in the water, Shonkoff said, or someone did something different before experts came to evaluate the operation.
Chevron claims that recycling produced water for irrigation allows the company to operate in a “sustainable manner,” by minimizing reliance on fresh water. Yet the massive energy requirements of the extraction process make Kern’s oil one of the world’s most climate-polluting fossil fuels, and Chevron one of California’s top greenhouse gas emitters.
“California has this green reputation, but if you scratch the surface on the oil industry in the state, you quickly discover that that’s not the case at all,” said Hollin Kretzmann, senior attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute.
“This is an industry from top to bottom that’s used to getting its way, whether that’s drilling in neighborhoods, or disposing of the wastewater in unlined pits, or using that wastewater for unsafe purposes,” Kretzmann said.
Unfit for Purpose
The Central Valley water board said it focused on crops grown in oil wastewater to address public concerns, which included petitions with hundreds of thousands of signatures, protests outside the state Capitol and a bill to label food grown with the water.
Then-Assemblyman Mike Gatto (D-Los Angeles) introduced the bill in 2015, after learning that farmers could get organic certification for shunning pesticides while using produced water, and consumers would never know. “I thought that was a real problem,” said Gatto.
The same year, legislators called hearings to increase scrutiny of oil companies after learning their practices posed risks to protected groundwater, including potential drinking water and irrigation supplies.
“The commitment I made to our board was that if we ever discovered that there was an effect on people consuming crops grown with this, we would stop it immediately,” said Clay Rodgers, assistant executive officer of the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board, who oversaw the Food Safety Project.
Testing crops for harmful chemicals to figure out if they’re safe to eat may seem logical, but techniques to analyze food for oil-related chemicals are “light years” behind those for detecting the compounds in water and soil, Shonkoff said. He raised the problem repeatedly at panel meetings.
In the end, the panel agreed. Its first recommendation to the board was to discontinue crop sampling. It would be far more productive to focus on produced water and irrigated soil, the panel said, using approaches that can reveal the toxicity of the water and soil itself.
Instead, Shonkoff said, “most of the work that was done to test things for chemicals was done in food. Unfortunately, that was, in my professional opinion, a pretty big waste of time and resources.”
The data GSI compiled—including the list of chemicals and their hazard profiles—was “way too limited” to draw conclusions about lack of toxicity, said Borch, the Colorado State University professor and produced water expert.
“That doesn’t mean it’s toxic,” said Borch. But there was no way they could conclude that produced water posed no identifiable health risks based on the data they had and their experimental approach, he said.
That leaves Siemens, who’s transitioning to organic, in a tough spot. Although produced water isn’t specifically defined under organic standards, organic farmers can’t use water that contains arsenic, a constituent of Kern’s produced water, and most synthetic compounds, like those used in oil and gas operations.
Siemens stopped watering his orchard for a few weeks after his district notified him about the produced water. “And the trees suffered,” he said.
But as the almond harvest approached, Siemens couldn’t risk losing the trees. He used just enough of the water to keep them alive.
“We didn’t know what we were getting into,” he said. “We just didn’t have time to do the research.”
Even if Siemens had done the research, it might not have mattered.
“We could have done some much more impressive and well-designed studies to either conclude that we can continue to use this water or that we should maybe improve the way we treat the water before we reuse it,” said Borch. “We certainly don’t know enough to evaluate whether we need to be worried or not.”
A Failure to Disclose
One of the biggest hurdles to evaluating the safety of produced water has been oil companies’ unwillingness to reveal key details about the chemicals they put down wells.
Before joining the panel, Shonkoff was working on an independent study of fracking for the California Council on Science and Technology, or CCST, when he discovered a dataset he’d never seen before: a list of chemicals used in conventional oil development, from fields in Southern California. At the time, no other location in the country, and maybe the world, required chemical disclosure for conventional operations. The CCST assessment, commissioned by the state, revealed that testing and treatment of produced water used for irrigation might not remove or even detect chemicals used in fracking.