For Immediate Release, August 8, 2018

Contacts: Clare Lakewood, Center for Biological Diversity, (415) 316-8615, clakewood@biologicaldiversity.org
Greg Loarie, Earthjustice, (415) 217-2000, gloarie@earthjustice.org

Trump Administration Moves to Reopen California Public Lands to Oil Leasing

Process Could End 5-year Moratorium on Leasing Federal Land to Oil Companies

BAKERSFIELD, Calif.— The Trump administration today took the first step in a process that could open more than a million acres of public land and mineral estate in central California to oil drilling and fracking. The move could end a five-year-old moratorium on leasing federal public land in the state to oil companies.

Today’s notice from the Bureau of Land Management seeks comments on the potential harms of fracking in 400,000 acres of public land and an additional 1.2 million acres of federal mineral estate in Fresno, Kern, Kings, Madera, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Tulare and Ventura counties.

“This step toward opening our beautiful public lands to fracking and drilling is part of the Trump administration’s war on California,” said Clare Lakewood, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. “We desperately need to keep these dirty fossil fuels in the ground. But Trump is hell-bent on sacrificing our health, wildlife and climate to profit big polluters.”

In 2015 the Center for Biological Diversity and Los Padres ForestWatch, represented by Earthjustice, successfully sued the BLM for approving a resource management plan allowing oil and gas drilling and fracking on vast stretches of California’s public lands without adequately analyzing and disclosing the impacts of fracking on air quality, water and wildlife.

As a result of the groups’ legal victory, the BLM agreed to complete a new analysis of the pollution risks of fracking before deciding whether to allow drilling and fracking on public land across California’s Central Valley, the southern Sierra Nevada and in Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo and Ventura counties.

The BLM has not held a single lease sale in California since 2013 when a federal judge first ruled that the agency had violated the National Environmental Policy Act by issuing oil leases in Monterey County without considering the environmental dangers of fracking.

Fracking is an extreme oil-extraction process that blasts toxic chemicals mixed with water underground to crack rocks. The public lands at stake encompass “numerous groundwater systems that contribute to the annual water supply used by neighboring areas for agricultural and urban purposes,” a federal judge noted in 2016.

A 2015 report from the California Council on Science and Technology concluded that fracking in California happens at unusually shallow depths, dangerously close to underground drinking water supplies, with unusually high concentrations of chemicals, including substances dangerous to human health and the environment.

Today’s announcement comes after San Luis Obispo residents, concerned about the harms fracking poses to their county, placed a voter initiative on the November election ballot. If passed, Measure G will ban fracking and new oil and gas wells in San Luis Obispo County.

“It’s great that BLM is finally going to look at this problem,” said Greg Loarie, an attorney at Earthjustice. “But analyzing the impacts of fracking is like analyzing the impacts of smoking cigarettes: there’s really no question that more fracking would be terrible for California.”

The BLM’s 30-day comment period for the proposal begins today.

The Center for Biological Diversity is a national, nonprofit conservation organization with more than 1.6 million members and online activists dedicated to the protection of endangered species and wild places.

Although the White House has avoided addressing climate change, it made a rare acknowledgement that its proposal to weaken vehicle fuel efficiency standards would contribute to a warmer planet. Its prediction for what the atmosphere will look like in 2100 startled climate scientists — a carbon dioxide concentration of 789.76 parts per million.

... The concentration of atmospheric CO2 has risen more than 35 percent since before the Industrial Revolution, when it was estimated to be 280 ppm, according to Scripps. When scientists first started recording CO2 about 60 years ago, it was 320 ppm. This year, that number hit 410.31, a record high in modern history and a sharp increase since 2013, when CO2 levels surpassed 400 ppm for the first time, according to Scripps.

... The number used by the Trump administration assumes that fossil fuel consumption will continue to rise every year, said Ralph Keeling, head of the CO2 program at the University of California, San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography. It does not account for competition from renewable energy, emissions reduction policies or the assumption that the market can support that rate of growth, he said. It also doesn't account for a significant global effort to curb emissions, such as the Paris climate agreement.

The problem lies with the geology of the Monterey Shale, a 1,750-mile formation running down the center of California roughly from Sacramento to the Los Angeles basin and including some coastal regions.

Unlike heavily fracked shale deposits in North Dakota and Texas, which are relatively even and layered like a cake, Monterey Shale has been folded and shattered by seismic activity, with the oil found at deeper strata.

Compared with oil production from the Bakken Shale in North Dakota and the Eagle Ford Shale in Texas, "the Monterey formation is stagnant," Staub said. He added that the potential for recovering the oil could rise if new technology is developed.