Don’t let the palm trees, waterfalls and neon lights fool you. There is a danger lurking beneath the islands off Long Beach.
Just weeks after the Plains All American pipeline burst near Refugio State Beach in May and spewed more than 140,000 gallons of oil into the coastal environment, state oil officials quietly gave Long Beach approval to frack more than a dozen new and existing wells at its artificial oil islands in the Pacific Ocean.
Now Long Beach officials have just weeks left to decide whether to go forward with these planned fracks, which would employ chemicals recently identified as among the world’s most toxic by a report from the California Council on Science and Technology.
The right decision is clear: Fracking simply poses too many risks to California’s beautiful coastal waters.
Offshore fracking is similar to what occurs onshore — companies blast huge amounts of water and chemicals into the earth at high pressures to crack rock beneath the ocean floor. But the unpredictable ocean environment makes offshore fracking especially dicey.
Every offshore frack increases the risk of well failure, chemical pollution or another devastating oil spill. The toxic soup of chemicals Long Beach wants to use in its offshore frack jobs underscores these dangers.
Documents submitted with its applications to the state’s Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources reveal that Long Beach wants to use two chemicals identified by the science council as among the “most toxic” to aquatic life. Frequently used together as a compound called Kathon, these chemicals can harm people as well as many different species that live in the ocean.
Some offshore fracking chemicals can kill fish, crustaceans and zooplankton, the base of the ocean food chain. Others can cause cancer and damage reproductive and neurological systems. And some are known to break down into other toxic substances and bioaccumulate, or become dangerously concentrated, in sea otters.
Oil spill risk is also a serious concern. That’s partly because fracking uses incredibly high injection pressures that could increase the risk of well failure or another accident.
In 1968, when a huge spill in the Santa Barbara Channel coated beaches down the coast in oil, state officials responded by prohibiting new offshore drilling leases.
But after this year’s devastating Refugio spill, instead of responding by beginning to retire aging offshore oil and gas facilities, California oil regulators approved the first fracking permits in California waters since 2013. That increases the risk that we’ll suffer yet another devastating accident.
Thankfully, Long Beach hasn’t yet used those state fracking permits, which are only good through the end of this year. The Coastal Commission has correctly insisted that Long Beach can’t frack any offshore wells until it receives a coastal development permit under the Coastal Act.
That permitting process rightly seeks to ensure that any development activity in the coastal zone will be consistent with the Coastal Act, which seeks to protect California’s unique coastal environment.
But more permits won’t be enough — the risks of offshore fracking cannot be managed or reduced to a level that is consistent with the central tenets of the Coastal Act. Offshore fracking is inherently dangerous and threatens swimmers, beachgoers, and marine wildlife, as well as our beaches and other sensitive coastal habitat.
As the clock runs out on the state permits for these planned fracks, the City of Long Beach is clearly thinking hard about offshore fracking’s dangers. Given the risks, it’s time for city officials to pull the plug on plans to use this toxic technique in our coastal waters.
Kristen Monsell is an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity.
People Post is an occasional column featuring readers’ commentary, articles from guest writers, and letters to the editor. The views expressed in this column do not necessarily reflect those of the Long Beach Post, nor its editorial staff. To submit an article to People Post, email [email protected].