Equilibrium/Sustainability — Biofuels company gets methane from manure

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One California biofuels company is giving its profit margins some gas - by switching its fuel source from landfill-derived methane emissions to a chemically identical byproduct of cattle excrement.

In making this choice, Clean Energy Fuels Corp. has succeeded in boosting its earnings by millions of dollars overnight, The Wall Street Journal reported.

California's clean-fuels ranking system grants cow manure a better score and higher subsidies than gas from garbage, according to the Journal. The switch has therefore meant that Clean Energy could net an additional $70 million in gross earnings by 2026, the Journal reported.

"It is like magic," Andrew Littlefair, president and chief executive of Clean Energy, told the Journal.

Today we'll look at another fuel source that is making magic for some U.S. drilling firms, as they seek a quick financial boost by returning to environmental fraught fracking practices. Then we'll look at the environmental toll of Colombia's 2016 peace treaty.

For Equilibrium, we are Saul Elbein and Sharon Udasin. Please send tips or comments to Saul at selbein@thehill.com or Sharon at sudasin@thehill.com. Follow us on Twitter: @saul_elbein and @sharonudasin.

Let's get to it.

Shale companies scale up drilling

With oil prices soaring to their highest in years, U.S. shale companies are now returning to fracking fields that they had abandoned in recent years, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Some such places include the Anadarko Basin of Oklahoma and the DJ Basin in Colorado, which drilling companies had deemed unprofitable as recently as mid-2020 due to low oil prices, according to the Journal. With prices now at $90 a barrel - the highest in more than seven years - small shale companies are jumping on a profitable, even if temporary, opportunity.

First words: "We have a limited window of opportunity," Joe Brevetti, founder of Charter Oak Production Co., told the Journal, amid plans to bring a drilling rig back to the Anadarko Basin this month.

"Our costs are obviously up right now, but I'd rather have the higher costs and sell the product at $90," he said.

The average number of active rigs in the Anadarko Basin has risen from a pandemic low of seven to 46 today, the Journal reported, citing energy data firm Enverus. Rigs in Colorado's DJ Basin, meanwhile, have surged from four in 2020 to 15 today.

With drilling comes debris: In parallel with a drilling surge also comes increasing pollution concerns - and not just regarding greenhouse gas emissions.

As companies begin ramp up oil and gas production, scientists warned that the wastewater generated in the hydraulic fracturing process contains contaminants like organic chemicals and metals, in a Friday news release from a University of Toledo and University of Texas Arlington research team.

One such group of substances already known to be present in fracking fluid are compounds that can break down into "forever chemicals," the per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) linked to kidney cancer, thyroid disease and other health issues, as we previously reported.

Concerns about water reuse: The latest frack fluid finds are particular concern as drilling firms increasingly opt to recycle and reuse their wastewater, the scientists cautioned.

In a recent characterization of the chemical composition of extracted water, they identified carcinogenic contaminants in untreated samples. These toxins, they reported in Environmental Science and Technology, could pose a threat to wildlife and human health.

By recognizing the presence of such contaminants, regulatory agencies could modify guidelines related to the safe treatment and disposal of fracking wastewater, to ensure that drinking water remains clean, according to the scientists.

'A PLACE SYNONYMOUS WITH THE FRACKING DEBATE'

In the northern Pennsylvanian township of Dimock, which The Associated Press described as "a place synonymous with the fracking debate," a longstanding fight over water contamination is still underway.

Residents had been fighting for clean water since the second Bush administration, when a water well exploded and people began experiencing symptoms like vomiting, dizziness and rashes, according to the AP.

The state launched a criminal case against Texas-based Cabot Oil & Gas in 2020, charging the company with violating the law by allowing methane to leak into the region's aquifers, according to the AP. The attorney general ordered water tests at dozens of homes, after which prosecutors proposed installing water treatment systems to resolve the charges.

For residents, treatment may be insufficient. Ray Kemble, whose well water has been polluted for years, said he would not consider accepting a treatment system from the company, the AP reported. He and other homeowners want to be connected to the public water system instead.

Rebecca Franz, a chief deputy attorney, told Kemble that "the best path forward" would be to install a treatment system "approved by an independent consultant, to make sure that it's actually something that's going to function," in an audio recording obtained by the AP.

Her colleague, supervisory special agent Justus Brambley IV, agreed that a settlement is optimal, because "all bets are off" if the case goes to trial, the AP reported.

"Water line or nothing": Kemble has refused this idea, stressing that Pennsylvania needs to make good on a 2010 promise to force Cabot to hook up residents to public water, stressing that in his mind, it's "water line or nothing," according to the AP.

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Colombia's peace treaty bad news for forests

A 2016 peace treaty between Colombia's government and leftist rebels has been bad news for the country's forests - but in diverse ways and for diverse reasons, according to a new study.

First steps: While tropical forests are notable for housing at least two-thirds of the world's organisms, they are also known for being "marked by the presence of armed conflict," the authors wrote in Frontiers in Environmental Science.

"In these regions, the interplay between conflict and peace shapes an important part of how deforestation trajectories unfold."

Colombia's civil war is a poster child for such a conflict. The country's decadeslong intermittent war has pitted a complex mix of U.S.-backed government forces, state backed paramilitaries and local oligarchs against a network of leftist revolutionaries like the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), based in guerilla camps in the jungle.

The conflict, which officially ended with a peace treaty in 2016, killed 270,000 people and displaced more than 5 million, leaving the country with more internal refugees than Afghanistan, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre.

And the forests? In addition to its human cost, the fighting led to a combination of positive and negative impacts for Colombia's forests. A 2019 study found that areas of Colombia where armed conflict was present were eight times more likely to undergo deforestation than more peaceful areas. (Globally, it's a factor of four.) This phenomenon arose in part as conflict-displaced farmers were pushed into new frontiers.

A perverse silver lining: But some Colombian environmentalists and park officials had long suspected that peace would be even worse and that the return of exiled populations would come in tandem with the intrusion of the industrial development that the conflict had kept of the forest, according to Nature.

Peace, as one 2017 study warned, could bring a tide of large-scale deforestation that has been endemic across Latin America in previous decades, keeping Columbia's Forest cover an unusually high 72 percent, according to Global Forest Watch.

Another 2017 study in Nature, published soon after the peace treaty, asked if Colombia's biodiversity could "survive development" that peace had enabled.

DID PEACE LEAD TO DEFORESTATION?

Indicators are ominous, according to Monday's Frontiers study. On the largest scale, the researchers from the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) found that deforestation had increased overall across Colombia - "even in places where deforestation was declining before the peace agreement."

Any local specifics? Plenty. This overall picture concealed important local wrinkles - showing that factors driving deforestation were very dependent on other geographic and social factors, according to the authors.

In the Amazon, for example, they found that the presence of cattle was the strongest predictor of deforestation, while in the Andes mountains, by contrast, it was the presence of coca fields.

A grim dynamic of land clearing: The research also laid out how the peace between government and rebel forces had opened the way for a new, interrelated form of conflicts and deforestation similar to that happening across the Amazon.

In the early stages of movement into the forest, municipalities were marked by high deforestation and large coca fields, but few cattle. Then as wealth flowed into the frontier, coca farms bloomed and smallholdings in the forest were replaced by large ranches full of cattle, all accompanied by a rise in less-organized conflicts that were actually facilitated by the peace treaty.

An ironic power vacuum: The retreat of the FARC rebels, ironically, helped open the field for these more chaotic conflicts, according to the study.

"FARC dissidents, criminal bands, and competing paramilitary groups continue to fight for control over areas previously dominated by the FARC and have promoted livestock production and coca crops as a means to expand territorial control," the authors stated.

Takeaway: The researchers stressed the importance in not treating forest conservation and peace processes as separate, but as part of a related processes of governance - or lack thereof.

"Such insights can help us understand the role of forest conservation efforts in delivering peace and, likewise, the role of peacebuilding efforts in delivering forest conservation," they wrote.

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Motor Monday

Burning EV batteries complicate ship salvage

• Efforts to recover the Felicity Ace, a burning cargo ship drifting in the North Atlantic, are being stymied by the powerful flames fueled by its cargo: thousands of luxury Volkswagen electric vehicles and their flammable lithium-ion batteries, which had been enroute from Germany to the U.S., The Wall Street Journal reported.

Protesters plan to 'squeeze', 'choke,' DC

• With anti-vaccine protesters forced out of Ottawa, Ontario over the weekend, more protesters say they plan to blockade the D.C. Beltway during President Biden's State of the Union Address, Fox News reported. Scranton, Pa. organizer Bob Bolus compared the protest to "a giant boa constrictor ... that basically squeezes you, chokes you and it swallows you, and that's what we're going to do the D.C."

Tesla's German 'Gigafactory' has yet to open amid repeat delays

• While Tesla planned to open its first European "Gigafactory" in Germany this past summer, the plant's opening has been postponed several times and the company has yet to establish an official launch date, The Wall Street Journal reported. Tesla has said it will first build the Model Y at the plant, located in the Bavarian hamlet of Grünheide, with the capacity for about 500,000 vehicles annually, according to the Journal.

Please visit The Hill's sustainability section online for the web version of this newsletter and more stories. We'll see you on Tuesday.