Listen to Rachael Myrow’s radio feature on The California Report.

Valero's Benicia refinery in Solano County. (Photo: Craig Miller)

Last week, as the campaign rhetoric for and against Proposition 23 was heating up, The California Report host Rachael Myrow and I spent an afternoon with three of Valero’s environmental specialists at the company’s refinery in Benicia, up the Sacramento River from San Francisco Bay. They briefed us on the refining process in some detail and drove us around the 400-acre refinery site, near the Carquinez Strait in Solano County.

Valero has been in the spotlight as the largest single contributor to Prop 23, with more than $4 million in the game. The company maintains two medium-sized refineries in California. The Benicia plant produces gasoline, diesel and jet fuel, as well as most of the asphalt used to pave highways in northern California. Unless halted by Prop 23, the cap-and-trade system of carbon pricing under the state’s greenhouse gas law (AB 32) would likely cost refiners millions in emissions fees.

“Our refinery operates under some of the most strict emission limits that exist anywhere in the world,” said Chris Howe, who directs health, safety and environmental affairs at the plant. But Howe and his co-managers made it clear that they don’t consider carbon dioxide emissions to be “pollution.” It should be noted that regulators, including the federal Environmental Protection Agency, appear to differ with that. In a landmark  “endangerment finding,” the EPA concluded that greenhouse gases such as CO2 “threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations.” The published finding also uses the term “greenhouse gas pollution.” Clearly CO2 presents a different kind of threat than “local” air pollutants such as sulfur dioxide (SO2) and oxides of nitrogen (NOX), the building blocks of smog. But Kristine Roselius of the Bay Area Air Quality Management District says that distinction may be overblown. “When you reduce GHGs (greenhouse gases), you reduce smog and soot pollution,” wrote Roselius in an email.

Howe says his facility has to comply with 50,000 individual requirements under various environmental laws. “It’s a continuous challenge to maintain compliance with all of those,” said Howe, who maintains a staff of ten people who monitor environmental compliance full-time.

Don Cuffel, Valero’s lead environmental engineer at Benicia, says that the company has spent $650 million over the past five years, adding systems to keep SO2 and NOX out of the air. Cuffel says that keeping a lid on those local pollutants while reducing greenhouse gases presents them with a dilemma, since all that added equipment requires energy to run, and a natural byproduct of combustion is…CO2. Standing in front of the refinery’s desulfurization unit, Cuffel describes one example in the video clip below.

Asked how he feels when he hears critics refer to Valero as one of the “toxic twins” (with neighboring Tesoro), Howe says: “It’s fairly easy and common for people to make statements like that but it typically comes from a real ignorance of our business. I’ve been in the environmental management business for the majority of my career,” said Howe. “We strive to get out and explain to people what we do. We’re proud of our performance and are seeking to be in compliance with all rules, all the time.”

Clearly they’re not entirely successful, as was highlighted last week, when Prop 23 opponents released a list of 120 environmental violations at the Benicia refinery, since 2007 (200 at Tesoro, across the river). Howe estimated that 10% of the Valero citations resulted in some detectable effect on the local community,  such as a “nuisance odor,” and that most were self-reported to regulators, by the company. “By no means would I consider these significant and putting folks in harm’s way,” said Howe.

In response to an email query on that topic, Roselius of the Air Quality District wrote that all of the Bay Area’s five major oil refineries tend to generate similar numbers of citations. Last week directors at the District added theirs to the list of organizations officially opposing Prop 23.

You can take a brief tour of Valero’s Benicia refinery in the slide show, below:

(Archival Photo: Angela George)

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger used his appearance at the Commonwealth Club in Santa Clara today to “put a spotlight” on what he called the “self-serving greed” of oil companies Valero, Tesoro, and Koch Industries. These companies, two of which he described as among the state’s top polluters, are bankrolling Proposition 23 for their own gain, while trying to hide behind a false claim that the initiative would be good for the state’s economy, said the Governor. Prop 23 would suspend California’s Global Warming Solutions Act, AB 32, which authorizes incentives and regulations for reducing the state’s greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. Schwarzenegger’s speech was timed to the fourth anniversary of the law.

Proponents of the ballot measure claim that allowing AB 32 to be fully implemented would drive businesses from the state and could potentially cost the state more than a million jobs, a figure which has been challenged in several studies.

“They are creating a shell argument that this is about saving jobs,” said Schwarzenegger. “Does anyone really believe that these companies, out of their black-oil hearts are really spending millions and millions of dollars to protect jobs? It’s not about jobs at all. It’s about their ability to pollute and thus protect their profits.”

He said that green jobs in California have grown ten times faster than the statewide average since 2005, and that they now comprise the single largest source of jobs in the state. Passing Prop. 23, would kill investment in the strongest sector of California’s economy, said the Governor.

“The old oil companies are all out for Prop. 23. Silicon Valley is overwhelmingly against it,” he said. “Which side do you believe our economic future as a nation is on?”

The full recording of the Governor’s speech from today’s Climate One event at the Commonwealth Club will be broadcast tonight at 9 p.m. in the Bay Area on KQED Public Radio (88.5) and in the Sacramento region on KQEI (89.3).

1. Big Coal Donates to Fiorina Campaign

Republican Senate candidate Carly Fiorina received $63,000 in donations  from out-of-state coal mining interests. About a third of that money is from Murray Energy Corporation in Ohio, the largest privately owned coal producer in the U.S.

California has become a political battleground for out-of state energy interests. Proposition 23, which could freeze the state’s 2006 climate change mitigation law known as AB 32 if passed in November, is getting the lion’s share of its funding from two Texas-based oil companies, Valero and Tesoro.  Valero, based in San Antonio, has two California refineries and nearly ubiquitous retail outlets. Tesoro also maintains two refineries here.

Asked whether climate change is occurring, Fiorina has said she’s “not sure.” (Read more at MoJo, SF Gate)

2. Study shows that soot is influential in Arctic ice melt

A Stanford study suggests that soot is the second leading cause in global warming. Researcher Mark Jacobson says that “controlling fossil fuel soot is possibly the only method of preventing the runaway loss of the Arctic ice.”

The study finds that curbing soot emissions could reduce Arctic warming by almost 2 degrees Celsius over the next 15 years. And because soot has a short lifetime in the atmosphere, regulation control on emissions would yield quick results. “We may not be able to save the Arctic ice from disappearing but the controlling of soot will reduce the effects on the Arctic the greatest in the next 10 to 15 years,” said Jacobson.

The Stanford study appears this week in the Journal for Geophysical Research Atmospheres (Read more at Stanford News, SF Gate).

Rendering of a portion of the Alta Wind Farm, in the Mojave. (Image: Alta Wind Energy Center)

3. Giant wind power station  in the Mojave breaks ground

Windmills may not be the first thing that comes to mind when it comes to producing renewable energy in the Mojave Desert. But on Tuesday, construction began on the multibillion-dollar Alta Wind Energy Center, expected to cover thousands of acres in the Mojave. And like its renewable cousin in the Mojave, Alta Wind is dubbed the largest wind power project in the world. This mega-wind farm 75 miles north of Los Angeles is designed to produce energy for the equivalent of about 600,000 homes. It’s scheduled to be finished in the next decade (Read more at Alta Wind Energy Center, LATimes).