Energy & Environment — White House touts final oil reserve release 

The Biden administration is touting the final release from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve of the 180 million barrels it announced in March.

Meanwhile, the Interior Department is announcing its first West Coast offshore wind lease sale, and a new analysis has found most waterways it surveyed containing “forever chemicals.”

This is Overnight Energy & Environment, your source for the latest news focused on energy, the environment and beyond. For The Hill, we’re Rachel Frazin and Zack Budryk.

US to release 15M oil barrels from strategic reserve

The White House is touting the release of 15 million barrels of oil from the country’s strategic reserve — expected to officially be announced by President Biden on Wednesday — as it faces headwinds from high gasoline prices.

• The 15 million barrels of oil is the final part of a 180-million-barrel release announced in March, and does not constitute a further release.
  
• Nevertheless, a White House fact sheet listed the action as one that would “take additional action to strengthen energy security, address the supply crunch, and lower costs.” 

A gas price resurgence in recent weeks — linked to factors including refinery outages and production cuts from OPEC+ — has turned up the heat on the White House.  

It is once again facing prices near $4 per gallon ahead of the midterms. While presidential policies have limited impacts on gasoline prices, the high costs are still expected to be a political liability for the party in power.  

In addition, the White House detailed a new strategy for eventually purchasing oil to replenish the stockpile. It said it would aim to do so when prices are at or below the $67 to $72 per barrel range.

Currently, the U.S. benchmark for crude oil — a major factor in the price of gasoline — is around $84 per barrel.  

Asked about the possibility of restricting fuel exports during a call with reporters, an administration official said they were keeping all of their options open, but did not explicitly endorse or condemn the idea.

Read more here.

Interior unveils first Pacific offshore wind lease sale

The Interior Department on Tuesday announced the first offshore wind lease sale off the west coast of the U.S., set for Dec. 6 off the coast of California.

• The sale will incorporate five lease areas with a total capacity to generate 4.5 gigawatts of wind energy, the department said in an announcement Tuesday.
  
• Three of the areas are off the central cost of California, while two are off the state’s northern coast. 

The agency said wind farms in these areas could be able to eventually produce enough energy to power more than 1.5 million homes.  

“Today’s announcement represents years of close coordination and engagement with the state of California, Tribes, ocean users, local communities and all interested parties to move us closer towards achieving the administration’s vision to fight climate change and realizing California’s clean energy future, while creating a domestic supply chain and good-paying union jobs,” Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) Director Amanda Lefton said in a statement.

“BOEM remains committed to ensuring transparency and active engagement with stakeholders throughout the post-leasing process.” 

The Biden administration has set a broader goal of 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy by the end of the decade, with a plan to eventually install wind power up and down the east, west and Gulf coasts. 

Read more about the announcement here.  

SOUTHWEST FIRES AND FLOODS THREATEN DRINKING WATER

Las Vegas, N.M., was running out of clean water.  

The city — not to be confused with the Nevada metropolis — was the victim of a combination of flame and flood that put its water supply, as well as that of multiple communities in the Southwest, in serious jeopardy.  

A wildfire, in this instance one that started off as a planned burn by the U.S. Forest Service but got out of control, left behind ash and debris. And then there was the flooding.  

“Our water comes off the Gallinas River, and the Gallinas River was contaminated following the fire and then the floods that brought all that sediment and metals and chemicals and everything down into the river, making the water untreatable by our treatment system,” Maria Gilvarry, the city’s utilities director, told The Hill in an August interview.   

At the time, she said the city only had 35 days’ worth of water left.   

In a follow-up interview this month, Gilvarry said that at one point the city got down to only 21 days’ worth of water.

While the Southwest region has always been defined by a cyclical weather pattern of drought and monsoon, climate change is making each more intense and variable — creating both drier, longer droughts and more intense rains that can ravage landscapes while failing to do much to return greatly needed water to a region.

Read more here, from Rachel and The Hill’s Saul Elbein. 

Analysis: 83% of waterways contaminated with PFAS

More than 83 percent of U.S. waterways recently sampled in a nationwide survey were contaminated by cancer-linked “forever chemicals,” a new analysis has revealed.

• Out of 114 rivers and creeks assessed across the country, 95 showed detectable levels of these toxic compounds, according to the analysis, conducted by the Waterkeeper Alliance.
  
• Nearly all these waterways were contaminated by at least one type of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) — of which there are thousands — while multiple PFAS compounds were present in most of the samples, the study determined. 

In some spots — such as the creeks connected to the Potomac River in Maryland, the Lower Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania and the Niagara River in New York — contamination levels were thousands to hundreds of thousands times higher than what experts have deemed safe for drinking water, the researchers warned. 

“When we began testing waterways for PFAS earlier this year, we knew that our country had a significant PFAS problem, but these findings confirm that was an understatement,” Marc Yaggi, CEO of Waterkeeper Alliance, said in a statement.  

A reminder: Known for their presence in jet fuel firefighting foam and industrial discharge, PFAS are also key ingredients in a variety of household products. 

Living up to their “forever chemical” epithet, these compounds tend to linger in both the human body and the environment. They have been linked to many illnesses, such as thyroid disease, kidney cancer and testicular cancer. 

The methodology: 

• While the survey was a nationwide effort, the work on the ground occurred via 113 local Waterkeeper branches, which took samples in 34 states and in the District of Columbia this past May through July.
  
• The groups took a total of 228 samples from 114 rivers and creeks in these territories and ran laboratory analyses for 55 types of PFAS, according to the study. The researchers said they identified 35 of the 55 individual PFAS in at least one sampled waterway. 

Read more here, from The Hill’s Sharon Udasin.  

NJ LATEST STATE TO SUE OVER CLIMATE CHANGE 

New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin (D) on Tuesday announced a lawsuit against five fossil fuel companies and the American Petroleum Institute (API), alleging they misled the public on their products’ role in climate change. 

In the lawsuit, Platkin and the state Department of Environmental Protection and Division of Consumer Affairs alleged Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, ConocoPhillips, Shell and API “systematically conceal[ed] and den[ied]” knowledge of fossil fuels’ role in climate change. The lawsuit further accuses the defendants of mounting public relations campaigns to cast doubt on the facts of climate change despite their knowledge of the industry’s contributions to it. 

The lawsuit cites documented instances of implied knowledge of climate change by the defendants dating back decades, such as investments in raised oil platforms to account for sea-level rise and a 1973 Exxon patent for a cargo ship that could break through sea ice.

Even further back, the plaintiffs allege, the company that would eventually become ConocoPhillips obtained a patent in 1966 for an early form of carbon sequestration technology.

Emissions from greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, are the predominant driver of climate change. 

The plaintiffs further accuse the defendants of ongoing greenwashing, or misrepresenting the environmental benefits of their products and services, despite an analysis indicating that between 2010 and 2018 none of the companies spent more than 2.3 percent of total capital on low-carbon energy. 

Defendants’ responses:  

• API: “The record of the past two decades demonstrates that the industry has achieved its goal of providing affordable, reliable American energy to U.S. consumers while substantially reducing emissions and our environmental footprint. Any suggestion to the contrary is false.”
  
• Chevron called the complaint “a special-interest lawsuit asking the Superior Court of New Jersey to punish a select group of energy companies for a problem that is the result of worldwide conduct stretching back to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.”
  
• Exxon: “Legal proceedings like this waste millions of dollars of taxpayer money and do nothing to advance meaningful actions that reduce the risks of climate change.” 
  
  

WHAT WE’RE READING

• Pollution still flows through Clean Water Act loophole (E&E News) 
• Government Scientists Make Breakthrough in Recycling Plastics That End Up In Landfills (Vice) 
• California Passed a Landmark Law About Plastic Pollution. Why Are Some Environmentalists Still Concerned? (Inside Climate News) 
• U.S. Permian oil production forecast to hit record in November -EIA (Reuters) 
• A new study shows just how awful California’s wildfire smoke is for the climate (The Los Angeles Times) 
  
  

That’s it for today, thanks for reading. Check out The Hill’s Energy & Environment page for the latest news and coverage. We’ll see you tomorrow.