Oil can look better up close than from afar.
A spill at Chevron’s Cymric field in Kern County, Calif., illustrates the proposition.
When 28,000 bbl of crude and water began seeping in May from an abandoned well apparently damaged during cement reinforcement, response from a distance was harsh.
“California can put a stop to the inevitability of oil spills by intentionally transitioning away from oil extraction,” said Sierra Club California Director Kathryn Phillips.
Indeed, the state Assembly is considering a setback bill that would hamper drilling.
Sierra Club California and the legislature are in Sacramento.
In tiny McKittrick near Cymric field, Louis Sahagun of the Los Angeles Times found a different perspective.
Compared with the Exxon Valdez and Macondo spills, “Our little outbreak is nothing,” one patron of a McKittrick bar told Sahagun, who wrote a nicely balanced article published Aug. 2.
The California Department of Conservation said an earthen dam confined released Cymric fluids to a dry creek. The damaged well continued leaking intermittently.
Most fluids were promptly collected.
The department said no one was injured. Wildlife and water supplies suffered no damage.
Outside the San Joaquin Valley, worry simmered about long-term human exposure to remaining oil.
But McKittrick residents didn’t share the anxiety.
“I know that Chevron is out there cleaning things up,” a retired oil field worker told Sahagun from his McKittrick home. “They know what they’re doing. If it was a danger to the people living here, they would have notified us.”
He experienced other releases during his 40-year career, including one that flowed for miles in a ravine.
“That problem got fixed right away,” he recalled.
Local economics inevitably shapes views.
Environmentalists, said the tippler unconcerned about “our little outbreak,” are using the Cymric release “as an excuse to shut down California’s oil industry and wipe us out.”
That’s because from Sacramento, where environmentalists make their money, oil in a ditch looks nastier than it does in McKittrick, where oil workers make theirs.
(From the subscription area of www.ogj.com, posted Aug. 2, 2019. To comment, join the Commentary channel at www.ogj.com/oilandgascommunity.)
Bob Tippee | Editor
Bob Tippee, Editor of Oil & Gas Journal, has written the weekly magazine's editorials since 1981. Since 1996, he also has written a weekly online feature called "Editor's Perspective," which appears first on OGJ Online and later in the print magazine. A member of the OGJ staff since 1977, Tippee has been chief editor since January 1999. He holds a degree in journalism from the University of Tulsa.