Amid Heatwave, Texas Firms Vented Vast Quantities of Toxins

On June 21, WTG South Permian Midstream burned about 7,000 pounds of carbon monoxide, 2,600 pounds of nitrogen oxide and 1,200 pounds of VOCs due to “high gas temperature in the sales line.” On June 26 the same company burned  off 5,200 pounds of carbon monoxide and 2,000 pounds of nitrogen oxide because of “restricted flow due to high discharge gas temperature causing the recompressor shutdown.”

Initial reports of emissions quantities are only estimates, said TCEQ spokesperson Victoria Cann, and may be revised up to two weeks after the event. After that, the agency will determine whether to enforce environmental law. 

TCEQ typically allows companies that emit excess pollutants to cite an “affirmative defense” and argue that the emissions were beyond their control because of unforeseeable circumstances. The agency says it “carefully considers the facts” in deciding whether excess emissions were unavoidable.

Cann said TCEQ rules “require operators to be accountable for good operation and maintenance practices, and those rules do not extend an affirmative defense to any activity or event that could have been foreseen and avoided or planned for.”

“TCEQ may pursue enforcement actions when appropriate against regulated entities which may include the assessment of a penalty,” Cann said. 

A 2017 report by the Environmental Integrity Project and Environment Texas found that TCEQ penalizes only about three percent of unauthorized emissions events each year. 

A 2023 report by the Environmental Integrity Project identified 21,769 instances of unauthorized pollution in Texas between 2016 and 2022, but found that in “only one half of one percent of these incidents did the state use its legal authority to require the companies to analyze the cause of the problem and take concrete action to avoid these pollution releases in the future.”

“The TCEQ has been unwilling to require industry to do better,” that report said. 

Luke Metzger, executive director of the nonprofit Environment Texas, said that state authorities should require sufficient insulation on oil and gas facilities to avoid temperature-related pollution. 

“Many companies avoid making health and safety investments to their facilities to reduce costs and maximize profits, leaving Texans to hold the bag of pollution and blackouts,” he said. 

Metzger also noted that about 10 gigawatts of power generation was unavailable to Texas’ electrical grid during the heatwave, driven largely by interruptions of gas supply. 

“These facilities not only pollute during extreme temperatures, they often fail to deliver gas to the power plants which need it,” he said. “This demonstrates the vulnerability of our gas infrastructure to extreme weather, whether it’s hot or cold.”

Gas supply also failed in 2021 during Winter Storm Uri, which caused catastrophic grid failure in Texas, according to Virginia Palacios, executive director of Commission Shift, a watchdog group for Texas’ oilfield regulator, the Texas Railroad Commission. 

Nonetheless, she said, lawmakers in Texas’ recent legislative session focused on subsidies for the gas sector in order to boost grid resilience. 

“That goal was misguided because natural gas infrastructure is subject to failure during extreme weather,” Palacios said. “Too many Texas legislators are blindly pushing natural gas as the ultimate fuel without following the data.”

Targa Resources, one of the largest midstream companies in the Permian Basin, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

According to Andrew Wheat, research director for Texans for Public Justice, the company has made campaign contributions to oil regulators on the Texas Railroad Commission, who have also traded the company’s stock. 

“Our state oil and gas agency is captured by the companies it is supposed to oversee,” Wheat said.  “These conflicts of interest lead to long term sustained negligence by companies who know that there is no state agency that will penalize them for breaking the rules.”

The Railroad Commission did not respond to a request for comment.