LOS ANGELES — After years of complaints from Los Angeles residents living near active oil and gas drilling operations, the Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday voted to ban new oil and gas wells and eliminate of existing wells over a period of five years.
“Today is the day we begin to take back land across the city that can be used for productive and positive community purposes,” Council Member Paul Krekorian said before the vote at City Hall. “Today is the day we stand up for families and stand up against the oil and gas industry and its profit motive.”
LA is home to the highest concentration of urban oilfields in the country, with 700 active drilling sites, many near homes, schools, hospitals and businesses. Recent estimates suggest that 500,000 city residents live within half a mile of a well, exposing them to various health risks from air pollution and product use. toxic chemicals.
“I’ve lived my whole life on the front lines of neighborhood oil drilling,” Wilmington resident Ashley Hernandez said at the event at City Hall. “I had nosebleeds while I was playing at school, I had teachers who got sick, I had an eye infection that caused me to miss weeks of school.”
These experiences led her to become an organizer with the environmental justice group Communities for a Better Environment – part of a coalition of activists known as STAND LA, or Stand Together Against Neighborhood Drilling, which has spent most of the past decade lobbying the municipal government to ban oil and gas wells.
“The most important thing coming from my community is not oil,” Hernandez said after telling stories of a classmate who had to run beside a drilling operation while carrying an inhaler. and other people in his neighborhood who suffered from asthma or even worse – cancer. “It’s us, the people, who are leading our city towards a better and just future.”
Council Member Krekorian and Council Speaker Nury Martinez introduced the measure to ban oil and gas drilling in December 2020, although the idea has its roots in a motion that City Council members Mike Bonin and Paul Koretz introduced in 2013 to ban hydraulic fracturing in Los Angeles.
“We didn’t know what we didn’t know,” Koretz said Wednesday, adding that the STAND LA coalition of environmental justice groups “worked with us to show that neighborhood oil drilling of all kinds across the city was the real problem we had to solve”. to resolve.
Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing of bedrock to extract oil or gas, was not a common practice among oil producers in Los Angeles, according to Richard Parks. The president of the STAND LA member group Redeemer Community Partnership in South Los Angeles said acidification, or the use of acid, was the problem.
“They’re pumping this under pressure into the wells, and they’re doing it right next to houses, 10 feet from bedroom windows,” said Parks, who lived next to Murphy’s active drilling site and the drilling site. Jefferson recently closed for over 30 years. “The ambient acid fumes were so intense that they scorched plants in the downwind corner of these drill sites. If that’s what it does to plants, we know pretty well what it does to us.
Parks said his group would like to see parkland and affordable housing built on the two sites, which together span about five acres, and have workers from those sites retrained to do oil rig cleanup.
The city of Los Angeles is part of a larger movement in the state to more tightly regulate fossil fuel production. Last year, the California Geologic Energy Management Division, which regulates oil and gas production, proposed banning new gas and oil wells within 3,200 feet of hospitals, homes and schools.
Los Angeles has been producing oil since 1892, when Edward Doheny and Charles Canfield drilled the first well in Echo Park, helping the city produce a quarter of the world’s oil in the early 20th century.
With today’s vote, LA is the first city in the nation to make oil and gas production an off-label land use. Drilling rights will no longer qualify for exceptions to zoning orders.
The California Independent Petroleum Association, which represents about 400 oil and gas companies in the state, opposes the ban.
“Shutting down domestic power generation not only puts Californians out of work and cuts taxes that pay for vital services, but makes us more dependent on imported foreign oil from Saudi Arabia and Iraq that is trucked in tanker in the crowded Port of Los Angeles,” CIPA CEO Rock Zierman said. said in response to Wednesday’s vote.
California is the second largest consumer of petroleum products in the United States, accounting for 10% of the country’s overall consumption, he said.
“The proposed production ban would disrupt citizens’ supply chains by forcing California to import even more oil from foreign sources, which would significantly increase the greenhouse gases associated with meeting Californians’ oil demand. .”
