Former employees say the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality gutted the unit soon after the fracking boom swept the state oil industry. The operation never returned to what it was before.
, a unit of air pollution specialists based at agency headquarters in Austin. The TCEQ claims the effort is stronger than it’s ever been, but anof 20 years of agency records and interviews with former employees show it’s only a shadow of what it used to be.
“They just completely changed philosophies,” said Doty, who left the TCEQ in 2018 and now works as a private consultant monitoring pollution for environmental groups in Texas. “Currently, TCEQ has one of the largest mobile monitoring fleets among state regulatory agencies,” TCEQ spokesperson Victoria Cann said in a written response to questions from Inside Climate News. “TCEQ uses a variety of approaches, equipment, and staff located across the state to perform monitoring operations.”
Regional investigators, often hired out of college with bachelor’s degrees, make up the infantry of the TCEQ, producing thousands of rapid on-site air quality investigations every year — the primary metric by which the agency is judged by state lawmakers. Yet from their introduction in late 2021 to Sept. 3, 2024, the new regional mobile monitoring vans contributed to just 195 of these investigations, according to agency records.
“We weren’t aware of any study that TCEQ has conducted in Channelview,” said Carolyn Stone, founder of the Channelview Health and Improvement Coalition community group. “They have not provided us with any kind of findings.” Also in recent years, the mobile monitoring team spent time in the Permian Basin, the nation’s top producing oilfield, whereof hydrogen sulfide poisoning in October 2019. Six weeks after that, the monitoring team completed its first of four weeklong projects over subsequent years studying hydrogen sulfide, a ubiquitous oilfield gas that is highly flammable and can be instantly fatal at high concentrations., on Oct.
“Although hydrogen sulfide concentrations were detected above regulatory limits by mobile monitoring vehicles, a specific source was not identified,” Cann said.The TCEQ holds a daunting mandate: to enforce federal and state environmental laws in Texas, home of the nation’s oil and gas industry and its leading fossil fuel producer. Headed by a panel of officials appointed by Republican Gov.
“TCEQ’s dedicated employees work long and hard to ensure the protection of public health and the environment,” Cann said. “The agency’s commitment to follow and execute the laws set out by the Legislature is not compromised in any way by its employees — former or present.”Twenty years ago, a robust mobile monitoring team used to make regular visits to Texas’ biggest industrial hubs.
“They got rid of that,” Stanley said, referring to the upwind-downwind monitoring. “There was a lot of reduction in services that you could see coming.” “Assessment of the Barnett Shale Formation became a priority for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, and efforts were focused on identifying specific natural gas and oil production emission sources,” read a report co-authored by Doty, the former mobile monitoring team leader.
Doty remembers the day he was called into the chief auditor’s office to discuss the allegations, which came from someone in his division. But unbeknownst to the public, TCEQ officials also slowly killed the mobile monitoring team responsible for those findings. Rather, Cann said, the mobile monitoring team was combined with the agency’s emergency response team in 2010, part of a larger agency reorganization.
“We just stopped being able to go out and do things. said, ‘You’re not doing that anymore, that’s not federally mandated.'”“When I left, the team was pretty much disbanded and they hired a lot of high-level managers’ friends,” he said. “They hired other people that didn’t have degrees or any experience whatsoever, then they gave them a lot more money.”under the Office of Compliance and Enforcement, now under new management.
“We were never allowed to go back and sit and sample in those peak areas to see if it was just one off, or if it was going on for hours, days and weeks,” the former employee said. “We’d write up a little thing saying we went and did surveys, we saw some stuff and there was no problem.” For example, in 2019 a petroleum tank farm outside Houston caught fire, sending a massive black plume of smoke over the city for days. The mobile monitoring team jumped into action. Two vans spent almost two months patrolling neighborhoods east of Houston, searching for chemicals in the air.
“There were no other detections of benzene above 1 ppm reported in the community during the response,” the report said. The mobile monitoring team also conducted test surveys in 2021 around refinery complexes of Beaumont and Houston for the purpose of comparing its results with the companies’ monitor data. Those projects did not generate reports.
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