Hooray for residents in a small Tulare County town who stopped an energy project | Opinion
Chalk one up for the little guy: The residents of Pixley in Tulare County are forcing an energy company to decide whether it wants to do an environmental review for a proposed hydrogen production plant.
A review, I might add, that should have been done from the start, no question, full stop.
Like many small communities located on Highway 99 in the San Joaquin Valley, Pixley is home to low-income farm workers. According to a report by the Fresno-based Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability, 70% of Pixley’s 3,800 residents live below twice the federal poverty level, which is an annual income of $31,200. More than half of the population is in “linguistic isolation,” meaning living in a household with limited English-speaking skills.
When it comes to pollution, Pixley is also sadly notable. As to bad water quality, Pixley is in the 100th percentile — meaning the worst. The local groundwater basin is already overdrafted, with more water being pumped out than is naturally replenished.
Residents also deal with air choked by pesticides, particulates and ozone. The town is in the 96th percentile for the overall pollution burden. The asthma rate 48% higher than the rest of the state, while Pixley’s rate of heart disease is 73.6% higher than all other census tracts in the state.
Against this backdrop is the proposal to build a plant in Pixley that would manufacture hydrogen for use as a fuel, mostly by public transportation, big-rig trucks and machinery at ports.
Hydrogen is viewed by California Gov. Gavin Newsom as a clean-burning fuel of the future. The state was awarded $1.2 billion by the federal Department of Energy to become a “hydrogen hub” intended to reduce fossil-fuel pollution and instead expand clean energy.
The byproduct of using hydrogen as fuel is water. But transporting hydrogen, as proposed from the Pixley plant, requires lots of truck trips. If those are diesel-burning trucks, bad air quality impacts would result. The production process will also create carbon dioxide emissions.
Pixley residents sue
The Pixley Residents for Environmental Justice sued Tulare County last March because an environmental review had not been done. Then in early December the county supervisors withdrew their approval for the 28-acre project known as the Golden State Hydrogen Plant.
The county’s original position was that the plant, proposed by Phoenix-based Proteum Energy, fit under a manufacturing zoning already in place, and did not require an environmental review. Leadership Counsel argued that the project represented a heavy industrial use with all kinds of likely impacts that, under state requirements, needed to be studied so mitigation measures could be made to protect Pixley’s residents..
Rather than go to court, county officials chose to rescind their approval. Vida en el Valle staff writer María Ortiz-Briones reported that Aaron Bock, assistant director of economic development and planning for Tulare County, said Proteum Energy would have to include a “more robust environmental document” in any reapplication in order to advance the project.
John Rosenfeld, a Proteum vice president, said his company “would engage with the community going forward. We want to make sure that we understand what their concerns are.” Too bad the county and the firm chose not to do that at the outset.
Proteum must identify impacts
The concerns listed by Leadership Counsel in its report are many. Among them are:
▪ No study has been made of how many truck trips would be made daily to transport hydrogen produced by the plant. Those truck deliveries will result in air pollution.
▪ Producing hydrogen requires a lot of water. The Pixley basin is already overdrafted and subject to state rules for pumping. Plus the local water is in a region polluted by nitrates from farming fertilizers.
▪ Gas turbines could be used to generate power for hydrogen production. That adds to the air pollution.
▪ The property where Proteum wants to build its plant is close to a refinery, the highway and a train line. Pollution impacts get magnified with such co-location of industries.
Whether hydrogen is indeed the fuel of the future is also to be determined. There is some skepticism in science circles that it will actually work as well as proponents think.
For now, Newsom is excited by hydrogen’s promise. Certainly it is worth further study. But that means understanding all the possible impacts, including to the people living in Pixley.
Kudos to the residents of Pixley for owning their responsibility to speak up in their own best interest. Now it is up to Tulare County leaders to also do what is best for their Pixley constituents. That means requiring an environmental report that gives a fair and complete assessment of Golden State Hydrogen’s impacts.
This story was originally published December 31, 2024 at 5:30 AM.
