At last night’s warily watched, heavily attended Plains Exploration & Production Co. community meeting in Ladera Heights, on the seminal fracking study released last week, both sides stuck stubbornly to their pre-game scripts.
The oil drilling company insists that its unanimous and not-to-be-doubted findings are that their methods of drilling into the ground are shrink-wrap safe for human health and environmentally.
The exceedingly well-informed anti-fracking activists, who comprised most of the crowd of 250, remain darkly suspicious of both PXP’s methods and motivations.
No one who was present at the hillside Knox Presbyterian Church will be able to deny it. The contrary evidence will be overwhelming.
About every other person who entered was shlepping a video camera, and one wall was lined with such specialists.
What exists between PXP and the anti-frackers is the coldest peace between warring parties since Kelvinator and Westinghouse debated freezers while standing in a wading pool in an Alaskan blizzard.
Although hardly anyone claims to have digested the hundreds of pages examining and pretty much exonerating fracking as a threat, the distance between the largely anti-fracking public and PXP this morning remains putatively unbridgeable.
Minds in Same Positions
This was not a Scientology interlude – no overt or covert conversions were noted among the many who were fanning themselves from the outset in the warm setting.
The ostensible star of the evening was the scholarly Dr. Dan Tormey, leader of the study. He earned a Ph.D from MIT, and he sounded like it.
His densely technical, dryly delivered 65-minute summation of what he characterized as the first study of its kind in the country carried the tone of a refresher course for grad students.
One of the major contentions of activists is that the kind of fracking attributed to PXP inevitably leads to earthquakes – witness fracking outcomes in the East where unprecedented ground cleavages have been occurring.
Dr. Tormey appeared to walk a rubbery path in distinguishing the type of fracking conducted at the Inglewood Oil Field and in the East.
He allowed that the “fracking causes” charge was valid in its eastern state applications but asserted that the opposite was true here.
He said the underground activity resulting from PXP’s type of drilling registers between a minus-2 and a minus-3 on the Richter Scale, meaning it cannot be heard or supposedly cause visible damage.
That explanation did not appear to mollify sign-bearing, sticker-wearing activists.
The Company’s View
In a “Dear Neighbor” brochure distributed to the crowd as it arrived, PXP Vice President Steve Rusch, the face of the company for many years on the Westside, he attempted two answer a series of questions, including the two below:
Is PXP fracking?
“PXP is not currently conducting any high volume hydraulic fracturing operations in the Inglewood Oil Field of the type that are the focus of discussion in Pennsylvania and other parts of the country. Two high volume hydraulic fracturing hydraulic fracturing treatments were conducted in the past year to provide data for the hydraulic fracturing study (presently under discussion) as a condition of the Community Standards District lawsuit settlement.”
What is hydraulic fracturing?
“It is not a drilling technique, contrary to how it is routinely described in the news media. In reality, hydraulic fracturing is a type of ‘completion’ technique that is used to stimulate the reservoir after a well already has been drilled. Before hydraulic fracturing can begin, the drilling rig is removed from the well pad and replaced with highly specialized equipment designed to complete the well. While it may take a drilling rig two to three weeks to drill a well, the hydraulic fracturing process usually takes one or two days.”
