Are Chevron's halcyon days slipping away? For the first eight years of the 21^st century, the oil giant had a major stake in the world's most productive pipeline, which went directly to the oval office delivering an unprecedented level of influence. For the first time, the oil industry had two of their own occupying the two highest offices in the land. But their brothers and sisters in industry have been forcibly removed by the will of the people and Chevron has taken to airing a series of ads which make them appear to be a Gore-ish shade of green. This commercial is titled "Tomorrow".

The world is changing.

And how we use energy today, cannot be how we'll use it tomorrow.

There is no one solution.

It's not simply more oil, more renewables, or being more efficient.
It's all of it.

Our way of life depends on developing all forms of energy.
And to use less of it.

It's time to put our differences aside.

Will you be part of the solution? Chevron. Human Energy.

"It's time to put our differences aside?" That's a serious leap from "drill baby drill" (very last year) or the old-school Cheney "go fuck yourself."  Perhaps the latter sentiment is being reserved for the people of Ecuador.

When René Arévalo draws water from his well, it is brown and gummy, requiring him to run it through a makeshift filtering system outside his wood-plank home in the jungle outside this town.

Like thousands of other people here, he suspects the water was fouled by the waste an American oil company dumped across miles of Amazonia in its 20 years of operations. After all, he and his five children live across from a separation plant once operated by a Texaco affiliate, their house built on a mound of dirt that covered a pit where wastewater was dumped.

''If you dig here just a meter deep, you hit oil,'' Mr. Arévalo said, moments after probing into the dirt outside his house to show visitors the gooey slime. ''The water is contaminated, very contaminated. But we drink it. What else can we do?'' - New York Times, 2003

In 2001 Chevron supersized itself by purchasing Texaco. From 1964 to 1990, Texaco was the exclusive operator of an oil consortium in Ecuador, cumulatively dumping more than 18 billion gallons of toxic waste into the country's Amazon waterways.

Chevron also acquired Texaco's headaches.

In a forsaken little town in the Ecuadorean Amazon, an overgrown oil camp called Lago Agrio, the giant Chevron Corporation has been maneuvered into a makeshift courtroom and is being sued to answer for conditions in 1,700 square miles of rain forest said by environmentalists to be one of the world's most contaminated industrial sites. The pollution consists of huge quantities of crude oil and associated wastes, mixed in with the toxic compounds used for drilling operations-a noxious soup that for decades was dumped into leaky pits, or directly into the Amazonian watershed. The company that did much of this work was Texaco-an outfit with a swashbuckling reputation worldwide. It signed a contract with Ecuador in 1964, began full-scale production in 1972, and pulled out 20 years later. In 2001, Texaco was swallowed whole by Chevron, which by integrating its operations nearly doubled in size. The lawsuit against it in Lago Agrio was filed in 2003, though the legal antecedents go back much further. Having dragged on for four years, the suit may continue for half again as long. Chevron is represented by high-priced firms of experienced lawyers in Quito and Washington, D.C., whose collective fees run to millions of dollars annually. Its antagonists are 30,000 Amazonian settlers and indigenous people, who call themselves Los Afectados-the Affected Ones. These plaintiffs are represented by a low-budget but serious team of North American and Ecuadorean attorneys, who are backed by a Philadelphia law firm that is known for class-action securities litigation and has gambled that this case, though risky, can actually be won.

Chevron objects vociferously, and presents itself as the victim here. Its attorneys have repeatedly claimed that the company is being extorted for "two juicy checks," one to be divided among the plaintiffs and the other to enrich their North American lawyers. The North American lawyers are indeed working on a contingency basis, but unapologetically so, and for a percentage significantly lower than the norm in high-risk cases; they would like to be well compensated for their efforts, but as much, they say, to encourage other lawyers to bring similar suits elsewhere in the world as to pad their personal bank accounts. The most active among them is a New York-based Harvard Law School graduate named Steven Donziger, who has invested 14 years in the case and would certainly be more secure had he pursued a conventional career involving the preservation of wealth. He counterclaims that Chevron's lawyers are the real mercenaries here. It is a philosophical quarrel that will never be resolved.

As for the plaintiffs themselves, under Ecuadorean law they are not suing individually, and personally may never see a dime. They have sued to seek compensation for past damages and to force Chevron to clean up the residual mess that continues, they believe, to taint the soil and water today. It is unclear how a cleanup would proceed and to what extent it could succeed, but over decades the cost might run to $6 billion or more-making this potentially the largest environmental lawsuit ever to be fought. And fight is the word. The case has become emotional for both sides, with few signs of willingness to compromise. Worldwide the oil industry is watching. Lago Agrio is a forsaken little town where something rather large is going down. - Vanity Fair, 2007

And now, that stateside change of heart to "put our differences aside" is beginning to gain some context.

Chevron executives are renewing efforts to have Ecuador's preferential trade status with the U.S. revoked next month, although the oil company is unlikely to find a sympathetic ear with President Obama.

Chevron and its subsidiary Texaco have been locked in a legal battle in the South American country since 1993 when about 50 Ecuadorean Indian residents of Lago Agro sued Texaco, maintaining that American oil exploration and extraction had created an "Amazonian Chernobyl." Chevron executives expect an Ecuadorean court to file soon a judgment against them in the class-action suit on behalf of tens of thousands of Indians.

The company says the judgment, which could reach up to $27 billion and which Chevron says has been whipped up by populist President Rafael Correa, should give the U.S. grounds to cancel Ecuador's benefits under the Andean Trade Preferences Act.

"The only remedy is for the preferences to be suspended," Chevron spokesman Kent Robertson told The Washington Times on Wednesday. - Washington Times, 2009

You read right. Chevron is asking the American government to revoke Ecuador's trade status unless they make the lawsuit disappear.

Chevron, which has profited to the tune of more than $42 billion over the past two years is asking the United States government, in essence, for a $27 billion bailout.

Public opinion has turned remarkably uncharitable towards those who are perceived as fat cats, and oil companies have found that favorable press is hard to come by. Items like this can't help:

Scientists in the $27 billion class action lawsuit against Chevron in Ecuador's Amazon have discovered that the company manipulated laboratory results to evade a judgment at trial, lawyers for indigenous tribes announced today.

[...]

Douglas Beltman, an executive vice-president at Stratus Consulting in Boulder, said that Texaco used a laboratory test called the Toxicity Characteristic Leaching Procedure (TCLP) to measure soil contamination remaining after its purported clean-up of dozens of waste pits in Ecuador between 1995 and 1998. The TCLP test is designed to evaluate the amount of soil contamination that leaches into surrounding water, rather than the amount of contamination in the soil itself. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recommends that the TCLP test not be used for oil-contaminated soils because of unreliability.

In a remarkable finding, Beltman discovered that in Ecuador Texaco used a clean-up standard of 1,000 mg/L of oil that leaches into water from soil in the TCLP test to determine whether it had properly remediated the soil -- a threshold level physically impossible to reach because the water solubility of crude oil is typically 10 mg/L or less.

"If nothing were done at a site contaminated with pure crude oil, a sample measured using the TCLP test would still easily pass Texaco's clean-up standard," said Beltman, a former EPA scientist who made the discovery when analyzing reams of data submitted by Chevron as evidence in the trial.

"The entire Texaco clean-up was guaranteed to pass muster because of the improper use of the test, regardless of the amount of contamination," he added. - Amazon Defense Coalition press release

I contacted Kent Roberston, Chevron's Media Relations Advisor and Amazon Defense Coalition's spokesperson Karen Hinton for elaboration.

Doug Snodgrass, to Kent Robertson:

(I) would like to give Chevron an opportunity to respond to the recent claims by the legal team for for the plaintiffs that Texaco manipulated toxicity characteristic leaching procedure results between 1995 and 1998.

Any statement that you supply will not be edited or altered.

Kent Robertson, for Chevron:

1) Ecuador's government stated in 1995 that 1000 mg/LTCLP-TPH was to be used as the limit for Texaco Petroleum's remediation and it still uses the TCLP method today; and

2) The USEPA in 1988 told Congress that it used TCLP extraction results to model leachate from reserve pits as it yielded the "best data available for modeling this leachate." The full citation is: "The Agency used TCLP extraction results to model leachate from reserve pits. While uncertainties concerning the applicability of TCLP tests to leachability of reserve pits are acknowledged, the Agency believes the TCLP results were the best data available for modeling this leachate." (Environmental Protection Agency, Regulatory Determination for Oil and Gas and Geothermal Exploration, Development and Production Wastes [FRL-3403-9], 53 FR 25447, July 1988.)

More importantly, it is remarkable that the Amazon Defense Coalition would publish a statement that claims, "a threshold level physically impossible to reach because the water solubility of crude oil is typically 10 mg/L or less." In the attached file titled, "Data Tables from Plaintiffs' SA-53 Report.pdf" you will find the plaintiffs' water sample data for a site called Sacha-53. On page four of the document you will see that the plaintiffs report total petroleum hydrocarbon (TPH) results of 85 mg/L, 5.7 mg/L, 418 mg/L, and 42 mg/L. If these water analysis figures are accurate, as the plaintiffs' counsel assert, then 75 percent of the results exceed Mr. Beltman's 10 mg/L threshold. So, either their waterdata doesn't make sense or Mr. Beltman's assertion about water solubility is incorrect. They can't have it both ways -- it would be interesting to know what they have to say about the discrepancy.

More detail regarding the remediation work performed as well as the applicable standards can be found at http://www.texaco.com/sitelets/ecuador/en/PlaintiffsMyths.aspx#remediation. I've also attached a paper that reviewed Chevron's sampling protocols, including TCLP, that may be of interest.

Karen Hinton, for Amazon Defense Coalition in response to Mr. Roberston's request for ADC's response to his suggestion of a discrepancy:

1. Nowhere does Chevron deny that 1,000 mg/L TPH in a TCLP test is a scientifically indefensible standard. The point is that you can't get 1,000 mg/L TPH in a TCLP test, which means that their standard is meaningless for cleanup. They do not deny this in their comments, and that is the point. Their response on this is that the government agreed to it, but the indictments brought by the Ecuadorian prosecutor against the two Chevron lawyers and seven Ecuadorian government officials show the fraudulent nature of the cleanup agreement. See press release about the indictments at http://www.chevrontoxico.org/article.php?id=474.

2. Re: Sacha 53, Chevron is comparing apples and oranges. The results from Sacha 53 are from a field sampling study that was conducted to investigate contamination. The TCLP test is an artificial test done in a laboratory setting. The samples are produced and collected differently between the two, and aren't directly comparable because of how the data are collected.

3. Re: EPA's use of the TCLP test on reserve pits. We do not disagree that the TCLP test can be a useful test to estimate the leachability of contaminants from soils. That isn't the point of our press release. The point is that they applied a ridiculous limit (1,000 mg/L TPH) in evaluating the results of the test. This is probably too specific, but the federal register citation Chevron is quoting from is from a specific case study that EPA did, and EPA is saying that the TCLP test is the best they have to model leachate from the pits, despite the "uncertainties". Elsewhere, in their more general guidance on the use of the TCLP, EPA recommends against using the TCLP test on oily wastes. The only issue with the TCLP test is that is only measures what leaches from soil into water, but doesn't measure what's actually in the soil itself. But I don't think that this is the point, since EPA focuses on leachate in some cases as well. The point is that it is impossible to get 1,000 mg/L TPH in leachate from a TCLP test, no matter how contaminated the soil is with crude oil, which makes it a meaningless standard for cleanup.

Amazon Defense Coalition has stated that Chevron has promised a "lifetime of litigation" if they receive an unfavorable ruling. Don't expect this one to be over anytime soon.

Related Reading:
The Sad State of Somalia: Complex Issues Hit Home
"Clean Coal" Disaster 100x Worse Than Exxon Valdez



Image Credits:
www.latinamericanstudies.org