Lawsuit for Our Livable Future

This fundraiser has ended; thank you everyone for your support!!!

Help Set a Statewide Precedent! No Drilling in Contra Costa

 

Our state oil and gas regulators have just expanded an oil drilling operation in Contra Costa, in our own backyard, within the very 3,200′ setback distance they’re proposing for new oil drilling—and they’re prohibiting any public review! The only recourse is to sue, which is exactly what our allies in Sunflower Alliance have done. They’ve hired a great legal team to pursue this.

 

Now is your chance to help fund lawyers to fight this terrible precedent and support organizing to stop oil and gas drilling in Contra Costa and beyond!

 

Background:

 

CalGEM, the California Geologic Energy Management agency, has approved a Class II injection well across from the active oil drilling site on Deer Valley Road in unincorporated Antioch. This drill pad is a half mile from Dozier-Libbey High School, the Kaiser Antioch Medical Center, and pending senior housing. Kaiser patients, high school students, and elders are all considered “sensitive receptors,” those most adversely impacted by toxic emissions from oil and gas wells.

 

Please donate now to help cover legal expenses, and support further climate organizing.

 

CalGEM issued a CEQA exemption for the project that involves repurposing a 50 year-old plugged and abandoned dry gas well for its brand new use as an injection well for the waste water that’s coming up with the oil extracted across the road. The CEQA exemption designates this resurrection of a plugged and abandoned well—first permitted in 1972—as part of the “ongoing” drilling project just permitted in 2019. This is a violation of CEQA requirements and is a terrible precedent, as there are 273 plugged and abandoned wells in Contra Costa that could be similarly reactivated without public review.

 

Going forward we will also have to deal with a circa-1982 Aquifer Exemption in place for the site. Waste water injection is frequently used as a method of enhanced oil recovery and is known to threaten groundwater integrity, among other serious problems, and it demands much closer evaluation than CalGEM is giving it.

 

Many thanks for your support in this important local struggle to end oil and gas drilling!