Recent Articles
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Oil Industry Methane Pollution Is Business as Usual, Not Accidental

The oil industry is once again winning the messaging war to mislead the public about the true nature of its business. Methane is getting significant media attention these days due to the launch of a new methane-detecting satellite and new U.S. methane regulations that may require some companies to pay fines for large methane emissions. However, almost all of the media coverage is making the mistake of talking about methane “leaks” or “fugitive emissions” being the main problem, when that is far from the truth.

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U.S. Oil Industry Peaks as “the days of easy oil are over”

In October, shortly after Exxon and Chevron announced over $100 billion in combined acquisitions, oilfield services company Halliburton’s CEO Jeff Miller warned about the reality of producing oil in the U.S. shale industry.
“The reality is you have to do more work in order to stay flat.”This is an acknowledgement of the dreaded Red Queen effect for shale oil production. This is the situation where you have to do more just to keep production flat (aka running faster just to stay in place) because fracked shale oil wells decline much faster than conventional oil wells. This isn’t a new concept. Reuters reported on it in 2013 saying, “Shale production has been likened to Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen Race, in which more and more new wells will need to be drilled just to offset rapidly declining output from existing holes.”

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Touring Ground Zero of the Methane Emergency

March 12 – Flying into Midland, Texas on my quest to see the source of the Permian’s high methane emissions, I was greeted by familiar images. As the plane descends into Midland, you see endless shale oil wells in grid formation across the Texas desert. I’ve used similar images for my articles over the years but it was the first time seeing it in person. The only thing that surprised me was the amount of waste water pits. The only standing water in this part of the Texas desert is toxic oil field wastewater. It’s everywhere. They are creating so much toxic wastewater producing oil in the Permian that they have nowhere to put it. I first wrote about this issue in 2018 and it continues to be a big problem for the fracking industry. And the “solutions” they have, like injecting the toxic water back into the ground, definitely have consequences.

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Exxon’s $20 Billion Fraud Lawsuit Continues

In March of 2019, U.S. oil major Chevron announced it planned to make investments in its Permian oil operations that would increase its production of oil and other liquids to 900,000 barrels per day (bpd) by 2023. Approximately 95 minutes later, Exxon announced that it planned to reach one million bdp by 2024. Was Exxon responding to Chevron’s plan with a hasty public relations stunt not based in the reality of its Permian acreage? Now that it is 2024, it seems worth evaluating. Along with reviewing the status of the ongoing fraud lawsuit focused on that one million bpd prediction which looks at the question of whether, “ExxonMobil portrayed its oil and gas assets in the Permian Basin as more valuable than they were.”
Exxon’s optimism about its Permian operations didn’t stop in 2019. In March of 2020, Neil Chapman, the head of Exxon’s oil and gas division told the audience at the annual Investor Day conference that, “For our largest resource, which is in the Delaware Basin [located in the Permian], we’re only just about to unleash the hounds.”

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East Palestine Rail Disaster Example of Much Broader Regulatory Failure in US

In the 1901 annual report of the Commissioner of Railroads for the state of Michigan, the author mentioned that “Railroad rules have been written in blood.” The idea was that safety rules were only implemented when enough blood had been spilled.

As we reach the one year anniversary of the East Palestine rail disaster, no new safety regulations are in place to prevent the next such disaster. While no blood was spilled in this disaster, a lot of polyvinyl chloride was and it resulted in the town being poisoned. This despite the National Transportation Safety Board stating that the East Palestine rail disaster was “100% preventable.” The lack of new safety regulations isn’t because none were proposed. A bipartisan Rail Safety Bill was introduced by U.S. Senators Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and JD Vance (R-OH) and while it was immediately watered down and does not address the real ways to vastly improve rail safety, it was a start. Even that was not acceptable to the corporations that profit from unsafe rail transport of hazardous materials in the U.S. The lack of new rail regulations is more confirmation of the broader issue of the current failed regulatory system in America.

Mentions in the Media

“Justin Mikulka is a great reporter who’s been on the energy beat for more than a decade and this piece draws attention to the incredibly important point that in addition to using the atmosphere as its dumping ground, the fossil fuel industry uses the literal earth as its dumping ground too, leaving taxpayers to clean up the mess of abandoned and idle wells that dot the country.” Amy Westervelt, Drilled

This Intercept article includes several references to my oil train work.

“While the trains are still burning, they’re rebuilding the rails,” Mikulka told Grist. “It’s again an excellent example of how they put profit over public safety.”

“Every potential opportunity to exploit oil and gas reserves in this country has been looked at in detail by experienced professionals,” said Justin Mikulka, a research fellow at the energy-transition think tank New Consensus. “We now have some people with no experience who are looking for a lot of public money to do this project, which raises a red flag. They will get paid handsomely if they are able to pull it off — that doesn’t mean it’s a good financial investment.”

“Economically, as a long-term investment, you want to be in green hydrogen,” said Mikulka of New Consensus. “And so I think that there’s a lot of risk in pursuing these blue hydrogen projects.” 

“Getting the world to use blue hydrogen made from natural gas gives the oil and gas industry a way to lock in decades of natural gas demand via blue hydrogen,” Mikulka said.

I was on Democracy Now to discuss my Intercept op-ed on the need for the U.S. to build a green steel industry and stop relying on imports from Russia and Ukraine.

I talked to Stephanie Mencimer from Mother Jones for this article about the ill-advised oil train project in Utah.

Bill McKibben references my recent article in his recent piece in the New Yorker.

The Intercept writes about how the rail lobbying group (Association of American Railroads) targeted me and my work and submitted it to security agencies. The truth is apparently a real threat to them.

My articles have also appeared in In These Times, The Intercept, DeSmog, Drilled News, EcoWatch, Naked Capitalism, Real Clear Markets, Truthout, Energy Post (Europe), Nation of Change and The Contributor.

Contact: mikulka@gmail.com