Neighbors Fight Plan for Newhall Power Plant

Property owners in Newhall’s Placerita Canyon have taken on one of the nation’s largest oil companies over the proposed installation of a power plant at an old oil field nearby.

Residents and their attorney maintain that the plant would spew nitrogen oxides and other harmful elements into the secluded residential area, already polluted by neighboring oil fields, killing trees and other plant life and threatening human health.

But representatives of the Tenneco Oil Co. maintain that although pollutants will be generated by the plant, pollution will be lowered in other areas of the Los Angeles basin, causing an overall improvement in air quality.

Tenneco wants to build a gas-burning “cogeneration” plant that would produce both electricity and steam for oil field use.

Neighborhood opposition caused the Los Angeles Regional Planning Commission on July 30 to postpone a decision on whether to allow the company a conditional use permit to build the facility. Commissioners plan an investigatory trip to its proposed site, near the junction of Placerita Canyon Road and Sierra Highway, on Aug. 24.

They also will examine comparable cogeneration plants before the next hearing, scheduled for 9 a.m. Sept. 25.

Hearing Officer’s Finding

Tenneco executives had appealed to the full Planning Commission to reverse a decision by a hearing officer, David W. Owen, who denied the permit after a public hearing in April.

Owen concluded that the plant would adversely affect the health, peace, comfort and welfare of people living and working in the surrounding area. He also said the plant would constitute “an industrialization of the oil field beyond the intent of the zoning” of the neighborhood, which is for agriculture and industry.

“There would be an increase to the local air pollution levels in an area that already has high air pollution levels from other oil production sources,” Owen wrote.

Laurene Weste, vice president of the Placerita Canyon Property Owners Assn., and the association’s attorney, Michael McEntee, said they agree with Owen.

Weste pointed out that the Newhall Oil Refinery already is operating a small cogeneration plant in the area and that Applied Energy Systems is in the process of building a much larger one, which earlier had caused a local controversy.

“How much can one small area take?” she asked.

McEntee said the entire Santa Clarita Valley would be affected by the plant because its surrounding mountains trap the polluted air. The area already has “some of the worst air in the United States,” McEntee asserted.

Nitrogen oxides, among other things, can destroy white blood cells, which fight disease, he said. “It’s an insidious thing,” he said.

But Jerry L. Kelly, Tenneco project manager, argued that in the long run the cogeneration plant will improve the Santa Clarita Valley’s air quality.

To obtain a permit for the facility from the South Coast Air Quality Management District, the firm agreed to reduce at other sites in the Los Angeles basin 2 1/2 times the amount of pollutants it will emit in Placerita Canyon, Kelly said. The district oversees regulation of air quality in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, and San Bernardino counties.

‘A Regional Problem’

“Air pollution is a regional problem,” he said. “There has to be a regional solution to air quality. Overall, we will be improving the air quality.”

The Santa Clarita Valley’s air quality problems mainly are the result of airborne pollution originating in other parts of the basin, which “we will be reducing,” he said.

A spokesman for the air quality district said Tenneco’s permit was obtained through an offset-credit system, which allows companies to pollute air in one neighborhood if they improve the air quality in another. Thus, regionally, the total amount of air pollution is reduced, he said.

McEntee maintains, however, that the district’s offset-credit system violates federal law because the federal air quality standards are exceeded in areas where pollution increases are allowed.

“Federal law is supreme law,” he said. “Local agencies have no power to violate federal air standards. The local system of credits has no legal justification.”

In addition to complaining about pollution, property owners say the proposed 42-megawatt cogeneration system, powered by gas turbines similar to jet engines used in aircraft, will be too noisy.

In response, Kelly said the nearest home is more than half a mile away from the site, which is buffered by a mountain. He said the company has conducted noise tests that showed that the “people of Placerita Canyon will not be able to hear” the plant.

Weste said she objects to what she considers a reindustrialization of the area and the 60-foot-tall smokestacks that would be installed at the plant.

Kelly denied the plant represents reindustrialization.

“The oil field has been there for 70 years,” he said. There are several other operators in the 20,000-acre oil field, he pointed out. “We just lease a portion of the field,” Kelly said.

Since Tenneco began operating in the area in 1985, the company has spent $8 million in improving the property, he said. He said another $1.8 million will be spent to remove old, dilapidated equipment and to plant a greenbelt, including ground cover and 35 trees, between the smokestacks and the Antelope Valley Freeway.

Tenneco needs the plant to generate steam to pump into the ground to warm thick oil reserves in the old field to make them flow more easily, Kelly said.

The project will produce steam and at the same time generate electricity, 2% of which will be used in Tenneco’s oil field operations, with the remainder to be sold to the Southern California Edison Co., he said.

‘It’s More Efficient’

Kelly said the company would not need a permit if it used the steam solely to thin its oil, but much of its energy would be wasted. “It’s more efficient to generate steam and electricity,” he said. “Cogeneration is something that’s encouraged by power companies and the government.”

Property owners hired an energy consultant, Morris Deason of Environmental Consultants Ltd. of Saugus, who concluded that the cumulative effects of the Applied Energy Systems and Tenneco cogeneration plants could, under the right weather conditions, cause severe pollution, such as acid rain and serious smog, in the Placerita Canyon area.

The property owners are paying Deason and McEntee with a portion of the $500,000 they received from Applied Energy Systems to help clean up the air in the area, in return for their dropping their opposition to that cogeneration plant.

Tenneco has offered the property owners’ association $250,000 for the same purpose.

Cogeneration plants release nitrogen oxides, as do automobiles and other sources. The oxides are produced when organic fuels like gasoline, diesel fuel or coal are burned. Once released, the chemicals combine with water vapor in the air to form nitric acid, a key component of acid rain. One of the oxides of nitrogen also reacts with oxygen to produce ozone, a pollutant at low altitudes.