The Hyperion Project: Health risks largely unknown
By Michele Linck, Journal staff writer | Posted: Saturday, May 24, 2008
Harland and Arlinda Gylfe stand with their two children, Ashley and Cecil, on May 16 at their farm which will be within a 1/2 mile of the Hyperion site. The couple wonder how affected their ground water they use for drinking will be since some toxins will be produced by the plant. (Staff photo by Jerry Mennenga)
ELK POINT, S.D. -- The inside joke at Arlinda and Harland Gylfe's home is, "Hey, wanna buy a house?"
It's a coping mechanism. The Gylfes are more than a little worried about what Arlinda calls "my little piece of earth," the 11-acre home site where they have lived for 10 years. It's where their two youngest children, Ashley, 13, and Cecil, 9, help raise about 30 bottle calves and a couple of dozen hogs, and it’s where Arlinda photographs migrating geese and ducks each year as they rest on nearby Brule Creek.
The acreage lies off 317th Street in a notch of land near the south side of the 3,226 acres where Hyperion Resources' proposed oil refinery/energy plant would be built.
It's what an oil refinery might do to her family's well water that most concerns Arlinda Gylfe.
"Benzene, for one," she said of a known cancer-causing element found in all petroleum products. "And anything seeping in. Your family drinks this water. Any kind of spillage is a real concern. How would you clean it out?"
"Out of good conscience, I don't think I could ever sell my house to anybody," Gylfe said.
The Gylfes aren't the only ones worried about the environmental impacts an oil refinery would have. Forty-one percent of 340 registered voters in Union County said in a Journal poll conducted April 29 that they "strongly" or "somewhat" agree that "the refinery's emissions would impose a serious health hazard."
But quantifying or defining those hazards is difficult, making the decision about whether to vote yes or no June 3 on Hyperion’s request to rezone ag land for the refinery all the more challenging.
Will technology make a difference?
Hyperion has filed an air-quality permit application with the South Dakota Department of Environment and Natural Resources, but very little is known about how the plant would operate and what those operations would mean for the environment and health of the region. In fact, if the rezoning proposal is approved, its likely Union County residents won’t have access to much of the specific data and information opponents have asked for until the state and federal permitting process begins.
The DENR has said the permitting process will be open to public scrutiny and comment.
Hyperion officials say the refinery will be “green” and will be 80 percent cleaner than those operating in California, a state with some of the nation’s most stringent environmental standards. Opponents say a refinery of any kind cannot truly be “green” and that if Hyperion were serious about building an environmentally conscious project it would have selected an abandoned refinery or other “brownfield” site rather than choosing unspoiled land for its project.
More specifically, many Union County residents worry about emissions of cancer-causing chemicals such as benzene, the potential dangers involved with the heavy tar sands oil the project is being designed to refine, runoff into aquifers and nearby water sources and the plant’s use of water, among other concerns.
For Jackie Heckathorn, who lives one mile from the proposed footprint, it's not the water but the air that concerns her. She has suffered from allergies and severe asthma since a bout of influenza years ago.
"We spent 10 years looking for a place where I could live comfortably without being on massive medications," she said. “Just because I'm extreme, I'm not out of the ordinary for what the impact on the air is going to be in this area.”
Hyperion officials say the impact the refinery would have on air and water would be considerably less than some opponents fear.
"(Refining) technology has advanced across all phases, just like the automobile has advanced on engine technology," said project executive J.L. "Corky" Frank.
Frank said the refinery would have more than the minimum required number of air monitors, and project manager Preston Phillips said he hopes to have the data they gather available online in near real time.
They said Hyperion will capture and clean even rainwater runoff and will clean all the water it returns to the Missouri River, along with design measures to keep petroleum products in any form from escaping.
Frank said there would be no detectable odor beyond the fence and that the facility would not produce noise at a level that is "unacceptable." Further, he said, tanks would be surrounded by a "firewall" high enough to contain their entire contents in the event of a leak or rupture and would be lined to prevent seepage into the soil. Likewise, any leakage from the miles of pipe in the refinery would be collected in the hazardous waste system, he said.
However, Hyperion has not released detailed engineering information about exactly how the plant would operate in order to achieve all of those goals.
Weighing the risks
The Union County Board of Commissioners held two public hearings before it approved the zoning change March 11. Charles Yelverton, a family physician in Vermillion, S.D., testified at both hearings that he is concerned about the potential for benzene emissions from the refinery to cause health problems, "the most disturbing of which is childhood leukemia."
Benzene is a colorless, sweet-smelling liquid that is highly flammable, evaporates quickly and is found in all petroleum products, including crude oil and gasoline.
It is on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's top-10 list of proven cancer causers. It is also among the top 20 chemicals for production volume and one of the most widely used in manufacturing, according to the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.
Benzene is present at all gas stations, and workers in industries that produce or employ the chemical have higher cancer rates than nonexposed workers, EPA data show.
Yelverton said other health issues he believes are related to refinery emissions include respiratory problems, rashes, preterm labor and liver and kidney ailments.
"It's just not worth the risk to be wrong in predicting there will be no health effects," he said, noting people once thought there was no harm in breathing second-hand smoke.
Benzene is often expressed in air emissions data as part of a group of pollutants classified as volatile organic compounds. Hyperion's air permit application says the refinery and energy center would produce 473 tons of volatile organic compounds per year. Frank says the benzene emissions involved in that group of pollutants will be “extremely low."
Hyperion's center would also emit nearly 2,000 tons of carbon monoxide, 773 tons of nitrogen oxides, more than 1,000 tons of particulate matter and 863 tons of sulfur dioxide annually, according to the permit.
The health-risk report prepared by a Hyperion consultant indicates the refinery would increase cancer by just one case for every 1 million people exposed outdoors nearby for 70 years.
Denny Larson, a community activist in California who has come to Siouxland to speak about refineries' environmental impacts at the behest of Hyperion opponents, has worked in refinery communities for 25 years to get oil companies to do a better job of reducing their air and water pollution. He heads the San Francisco-based Refinery Reform Campaign and has served on a number of federal and state boards working to design better regulations for the refining industry.
However, Larson said he is not anti-oil refinery. In fact, he said, he is trying to get some existing refineries to adopt some of the environmental precautions Hyperion says it will take in South Dakota.
But Larson believes Hyperion’s health-risk study ignores other health concerns, such as those pointed out by Yelverton.
"Risk assessments in general have been losing favor for about 20 years now because they're just guesstimates based on a lot of assumptions," Larson said. "You can take data and tweak it and change the assumptions until you come up with that one-in-a-million health-risk factor."
Still, proponents such as Alcester’s Tracy Koenig aren’t daunted by the murky picture voters have about the proposed refinery’s impact on health. Koenig said that if Hyperion doesn’t live up to its promises, she will quickly become a project opponent.
Until that time, she supports the project and doesn’t believe it will have a detrimental impact on her family’s health.
“I have a son with asthma, and if I thought he was going to be in a life-threatening situation I would not be for it,” she said.
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DENR: We have the expertise
PIERRE, S.D. -- The South Dakota Department of Environment and Natural Resources has all the expertise it needs to evaluate Hyperion Resources' air-quality permit application and the numerous other permit applications that will follow if voters approve a zoning change in the June 3 referendum, according to the agency's public information officer, Kim Smith.
The state has already begun evaluating the company's 613-page air-quality permit application, the first of at least a dozen Hyperion must have to build and operate the oil refinery it wants to build.
The 2008 state Legislature approved additional environmental monitoring by the DENR in the Union County area. The agency is waiting to see whether voters give the company the go-ahead and will continue to evaluate whether any additional staff is needed, he said.
The agency has come under fire from refinery opponents who say it should hire a petroleum expert to work on the permitting.
Smith said the state already has on staff the chemical, environmental, civil, geological and other engineers it needs to review the application, as well as chemists, biologists, hydrologists, microbiologists and other scientists who may be involved.
The staff is qualified to review Hyperion’s draft environmental permits, to inspect Hyperion’s operations to ensure they comply with state and federal environmental regulations and to monitor the environmental conditions at the facility, according to Smith.
The state's DENR administers the permitting process of the federal Environmental Protection Agency as laid out in the Clean Air Act.
A list of the needed permits, filed documents and correspondence, as well as much more information about Hyperion's applications and status, the permitting process and answers to frequent questions can be found at http://www.state.sd.us/denr/hyperion.htm.
It's a coping mechanism. The Gylfes are more than a little worried about what Arlinda calls "my little piece of earth," the 11-acre home site where they have lived for 10 years. It's where their two youngest children, Ashley, 13, and Cecil, 9, help raise about 30 bottle calves and a couple of dozen hogs, and it’s where Arlinda photographs migrating geese and ducks each year as they rest on nearby Brule Creek.
The acreage lies off 317th Street in a notch of land near the south side of the 3,226 acres where Hyperion Resources' proposed oil refinery/energy plant would be built.
It's what an oil refinery might do to her family's well water that most concerns Arlinda Gylfe.
"Benzene, for one," she said of a known cancer-causing element found in all petroleum products. "And anything seeping in. Your family drinks this water. Any kind of spillage is a real concern. How would you clean it out?"
"Out of good conscience, I don't think I could ever sell my house to anybody," Gylfe said.
The Gylfes aren't the only ones worried about the environmental impacts an oil refinery would have. Forty-one percent of 340 registered voters in Union County said in a Journal poll conducted April 29 that they "strongly" or "somewhat" agree that "the refinery's emissions would impose a serious health hazard."
But quantifying or defining those hazards is difficult, making the decision about whether to vote yes or no June 3 on Hyperion’s request to rezone ag land for the refinery all the more challenging.
Will technology make a difference?
Hyperion has filed an air-quality permit application with the South Dakota Department of Environment and Natural Resources, but very little is known about how the plant would operate and what those operations would mean for the environment and health of the region. In fact, if the rezoning proposal is approved, its likely Union County residents won’t have access to much of the specific data and information opponents have asked for until the state and federal permitting process begins.
The DENR has said the permitting process will be open to public scrutiny and comment.
Hyperion officials say the refinery will be “green” and will be 80 percent cleaner than those operating in California, a state with some of the nation’s most stringent environmental standards. Opponents say a refinery of any kind cannot truly be “green” and that if Hyperion were serious about building an environmentally conscious project it would have selected an abandoned refinery or other “brownfield” site rather than choosing unspoiled land for its project.
More specifically, many Union County residents worry about emissions of cancer-causing chemicals such as benzene, the potential dangers involved with the heavy tar sands oil the project is being designed to refine, runoff into aquifers and nearby water sources and the plant’s use of water, among other concerns.
For Jackie Heckathorn, who lives one mile from the proposed footprint, it's not the water but the air that concerns her. She has suffered from allergies and severe asthma since a bout of influenza years ago.
"We spent 10 years looking for a place where I could live comfortably without being on massive medications," she said. “Just because I'm extreme, I'm not out of the ordinary for what the impact on the air is going to be in this area.”
Hyperion officials say the impact the refinery would have on air and water would be considerably less than some opponents fear.
"(Refining) technology has advanced across all phases, just like the automobile has advanced on engine technology," said project executive J.L. "Corky" Frank.
Frank said the refinery would have more than the minimum required number of air monitors, and project manager Preston Phillips said he hopes to have the data they gather available online in near real time.
They said Hyperion will capture and clean even rainwater runoff and will clean all the water it returns to the Missouri River, along with design measures to keep petroleum products in any form from escaping.
Frank said there would be no detectable odor beyond the fence and that the facility would not produce noise at a level that is "unacceptable." Further, he said, tanks would be surrounded by a "firewall" high enough to contain their entire contents in the event of a leak or rupture and would be lined to prevent seepage into the soil. Likewise, any leakage from the miles of pipe in the refinery would be collected in the hazardous waste system, he said.
However, Hyperion has not released detailed engineering information about exactly how the plant would operate in order to achieve all of those goals.
Weighing the risks
The Union County Board of Commissioners held two public hearings before it approved the zoning change March 11. Charles Yelverton, a family physician in Vermillion, S.D., testified at both hearings that he is concerned about the potential for benzene emissions from the refinery to cause health problems, "the most disturbing of which is childhood leukemia."
Benzene is a colorless, sweet-smelling liquid that is highly flammable, evaporates quickly and is found in all petroleum products, including crude oil and gasoline.
It is on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's top-10 list of proven cancer causers. It is also among the top 20 chemicals for production volume and one of the most widely used in manufacturing, according to the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.
Benzene is present at all gas stations, and workers in industries that produce or employ the chemical have higher cancer rates than nonexposed workers, EPA data show.
Yelverton said other health issues he believes are related to refinery emissions include respiratory problems, rashes, preterm labor and liver and kidney ailments.
"It's just not worth the risk to be wrong in predicting there will be no health effects," he said, noting people once thought there was no harm in breathing second-hand smoke.
Benzene is often expressed in air emissions data as part of a group of pollutants classified as volatile organic compounds. Hyperion's air permit application says the refinery and energy center would produce 473 tons of volatile organic compounds per year. Frank says the benzene emissions involved in that group of pollutants will be “extremely low."
Hyperion's center would also emit nearly 2,000 tons of carbon monoxide, 773 tons of nitrogen oxides, more than 1,000 tons of particulate matter and 863 tons of sulfur dioxide annually, according to the permit.
The health-risk report prepared by a Hyperion consultant indicates the refinery would increase cancer by just one case for every 1 million people exposed outdoors nearby for 70 years.
Denny Larson, a community activist in California who has come to Siouxland to speak about refineries' environmental impacts at the behest of Hyperion opponents, has worked in refinery communities for 25 years to get oil companies to do a better job of reducing their air and water pollution. He heads the San Francisco-based Refinery Reform Campaign and has served on a number of federal and state boards working to design better regulations for the refining industry.
However, Larson said he is not anti-oil refinery. In fact, he said, he is trying to get some existing refineries to adopt some of the environmental precautions Hyperion says it will take in South Dakota.
But Larson believes Hyperion’s health-risk study ignores other health concerns, such as those pointed out by Yelverton.
"Risk assessments in general have been losing favor for about 20 years now because they're just guesstimates based on a lot of assumptions," Larson said. "You can take data and tweak it and change the assumptions until you come up with that one-in-a-million health-risk factor."
Still, proponents such as Alcester’s Tracy Koenig aren’t daunted by the murky picture voters have about the proposed refinery’s impact on health. Koenig said that if Hyperion doesn’t live up to its promises, she will quickly become a project opponent.
Until that time, she supports the project and doesn’t believe it will have a detrimental impact on her family’s health.
“I have a son with asthma, and if I thought he was going to be in a life-threatening situation I would not be for it,” she said.
]]>
DENR: We have the expertise
PIERRE, S.D. -- The South Dakota Department of Environment and Natural Resources has all the expertise it needs to evaluate Hyperion Resources' air-quality permit application and the numerous other permit applications that will follow if voters approve a zoning change in the June 3 referendum, according to the agency's public information officer, Kim Smith.
The state has already begun evaluating the company's 613-page air-quality permit application, the first of at least a dozen Hyperion must have to build and operate the oil refinery it wants to build.
The 2008 state Legislature approved additional environmental monitoring by the DENR in the Union County area. The agency is waiting to see whether voters give the company the go-ahead and will continue to evaluate whether any additional staff is needed, he said.
The agency has come under fire from refinery opponents who say it should hire a petroleum expert to work on the permitting.
Smith said the state already has on staff the chemical, environmental, civil, geological and other engineers it needs to review the application, as well as chemists, biologists, hydrologists, microbiologists and other scientists who may be involved.
The staff is qualified to review Hyperion’s draft environmental permits, to inspect Hyperion’s operations to ensure they comply with state and federal environmental regulations and to monitor the environmental conditions at the facility, according to Smith.
The state's DENR administers the permitting process of the federal Environmental Protection Agency as laid out in the Clean Air Act.
A list of the needed permits, filed documents and correspondence, as well as much more information about Hyperion's applications and status, the permitting process and answers to frequent questions can be found at http://www.state.sd.us/denr/hyperion.htm.
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