I appreciate everything the oil companies have done the past 10 or 15 years to reduce their pollution emissions.  But, they still have to use a huge amount of energy to produce the oil and the burning of this energy is not a small part of the emissions inventory by any means.  I think I heard about 20% of the energy in the oil is needed to produce and refine the product.  They might burn just about anything to make a lot of the steam they need.  They certainly produce steam from significant amounts of coal and tires in at least one part of the county which I think contains the Mt. Poso and Poso Creek fields.  All I really know is, according to friends, there seems to be a train load of coal delivered to Wasco every week which is trucked to semi-hidden cogeneration plants in the Poso hills.

What is confusing most to me are the produced water ponds scattered all over the place which evaporate the water that comes up with the oil.   Hondo Chemical was just in the news for receiving some of this water.  Along with the evaporating water there is most probably quite a lot of other substances also evaporating into our air.  This is not clean water as it contains hydrocarbons and other toxic chemicals in varying amounts.  I thought they could inject this water back where it came from.  I guess that is too expensive and they are allowed instead to simply let it go into our air.  No one seems to know what is mixed in this water that could end up in our air.  The air district claims the inventory is not done.  All I know is our air is used as a waste dump when we don't pay attention.  I don't like to subsidize any industry with my lungs.

There seems to be at least 800 acres of these evaporation ponds along Highway 33 between Lost Hills and McKittrick.  We could easily be getting a hundred tons per day of different pollutants into our air from these ponds as literally thousands of tons of water evaporates out of them every day.  It also percolates into the ground which cannot be a good thing.