Mose Buchele is the Austin-based broadcast reporter for StateImpact. He has been on staff at KUT 90.5 in Austin since 2009, covering local and state issues. Mose has also worked as a blogger on politics and an education reporter at his hometown paper in Western Massachusetts. He holds masters degrees in Latin American Studies and Journalism from UT Austin.
Photo courtesy of Lunchbox Photography via Flikr’s Creative Commons. http://www.flickr.com/photos/jcorduroy/6817020034/
Even Thor’s lightening, thunder and rain didn’t free Central Texas fully from drought.
The word Thursday derives from the Old Norse thorsdagr, meaning “Thor’s Day.”
But here at StateImpact Texas, Thursday means something else entirely. It’s the day the U.S. drought monitor releases it’s weekly drought map!
Thor was the Norse god of thunder, and parts of Texas saw plenty of storms (and rain) last week, raising hopes that the central part of the state would finally be able to proclaim itself drought free. Unfortunately, those hopes were dashed by the new map which shows the western edges of the Hill Country are still in moderate or severe drought.
Pipe is stacked at the southern site of the Keystone XL pipeline on March 22, 2012 in Cushing, Oklahoma.
The debate over TransCanada’s proposed oil pipeline from the oil sands of Alberta to the Texas Gulf Coast has mostly focused on the environmental and economic impacts. People in favor say it will bring jobs and energy security. Opponents say the pipeline, and the crude it will carry, will harm the earth.
But the project might have another consequence that’s been largely overlooked. Some analysts say it could actually raise gas prices for many American consumers.
Cattle prices are breaking records as ranchers rebuild their herds after the drought.
If you’re getting ready for summer grilling season, be warned. You can expect the price of steaks and hamburgers to be higher this summer. The reason is that cattle prices are nearly double what they were last year.
The drought that struck Texas in 2011 caused the state cattle industry to lose over three billion dollars. With little rain, grass simply didn’t grow, and ranchers had to buy hay at record-high prices from as far away as Montana. Many ranchers sold off their herds, which resulted in the largest decline in the beef cow inventory in Texas history.
But as that dry weather reduced supply, recent wet weather has increased demand. Continue Reading →
This summer may not be nearly as hot as last year, but blackouts aren’t completely off the table.
Today the group that monitors the Texas Electric Grid came out with a new assessment of the state’s power reserves heading into the summer. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) says Texas is still at risk of rolling blackouts. But the likelihood has diminished as conservation has ramped up and more energy companies have brought “mothballed” power plants back online.
Those plants are operating thanks in part to the low cost of natural gas, which makes it economically attractive to run less efficient natural gas power plants. All but one of the state’s mothballed plants that are being brought back online are natural gas-fired plants.
The Rock House fire of 2011 started at this site outside of Valentine, Texas in April of last year. Much of the same area that burned in that fire is burning again today.
Evening Update: In a late afternoon interview the Texas Forest Service put the amount of land burned by both fires in the Livermore Ranch Complex Fire at over 23,000 acres. Reinforcements have arrived and the smaller of the two fires is now 60 percent contained. The larger fire, which continues to threaten the Davis Mountains Resort, is said to be 25 percent contained.
Two massive wildfires scorched over 19,000 acres of land and continue to burn uncontained in far West Texas as of Tuesday morning, said the Texas Forest Service. The fires are burning in roughly the same parts of Jeff Davis County that were scorched close to a year ago by the “Rock House Fire,” a massive blaze that ushered in a year of devastating wildfires throughout the state.
The fires, now jointly called the Livermore Ranch Complex Fire, were sparked by lightning on April 24. They threaten about 150 permanent residents as well as empty vacation structures in the Davis Mountain Resorts. Continue Reading →
Arthur Berman heads Labrynth Consultanting, and is an outspoken critic of how America’s natural gas reserves are being developed.
Chesapeake Energy has been getting a lot of attention lately, and not the good kind.
An investigation by Reuters found that its CEO, Aubrey McClendon, had been leveraging his interests in the company’s wells to secure over a billion dollars in personal loans, setting up a possible conflict of interest. After the news broke, Chesapeake’s stock dropped by a quarter, the company’s Board of Directors discontinued the program that gave McClendon a stake in the wells, and the SEC announced it would be investigating the deals.
It seemed like a good time to touch base with Arthur Berman.
Berman is the head of Labryth Consulting, a Houston-based geological consulting firm. He’s developed the reputation of a one-man cloud, raining on the parade of America’s natural gas cheerleaders.
In a nutshell, Berman thinks the industry is over-leveraged, over-hyped and bound for a market “correction.” It should be noted at the outset that many people in the industry disagree with his analysis. But With the McClendon controversy focusing attention on issues Berman has been talking about for years, StateImpact Texas gave him a call to see what he’s thinking:
Q: To begin with could we just get your general impression. What are you thinking when you read the news about Chesapeake and McClendon?
A: None of this comes as a surprise to me. But to me, the takeaway that the average person ought to get is, this is characteristic of how unstable and unsustainable these kinds of propositions are. Continue Reading →
Death has been stalking the Pronghorn of West Texas Their numbers have dropped dramatically in the last five years, leaving people wondering if the species will continue in the region.
If you think pronghorn don’t hold an iconic place in the story of the old west, consider the lyrics to the tune Home on the Range. Remember, “where the deer and the antelope play?”
Those “antelope” you’ve heard about your whole life weren’t really antelope at all. They were pronghorn.
The confusion started with European settlers who mistook them for the old world species. In fact, the pronghorn is a uniquely American creature. The the fastest land mammals in the Western Hemisphere, they are the second fastest in the world after the cheetah. They evolved that way to out run a long-extinct species of North American Cheetah.
Pronghorn once roamed Texas from the Hill Country all the way to the state’s western tip. Today, though they still maintain healthy populations in many parts of the Midwest, their range in Texas is diminished to the point of disappearing.
TransCanada wants to seize land to construct part of a pipeline over Julia Trigg Crawford’s farm in Lamar County, Texas.
This is the final story in a four-part collaborative series by StateImpact Oklahoma and StateImpact Texas on the economic and environmental impact of the Keystone XL pipeline. You can read part one here, part two here and part three here.
Texas politicians love giving lip service to the sanctity of private property. They also talk a lot about the benefits of the state’s robust oil and gas industry. But what happens when those two things come into conflict?
Courtesy of KQED Radio via Flickr Creative Commons
An injection well in Northern California, one of the most seismologically active regions in the country.
At a meeting of the Seismological Society of America today, scientists for the U.S. Geological Survey presented their much-anticipated findings linking the oil and gas industry with an increase in earthquakes in parts of the United States. (You can find NPR’s report on the findings here.)
The abstract released this week, which is still the only publicly available part of the study, says that “the acceleration in activity that began in 2009 appears to involve a combination of source regions of oil and gas production… to deep waste water injection wells.”
The report indicates that disposal wells, where liquid by-products from oil and gas excavation are stored, are linked to an uptick in earthquakes in states like Arkansas and Oklahoma. But what about here in Texas?Continue Reading →
A cow that perished on a ranch outside of Marfa was dried “like jerky” by the drought.
Driving a pickup through a ranch outside of Marfa, Texas last week, grad students Justin Hoffman and John Edwards came across a sight sadly common for their region in far West Texas. A cow that had perished in the field.
What was strange about the grisly discovery was the condition of the body. After months in the elements, the animal still looked very nearly intact. The arid weather had dried its skin and organs “like jerky,” says Edwards. He gave its side a knock with his fist, the hollow drum-like thud illustrating his point.
For many Texans who came close to forgetting what rain looked like, this past winter was a welcome surprise. Unusually-wet weather helped Central and East Texas crawl their way out of last years historic drought. But the same can’t be said for the Trans-Pecos region, the far western point of the state, where the drought persists unabated. Continue Reading →
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