If you live around Dallas-Fort Worth, you may have noticed some shaking last night. No, it wasn’t Obama and Romney sparring over energy policy and the economy. It was another earthquake in an area that up until a few years ago had been seismically silent.
Around ten o’clock Tuesday night, a 2.7 magnitude earthquake struck near the town of Midlothian, Texas, according to the US Geological Survey. “It really shook our house too plus a loud boom,” one commenter on the website Texas Storm Chasers said.
Midlothian is part of the Barnett Shale, an area of drilling for natural gas. That natural gas is drilled by a process known as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” where a mix of water, sand and chemicals is injected at high pressure deep underground to break up rock formations and release oil and natural gas. After a well is “fracked,” some of that liquid mixture comes back up. And it has to be disposed of.
Enter disposal wells. They’re essentially waste dumps that go even deeper underground, used to dispose of fracking liquids, and several scientific studies have made a definitive link between injecting fluids into these disposal wells and manmade earthquakes in the region (as well as other parts of the country).
It isn’t immediately clear if there’s any connection between this quake and disposal wells in the region. It can take months and even years to make such links scientifically, as we’ve reported earlier. But in the meantime you can read our earlier report: How Fracking Disposal Wells Are Causing Earthquakes in Dallas-Fort Worth
Tonight presidential candidate Mitt Romney will face incumbent President Barack Obama in the second of three debates in a tight race for an election just weeks away. Energy has been more of an issue in this election than recent presidential contests, with the candidates squaring off on coal, green jobs and climate change.
Today a new nationwide poll of over two thousand people by the University of Texas at Austin provides a glimpse into what voters feel about the policies of both candidates. And the results show a preference for the current president’s policies.
“Overall, 37 percent of respondents say Obamaâs platform is best for the country, while 28 percent favor Romneyâs views on energy,” says the new poll. “More than a third of those surveyed (35 percent) are not sure whose energy policies they prefer or are undecided.”
Sheril Kirshenbaum, director of the University of Texas at Austin Energy Poll, says in a statement that while the economy is a big issue this election, “two out of three consumers say energy issues are important to them,â she says. âSupport for increased production of domestic energy supplies remains strong, and weâre also seeing a lot of interest in the promotion of alternative forms of energy and energy-saving technologies that crosses party lines.â
And climate change is becoming more of an issue as well. Here’s what the poll found: Continue Reading →
From January to September the U.S. had the warmest first nine months of the year in its history, according to the latest ‘State of the Climate‘ report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). And there have been numerous other anomalies in the climate as of late, the report says.
“The average combined global land and ocean surface temperature for September 2012 tied with 2005 as the warmest September on record, at 0.67°C (1.21°F) above the 20th century average of 15.6°C (60.1°F),” the report says. The records go back to 1880.
There are some other happenings in the earth’s climate that may interest you, like the fact that Japan saw record warmth, while the U.K was cooler than normal. You can read about them all over at the NOAA.
Texas A&M scientist Anna Armitage and mangrove shrub on Pelican Island
The other day, a team of Texas A&M researchers was comparing satellite photos of the Texas coast. As the scientists looked at the images from the past 20 years, they noticed something different: there are now a lot more mangroves. Continue Reading →
Pipe is stacked at the southern site of the Keystone XL pipeline on March 22, 2012 in Cushing, Oklahoma.
Two reporters for The New York Times were detained Wednesday while covering protesters at the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline in Wood County in East Texas. The two reporters, Dan Frosch and Brandon Thibodeaux, who identified themselves as members of the media, were handcuffed by a pipeline company security guard and a local police officer. After ten minutes, the two were released, but told they had to leave the property or face arrest. They were on private property at the time at the invitation of the landowner.
When the incident first came to our attention, we emailed several questions to TransCanada, the company behind the Keystone XL pipeline. They sent a statement to the media (which you can read after the jump) that failed to address our questions, but promised they would get to them. After 24 hours, we now have some answers. And, inevitably, more questions.
TransCanada says the two Times reporters were in the pipeline’s right of way at the time of the arrest, and that they were detained by an off-duty police officer contracted to provide security for the pipeline construction. Continue Reading →
This infographic shows how new wells can cause water contamination when they're drilled in the same formation as old abandoned wells.
Abandoned wells in Pennsylvania are putting landowners at risk for drilling-induced explosions and water contamination, according to a new investigative series by our fellow StateImpact reporters in Pennsylvania. After a methane geyser erupted in the Pennsylvania countryside last year, StateImpact Pennsylvania is now looking into the dangers of abandoned, aka âorphaned,â wells in their Perilous Pathways series.
Laurie Barr lives in Pennsylvania and remembers reading those reports about the geyser earlier this year. âI thought, whoa, what the fâ?â Barr recalls. âCan you imagÂine stepÂping out to shovel snow, and your whole house goes poof?â Now she’s made it her mission to find where the orphaned wells are and what danger they pose.
Texas also is home to abandoned wells, as we reported earlier this year. Over 7,869 orphan wells scatter across the oil and gas fields of Texas, which cost millions of dollars to plug.
UPDATE: The latest on this story can be found here.
The massive (and controversial) Keystone XL pipeline, which will take heavy crude harvested from oil sand pits in Canada to refineries on the Gulf Coast, is currently under construction. And it’s also under protest.
For weeks, protesters have chained themselves to tractors and fences in attempts to halt construction of the pipeline. Some have camped out in trees in the pipeline’s path. And several private landowners have protested the pipeline’s construction as well. Landowner Eleanor Fairchild was arrested this week on her own property for trespsassing as she and actress Daryl Hannah attempted to stop a bulldozer clearing a path for the pipeline. You can watch their protest in the video above.
Joining the ranks Wednesday were two reporters covering the protests for TheNew York Times. Reporter Dan Frosch and an unnamed photographer accompanying him were covering a protest on private land yesterday when they were handcuffed and detained by a security guard for TransCanada (the Canadian company behind the pipeline) and local police.
The reporters were on the private land at the invitation of the landowner, but were detained for trespassing, according to a spokesperson for the newspaper. After identifying themselves as members of the media, they were released, but told they had to leave the property immediately or they’d be arrested for trespassing. Continue Reading →
Dr. David Allen is leading a new study on methane emissions from drilling.
The University of Texas at Austin is wrapping up the final stages of a new study that looks at how much methane is released during the drilling process known as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” Understanding how much methane is released is important to decreasing emissions overall, as methane is a known âgreenhouse gasâ that contributes to climate change.
The research team and environmental research companies URS and Anodyne Research have been busy measuring methane emissions at natural gas production sites throughout the United States.
Dr. David Allen of UT’s Cockrell School of Engineering led the study. âWe are using a variety of different techniques, direct source measurements, directly measuring emissions at the point of origin, but also downwind of production,â he says. The study will aslo use data from nine participating natural gas producers.
Though natural gas burns cleaner than fossil fuels once its been produced, not a lot of research has been done about how much methane is released into the air during drilling and transportation with data drawn from the actual sites. Continue Reading →
As Texas moves away from coal and towards natural gas for its power plants, it stands to save billions of gallons of water in the process, according to a new study by the University of Texas at Austin’s Webber Energy Group. And in planning for the future, switching to gas will save even more. You can see a video version of the report above.
âItâs not realistic to switch our power plants today to something else, but as a state we are considering what our power mix will be over the next few decades, because many of the things we built three or four decades ago are up for retirement or a retrofit to be maintained for a longer lifetime,â Michael Webber, a professor of Mechanical Engineering that leads the group, tells KUT. âAnd as we contemplate those decisions, itâs worth keeping the water impact in mind.â Â Natural gas uses less coal even if you account of the water needed to drill via hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” for the gas.
The authors of the study posit that for the year 2007, if Texas’ coal power plants had been natural gas ones instead, it would have saved enough water for a million Texan households for a year.
âSince then, weâve been off to the races,â says Warren Lasher, the Texas gridâs system planner. He appeared on a panel on solar and wind development in Texas at the SXSW Eco conference last week. Now there are about 6,500 wind turbines in Texas. Youâll mostly find them in the panhandle, and some on the coast. Texas is the biggest wind energy state in the country, and one of the largest wind energy producers in the world, with more wind capacity than France, Italy or Great Britain, as of the beginning of this year. (A federal tax credit â now being lambasted by some state officials and power companies â also helped.)
Most of that wind is in the panhandle, the incubator for Texasâ experiment with renewables. It can get quite gusty there. âThe trees kind of tilt to the side up there,â Lasher joked. âAnd now transmission lines do, too.â* Theyâre designed to change direction with the wind (as it inevitably does), which reduces stress from torque on the turbine, resulting in less maintenance.
But while thereâs plenty of wind â and now plenty of turbines â in the panhandle, there arenât that many people. 85 percent of the stateâs population now lives in cities, and that number is growing. Continue Reading →
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