Courtesy of Cathy McKenna via Flickr Creative Commons
A Range Resources oil rig across the street from a public park in Denton, TX.
The original version of this article, released on March 30, 2012, incorrectly attributed the following quote to an EPA press release: “In a press release today, the EPA stated that ‘multiple investigations into the claims showed no link between Range Resources’ operations and water contamination.’” The Texas Oil and Gas Association provided this quote in its own press release on 3/30/2012. The EPA did not issue a press release on 3/30/2012. We regret the error.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced today its decision to drop charges filed against oil drilling company Range Resources for contaminating residential well water. The now-defunct charges stemmed from a Parker County couple’s claim back in August 2010 that Range Resources’ natural gas fracking wells polluted their water supply with methane. A press release issued by the Texas Oil and Gas Association (TXOGA) attributed the EPA’s decision to withdraw from the case to “multiple investigations into the claims [that] showed no link between Range Resources’ operations and water contamination.”
Industry representatives across the state greeted the EPA’s decision with enthusiastic approval.
Barry Smitherman, Chairman of the Texas Railroad Commission – which conducted its own geological investigation of the the Parker County wells – celebrated the announcement as “a vindication of the science-based processes at the Railroad Commission.” Smitherman underscored his remarks with the promise that he “will remain vigilant to ensure that the EPA uses the highest standards of science instead of making arbitrary regulations to President Obama’s anti-fossil fuel agenda.”
The Texas Oil and Gas Association praised the Railroad Commission’s investigation in its own press release, saying that the association is “encouraged that science appears to have prevailed in this instance at the Environmental Protection Agency.”
Despite the EPA’s withdrawal from the case, Range Resources isn’t completely off the hook. Continue Reading →
Damaged beach front homes are seen on Galveston Island after the passing of Hurricane Ike September 13, 2008 in Galveston, Texas.
Planning to go to a Texas beach this summer? If you’re hoping to hit the public beach at Galveston’s West End, you might find it’s now private property, thanks to a new ruling from the Texas Supreme Court.
In a 5-3 opinion, the Court ruled that “the State claims that it is entitled to an easement on privately owned beachfront property without meeting the law’s requirements for establishing an easement.”
“It seems that the Open Beaches Act — at least for Galveston’s West End — is dead, thanks to the Supreme Court,” Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson said in a release. “This is truly a sad day.” He also said that the ruling “gives a pretty big club to anyone who wants to challenge the Texas Open Beaches Act anywhere else along the coast.”
“As we acknowledge continuous and natural physical changes in the West Galveston shoreline, we must also recognize ages-old private property rights that are protected by law,” the Court wrote in its decision, which you can read below. Continue Reading →
Photo Courtesy of Flickr user boboroshi/Creative Commons
Silencers make hunting easier on the ears, but some control control groups worry about safety.
Earlier this month we told you about a proposed rule change that would allow hunters to use silencers when going after game, birds and even alligators. Today the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD) announced it has adopted that rule, so Texans can now hunt in relative silence. (Provided they submit an application to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), pay $200 and get a criminal background check.)
“These devices are already legal for hunting exotic animals, including feral hogs, and there is no resource or enforcement-related reason to prohibit these devices for hunting alligators, game animals or game birds,” Scott Vaca, TPWD Assistant Chief of Wildlife Enforcement, said in a statement.
Opponents of the rule change had argued that a bullet is exactly the sort of thing that people should able to hear.
“I think there should be concerns across the spectrum, from people who are engaging in legitimate hunting activity and who are not able to hear the report of rifle fire from a hunter, or hunters who are not in their group and who don’t have that warning,” Ladd Everitt, a spokesperson with the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, told StateImpact Texas earlier. Continue Reading →
Courtesy of KQED Radio via Flickr Creative Commons.
An injection well in Northern California, one of the most seismologically active regions in the country.
A few months ago we spoke with Cliff Frohlich, a seismologist and Associate Director of the University of Texas at Austin’s Institute for Geophysics, about the connection between a recent string of earthquakes and hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” In the interview, Dr. Frohlich told us that fracking can directly cause earthquakes, but only in very rare cases. “In the last year, there have been three well-documented earthquakes that occurred during the frack job and were probably related to fracking. They were all small earthquakes – of a magnitude of 2 or 3 – and, considering that there are millions of frack jobs, fracking-related earthquakes are so rare.”
What is causing these earthquakes, then? Deep well injection, the method used to dispose liquid and solid wastes produced during the fracking process. Frohlich explained that earthquakes occur when this industrial byproduct flows into, lubricates, and provokes a fault located in a shale or coal formation.
Scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey announced Thursday that they will corroborate Frohlich’s interpretation in a report they plan to unveil next month. (The study was the subject of an article this week in E&E EnergyWire.) The government-sponsored researchers studied ten years of seismological data and concluded that recent earthquakes can, indeed, be attributed to deep well injection. “A remarkable increase in the rate of [magnitude-3.0] and greater earthquakes is currently in progress,” the study’s abstract states. “A naturally-occurring rate change of this magnitude is unprecedented outside of volcanic settings or in the absence of a main shock.” Continue Reading →
A NASA image of Pine Island Bay along West Antarctic’s Walgreen Coast. The bay deposits into the Amundsen Sea, which is absorbing a significant amount of slipped glacier ice. Although most of the surface of this ice shelf appears smooth, the presence of several ice cracks suggest that several fragments will break off and form icebergs in coming summers.
Satellite image of Iceberg B-15, the largest recorded iceberg. It once had an area of 3,100 square kilometers, which made it larger than the island of Jamaica.
An iceberg drifting on the Amundsen Sea in West Antarctica.
Photos taken as part of NASA’s 2009 mission to study Antarctic ice sheets, sea ice, and ice shelves. This photo was taken at an elevation of 2,000 feet above the Bellingshausen Sea in West Antarctica.
These pieces of floating ice broke off from a fjord in Marguerite Bay, on the west side of the Antarctic peninsula.
Floating ice on the west coast of the Antarctica Peninsula, just north of the Antarctic circle.
Aircraft-induced hole observed at the West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide Camp, Antarctica.
Ice sheets floating on the Grandidier Channel on the western coast of the Antarctic peninsula.
An image of a polar ice cap at Lake IJsselmeer near Amsterdam.
Truck tracks imprinted on a West Antarctic ice sheet.
The team’s conclusions reflect data taken from nearly 40 years of satellite imagery. “Anyone can examine this region in Google Earth and see a snapshot of the same satellite data we used,” Joseph MacGregor, a research scientist associate and lead author of the study, said in a release accompanying the study.
The greatest source of concern is a disintegrating ice shelf in West Antarctica’s Amundsen Sea Embayment, which saw the highest rate of ice loss from 1972 to 2011. Researchers are particularly worried about the state of the Thwaites and Pine Island Glaciers, which thinned considerable over the past ten years. Evidence of existing fractures in remaining ice shelves suggest that the pattern will continue in the future.
See for yourself in the slideshow of photos above (collected by StateImpact Texas intern Filipa Rodrigues) which contains several satellite and up-close images of West Antarctica’s glacier population. Combined, they illustrate just how majestic, vast, and vulnerable these glaciers really are.
Yana Skorobogatov is an intern with StateImpact Texas.
Climate scientists Katharine Hayhoe says the drought was exacerbated by climate change.
We’ve been posting videos and reports recently from a series on the drought by PBS NewsHour done in collaboration with StateImpact Texas. The series is part of a larger project by PBS NewsHour in partnership with local public media, Coping With Climate Change, that looks at how a transforming climate affects everyday life. Today’s piece is an interview with Katharine Hayhoe, director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University, about what role climate change played in the drought.
Q: So Texas is still in the middle of this drought and it’s pretty extreme. Does this relate to climate change, and if so, how?
A: Whenever something happens, there is always the temptation to try to pigeonhole it either [as] an entirely natural event or [as a result of] climate change. But the reality is that every event that occurs right now is probably a little bit of both. Like in our case, with our drought, there is no question that it was initiated by La Nina. But on the other hand, our temperatures this summer were really extreme. We set all kinds of records, so there is a very strong possibility that climate change also played a role. In that sense, we have a little bit of both going on. We always have natural variability, but now we’ve gotten to the point where we’ve altered the background conditions of our atmosphere to such an extent that … climate change has a little bit to do with everything that happens around us. Here in West Texas we’re already really dry… so drought is almost the norm for us. But with climate change, what we see is through increasing temperatures and through increasing variability in our precipitation rainfall patterns, we have the potential for even more impacts on water in the future … It’s as if we have two dice and we always have a chance of rolling that double six, which would be that extreme event. But with many of our events – including very high temperature days, extreme heat, and heavy rainfall – climate change has been kind of coming in and removing some of those other numbers off the dice and putting in more sixes … increasing our risk of having one of those [extreme] events.
Q: So you’ve said that climate change exasperates preexisting problems. What are some of the specific things that you see being affected now?
Monica Malone, general manager at J&J Pest Control, holds a sticky strip covered in dead crane flies.
You’ve probably seen them hovering at your windows or waiting at your door. A few may have even flown into your house. They look like giant mosquitoes, and they appear to be everywhere this season. Say hello to the Crane Fly.
As Texas A&M University points out on its site devoted to the fly, “large numbers of adult crane flies can be a nuisance indoors” but they are “medically harmless.”
So why are there so many flying around this year? For StateImpact Texas partner KUT News, Nathan Bernier looks at how a dry year followed by a wetter-than-usual winter has led to a proliferation of the bug:
The explosion of crane flies is a direct product of two things: the drought killed a bunch of plants, and recent rains helped those dead plants rot. There’s nothing that crane fly larvae love more than rotting plant matter.
Crane flies aren’t the only insect that benefited from the 13 inches to 16 inches of rain Austin has received since January. Fire ants are making a comeback too, says Wizzie Brown, an entomologist with the Texas Agrilife Extension Service. She tries to lure them out of their holes with hot dogs by placing a slice of the meat into a clear pill bottle and waiting about an hour.
Photo Courtesy of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Advocates say Endangered species classification is the last hope for the Dunes Sagebrush Lizard.
Today Texas Senator John Cornyn filed an amendment to the Energy Tax Credits Modification bill on the Senate Floor that would block the listing of the Dunes Sage Brush Lizard as an endangered species. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is due to make an announcement in June on whether the creature will be added to the list.
In a conference call with reporters today Cornyn said he wanted the lizard blocked from the list because classifying it as an endangered species could harm the Texas Oil industry.
“In this instance it would threaten about 27,000 jobs in the Permian basin at a time when it has regained its status as one of the premiere oil and gas producing regions of the country,” Cornyn said in response to a question from reporter Ben Philpott from KUT News. Continue Reading →
Texas political leadership was in a celebratory mood today, after news spread that the state had won a battle in its ongoing legal disputes with the Environmental Protection Agency in federal court earlier in the week.
The decision Monday from the 5th US Court of Appeals effectively ordered the Agency to take a second look at TCEQ pollution control procedures. The EPA had initially said those procedures failed to meet the standards of the Clean Air Act. But the court found the Agency’s reasons were insufficient to prove that case and that it’s rejection of the Texas rules came long past the deadline when such rules can be nullified.The opinion read in part: Continue Reading →
Andrew Sansom is the Executive Director of the River Systems Institute at Texas State University.
We’ve been posting videos and reports recently from a series on the drought by PBS Newshour done in collaboration with StateImpact Texas. The series is part of a larger project by PBS Newshour in partnership with local public media, Coping With Climate Change, that looks at how a transforming climate affect’s everyday life. Today’s piece is an interview with Andrew Sansom, executive director of the River Systems Institute at Texas State University, about current water policy and where the state can go from here.
Q: We’ve been telling a kind of “tale of two cities” for Robert Lee and Spicewood Beach. Can you explain to us why this is happening in Texas?
A: Well, it’s happening because Texas is one of the most rapidly urbanizing states in the United States. We expect that we will have twice as many people here in the next 40 or 50 years, and we have already given permission for more water to be withdrawn from many of our rivers than is actually in them today. So we’re reaching a crisis that’s brought on by declining water supplies and a rapidly growing population. Essentially, we’ve got more straws in the ground, which causes situations like Spicewood [Beach] and Robert Lee to occur.
Q: Considering the drastic measures that these two towns have had to take, like building a pipeline for a million and half dollars and trucking in water on a day-to-day basis, do you think the situation is likely to get worse?
A: I believe that it will get worse. I think it will get worse until we begin to make some fundamental changes in terms of how we view water, how we price it, and how we use it particularly. Continue Reading →
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