President Obama is visiting Cushing, Oklahoma today as part of a multi-day tour promoting his energy prices in the midst of high gas prices and Republican criticism. Cushing is an interesting stop for the President because it’s a major oil hub and it’s where the southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline will begin.
That pipeline would take heavy crude harvested from oil sands in Alberta, Canada to refineries on the Gulf Coast of Texas. The President had denied a permit last year for the entire pipeline – part of which went through sensitive aquifer areas of Nebraska. The company behind the pipeline, TransCanada, recently announced that it intended to go ahead and build the Oklahoma-to-Texas leg, which wouldn’t require approval by the State Department. (For a more thorough explainer and background, read our topic page on the Keystone XL pipeline.)
Based on his remarks, Obama is in favor of that plan. Noting that there’s a bottleneck in Cushing of oil, coming in from places like the oil sands of Alberta and the Bakken Shale in North Dakota, the President said that he’s “directing my administration to cut through the red tape, break through the bureaucratic hurdles, and make this project a priority, to go ahead and get it done.”
More from his remarks and some reactions from others: Continue Reading →
The research team may have found a way to mitigate the effects of oil drilling and shipping noise on sea life.
One of the insidious things about noise pollution is that it is invisible. While the long plume that rose after the Deepwater Horizon explosion is a discernible reminder of how oil can harm the ocean, the sound that explosion made is less tangible.
But recent research shows that the noise caused by human activity, like noise from oil shipping and drilling, is having a negative impact on the marine ecosystem. That’s lead to new research and the possibility of new regulation, all aimed at keeping human activity quieter. Continue Reading →
The drought has caused agricultural losses greater than any other in Texas' history.
It’s official: the current Texas drought has been the costliest in history, resulting in $7.62 billion in agricultural losses, according to an update today from the Texas AgriLife Extension Service at Texas A&M University. That’s nearly twice as high as the previous record, $4.1 billion in losses during the 2006 drought, and equal to nearly half of Texas’ agricultural business over the last four years.
“No one alive has seen single-year drought damage to this extent,” Dr. Travis Miller, AgriLife Extension agronomist and a member of the Governor’s Drought Preparedness Council said in a release. “Texas farmers and ranchers are not strangers to drought, but the intensity of the drought, reflected in record high temperatures, record low precipitation, unprecedented winds coupled with duration – all came together to devastate production agriculture.”
Today’s numbers are an update from a previous estimate released in August 2011. The Agrilife Extension service says that there was still some time left in the growing and grazing seasons after that point, hence the updated losses today. Livestock made up the biggest part of the losses, with $3.2 billion lost. 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. Continue Reading →
Charles Upshaw is researching renewable energy and smart grid technology at the Mueller Development in Austin.
The Mueller subdivision, just northeast of downtown Austin, is recognized as a haven for green building standards, energy conservation and environmentally-sustainable development.
Smart appliance makers, sustainable home developers, renewable energy companies and green home builders are all using the Mueller development as a test ground for some of the most advanced home technologies in America.
StateImpact Texas recently sat down with Charles Upshaw, a mechanical engineering graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin and member of the Webber Energy Group. He’s working with the Mueller Development on residential smart grid applications for home energy management and analyzing energy consumption in homes to improve efficiency.
Q: Can you tell me about the solar energy that you are using there at the Mueller Development?
A: Pecan Street is the smart grid consortium here in Austin. It’s a collaboration between the University of Texas, the City of Austin, Austin Energy and a bunch of companies. In order to really test, and have a real world kind of experiment with high density residential solar, they have offered additional incentives to the [Mueller homeowners] on top of the Austin energy rebate and the federal rebate, so the people in Mueller have an opportunity to get solar really cheaply, less than a dollar a watt and so a lot of them have taken advantage of that… it’s around a megawatt of solar installed or going to be installed in the next few weeks or month.
One popular solution to running low on water? Drill a well. In Texas alone, there are an estimated million of them.
But with the extreme Texas drought stressing aquifers, while more and more people are sucking water out of them, many wells have ended up being too shallow. In its latest report on the drought – done in collaboration with StateImpact Texas – PBS Newshour looks at how companies that drill wells are keeping busy digging deeper and adding storage tanks for their customers.
Marjorie Farabee was stopped from bringing her wagon to the steps of the capitol. But she did deliver around 100,000 signatures collected online to protest the burro killings.
Donkeys in West Texas can bray a little easier today: the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD) has announced that they will “not likely” conduct killings of wild burros in the region “until it has been determined whether any non-lethal methods are feasible.”
In a release today, the department says that they are working with the Human Society “to conduct an aerial survey to determine the numbers and locations of burros at the park, an essential first step to assess costs and feasibility of control options. TPWD has agreed to cost-share up to $10,000 to help pay for the survey, which should occur this spring.”
As StateImpact Texas reported in January, Parks and Wildlife sees the wild donkeys as an invasive species, responsible for habitat destruction and the fouling of West Texas water sources. (TPWD even has a webpage devoted to burro droppings found near water wells.) The burros were introduced to Texas by early Spanish colonists in the 1600s.
But some West Texas residents and advocacy groups felt differently, and led a donkey-powered protest on the state capitol in January asking for Parks and Wildlife to change its policy. They collected 100,000 signatures in an online petition protesting the donkey killings. With today’s news, it appears that stubbornness has paid off for the wild donkeys.
When you get a second, step outside. Take a look at your roof. Where you may just see shingles, one Texan sees a new source of water.
Richard Heinichen of Dripping Springs, Texas has built a successful business selling bottled rainwater, and as of late he’s been busy taking that work one step further. He’s building rainwater collection systems for residences that can provide their entire water supply.
Watch the video report from PBS Newshour above, part of a reporting collaboration with StateImpact Texas, to learn how Heinichen is harvesting water from the clouds. And stay tuned for more on how rainwater harvesting can boost water supplies, even in times of drought.
Texas could be looking at spending possibly hundreds of millions of dollars for road repairs and improvements to cope with the surge in oil and gas drilling.
“We have a task force [that] in the next 90 days is going out and talking to all the partners involved in the activity to see what we can do,” Mark Cross, spokesperson for the Texas Department of Transporation (TxDOT) told StateImpact Texas.
Cross said the state has already made $40 million available for immediate paving of ripped up roads in the areas of heaviest drilling activity: the Barnett Shale in North Texas and the Eagle Ford Shale in South Texas. Continue Reading →
Technology that can reduce the amount of water a power plant needs to create energy and cool down has never been more important. Ashlynn Stillwell, a civil and architectural engineering PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin with the Webber Energy Group, sat down to speak with us recently about her research into water use by power plants and how it will affect Texas’ water supply.
Q: Can you give us a brief description of how thermoelectric power plants use water?
A: So, thermoelectric power plants use some sort of fuel to create steam and then that steam turns a turbine. Usually, the water that is used is very high-purity, so we don’t want to lose that water. We want to condense it and recycle it and reuse it. The way that we condense it is to use some method of cooling. So, that is either using a river or a lake for cooling directly, or using cooling towers.
StateImpact seeks to inform and engage local communities with broadcast and online news focused on how state government decisions affect your lives. Learn More »
