Dave Fehling/StateImpact Texas
The small community of Port Lavaca got a boost a few decades ago with the opening of a plastics plant.
Oil and gas have always fueled dreams in Texas. Here’s one more.
“It feels like Port Lavaca is right on the verge of something really big happening,” says Bob Turner, the city manager for this coastal community of 12,000 people. Continue Reading
Photo by Jonathan Ferrey/Getty Images)
2012 could end up being the warmest year in Texas since record-keeping began.
It’s time for our look back at the year in Texas weather for 2012. Although it was a time of improved precipitation for the state, Texas was still struggling to recover from its driest one-year period ever in 2011, and “improved” just wasn’t enough to bring the state back from drought in 2012. It was also an abnormally warm year, perhaps the warmest ever in Texas, and one filled with natural disasters that did billions of dollars in damage.
Anyone that lived through the summer of 2011 in Texas will likely be surprised to hear that 2012 was actually warmer. Overall, it could be the warmest year in state history. Continue Reading
Map by NOAA
As the 83rd Texas Legislature convenes next week, there’s considerable pressure on lawmakers to do something about the state’s water woes, whether it be funding water infrastructure, increased conservation or even desalination. The state’s population is booming, with over 100,000 people moving to Texas in 2011 alone. And as new forecasts out this week show, our extended dry spell could continue this year, exacerbated by a dry winter that was initially forecast to bring some relief.
The latest seasonal drought outlook from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) shows that for much of Texas and the rest of the Southwest, the drought is likely to “persist or intensify” over the next three months. Currently, 97 percent of the state is in drought conditions, with Texas’ water supply reservoirs only 65 percent full overall. And a late December briefing by NOAA on the climate notes that drought continues in over 61 percent of the country.
“During the upcoming three months, a much drier pattern is expected across the southwestern quadrant of the nation, limiting the prospects for further drought improvements during the wet season in California and Nevada,” NOAA says in its drought outlook. Continue Reading
Photo by Jeff Heimsath/StateImpact Texas
The drought has affected Texans across the state. Haskell Simon, a rice farmer in Bay City, may not have water for his crops this year.
Under serious pressure by state legislators, the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA) has announced a new proposal that could result in more water for Austin and less for rice farmers this year.
The LCRA had initially planned to send water from the Highland Lakes downstream this Spring if the two main reservoirs, Lakes Buchanan and Travis, were 39 percent full. But after vocal, continuous opposition from state senators Troy Fraser and Kirk Watson, the LCRA appears to have reversed course. Now they’re considering a revised plan that’s essentially the same emergency plan that was in place in 2012. That resulted in most rice farmers downstream being cut off from water for the first time in history. Continue Reading
Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Thick oil is seen washed ashore from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico on July 1, 2010 in Gulfport, Mississippi.
Less than two months after BP announced a record settlement over criminal charges for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the company that owned the rig has announced a civil and criminal settlement for a total of $1.4 billion.
While BP leased the Deepwater Horizon rig and owned rights to the Macondo well, a crew from Transocean Deepwater Inc. owned the rig and operated it. In a statement today, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says that “members of [the Transocean] crew onboard the Deepwater Horizon, acting at the direction of BP’s “Well Site Leaders” or “company men,” were negligent in failing fully to investigate clear indications that the Macondo well was not secure and that oil and gas were flowing into the well.”
The blowout on April 20, 2010 killed 11 workers, nine of them Transocean employees, and resulted in a 3-month oil spill that sent 206 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. It was the largest oil spill in U.S. history.
The Texas state legislature meets next week for another session, and there’s a sense that this time around, serious measures will be taken to fund water projects. Texas is, after all, an ever-growing state in the midst of an extended dry spell.
Hopes that the lege will act to fund water projects are high in West Texas towns like Spur, where Texas Tribune reporters Alana Rocha and Justin Dehn visited recently. But even if lawmakers do act, some in Spur aren’t convinced it will be enough to make a real difference for small Texas towns like theirs. You can watch their video report above.
Photo courtesy of dshortey via Flickr's Creative Commons: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dshortey/
The Qudrantid Meteor Shower will be visible early Thursday Morning before sunrise.
Update: If you’re reading these words the peak of the Quadrantid Meteor Shower has passed. But if you missed it, you can check out this slideshow or check out the video embedded below the jump.
Earlier: If you didn’t see any fireworks on New Year’s Eve, you might want to look to the skies tonight (well, technically very early tomorrow). That’s when the Quadrantid Meteor Shower will reach its peek visibility for the year.
Between 3 a.m. and sunrise Thursday morning, as many as 120 meteors an hour fall to earth in the shower. That could make for quite a show, but there’s a problem for people who want to watch in Texas. Actually, there are two of them.
JOE KLAMAR/AFP/Getty Images
A wind turbine rises above field in Burgenland near the Austrian-Slovakian border
Just a week after Texas hit another record for wind power generation, the wind industry and the green energy sector are breathing a huge sigh of relief today after Congress extended a tax credit that was set to expire.
The Renewable Electricity Production Tax Credit (PTC) has been around since 1992, and gives producers of wind, geothermal and some biomass projects a credit for each kilowatt hour of energy they make during their first ten years of operation. The one-year extension of the credit is expected to cost $12.1 billion over ten years.
As Politico reports, the extension of the credit actually improves it for the wind industry, as it “changes the language to allow any project that has begun construction by [the end of the year] to qualify for the PTC, rather than just projects operational by the deadline.” This makes the credit more effective this year, as it typically takes between 18 to 24 months to develop a new wind farm, according to the American Wind Energy Association. Continue Reading
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