Graduate research assistant Kyle Knust holds a water chip.
It would be easy to mistake the small, translucent, object in Kyle Knust’s hand as just another cheap piece of plastic. With dozens more scattered around his section of a buzzing graduate assistant’s lab at the University of Texas, the thumbnail-sized chips don’t appear to be worth much.
And that’s because they’re not. At 50 cents apiece, the chips are pretty cheap to make. But the technology inside of them – a method of water desalination that’s potentially cheaper and more efficient than any other – could prove to be invaluable.
Along with other researchers and private companies, Knust is helping to develop a desalinating “water chip” that uses a charged electrode to separate salt from water. The new technique could revolutionize how people get water, as well as how much they pay for it.
With new regulations potentially on the horizon, will the fractious relationship between Texas and the federal government likely continue? Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott (and now candidate for Governor) has spent over $2.5 million suing the federal government. Many of those lawsuits, including 14 which are active, have been directed against the EPA. (Texas lost the latest round, fought over whether the EPA has the right to regulate greenhouse emissions.)Â
And the state’s U.S. senators, John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, voted against McCarthy’s appointment. However, Texas environmentalists consider her confirmation a victory. Continue Reading →
When it comes to settling disputes over who owns the oil & gas in Texas, the state’s law struck a federal judge as anything but fair. After reviewing an opinion by the Texas Supreme Court, he said it was more like theft.
“The Garza opinion gives oil and gas operators a blank check to steal from the small landowner,” wrote John Preston Bailey, a United States District judge in Wheeling, West Virginia.
Bailey had been asked to throw out a case involving a dispute between a landowner in West Virgina and a company drilling a horizontal well for natural gas. The company’s lawyers cited the Texas case, Coastal Oil & Gas v. Garza Energy Trust. Continue Reading →
William Christian is a lawyer with Graves Dougherty Hearon Moody. Part of his practice involves representing landowners in condemnation cases.
Texas is a funny place when it comes to property rights.
State Supreme Court rulings have said pipeline companies are not doing enough to prove they can take private land. Meanwhile, an unprecedented boom in oil and gas drilling means those same companies are scrambling to put more pipeline in the ground. The result has been an explosion in litigation over how and when companies are able to take private land.
But while Texas may be ground zero in the struggle over eminent domain, industry representatives and legal experts are seeing more Texas-style battles in other parts of the country as drilling and pipeline building expand.
Courtesy The Greater San Antonio Chamber of Commerce
Attorney General Greg Abbott has filed multiple lawsuits against the EPA.
What does Texas Attorney General (and now candidate for Governor) Greg Abbott like to do for fun?
“What I really do for fun is I go into the office,” Abbott said at a speech last year, “[and] I sue the Obama adminstration.”
Abbott has been openly bragging on the campaign trail of his many lawsuits against the Obama administration and federal agencies — at last count there were 28 of them. But today an appeals court rejected one of those suits against the Environmental Protection Agency over the regulation of greenhouse gases.
In a follow-up to an earlier ruling last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia denied Abbott’s lawsuit. That suit challenged federal requirements that states regulate greenhouse gases when permitting pollution new industrial facilities. Today’s ruling essentially says that letting the EPA regulate carbon emissions will do no harm to Texas. Continue Reading →
State Rep. Sylvester Turner helped create the System Benefit Fund. He will now see the fund drawn down.
Over the next three years, low-income Texans will receive approximately $800 million from the state to help pay their summer electric bills. However, on September 1, 2016, that money will run out. As a result, Texans who cannot afford to pay their electric bills are likely to go without air-conditioning during the summer.
The money comes from the System Benefit Fund, which the Texas Legislature created to assist low-income Texans with their electric bills after the state’s electricity markets were deregulated over a decade ago. (In Austin and San Antonio, where electricity markets are still regulated, residents are not eligible to receive this funding.)For years, however, though the state collected fees for the fund from Texas electric ratepayers, it often reduced or withheld the money that was supposed to go to low-income Texans. Keeping the money in the treasury helped state lawmakers certify that the budget was balanced.
During the 2013 regular legislative session, lawmakers ended the collection of fees for the program, but increased the electric bill discount for qualifying low-income households from 16.5 percent to 82 percent. The existing fund will be used to help pay the remaining 18 percent of those households’ electric bills for the month of September 2013, and the period from May to August 2014.
Once the fund is gone, there are concerns about what could happen to elderly and low-income Texans who cannot afford to pay their electricity bills during the hot summer months. Continue Reading →
Barry Smitherman is the chairman of the Railroad Commission of Texas, now running for Attorney General. He is skeptical of the science behind climate change.
‘Not Everyone Believes in Global Warming,’ Smitherman Says
Over 97 percent of climate change studies agree: the climate is changing, the world is warming and humans are the cause of it. But that does leave 3 percent of climate studies that are skeptical. And that sliver of skepticism is where Barry Smitherman, the head of Texas’ oil and gas drilling regulatory agency, has decided to plant his feet.
At a conference of utility commissioners in Colorado yesterday, Smitherman, chairman of the Railroad Commission of Texas, and now a candidate for state Attorney General, took some time to trumpet his skepticism. “Don’t be fooled — not everyone believes in global warming,” Smitherman tweeted from the conference.
“Given the incredibly high percentage of fossil fuels used to make electricity in America and given electricity’s fundamental role in powering our U.S. economy, we should be 100 percent certain about CO2’s role – or lack thereof – in ‘changing the climate’ before President Obama, by Presidential directive, dismantles our power generation fleet,” Smitherman said.
To buttress those claims, Smitherman turned to Dr. William Happer, a climate change skeptic and Chairman of the George C. Marshall Institute, a conservative think tank that has received funding from the oil and gas industry. Happer was the only scientist on a panel at the conference, moderated by Smitherman, called ‘The Myth of Carbon Pollution.’ A press release from the Railroad Commission called it a “key panel” and “well-attended.” (In an interesting bit of scheduling, a panel titled ‘Learning from the Regions: Cap and Trade, Carbon Tax, and the Way Forward‘ immediately preceded it.)
But Happer is not a climatologist, rather his specialty is physics — he’s a professor at Princeton, where he studies atoms and nuclei. He does not appear to have authored any peer-reviewed studies on climate change. And his claims have been refuted by many in the climate science community. Continue Reading →
Dr. Joseph Levy / The University of Texas Institute for Geophysics
Research team member Jim O'Connor of the USGS inspects a block of ice calved off the Garwood Valley ice cliff.
New Research Shows Melting at Rates Comparable to the Arctic
Unlike the Arctic Circle up north, where once-permanent sea ice began melting and miles of permafrost began thawing decades ago, the ground ice in Antarctica’s Garwood Valley was generally considered stable. In this remote polar region near the iceberg-encrusted Ross Sea, temperatures actually became colder from 1986 to 2000, then stabilized, while the climate in much of the rest of the world warmed during that same period.
But now, the ice in Antarctica is melting as rapidly as in the Arctic.
That’s not because temperatures are rising. A team of researchers has discovered that increased solar radiation is thawing ground ice in Garwood Valley at an accelerated rate, disrupting normal seasonal ice patterns.
The cause of the increased solar radiation is, for now, uncertain, although it is related to changes in weather patterns. More research will be required to determine why it is happening.
“I’m a geologist—I look down,” explained Joseph Levy, one of two University of Texas at Austin scientists on the research team and co-author of the research paper in Scientific Reports. “The next step is to figure out what’s driving this change in sunlight patterns. It’s going to involve working with meteorologists and climate modelers.”
Antarctica is predicted to warm during the coming century. As a result, the ground ice could melt even more quickly, which would cause more serious sinking and buckling of the landscape. Continue Reading →
Turn one, with its steep hill, was a big challenge for the racers
The shell of a solar racing car is lifted up after a car comes into the pit for repairs.
The race isn’t about speed, it’s about endurance. Whichever team does the most laps in 3 days, wins.
Taking a look inside the car
If the teams race too fast, the batteries will drain too quickly
A solar car approaches the pit
The battery, up close
It’s a sweltering Texas summer day in late June, and here at the Circuit of the Americas Formula 1 race track in Austin, the stands are empty. Just last fall, they were filled with fans witnessing the deafening roar of cars going upward of 200 miles an hour.
But if you were to listen closely this summer day, you’d hear a barely audible zooming on the track. Peek down from the stands, and you’d see little pods zipping along the track at a brisk 45 miles an hour. They’re solar-powered cars, part of the annual Formula Sun Grand Prix competition, where several teams of college engineering students race against each other, and the constant drain of batteries.
Unal Okyay at the University of Houston analyzes satellite images of Utah indicating oil & gas seeps
It’s part of the popular lore of how to get rich by finding oil: all you have to do is look for it bubbling to the surface. That’s actually how some of the biggest oil fields were discovered many years ago.
Now, scientists are again trying to find oil and gas deposits by looking for them at the surface, albeit with sophisticated satellite and digital technology.
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