Texas is the nation’s leader in oil, natural gas, and wind production. But what parts of the state are doing the heavy lifting when it comes to energy?
Last week, StateImpact Texas used data from the Railroad Commission of Texas and thewindpower.net to answer that question. We created maps that showed how much oil, natural gas, and wind energy each county produced between June 2012 and June 2013.
After digging even deeper into the data, we’ve come up with five key takeaways for what those maps mean, and why they’re important.
Pecos County is Texas’ All-Around Energy Leader
Out of Texas’ 254 counties, remote and arid Pecos County is the only one that ranks in the top 25 for oil, natural gas, and wind energy production. Few counties in the Trans-Pecos region are rich in fossil fuels, so Pecos County’s oil and natural gas operations (21st and 19th in the state, respectively) are unusual. Its wind production though is right in line with other West Texas counties — it clocks in as the state’s fifth-best.
Cliff Frohlich of the University of Texas at Austin.
A new study shows yet another link between oil and gas drilling and manmade earthquakes in Texas. The report, by scientists at the University of Texas at Austin, says that a recent string of quakes in the Eagle Ford Shale formation of South Texas are mostly a result of oil and gas drilling.
“The question we were looking at was, were quakes in the area linked to the disposal of hydrofracking waste?” says Cliff Frohlich, Associate Director at UT’s Institute for Geophysics and lead author of the study.
In previous studies of earthquakes in the Barnett Shale drilling in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, the science pointed to disposal wells as the culprit, where large amounts of wastewater from drilling are disposed of deep underground. In the case of South Texas, another drilling hotspot, Frohlich was expecting the same result.
But the geology and drilling history of the Eagle Ford are different, Frohlich says. Although the new study finds that some of the quakes in the area are probably linked to injection disposal wells, most of them, especially the biggest ones, are linked to the extraction of oil and gas. Continue Reading →
The Dallas-Fort Worth region wants to spend billions of dollars to secure long-term water supplies as its population continues to explode. But critics say conservation in the region, known for its lush lawns, must come first.
DALLAS — On the northern edge of the city limits, where residents have been subject to watering restrictions for more than a year, a cozy home on less than half an acre has one of the greenest lawns around.
The house is the first in Dallas to receive the Environmental Protection Agency’s “WaterSense” label, the agency’s stamp of approval for water efficiency. It is also the only such home in the country that is open to the public for tours and demonstrations. And the Dallas-Fort Worth region — one of the country’s fastest-growing and thirstiest — may be the most fitting location.
In a place where green lawns decked with water-sucking plants like St. Augustine grass and holly bushes are a status symbol, Dotty Woodson, a water resource specialist with Texas A&M University System’s agriculture education arm, said visitors are amazed to learn that the home’s lush zoysia palisades grass only needs watering once a week in the summertime.
“The first thing they say is, ‘Well gosh, here it is August and look at how much we have in bloom!’” she said.
But such outreach programs have yet to make a sizeable dent in the high household water consumption in North Texas. Environmentalists argue that the region must do more to conserve water before spending the proposed tens of billions of dollars needed to build costly new reservoirs or pipelines. Continue Reading →
Air pollution in a can: air sample awaiting analysis at UT School of Public Health
For years now, Texas has tried to block Federal air pollution laws, contending they stifle economic growth. But just last week, the U.S. Department of Justice filed another lawsuit to force power plants in northeast Texas to reduce toxic air emissions.
As the battle continues over how clean the air in Texas should be and at what cost, It might be worth highlighting why any of this matters.
One way to do that is ask researchers what they’re learning about how air pollution affects people. Scientists are finding that it’s like a pack-day-smoker who ends up living into old age: polluted air doesn’t have the same impact on everyone.
Pollution Immunity
“What we now understand is people are quite different in terms of their immune systems,” said Dr. William Calhoun at the University of Texas Medical Branch on Galveston Island. He says there’s a lot of research now to find out exactly why immune systems react differently to pollution. Continue Reading →
Texas is oil country. It leads the nation in oil production, and would be one of the top oil-producing nations if it were its own country. This map illustrates those points by breaking down Texas’ oil production by county.
The data for the map comes from the Texas Railroad Commission’s data query feature. This particular data set shows how many barrels of oil each county produced between June 2012 and June 2013.
Not surprisingly, the most intense production came from the Eagle Ford Shale and Permian Basin regions. The most prolific county over the past year was Karnes County, which is about 60 miles southeast of San Antonio. Oil operations in Karnes County shipped out over 46 million barrels of oil last year. The only regions which did not produce much oil were the Hill Country and the extreme northeast part of the state.
The Austin Blind Salamander is one of the species now listed as endangered in Central Texas.
You can welcome two Central Texas salamanders this week to the list of animals protected under the Endangered Species Act.
The Austin Blind Salamander, a creature that doesn’t have eyes in the traditional sense and lives in the dark depths of the Barton Springs Pool, has been listed by the US Fish & Wildlife Service as endangered. The Jollyville Plateau Salamander, which lives underwater in caves and springs fed by the Edwards Aquifer in Travis and Williamson Counties, has been listed as “threatened.” Both listings were expected, a result of the settlement in 2011 of a lawsuit by environmental groups against the Fish & Wildlife Service.
“These are some of the most endangered salamanders in the world,” says Chris Herrington with the City of Austin’s Watershed Protection Department. His group has been working with the Fish and Wildlife service to keep the pool open and the salamanders protected. Herrington notes that the Austin Blind Salamander is only found in and around Barton Springs Pool, an Austin landmark. In their counts of the creatures at the pool, his group has never found more than a thousand of the salamanders. Continue Reading →
Texas holds about 23 percent of the country’s natural gas reserves. And thanks in large part to the advent of drilling techniques like horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” Texas is producing more of it than any other state.
This map shows how much natural gas each county produced from wells between June 2012 and June 2013. Like our oil production map, the data comes from the Railroad Commission of Texas’ data query feature.
Larry Schatte manages an auction house in Giddings.
The Giddings Livestock Commission holds its auction every Monday. Hundreds of cows pass through, brought in by their rightful owners to be sold to the highest bidder. But, every now and then, auction manager Larry Larry Schatte says, a contraband cow finds its way into the mix.
“Probably about a year ago. This one guy, he’d usually bring in some cattle for his mom,” Schatte told StateImpact Texas on a recent auction day that the man would always bring in the same kind of cow, a specific type of cross breed.
“And this one particular time he came in with a couple of long horns, and I thought it was kind of an odd deal,” he said.
Drive west from Austin or Dallas-Fort Worth towards cities like Midland, Amarillo, or El Paso, and you’re bound to see your share of wind turbines dotting the landscape.
That’s because Texas leads the nation in wind capacity, and more wind farms are on the way. That’s reflected in this map, which shows each county’s annual wind energy production in gigawatt hours. (One gigawatt hour is enough to power 200,000 Texas homes during peak summer energy demand, and many more than that during cooler times.)
Photo by UPI/Pat Benic/LANDOV
Texas has more wind energy than any other state.
It’s important to note that the values for this map are not exact. The data comes from The Wind Power, a wind industry website, which maintains a database of every wind farm in the world. While the group records the county and annual production of each wind farm, some farms span multiple counties, which means that some production data had to be approximated. Still, this map is a reasonably accurate representation of where Texas’ wind production is coming from.
Even though Texas is the nation’s wind leader, only 46 of its 254 counties are wind producers. The vast majority of these are found in West Texas and the Panhandle, although coastal counties like Kenedy and Willacy are also represented. Wind farms along the Gulf Coast might become more prolific in the future as companies continue to develop onshore wind, and look to offshore wind capabilities as well.
A wind turbine in Sterling county. Texas has more wind power than any other state, and more than most countries.
With Plenty of Turbines and Pumpjacks Along the Way
Over a thousand miles later, StateImpact Texas has returned from our first “Road Show,” a journey that took us from Austin to Midland-Odessa, then to Marfa, and back. Along the way, we heard stories of the drought, the drilling boom, and what everyday Texans think about energy and environment.
Photo by Terrence Henry/StateImpact Texas
A pumpjack in the Monahans Sandhills in West Texas.
One thing we saw a lot of this trip? Wind turbines and pumpjacks. Hundreds of them. Sometimes pretty close together, which makes for an interesting visual.
Those two icons tell two different stories about Texas energy. One is a victory for renewables, while the other means a continued reliance on fossil fuels. Continue Reading →
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