A photo of a rusted out pipe taken during a TCEQ inspection of a dam. This picture is now used in dam safety workshops presented by TCEQ.
This is part two of a series devoted to looking at the infrastructure of dams in Texas, and what can be done to improve it. You can find part one hereand part threehere.
In 2008, the Texas State Auditor’s office released the kind of report that keeps public officials awake at night. It found that state regulators were not ensuring the proper maintenance of thousands of dams in Texas. The audit found that state inspectors had never visited hundreds of dams that could cause loss of life if they failed.
The Dam Safety Program with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality is in charge of inspecting the state’s dams. Warren Samuelson, the program’s manager, says that his department has added staff and made progress since that audit was issued.
“At the end of 2011 we had all of them… except a handful that we couldn’t get into. We were able to look at all of these high and significant hazard dams,” Samuelson told StateImpact Texas.
This picture of a dam that over-topped is used in dam safety workshops presented by the TCEQ.
This is part one of a StateImpact Texas series devoted to looking at the infrastructure of dams in Texas, and what can be done to improve it.Â
Of the 1,880 dams inspected by the TCEQ since 2008, 245 were found to be in bad condition, according to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. Around 2,000 of the state’s dams were built with federal help in the wake of the great drought of the 1950s. Almost all of those are now past or nearing their projected 50-year lifespan, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers.
Statistics like these don’t come as a surprise to the people who work with dams in the state of Texas.
“We’ve traveled and looked at different dams just to make sure that we do things right. And there’s a lot of dams that we did come across that would scare me to live downstream from them,” Troy Henderson, Chief of Lake Patrol for the Brownwood Water Improvement District, told StateImpact Texas this summer.
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality is appealing a lawsuit that it has already won — and that was filed by children. Environmental advocates say the appeal shows that the state will go to any lengths to fight the suggestion that it address climate change.
As part of a national environmental movement, a group of youths in 2011 demanded that the commission enact steps to reduce greenhouse gases. The agency refused, and the youths’ parents sued on their behalf.
A year later, Travis County District Judge Gisela Triana ruled in the agency’s favor, saying it could use its own discretion and decide not to institute greenhouse gas regulations. But the commission still appealed, insisting that the court did not have jurisdiction over the case to begin with and that she made an “improper declaratory judgment” — that Texas is responsible for protecting “all natural resources of the State including the air and atmosphere.”
Vented methane gas burns at processing facility in DeWitt County
When the Environmental Defense Fund and researchers from the University of Texas wanted to find out just how much methane gas was coming from natural gas production sites, they ended up getting “unprecedented” access. The researchers had approached nine, big oil & gas exploration companies, gaining permission to do testing on 190 production sites nationwide.
“It definitely took some conversations with these companies to build a comfort and a trust level that this wasn’t a ‘gotcha’ exercise but rather an exercise to improve the science,” said Drew Nelson, manager of the Environmental Defense Fund ‘s climate and energy program. Continue Reading →
A vehicle is seen near the remains of a fertilizer plant burning after the explosion.
After the West Fertilizer Plant explosion on April 17, Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) said that “the federal government isn’t doing enough right now” to address regulating industrial disasters. Now, thanks to the federal government shutdown, it’s doing even less.
Senator Boxer, who is the chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, held a press conference yesterday highlighting the impact of the shutdown on the Chemical Safety Board (CSB) and other agencies. The CSB is the agency leading the investigation into the West explosion. Thirty seven of its 41 employees have been furloughed because of the shutdown.
The Keystone XL Pipeline could eventually stretch from Canada to Texas.
In Texas, the Keystone XL pipeline, which will take heavy oil harvested from sand pits in Canada to refineries on the Gulf Coast of Texas, has raised questions about eminent domain and potentially leaky pipes. Despite those controversies, Texas’ portion of the pipeline is nearly completed. That section will link up with the existing Keystone pipeline to trasport oil from Canada. If the XL portion is ultimately approved, even more Canadian tar sands oil will be coming to Texas.
But the fate of that last part of the project is still in question. Phase 4, which will stretch from Hardisty, Alberta to Steele City, Neb. is still a flashpoint of controversy. Here’s a quick roundup of the most recent Keystone XL Pipeline news:
The Gulf Coast Pipeline Project, the stretch of pipe that runs from Cushing, Okla. to Nederland, Texas, is almost done. Reuters reported last week that the southern portion of the pipeline’s expansion is “95 percent complete,” according to a TransCanada spokesman. The pipeline could start moving oil by the end of the year. Continue Reading →
Hurricane Ike in 2008 buckled this petroleum storage tank south of Beaumont
Research engineers say they’re finding that giant storage tanks for petrochemicals and petroleum are vulnerable to damage from tropical storms despite the tanks’ massive size and steel construction. The researchers found multiple cases of flood waters and high winds causing the tanks to float, buckle and rupture.
What the scientists say they didn’t find were regulations to minimize the risk in areas where “storm surge” waters are a threat.
“Overall we don’t see a wealth of any mandated provisions for considering surge or wave loads or external pressures from hurricane events,” said Jamie Padgett speaking at conference held recently in Houston by Rice University’s hurricane research center. Continue Reading →
The U.S. is set to be the number one producer of oil and gas this year.
The current domestic drilling boom has brought plenty of jobs, traffic and concerns about pollution and sustainability. It’s also put the U.S. in a position that was unimaginable a decade ago: this year, the U.S. will be the number one producer of oil and gas, according to the federal Energy Information Administration (EIA).
“Since 2008, U.S. petroleum production has increased 7 quadrillion Btu, with dramatic growth in Texas and North Dakota. Natural gas production has increased by 3 quadrillion Btu over the same period, with much of this growth coming from the eastern United States,” the EIA says in an analysis today. Production has also been up for Russia and Saudi Arabia, but not nearly the same amount. The U.S. and Russia had been neck and neck for the past few years; this year, the U.S. struck a clear lead in fossil fuel production.
The increase in domestic production is due largely in part to the use of drilling techniques like hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” and horizontal drilling. Those methods — largely proven viable in Texas — have allowed large domestic deposits of oil and gas to be reached. Texas has taken the lead in that domestic production, and is projected to continue to do so.
At a meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference last week in St. Louis, Charlie Kirk, executive director of the free-market group Turning Point USA, introduced state Rep. Stefani Carter as a leader who will one day prompt folks to muse, “Ah, I remember when I saw her.”
For most public office-seekers, being known as a rising star would boost their chances. But the seat Carter seeks is different. She’s campaigning — against a wide field of candidates — to replace attorney general candidate Barry Smitherman on the Texas Railroad Commission, the powerful oil and gas regulatory agency that’s widely known — and sometimes derided — as a launching pad for higher office. Leaders in the oil and gas industry, who are largely responsible for bankrolling the candidates’ campaigns, say they are frustrated by the seemingly constant turnover at the agency, and they are looking for candidates who plan to serve their full terms.
“The industry and the state deserves someone who’s going to stay a full six years,” said Bill Stevens, a consultant with the Texas Alliance of Energy Producers. Continue Reading →
Millions of them have been installed in homes across Texas, but not everyone is happy about them. Smart meters, which allow allow utilities to respond to outages faster and help utilities and consumers monitor their energy use, have been deployed across much of the state at the urging of the state’s Public Utility Commission (PUC). By replacing old analog meters, the argument goes, grid efficiency is improved and utilities are saved a monthly trip to each home to record usage.
But now that the smart meters are making their way to smaller towns like Alpine in Far West Texas, more opposition is occurring. As Natalie Pattillo reports for Marfa Public Radio today, that opposition is coming from people concerned about “health risks from radioactive-frequency signals, a rise in electric bills, and consumer anxieties about the security of their information.” Some of the opposition has come from Tea Party groups and the Alex Jones InfoWars crowd. In at least one instance, a Texas town has come up with rules to allow people to refuse the meters: the town of Brady successfully passed a smart meter opt-out plan earlier this year.
After some of the opposition became vocal over the last few years, the Public Utility Commission has approved a plan that will allow Texans across the state to opt-out of the meters. But it will come at a price.
“The customers who opts-out will have to pay the costs that will be incurred to be able to do that,” says PUC Commissioner Kenneth Anderson. “We also will be requiring those customers to acknowledge in writing that they understand they will be losing some benefits from not having the smart meters.”
The PUC says claims of health risks from smart meters are “unwarranted.”
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