A pickup truck equipped to detect pollution is a project of Rice University and the University of Houston
At Rice University in Houston, environmental engineer Rob Griffin is working on a project that uses a pollution detection device as big as a pickup truck. Actually, it is a pickup truck.
The mobile pollution lab has been roaming the streets and highways of Houston since this fall. The project won’t be done for at least another year.
“We are going to have a lot of data. This is going to be an incredibly massive project,” Griffin told StateImpact. Continue Reading →
In today’s meeting of the Railroad Commission of Texas, the state Agency that regulates the Texas oil and gas industry, Commissioner David Porter announced the search for a staff seismologist in response to the rash of small earthquakes that have sprung up throughout the state along with the boom in oil and gas production.
The hire “will allow the commission to be able to study seismic activity in Texas based on proven science and facts which the commission rules and regulations must be based on,” Porter said as he instructed Milton Rister, Commission Executive Director, to begin the search.
The announcement comes after a “listening session” Commissioner Porter and Commission Staff attended with residents of Azle, Texas. The town is home to numerous waste water disposal wells and has experienced dozens of quakes in recent months. The link between waste water disposal and earthquakes has been proven in other regions and the townspeople were disappointed when Porter and others repeated Railroad Commission assertions that a link was something that remains unanswered by science.
After 20 earthquakes in a month, will state regulators respond?
Last week we reported from the Texas town of Azle, where a swarm of low-intensity earthquakes has frightened townspeople, damaged property, and put state regulators on the defensive.
Azle had never experienced earthquakes like this before the arrival of waste water disposal wells, related to oil and gas drilling. Science has shown how those wells can cause earthquakes, so the people of the region were hoping for some answers when the Railroad Commission of Texas, the Agency that regulates the state’s oil and gas sector, came to town for a public forum.
The mood soured when Commissioner David Porter announced that he would not be answering questions.
The same day that event was taking place in Texas, our colleagues at StateImpact Oklahoma were filing their own report on the sudden uptick in earthquakes there.
ERCOT controls the power grid for about 23 million customers in Texas.
At the heart of the energy emergency that brought Texas to the brink of rolling blackouts this morning was the failure of power plants to provide electricity when the state needed it, says the state grid operator. That included two plants in North Central Texas that suffered equipment failure caused by freezing weather.
In fact, the state saw higher electric demand during a cold spell last month, without going into an “energy emergency,” ERCOT Spokesperson Robbie Searcy said in a telephone news conference today.
The difference this time was that there was less power available.
“We lost about 3,700 megawatts of generation,” said Dan Woodfin, ERCOT’s Director of System Operations. “About half of that was weather-related and the remainder were due to non-weather-related issues.”
Woodfin said about 1,800 megawatts of lost power came from two large plants that were forced offline after some of their monitoring equipment froze.
“Probably if we had lost another unit it would have put us into an Energy Emergency Alert Three,” Woodfin said, referring to the level that would have prompted rolling blackouts.
Controllers make daily forecasts of the next day’s electric demand and supply down to every five minutes.
As chilly weather grips much of Texas, the state’s electricial grid operator is asking consumers to reduce their energy use, though it says a brief threat of rolling blackouts has been averted.
In an alert sent at 8 a.m., the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which operates the grid covering 85 percent of the state, issued an emergency alert, meaning the grid’s power reserves had dropped below a comfortable threshold.
But the situation, ERCOT said, was improving.
Less than an hour earlier, ERCOT issued a “power warning,” which is just a step away from rolling blackouts — controlled, temporary interruptions of power service — due to high demands that threaten to exhaust capacity.
One speaker asked fellow residents to raise their hands if they've heard a loud "boom" accompanying recent earthquakes.
Azle, Texas – “I’ve got a crack in my hallway,” chuckled Marion LeBert as he stood in the parking lot of Azle High School.
“Oh my! We have sink holes in our yard. And they’ve gotten bigger since these earthquakes,” commiserated Tracy Napier.
The two were among hundreds of townspeople hoping to get answers at a meeting hosted last night by the Railroad Commission of Texas, the state’s oil and gas industry regulators. The area, in Parker and Tarrant counties, didn’t experience earthquakes until recently. Now, it’s seen a swarm of over twenty minor ones in the last two months, troubling residents and causing damage to some homes. The earthquakes would be the topic of discussion.
Mose Buchele
Marion LeBert, Tracy Napier and Tommy Eldridge (left to right) traded earthquake stories before the meeting.
“I just want to kind of sit back and see what [state regulators] are gonna say,” LeBert told StateImpact Texas. “I’ve lived here 20 years and we never had anything like this till they started all the drilling and the fracking and stuff. All I want to do is get the truth out of them.”
Scientific research has shown how similar quakes are caused when waste water from oil and gas drilling is injected into underground disposal wells. This area of North Texas has many such disposal wells. But the link has not been publicly acknowledged by the Railroad Commission (though agency staff agree it exists in internal emails and PowerPoint presentations obtained by StateImpact Texas). Ahead of last night’s meeting, Railroad Commissioner David Porter had said he would would talk about plans to deal with the quakes, signaling that the Commission was willing to publicly offer some answers.
As the meeting got underway, it quickly became clear that plan had changed.
A map of recent earthquakes (in red) and oil and gas wastewater disposal wells outside of Fort Worth. Active disposal wells are in green; inactive wells are in yellow. Map by Michael Marks/Terrence Henry
UPDATE: Check back on StateImpact Texas later this morning for full coverage of last night’s event.
Residents around Eagle Mountain Lake outside of Fort Worth have had a shaky few months. Dozens of small earthquakes have struck the area out of the blue. The Dallas-Fort Worth area is not known as a place that’s prone to earthquakes. In fact, before 2007, there were no recorded earthquakes in the area. Since then, there have been hundreds.
Studies of other swarms of earthquakes to the south in Johnson County and around the Dallas-Fort Worth airport have shown disposal wells to be the culprit, where wastewater from oil and gas drilling is injected deep underground. Inject enough wastewater, at the right pressure, and it can cause quiet faults to slip, resulting in earthquakes.
“Over just five years, we’ve come from an environment where, although experts like myself knew injection could cause earthquakes, it wasn’t something on companies minds or the public’s mind,” said Cliff Frohlich,a geologist at the University of Texas at Austin, during an earlier interview. Frohlich has led much of the research into the Texas quakes.
“We’ve gone to an environment now where a lot of people are worrying about this. And over the next five years, this is going to result in a lot more knowledge about the phenomenon. And how to handle it in a responsible way,” Frorhlich said.
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