The story comes from the Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Gilbert, who learned that Tillerson has joined his neighbors in Bartonville (a Dallas suburb) in a suit against a water tower that would be used in part for fracking and drilling operations. Tillerson (along with former U.S. House Majority Leader Dick Armey) is actually showing up in person at town hall meetings to protest the tower. “He and his neighbors had filed suit to block the tower, saying it is illegal and would create ‘a noise nuisance and traffic hazards,’ in part because it would provide water for use in hydraulic fracturing,” Gilbert reports.
More from the Wall Street Journal on Tillerson’s objections: Continue Reading →
“Texas’ air monitoring system is so flawed that the state knows almost nothing about the extent of the pollution in the Eagle Ford. Only five permanent air monitors are installed in the 20,000-square-mile region, and all are at the fringes of the shale play, far from the heavy drilling areas where emissions are highest.”
“Thousands of oil and gas facilities, including six of the nine production sites near the Buehrings’ house, are allowed to self-audit their emissions without reporting them to the state. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), which regulates most air emissions, doesn’t even know some of these facilities exist. An internal agency document acknowledges that the rule allowing this practice “[c]annot be proven to be protective.” Continue Reading →
Trucks at a state-authorized disposal site in Frio County, Texas
Acids used for drilling oil and gas wells are safe according to the oil and gas industry, but companies have been looking for better alternatives to protect workers and the environment.
The concern over acids was highlighted this week in Pennsylvania, where there’s been a boom in drilling for natural gas. The state’s Department of Environmental Protection said it found that Halliburton Energy Services had for years failed to handle hydrochloric acid as a hazardous waste when it trucked it to an unauthorized disposal site. The state said the “acidic waste” had come from “various gas well sites.”
A car tire lays exposed in the dried lake bottom at Lake Abillene near Abilene, Texas.
Texas is a state so huge that it experiences several different climate conditions, from the subtropical Eastern half (think swamps and hurricanes) to the semiarid West (desert and snow in the winter). As such, the state must wear a variety of hats as it navigates a changing climate.
A new study from Arizona State University says that because every region has a different climate, every region experiences climate change differently. So in combating climate change, each region must come up with a different strategy.
Matei Georgescu, one of the scientists who worked on the study, says that “local decisions can play a role” in decreasing effects of urban expansion to make conditions more livable. And Texas is no exception.
As cities burst at the seams from surges in population, those cities become pollution hubs that Georgescu says will “result in about one to two degrees Celcius warming” that will spread beyond city limits. Continue Reading →
Most candidates for Railroad Commission of Texas don't recognize the link between quakes and injection wells.
Scientists have known that man can create earthquakes by injecting fluids into the ground for decades. But if you listen to the people campaigning to regulate the Texas oil and gas industry, you may think the idea was in serious dispute.
Every Republican party candidate this primary season for the Railroad Commission denies that there is a link between injection wells used to pump oil and gas waste water underground and the surge in earthquakes that have struck Texas since the current oil and gas boom got underway. (The Railroad Commission of Texas has nothing to do with railroads; it’s the state’s oil and gas regulator.)
It’s a denial that has people living in quake-prone parts of the state deeply upset.
“Are they blind?!” Lynda Stokes, the mayor of the North Texas town of Reno, says. “Except for maybe one or two, every study says that they [quakes and injection wells] are linked. How can they say that there is no correlation?
Reno is at the epicenter of the most recent swarm of quakes. She calls herself a political independent.
The report found that toxic chemicals like benzene and hydrogen sulfide are being emitted in increasing amounts in the Eagle Ford Shale area of South Texas.
“It’s as if you’d took a big oil refinery that you’d find in Houston and plopped it down in the middle of rural Karnes County, Texas,” Jim Morris, a reporter for the non-profit Center for Public Integrity, tells StateImpact Texas. The findings came from a review of state air pollution permits.
The investigation comes on the heels of an analysis, published recently in Science Magazine, that found that natural gas “production and processing” is emitting more methane than estimated by the Environmental Protection Agency. That has implications for global climate change, though the report found that methane leaks could potentially be fixed.
Larry Burns is the Emergency Coordinator for the town of Timpson, in East Texas. “If the quakes get much over a 5.0 [on the Richter scale], then we suspect we’ll have some damage. It could be anything from broken lines, broken mains to a water tower on the ground.”
Cliff Frohlich of UT Austin has studied the quakes. “It’s like smoking and lung cancer,” Frohlich says. “Some people smoke and never get lung cancer. Some people get lung cancer and don’t smoke. And that’s sort of the situation with injection wells.”
The water tower in Timpson wasn’t build to withstand earthquakes. “After 4.0 [on the Richter scale], we get pretty nervous,” says Debra Smith, the mayor. “We have buildings in town that are over a hundred years old.”
One of the disposal wells outside of Timpson. Oil and gas drilling wastewater is sent into this well that goes nearly two miles underground.
Disposal wells like this one are the point where a small operation could turn out to be causing big tremors that can be felt miles away.
The Gator Services disposal well outside of Timpson in East Texas.
On a busy day, several tanker trucks will pull up and unload wastewater from fracking and drilling.
The North Texas towns of Reno and Azle have seen over thirty earthquakes since November, sometimes more than one a day. It’s been unsettling for residents like Barbara Brown.
“Damage to my home, sinkholes on my property. Nerves! And a lot of angst,” she said. “Because you just don’t know when they’re going to happen again.”
And it’s not the only town in the state that’s been hit with tremors. Texas has seen the number of recorded earthquakes increase tenfold since the drilling boom began several years ago. While studies have linked the quakes to oil and gas drilling activities, but state regulators and politicians say the science is far from settled.
So what does the science really say? Take a listen to the radio story:
Citizens opposed to gas drilling in Dallas made their voices heard about Trinity East's plans during city meetings
Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings says a $30 million lawsuit filed Thursday by Trinity East Energy is the latest in a “game of poker.” The gas drilling company is suing the city, claiming it breached a contract that would have allowed it to drill on city property.
In 2008 Trinity East Energy paid the City of Dallas $19 million for the right to drill for natural gas on 3,600 acres in Northwest Dallas.
The Fort Worth company filed three zoning applications to drill but the city plan commission and the city council rejected the sites because two were located in a park and floodplain and a third was near a new soccer complex.
Trinity East’s President Stephen Fort says city officials including Former City Manager Mary Suhm assured his company it would be able to drill, then they broke their promise. Continue Reading →
An empty rain gauge is strapped to a fence post on the edge of a pasture this summer near Canadian, Texas
In Spanish, El Niño means “the boy child.” But if El Niño predictions for late 2014 prove correct, winter rainfall in Texas could be anything but little. The deceptively-named weather pattern generally brings rain to Texas. Lots of it.
El Niño occurs when warm water buried below the surface of the Pacific rises up and spreads along the equator towards America. It often causes storms that devastate parts of Latin America, Indonesia and Australia, but it could also bring relief to drought-stricken Texas.
“It tends to cause the jetstream to be farther south than normal, which means we may get more rain events, generally cool temperatures and lots of run-off, which would be good for reservoir levels,” John Nielsen-Gammen, Texas State Climatologist, tells StateImpact Texas.
Now, a new study from Stanford University gives the El Niño weather pattern a 76 percent chance of returning this year. What exactly does that mean?
Acid solutions are trucked to drill sites and injected deep underground
Read about the history of oil drilling in Texas and you’ll find references to how wildcatters would pour barrels of hydrochloric acid into their wells. The acid would eat through underground rock formations and allow more oil to flow up the well.
That was decades ago. While a lot has changed in the drilling industry since then, using acid has not. It’s only gotten bigger. And in Texas, no one seems to have any idea of just how much hydrochloric, acetic, or hydrofluoric acid is being pumped into the ground.
“During my years with Shell, we did not have to go to the Railroad Commission [the state oil and gas regulator] to get approval for an acid job,” said Joe Dunn Clegg, a retired engineer who now teaches at the University of Houston. In his well drilling class, you’ll learn all about what the oil and gas industry calls acidizing.
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