“I’m not a dope smoker, okay?” he says with a point of his trademark unlit cigar. “Except with Willie [Nelson]. More as a Texas etiquette kind of thing.”
First, his argument for hemp. It is in the same family as marijuana but is its industrial form and doesn’t have the medicinal or recreational uses of marijuana. Friedman argues that if cotton farmers in Texas were allowed to grow hemp instead, the trade-offs would be attractive.
“Hemp requires half the water that cotton does, while producing two and a half times the fiber. All with zero pesticides needed,” he says. “Now if you were to pitch that as a pilot program to a cotton farmer, they’d take it.” Continue Reading →
Researchers from Southern Methodist University say folks shouldn’t rush to conclusions about what’s been causing the swarm of more than 30 earthquakes northwest of Fort Worth since November.
Scientists have installed a temporary seismic network in and around the earthquake swarm to help gain a better understanding of the quakes.
On Friday, in the basement of SMU’s Department of Earth Sciences, professors gathered in front of colorful waves from seismic stations.
Professor Brian Stump is part of SMU’s research team. He said those waves are what they use to pinpoint earthquakes, and more carefully examine each acceleration.
“Talking about how earthquakes generate waves,” Stump says. “That may be too technical, but it does help you understand what you’re feeling.” Continue Reading →
Hal Alper of UT examines a sample of his new yeast-based biofuel.
For years, soybeans have been the predominant base for biodiesel fuel in the United States. But the crop has a major limitation — it can’t grow everywhere, preventing its widespread adoption as a fuel.
Hal Alper, a chemical engineering professor at the University of Texas at Austin, has come up with a replacement. It’s found in your bread: yeast. After it undergoes some chemical tinkering and mixes with sugar, Alper and his team of researchers say yeast can then be converted into what he calls “sweet crude biofuel.”
He says yeast has been transformed into unlikely products such as alcohol for “thousands of years,” now it can be transformed into fuel. Alper says soybean and yeast have almost identical genes, which makes yeast an easy alternate for biodiesel. Continue Reading →
ERCOT is asking Texans to conserve power until noon Friday.
Update:At some point Friday morning, the conservation alert was canceled. ERCOT says there have been localized outages, but they weren’t related to “overall grid conditions.”
Original story: The group that operates much of the Texas electric grid is calling on people to conserve energy. Electric use is getting close to setting a new winter record because of the cold weather, but that’s not the only reason grid operators are worried.
While summer is usually the time when supplies can be stretched thin in the state, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) has already declared two energy emergency alerts already this winter. In those cases the cause wasn’t just electric demand, it was because power plants went offline when the grid needed them most. Cold weather can cause mechanical failures that shut plants down, and that’s one thing grid operators worry might happen again. Continue Reading →
Scientists study the make up of stalactites and stalagmites to learn about ancient climate trends.
Banner (right) and researcher Barbara Wortham.
This mirror like pool of water was dry during the great Texas drought of 2011.
Formations like these tell the story of the earths climate history.
Barbara Wortham recently presented new research on how to determine the age of speleothems..
Dr. Banner’s research team measures the length of time for a single drop of water to fall in this cave.
Dr. Jay Banner and Barbara Wortham in a part of the caverns closed to the public.
Barbara Wortham at the lowest part of the caves.
Rock formations.
Researchers venture off the public passages to learn carry out their work.
Paleo ‘Rain Gauges’ in Texas Caves Help Show How Our Climate is Changing
It’s easy to imagine that attitudes towards climate change would be different if everyone owned a device like the one Dr. Jay Banner showed me this winter in Georgetown, Texas. It’s a small instrument, about the size and shape of a walkie talkie, that measures carbon dioxide wherever you go.
“You can see that outside here, the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is 403 parts per million,” Banner says, holding it up for inspection on a frigid morning. “That’s a number we’re really worried about in our society today. Because, at the onset of the industrial revolution, we were at about 280 parts per million. We’re on our way towards doubling it.”
Scientists agree that carbon dioxide contributes to climate change. What researchers like Banner, a Professor of Geological Science at the University of Texas at Austin, want to understand is what climate change means for the world around us. That search has put him in some tight spots during his career, often deep underground, in the caves of Central Texas. Continue Reading →
Texas leases submerged coastal land for oil & gas wells and also wildlife projects
As Texas decides how it will spend millions of dollars from a multi-state agreement with BP following the Deepwater Horizon spill, the Texas General Land Office (GLO) is proposing a fee on projects that restore damaged coastal areas.
Some of the non-profit environmental and wildlife groups involved in the projects are not happy.
Nine groups including Ducks Unlimited, the Galveston Bay Foundation, and the Sierra Club Lone Star Chapter met last week with GLO staff members. The groups had expressed their opposition in a letter sent this past December to Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson. Continue Reading →
The likely culprit behind the quakes isn’t fracking, but rather a byproduct of it — hundreds of billions of gallons of wastewater from oil and gas drilling. The disposal of that wastewater deep underground has been known to cause faults to slip, triggering earthquakes in parts of Texas. There were under a hundred recorded earthquakes (measuring 2.0 or higher) in Texas during the three decades before the current drilling boom began in earnest in 2007, according to records from the United States Geological Survey (USGS). Since then, there’s been two hundred quakes recorded by the agency, along with hundreds more smaller ones.
The rate has increased from an average of three quakes a year in Texas before 2007 to nearly 30 a year since. “The increase in earthquakes is very clear, so it’s not an instrumental artifact,” says William L. Ellsworth, a seismologist with the USGS. “This we’re really quite confident of.” And the rapid increase in quakes isn’t unique to Texas: our neighbors to the north in Oklahoma have had an average of 40 quakes measuring 3.0 or higher a year since an uptick in drilling (and oil and gas wastewater disposal) in 2009. Before that, the state had one to three quakes a year of 3.0 or higher on average.
But to establish a link to drilling activity (and specific disposal wells) in each earthquake swarm, scientists need data. And they need a lot more of it when it comes to Texas. To look at how earthquakes are measured in the state and better understand the numbers, StateImpact Texas reached out to Ellsworth, who’s been studying the manmade quake phenomenon in Texas and other parts of the country. Continue Reading →
One big factor in that slowing consumption trend is something called demand response, programs that get participants to use less power when supplies on the grid are tight, like during the hot Texas afternoons when air conditioners across the state are running full-time. Some utilities and power companies give rebates for using less power during that time, or to shift power use to other times of the day.
These demand response programs are on the rise in Texas. In Austin, enough participants are expected this summer that the city is saving itself from using an entire power plant.
So we’ve put together a list of the available programs we could find in Texas for demand response: Continue Reading →
Residents of North Texas testifying before the Railroad Commission in Austin in January 2014.
A Very Different Oil and Gas ‘Boom’ Comes to Texas
“You might think you were in Iraq or Afghanistan,” Greg Morrison told a panel of state officials in Azle, Texas recently. “It feels like a semi truck hitting your house with a bomb going off.”
He was describing the experience of a 3.6 magnitude earthquake that hit his North Texas town late last year. Earthquakes were all but unknown in the area until a few years ago; now communities in the region are experiencing dozens of them, sometimes multiple times a day. In fact, there was one near the North Texas community of Benbrook just this weekend.
North Texas is not alone in being shook up. As the oil and gas boom has taken off, several areas of Texas (as well as other states) are experiencing quakes. These are often areas where drilling is taking place or where drilling waste water disposal wells are present. And, in many instances, residents are reporting loud noises — a “boom” — along with the shaking. Continue Reading →
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