Dave Fehling is the Houston-based broadcast reporter for StateImpact. Before joining StateImpact Texas, Dave reported and anchored at KHOU-TV in Houston. He also worked as a staff correspondent for CBS News from 1994-1998. He now lectures on journalism at the University of Houston.
Pool of of oily wastewater officials say is from illegal dumping in Ector County
In the booming Permian Basin of West Texas, Ector County is one of the leaders in oil production. But some of the crude is ending up on roads and highways, as haulers of drilling wastewater break the law to increase profits by dumping the slimy mixture from tanker trucks, sometimes as the trucks are moving.
In response, the county is developing ways to catch and prosecute the polluters.
“What we were seeing was a huge increase in illegal dumping,” said Susan Redford, the Ector County Judge in Odessa.
“A lot of companies that were drilling and providing related services were looking for quick, cheap and easy ways to dispose of the fluids they were generating,” Redford told StateImpact Texas. Continue Reading →
The Texas Environmental Enforcement Task Force affidavit for a warrant to search the Houston office of the Railroad Commission in 2010
As the legislature considers making changes to the Railroad Commission of Texas in the future, a search warrant is now shedding light on how the Railroad Commission interacted with criminal investigators in the past.
An affidavit for the warrant, obtained by StateImpact, shows that during a 2010 investigation of a state-regulated site used for disposing drilling fluids, the Texas Environmental Enforcement Task Force said it wanted to seize documents it said were being withheld; withheld not by the company that ran the disposal site, but by the Railroad Commission that was supposed to be regulating it.
Students from small towns in Texas are filling up community college classes that have titles like “Drilling” and “Well Completions.”
Dave Fehling / StateImpact
At Coastal Bend College, oil & gas instructor Roy Coley with students Kollin Harless and Nicole Burks
At Coastal Bend College in Beeville in the heart of the Eagle Ford Shale, just 46 students enrolled for petroleum training courses in 2008. Last year, there were 1,086. Many of the students are lured by promises of salaries that used to be found mostly in bigger cities.
“There’s so many more opportunities for jobs now in all these little small towns around here,” said Kollin Harless who’s from Three Rivers, population 1,834. He’s studying “mud engineering” to learn how to ensure that drilling fluid—or mud as it’s called—is properly formulated and injected at a drilling site. He expects an annual starting salary in the neighborhood of $60,000.
One of his classmates, Nicole Burks, started college with an entirely different career goal.
Ron Curry at a Superfund site with Harris County officials
Ron Curry is the EPA’s new administrator for Region 6, overseeing enforcement of federal pollution laws in New Mexico (where he once headed that state’s environment department), Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, and in Texas.
Texas, where the state has gone to court to stop the EPA from enforcing pollution laws. Texas is also where the previous EPA regional administrator, Al Armendariz, had a rocky relationship with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ). Armendariz left last year to join the Sierra Club after a firestorm erupted when he was heard on a video using the word “crucify” as he explained how tough his staff could be on the worst polluters.
A group of retirees from NASA who once put a man on the moon and call their group The Right Climate Stuff “shouldn’t be taken seriously” according to an article in The Guardian, a British newspaper.
Dave Fehling / StateImpact
Dr. Harold Doiron worked on NASA's Apollo project
One of the most vocal of the bunch, Harold Doiron, was taunted at a debate held at the National Press Club in Washington DC this past January.
“Do you believe in global warming? Do you believe there’s global warming,” asked moderator Blanquita Cullum. This came after other panelists assured the audience that virtually all peer-reviewed scientific studies support that humans cause climate change and that to argue otherwise “is like debating whether cigarettes cause cancer.” Continue Reading →
The golf course at Houston's River Oaks Country Club
Certain tax exemptions will cost Texas $43.9 billion in 2013, according to a new report from the Texas Comptroller.
Two state senators say it’s time to start reviewing those tax breaks.
“We have no earthly idea what they are, what they cost, who benefits from them,” Sen. Rodney Ellis told StateImpact.
Ellis, a Democrat from Houston, and John Carona, a Republican senator from Dallas, have filed a bill that would require such tax breaks be reviewed periodically to prove they continue to make fiscal sense. For example, breaks for drilling operations enacted years ago to encourage the new and costly horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing continue to drain money from state coffers for a method that today is neither new nor relatively as costly.
Texans can add one more item to the list of reasons to love the state: It has the best market for electricity. Anywhere.. At least, according to Donna Nelson. She’s chairman of the Texas Public Utility Commission.
“It’s arguably the most successful in the world,” Nelson told attendees at the IHS energy conference in Houston.
Critics of the deregulated Texas power market would certainly challenge that assertion. And Nelson made the comment as part of a panel discussion that focused on a problem with the market: It might not make enough electricity to keep the lights and air conditioners running on the hottest days. Not enough new power plants have been built.
The Webberville Solar Project outside Austin is the largest in Texas
In such a sunny place as Texas, some people think it’s a real shame to waste all that solar energy. They point out the state ranks 13th in the nation for total solar power generation, behind such often gloomy places as New Jersey (#2) and New York (#11) according to the Solar Energy Industries Association.
What’s more, Shell just predicted that solar might be the top energy source globally by 2070.
“It is a waste.Texas has the best potential in the country and we’re just falling behind,” says Luke Metzger. His group, Environment Texas, found that some of the state’s only bright spots for solar are Austin and San Antonio. The two cities had four times more solar power than the rest of Texas combined. He says it’s no coincidence those are the the two biggest cities in the state that are not in the deregulated market for electricity. Continue Reading →
In a radio ad, Texas Governor Rick Perry disses California as a place where it’s “next to impossible” to build a business.
“Come check out Texas,” Perry implores his listeners.
Some states are taking the governor up on his offer: They’re coming to Texas, but they’re not looking to bring business to the state. Rather, they want to take Texas business back home with them.
One state doing this North Dakota which, like Texas, is enjoying a booming economy thanks to horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing that are freeing up huge quantities of crude oil. Continue Reading →
If you drive west from Houston out Interstate 10, about the time you’ve gone 100 miles and reached the edge of the Eagle Ford Shale, you’ll begin noticing them: Big rigs and other assorted trucks. They’re heading to the oil and gas fields of South and West Texas. Some are loaded with tons of steel pipe, others with tanks and contraptions for mixing the concoctions used to drill and “frack” wells. Still others are full of high tech seismic devices.
The equipment is unique and expensive. And the crooks have noticed. Continue Reading →
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