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.
In the Texas Hill Country, one landfill’s trash powers homes
New Braunfels is best known for its clear-running rivers, the Guadalupe and the Comal seen here behind a city waste container.
For over two decades, trash from New Braunfels headed to the Mesquite Creek Landfill on the edge of town.
Garbage rich in organic matter arrives by the ton.
Compacted by heavy equipment, each “cell” of trash covers some 15 acres and will eventually be covered with soil.
A gas recovery system is made up of 2.5 miles of pipe and 67 gas extraction wells.
Paul Pabor is Vice President of Renewable Energy for the site’s operator, Waste Management, a Houston-based nationwide disposal giant.
From the landfill, the methane gas is piped to a cement-block building across the road.
Methane powers two huge engines that produce electricity.
Each engine cranks out about 1500 kilowatts
The electricity is then sent to the electric grid, enough to power up to 1800 homes in New Braunfels.
Landfills keep on producing methane for decades. This is the entrance to a city landfill in Houston and though closed in 1970, it’s listed by the US EPA as a potential project to produce methane for nearby industries.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), there are 27 landfills in Texas that are producing enough methane gas to make electricity or provide fuel to power industrial equipment. The agency says another 57 landfills are candidates for such projects.
“Texas is one of the few remaining states with a large number of landfills that don’t already have landfill gas energy projects and may have the potential to support them,” the EPA wrote in a lengthy statement emailed to StateImpact Texas.
The electricity industry and its regulators in Texas have consistently touted the state’s competitive retail market as good for consumers. But price data indicate many of those customers are failing to take advantage of the lowest rates.
Courtesy Texas PUC
Donna Nelson chairs the PUC
In speeches and at public hearings, Donna Nelson, chairman of the Public Utility Commission (PUC), has contended that the areas of Texas where electricity is sold by a variety of retailers — as opposed to just one utility company as in San Antonio and Austin — is a system that benefits consumers.
“I think what the rates now show us … is that competitive markets work,” Nelson said at a commission meeting earlier this year.
Similarly, in 2011, Nelson told the Gulf Coast Power Association, an industry group, that while critics may “look for any way to describe Texas’s restructured market as a failure,” Texas retail electric providers had rates well below the national average according to an example she cited. Continue Reading →
Wildlife officer Jim Yetter led a criminal investigation of a site in Jefferson County
Landfarms are privately-owned but state-regulated fields where “low toxicity waste” is thinly spread then tilled into the soil. The tainted waste is supposed to degrade naturally.
In Texas, landfarms are used to dispose of the drilling fluid used to reduce friction as the drill chews through thousands of feet of rock and sand.
But a criminal case involving the operation of a landfarm near Beaumont raises questions about how the Texas Railroad Commission (RRC) is enforcing the state’s pollution laws. Continue Reading →
Truck hauling tanks in Midland/Odessa hits and damages overpass
Looking for ways to pay to rebuild roads damaged by thousands of trucks servicing oil and gas drilling, the Texas legislature will likely consider raising fees for overweight trucks when it convenes in January.
“The fees we are collecting today just are not sufficient to compensate for the increased consumption of pavement and bridges,” John Barton, Assistant Executive Director for Engineering Operations with the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT), tells StateImpact Texas.
‘Completely Destroyed’
Consumption is one way to put it. Destroyed is another.
“With all the traffic, it’s destroying our roads. Some are already completely destroyed,” says Frio County Judge Carlos Garcia in South Texas. It’s in the heart of the Eagle Ford Shale formation, where oil production from hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” in nearby Karnes County now leads the state.
Thousands of new drilling sites mean a surge in record keeping for the state's regulators
With fracking and improved technology, oil and gas drilling is surging in parts of Texas. But the  Railroad Commission  of Texas (RRC) that regulates the industry has computers that can’t keep up.
“We have a lot of technology in our industry and the agency that oversees us needs to be up to par with us,” says Deb Hastings, Executive Vice President of the Texas Oil and Gas Association.
But it isn’t. Just ask one of the agency’s three elected commissioners, like David Porter.
“Quite frankly, that’s the biggest problem we’ve got at the Railroad Commission is our IT system,” Porter said at a conference in San Antonio recently. “And we’re probably stuck somewhere in the mid 90s as far as technology and software is concerned. Its not acceptable, we’ve got to improve that.” Continue Reading →
Poster at DUG Eagle Ford convention in San Antonio
Hearing some officials talk about the oil boom in South Texas, you’d think the streets were paved with gold.
Yet the reality is the pavement is almost gone in some spots, ripped up by thousands of heavy trucks servicing oil drilling rigs. Some county leaders say the millions of tax dollars that could help fix the damage has all gone to Austin. And now they’re fighting to reroute it back to where they say it’s sorely needed.
Texas A&M scientist Anna Armitage and mangrove shrub on Pelican Island
The other day, a team of Texas A&M researchers was comparing satellite photos of the Texas coast. As the scientists looked at the images from the past 20 years, they noticed something different: there are now a lot more mangroves. Continue Reading →
Crude oil from South Texas is loaded into tank cars bound for refineries on the Gulf Coast
So much crude oil is being produced in Texas and North Dakota that within the next couple of years, refineries on the Gulf Coast may no longer need to import any light crude. In fact, according to industry researchers, there may be so much light crude that the Gulf Coast could start experiencing the same bottleneck dilemma as the oil storage hub in Cushing, Oklahoma.
“We’re dubbing this region the ‘Cushing Coast’. We see a region in super-abundance of crude oil but with a real lack of pipeline capacity out and beyond the region,” says Greg Haas, research manager at Hart Energy, an oil industry publisher in Houston.
“We have this regional glut of crude cascading from Cushing, the inland areas, all hitting the shore,” says Haas. Continue Reading →
After losing electrical power, the TPC petrochemical plant in Houston flares hydrocarbons over Cesar Chavez High School
Power outages are a significant threat to petrochemical plants and refineries in Texas and have proven vexing for some facilities to reduce. The outages can wreak havoc, posing a health and safety risk to workers and to people who live near the plants.
“The sound of a (petrochemical plant) losing electrical power produces a sinking feeling in your stomach. It is a loss of resonance and vibration that is odd and unmistakable,” wrote Donald Schneider, a chemical engineer in League City, Texas. Continue Reading →
The City of Houston produced this video showing how to spot a terrorist
(Updated October 5, 2012) As part of his work as a community organizer for environmental causes, Juan Parras takes photos of refineries and petrochemical plants near the Houston Ship Channel. Sometimes, he says he’s made to feel like a criminal for doing it.Â
“It’s making it seem like you’re committing a crime by taking a picture. And when we get to the point where we can’t take pictures of facilities because they feel threatened, then I think we’re crossing the line,” Parras tells StateImpact Texas.
Parras guesses he’s been stopped and questioned by police outside the big plants no less than ten times since 9/11.
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