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.
Prices creep towards $4 a gallon at a Houston gas station
With oil surpassing $100 a barrel, drivers are feeling the pain at the pump and some wonder if it’s simply a case of supply and demand. Or maybe something else.
“It’s sad, but people are very greedy,” said Houston driver Jodie Minear as she put $60 of fuel into her Jeep SUV at a Chevron station along Highway 59.
Does she have suspicions as to how prices are set?
Carbon dioxide will be captured and piped to an oilfield
In past years, the W. A. Parish power plant outside Houston in Fort Bend County has ranked near the top of national lists for “Most Polluting Power Plants.” It has also been lauded for it’s efforts to reduce emissions.
Now, this power behemoth, the biggest power plant in Texas and second biggest fossil fuel-burning plant in the nation, is planning to build one of the country’s more innovative pollution control projects. It will use some of its pollution to pump oil out of the ground.
Plant owner NRG said it will begin construction next year of its “carbon capture” system. The system, made up of pipes and flues and sprayers, will be installed on one of the plant’s four coal-burning power generation units (four other units burn natural gas).
“This will be the first commercial-scale carbon capture on a power plant in the United States,” said Jeff Baudier, CEO of Petra Nova, NRG’s wholly-owned carbon capture business.
A case before the Texas Supreme Court could have big consequences for landowners and pipeline companies.
The Texas Supreme Court could decide by later this week if it will reconsider its opinion on the use of eminent domain by companies to take private land. At issue: companies that want to build pipelines to transport oil and gas as the need surges with increased drilling.
Those companies say the opinion the Court issued last August is now allowing the owners of private land to hold pipeline companies “hostage” and “extort” money from them.
In a petition filed by a pipeline company ETC NGL Transport, the company contends that “without the right of eminent domain, acquiring easements is a much more lengthy and expensive process—if it can be done at all.”
In a petition filed by the Texas Oil and Gas Association (TXOGA), the group predicts there will be “a devastating impact on an industry that serves as the economic engine for the State’s economy.”
As drilling for oil and gas has surged in Texas, so have injuries and deaths at drilling rigs and well sites. It has become a significant concern to Federal regulators and to the industry. But there are promising efforts to reduce accidents. One of those was hatched in South Texas.
The number of workers killed in Texas “mining”, as the Department of Labor classifies oil and gas drilling, has risen in the past decade. Deaths rose from 35 in 2003 to a high of 49 in 2007 and totaled 45 in 2010.
In South Texas, where drilling has surged in the Eagle Ford shale with its rich deposits of gas and oil, seven workers died on-the-job last year alone, up from three in 2010 according to Michael Rivera, director of the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA’s) office in Corpus Christi. Continue Reading →
In Midland, they try not to call it an oil boom because last time that happened in the 1980s, the economy went bust and stayed that way longer than anyone here wants to remember. But these days, things sure are boom-like.
K.C. Stallings, a landman, found that out when he moved last summer to Midland from Houston. He tried to buy a house.
“It’s the exact opposite as most of the country,” Stallings said.
Trailers housing drill workers line a city park in Gonzales
Rancher Tim Pennell says you need only look out the window in DeWitt County to see what “fracking” has brought to the gently rolling terrain of South Texas.
“If you want to work, you come to DeWitt County and you can damn sure get a job,” said Pennell.
Fracking is helping create a gusher of jobs as evidenced by the the line of oil field workers at a barbecue stand that operates along the road next to Pennell’s house. A few hundred yards away, a drilling rig is running 24/7.
But all the trucks servicing the drilling rigs are ripping up the roads. And there is concern over how the fracking process is using enormous amounts of groundwater during a record drought. Continue Reading →
May 2010: Shrimp boat deploys oil boom around slick in Gulf of Mexico
The Federal government’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) held a public hearing last week in Houston on the environmental impact of its plan to sell more leases to drill in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Texas. But almost nobody showed up to testify.
Pump jack in Pierce Junction oilfield south of downtown Houston
The Texas Comptroller’s office is adding auditors to increase scrutiny of tax breaks claimed by drilling operations.
“We are currently re-deploying resources and hiring auditors so that five auditors will work on oil and gas audits,” said Comptroller spokesperson R.J. DeSilva in an email to StateImpact Texas.
Gas and oil well blowouts are the stuff of legend in Texas. But in Pennsylvania, a state with little modern experience with wells, a surge in drilling has some residents on edge. The thought of a geyser of fire erupting in an otherwise peaceful pasture can sound like a nightmare.
“(A blowout) scares the heck out of me,” said Skip Roupp , the Deputy Emergency Management Director of Bradford County in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Experts told him to expect one major blowout for every thousand wells drilled. The well count in Pennsylvania is already at 3,000.
“We’re due for a major blowout at some point,” Roupp said. Continue Reading →
Dead trees are cut, some made into chips south of downtown Houston .
The Texas drought killed millions of trees this summer but only a small percentage will be salvaged for lumber or even wood chips according to state’s Forest Service. And time may be running out.
“If you wait too long, they will not be suitable for most forest products. Decay will set in and the trees will become much less useful,” said Burl Carraway, head of Sustainable Forestry at the Texas Forest Service office in College Station. Continue Reading →
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