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.
Near oil spill off Galveston Island, crew prepares to deploy rapid response tracking buoy built by Texas A&M
There are over 500 clean-up crew members working in boats and on beaches near where the oil spilled near Texas City on Galveston Bay.
But determining where some of the oil might still go is being done by experts who aren’t nearby. They’re over 2,000 miles away.
Doug Helton is in Seattle, Washington.
He’s in the war room the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration uses to help coordinate oil spill responses nationwide.
 “The basic question is where’s the oil going to go, how’s it going to behave and what is it going to look like when it gets there, “ Helton told StateImpact Texas.
Responders load hundreds of feet of boom onto vessels at the Texas City Dike in this U.S. Coast Guard photo taken March 23, 2014.
Two dozen boats and over 500 people are now involved in the response to an oil spill from Saturday that closed the Houston Ship Channel.
What spilled was a heavy fuel oil, called bunker fuel, which was carried in a barge that collided with a ship. Up to 168,000 gallons were dumped into the channel.
“Last ten years, I haven’t seen a spill like this,” says Larry McKinney, the head of a Gulf research institute at Texas A&M Corpus Christi. “Before that, we’d see them, seems like, every other year.”
McKinney knows a thing or two about the devastation of oil spills, having headed up natural resource protection for the State of Texas and working on spill prevention and response for decades.
“These spills here in Galveston are becoming less frequent. That’s the good thing,” he says.
In Ector County, officials say roads like this have been used for years to dump oilfield waste, leaving lanes coated with slippery fluids.
A case of alleged dumping of possibly thousands of gallons of chemicals into Odessa’s sewer system has local officials wondering who’s supposed to police the drilling industry.
“We’re finding that there’s so much confusion in this area of law regarding who is responsible for what,” said Susan Redford, the Ector County Judge. “So in Ector County, we have taken the lead upon ourselves to investigate the more serious illegal dumping cases and to prosecute those cases both civilly and criminally.”
Gated gas: brick wall surrounds well site near neighborhoods on Fort Worth's east side
In some cities, behind neat brick walls and wrought iron fences, you might find rows of nice homes.
In Fort Worth, you might find a gas well.
“We’re still drilling wells. We have three sites that are actively drilling. We have 2,000 producing wells,” said Tom Edwards, a senior inspector with the City of Fort Worth’s gas drilling division.
Since the drilling surge began in 2001 and peaked in 2008, Fort Worth residents learned a lot about the energy business. It was in their backyards, parks, and near hospitals. And just like the recent revelation that ExxonMobil’s own chairman was fighting construction related to drilling near his home in a Dallas suburb, there was resistance in Fort Worth. 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.”
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.
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 →
Workers clean tarballs from the BP oil spill on Waveland beach December 6, 2010 in Waveland, Mississippi.
Bad as the BP Deepwater Horizon spill was with its oil tainting miles of Texas beaches (36 miles to be exact, according to the state), there is now restoration money floating into Texas.
As part of an agreement reached in 2011 for “early oil spill restoration,” BP is paying Texas and four other Gulf Coast states a total of $1 billion. Texas’s portion is $100 million.
But in Texas, there is disagreement over what deserves the most immediate attention, a debate that goes something like this: Restrooms v. Wetlands.
Air pollution monitoring station at Croix Memorial Park in Manvel
At the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), they’re very familiar with a park in Manvel, a small town 15 miles south of downtown Houston. It’s a place where prairie land is quickly being turned into subdivisions but it still retains a rural appearance.
In Croix Memorial Park, between a soccer field and a playground, is one of the TCEQ’s air pollution monitoring stations, one of over 20 spread across the Houston area.
For some reason, the monitor in Manvel shows that ozone levels here are among the worst in the metro area. Consistently. And they haven’t come down as they have over the past decade at other monitoring sites, some of them near areas with far more sources of pollution from vehicles or industries.
“So the question is why, what’s different about that site,” said David Brymer, director of air quality at the TCEQ. “It’s south of town. Houston’s not really known for consistent north winds that would blow the urban core emissions towards that monitor. “ Continue Reading →
Texas has by far the most miles of natural gas pipelines and is the state with the most accidents. But according to federal pipeline regulators, Texas also grants the most exemptions (along with Florida) regarding who must notify a pipeline or utility company before digging.
Federal data show that in the past decade, 11 percent of serious pipeline accidents in Texas were caused by work crews doing excavations. According to CenterPoint Energy, a Houston comnpany that distributes natural gas to over 3 million customers in Texas and other states, over half the damage to its pipelines last year was “caused by an excavator failing to Call 811.” Continue Reading →
About StateImpact
StateImpact seeks to inform and engage local communities with broadcast and online news focused on how state government decisions affect your lives. Learn More »
