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.
Power pole in Houston with antenna and equipment to allow remotely controlled switching
In the five years since Hurricane Ike knocked out power in most of metropolitan Houston, the city now has more high-tech power poles and fewer trees in power line rights-of-way. But there’s no real assurance of a better outcome the next time a big storm hits.
“If you get another direct hit from a large category hurricane such as Ike, you will probably still have the same amount of people impacted,” said David Baker, CenterPoint Energy’s Vice President in charge of 50,000 miles of wires and poles. “But we’ve tried to apply lessons learned from Ike to speed the recovery up and make that go faster.”
Hurricane Ike was a strong Category 2 storm when it made landfall in Galveston, leaving 95 percent of CenterPoint’s 2.26 million customers in the dark. Ten days later, 75 percent of them had power restored. It would take a week longer to get to everyone else.
Dominic Krus was among them. After two and a half weeks, the lights came back on in his home in Houston’s Sharpstown subdivision.
“My wife says the lights are on. I said, ‘Oh great, we can sleep with AC tonight.’ It was a pretty happy event,” said Krus. Continue Reading →
As the Texas Public Utility Commission (PUC) considers changing the electricity market so there’s more money to build new power plants, a mystery has popped up: why aren’t Texans using as much electricity as predicted?
“There’s something that’s been going on recently with the forecasts, which affects a lot of things,” said PUC commissioner Kenneth Anderson at the commission’s open meeting last week.
Who Turned the Lights Out?
Anderson said forecasts from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) had predicted electricity demand would increase in 2013 by 2.1 percent.
In reality?
“It’s been barely one percent, if it’s even hit one percent,” Anderson said. Continue Reading →
The Motiva refinery is bordered by neighborhoods in Port Arthur
When your neighbors process millions of barrels of crude oil, you notice when things aren’t going right.
“There has been some increase in flaring incidents, because whenever you shut down they have to flare to let off certain gases,” said Hilton Kelley.
He lives in Port Arthur and years ago he led community activists in negotiations with the companies behind the massive expansion of the Motiva Refinery.
Hilton said the companies promised the new refinery would run cleaner using innovations in pollution control. What the activists didn’t think to ask for was a promise the refinery — now the nation’s largest — would just simply … run.
“We had no idea that the unit would not start off working properly,” said Kelley, founder of Community In-power and Development Association. Now he wonders what a series of leaks, fires, shutdowns and start-ups will mean to the air residents breathe.
Fires, Leaks, and Vibrations
The Motiva Port Arthur Refinery is a $10 billion joint venture of Royal Dutch Shell and Saudi -Aramco. The expansion was finished last spring, but quickly ran into trouble. There were a couple of small fires, apparently related to leaks caused when a corrosive chemical was mistakenly allowed to flow through the new unit, causing extensive and costly damage. Continue Reading →
Air pollution in a can: air sample awaiting analysis at UT School of Public Health
For years now, Texas has tried to block Federal air pollution laws, contending they stifle economic growth. But just last week, the U.S. Department of Justice filed another lawsuit to force power plants in northeast Texas to reduce toxic air emissions.
As the battle continues over how clean the air in Texas should be and at what cost, It might be worth highlighting why any of this matters.
One way to do that is ask researchers what they’re learning about how air pollution affects people. Scientists are finding that it’s like a pack-day-smoker who ends up living into old age: polluted air doesn’t have the same impact on everyone.
Pollution Immunity
“What we now understand is people are quite different in terms of their immune systems,” said Dr. William Calhoun at the University of Texas Medical Branch on Galveston Island. He says there’s a lot of research now to find out exactly why immune systems react differently to pollution. Continue Reading →
In Rosenberg, even the manhole covers have a train insignia on them. Railroads are the town’s heritage.
In this city 20 miles west of Houston and at the edge of South Texas, three rail lines converge. Add to the trains all the trucks the cross the town’s south side on the Interstate 69 corridor.
It all makes this small city a big hub of transportation. But should something go wrong, the firefighters who’d be first to arrive weren’t sure they’d be prepared.
“One of our major concerns was being able to suppress the vapors if there was a fire. And we identified that as a high risk,” said Darrell Himly, Rosenberg’s assistant fire chief.
It’s a risk the county didn’t want to take. Not only is rail being used more to haul crude oil from the booming oil fields of South Texas, there’s also more petrochemical shipments passing through as refineries expand along the Gulf Coast, giving Rosenberg officials more reason than ever to wonder “what if”. Continue Reading →
Well in Rusk County in one of the oldest oil fields in Texas
But Are They Being Penalized Enough?
The state’s regulator for oil & gas drilling, the Railroad Commission of Texas, said it’s charged over $2.1 million in penalties called “severance fees” to drilling violators so far this fiscal year that ends August 31. That’s almost double the amount in 2010.
“The severance fee charges are up, because in May 2012 the commission instituted a 150 percent surcharge on most fees paid to the commission, including severances,” wrote the commission’s spokesperson, Ramona Nye, in an email to StateImpact Texas.
The fees result when the Railroad Commission uses one of its harsher enforcement methods: an order to shutdown production because a well operator has failed to correct violations. The Railroad Commission says the majority of violations are corrected before that happens.
But when operators correct problems only after the severance order has been issued, they then have to pay the fee before they can legally resume production after bringing wells into compliance with state laws. Continue Reading →
When it comes to settling disputes over who owns the oil & gas in Texas, the state’s law struck a federal judge as anything but fair. After reviewing an opinion by the Texas Supreme Court, he said it was more like theft.
“The Garza opinion gives oil and gas operators a blank check to steal from the small landowner,” wrote John Preston Bailey, a United States District judge in Wheeling, West Virginia.
Bailey had been asked to throw out a case involving a dispute between a landowner in West Virgina and a company drilling a horizontal well for natural gas. The company’s lawyers cited the Texas case, Coastal Oil & Gas v. Garza Energy Trust. Continue Reading →
Unal Okyay at the University of Houston analyzes satellite images of Utah indicating oil & gas seeps
It’s part of the popular lore of how to get rich by finding oil: all you have to do is look for it bubbling to the surface. That’s actually how some of the biggest oil fields were discovered many years ago.
Now, scientists are again trying to find oil and gas deposits by looking for them at the surface, albeit with sophisticated satellite and digital technology.
Colorado now has what the drilling industry there calls “the most rigorous statewide mandatory groundwater sampling and monitoring rules in the United States.” Wyoming is considering similar regulations to make oil and gas well drillers test the groundwater on nearby property before they begin to drill.
Texas has over 800 rigs at work, far more than any other state, but has no such requirements for what’s called baseline water testing.
“I think it is a good idea to do baseline studies instead of figuring out ways to blame something or someone for something they might do. It might be better to figure what we have in our own backyard already,” said Don Van Nieuwenhuise, a former oil company geologist and now Director of Petroleum Geosience at the University of Houston.
Coal on its way to Luminant's Big Brown power plant in Freestone County
Last fall, a newspaper article caught the eye of staff members at the Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates coal mining.
“Analysts: TXU-Luminant bankruptcy possible next year,” read a headline in the Dallas Morning News.
That caused concern at the Railroad Commission because a related company, Luminant Mining, is on the hook to cover around $1 billion to restore Texas land damaged by strip mining for coal.
Luminant — operator of eight of the 20 coal mines in Texas — maintains it can cover the cost of reclamation despite any possible reorganization under Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code.
The newspaper article would eventually be mentioned in an official order from the Railroad Commission that, in part, called for tighter monitoring of Luminant’s financial status.
As the Railroad Commission’s spokesperson Ramona Nye explained in an email to StateImpact, Luminant Mining is “now required to submit quarterly unaudited statements to the Commission and certify that they continue to meet the financial requirements of the Texas Coal Mining Regulations.”
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