Terrence Henry reports on energy and the environment for StateImpact Texas. His radio, print and television work has appeared in the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, NPR, The Texas Tribune, The History Channel and other outlets.
He has previously worked at The Washington Post and The Atlantic. He earned a Bachelor’s Degree in International Relations from Brigham Young University.
The Austin Blind Salamander is one of the species now listed as endangered in Central Texas.
You can welcome two Central Texas salamanders this week to the list of animals protected under the Endangered Species Act.
The Austin Blind Salamander, a creature that doesn’t have eyes in the traditional sense and lives in the dark depths of the Barton Springs Pool, has been listed by the US Fish & Wildlife Service as endangered. The Jollyville Plateau Salamander, which lives underwater in caves and springs fed by the Edwards Aquifer in Travis and Williamson Counties, has been listed as “threatened.” Both listings were expected, a result of the settlement in 2011 of a lawsuit by environmental groups against the Fish & Wildlife Service.
“These are some of the most endangered salamanders in the world,” says Chris Herrington with the City of Austin’s Watershed Protection Department. His group has been working with the Fish and Wildlife service to keep the pool open and the salamanders protected. Herrington notes that the Austin Blind Salamander is only found in and around Barton Springs Pool, an Austin landmark. In their counts of the creatures at the pool, his group has never found more than a thousand of the salamanders. Continue Reading →
A wind turbine in Sterling county. Texas has more wind power than any other state, and more than most countries.
With Plenty of Turbines and Pumpjacks Along the Way
Over a thousand miles later, StateImpact Texas has returned from our first “Road Show,” a journey that took us from Austin to Midland-Odessa, then to Marfa, and back. Along the way, we heard stories of the drought, the drilling boom, and what everyday Texans think about energy and environment.
Photo by Terrence Henry/StateImpact Texas
A pumpjack in the Monahans Sandhills in West Texas.
One thing we saw a lot of this trip? Wind turbines and pumpjacks. Hundreds of them. Sometimes pretty close together, which makes for an interesting visual.
Those two icons tell two different stories about Texas energy. One is a victory for renewables, while the other means a continued reliance on fossil fuels. Continue Reading →
StateImpact Texas reporter Terrence Henry moderates a panel on the impacts of the drilling boom in West Texas in Odessa Tuesday, with (left to right) Kirk Edwards, Libby Campbell, W. Hoxie Smith, Gil Van De Venter, and Paul Weatherby.
StateImpact Texas hit the road this week to talk to communities in West Texas about the impacts of drilling and the drought. On Tuesday, we spent the day in Midland, talking to locals, oil field workers and new arrivals about how a massive uptick in drilling is changing the community.
We’ve been posting updates from the road to our Tumblr, here’s a few selections from our time in the Permian Basin, from a barber who thinks there’s more booms to come, to the effects of a housing shortage: Continue Reading →
Texas is changing — with more people, less water, and a surge in oil and gas drilling that is changing communities. To see some of that change up close, we here at StateImpact Texas have embarked on an occasional trip across the state — what we’re calling a “Road Show” — to engage with those communities. We’re traveling to hear from local, everyday Texans directly about how issues of energy and the environment are impacting them.
Our first trip, taking place this week, takes us from our home of Austin to West Texas, home of the drilling hotbed of the Permian Basin. Tonight we’ll be hosting a panel and community forum in Odessa on how that oil and gas boom is affecting the land, water and community of West Texas.
And along the way we’ve been talking to Texans about the drought, drilling and wind energy, to name just a few subjects. We’re posting short updates to our Tumblr page, and here’s a selection from our first few stops, Lampasas and Brownwood: Continue Reading →
West Texas is booming again — a major increase in oil and gas drilling is bringing jobs, prosperity and new development in the region. But it’s also having an impact on roads, water and the culture of West Texas. So please join us if you can tonight, Tuesday, August 13th, at the University of Texas of the Permian Basin in Odessa, at a special forum to discuss these issues.
Our panel will consist of energy industry experts and community representatives to discuss the impact of oil and gas drilling in West Texas. The event is free and open to the public and will be held at the Cooper Auditorium in the Science and Technology building at UTPB. The public is invited to ask questions of the panel as part of the community forum.
We’ll discuss how drilling is changing West Texas, from its impact on the economy, to the strain on roads and housing, to balancing water demands. Continue Reading →
Michael Webber of UT Austin says energy and water are highly dependent on each other.
A Conversation with Michael Webber
We’ve arrived in the dog days of summer in Texas, when air conditioners across the state stretch our power supplies thin. It’s also dry: the state is in a third year of drought, with reservoir levels at 63 percent full overall, down significantly from a year ago. In short, Texas needs more water and more power, and the two are highly dependent on each other.
Where those thirsts for more power and water collide is referred to as the ‘Energy-Water Nexus,’ and it’s a subject University of Texas at Austin professor and Deputy Director of the UT Energy Institute Michael Webber has spent a lot of time on. “Energy uses a lot of water, and water uses a lot of energy, and this fact is surprising for a lot of people, just how much they use of both,” Webber says.
For instance, energy needs water to grow biofuels, drill and produce oil and gas, cool power plants and power hydroelectic dams, Webber says. And water needs energy to be heated, treated, cleaned and moved. Getting water cleaned up and into our homes makes up over 12 percent of our nation’s energy use, Webber says.
We sat down with Webber to talk about these issues in advance of a lecture in Austin Tuesday, August 6 about “The Global Nexus of Energy and Water.” The talk is free and open to the public, at 5:45 pm at the AT&T Conference Center. (More details here.)
Q: So energy needs water, and water needs energy, and I would imagine that this nexus is even more pronounced here in Texas.
A: These days in Texas, it seems like we’re worried about the grid being on edge. We’re worried about drought, and these things sort of play into each other’s hands in a bad way. As we have more drought, we have less water available for our dams to make electricity, we also have less water available for cooling our power plants. And as that water gets hot from heat waves, water is less effective as a coolant, and so the power plants perform with lower efficiency. So a water strain or water constraint becomes an energy constraint, so it’s true also that if you have an energy constraint – if you have a power outage or a rolling blackout, your water infrastructure might be hindered as well. So the energy-water nexus means they rely on each other, and that means — bad news — they inherit each other’s vulnerabilities. A constraint in one becomes a constraint in the other. Continue Reading →
A chemical trailer sits among the remains of the burning fertilizer plant in April.
A few months after a deadly explosion at a fertilizer plant in the town of West, Texas, President Barack Obama signed an executive order today that aimed at increasing safety and oversight of chemical plants across the country. In a series of measures, various federal, state and local agencies would share more information and look for best practices to reduce risks from such facilities.
The explosion in April at the West Fertilizer plant took 15 lives and destroyed hundreds of homes and schools. While the origin of the fire that led to the explosion has still not been determined, investigators have said that it was ammonium nitrate stored at the plant that exploded. Among several issues believed to have been a factor in the fire and explosion are the facts that the facility had stored the chemical in wood buildings, and had no sprinklers.
Many of those killed in the explosion were first responders, who had rushed towards the plant to fight the fire after it ignited. Today’s executive order calls for improving coordination with local governments and first responders, and make sure they have “ready access to key information in a usable format” about chemical facilities.
The order also calls for government agencies to find chemical facilities that haven’t provided all the information they’re required to or are not following federal safety requirements. Continue Reading →
Courtesy The Greater San Antonio Chamber of Commerce
Attorney General Greg Abbott has filed multiple lawsuits against the EPA.
What does Texas Attorney General (and now candidate for Governor) Greg Abbott like to do for fun?
“What I really do for fun is I go into the office,” Abbott said at a speech last year, “[and] I sue the Obama adminstration.”
Abbott has been openly bragging on the campaign trail of his many lawsuits against the Obama administration and federal agencies — at last count there were 28 of them. But today an appeals court rejected one of those suits against the Environmental Protection Agency over the regulation of greenhouse gases.
In a follow-up to an earlier ruling last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia denied Abbott’s lawsuit. That suit challenged federal requirements that states regulate greenhouse gases when permitting pollution new industrial facilities. Today’s ruling essentially says that letting the EPA regulate carbon emissions will do no harm to Texas. Continue Reading →
Barry Smitherman is the chairman of the Railroad Commission of Texas, now running for Attorney General. He is skeptical of the science behind climate change.
‘Not Everyone Believes in Global Warming,’ Smitherman Says
Over 97 percent of climate change studies agree: the climate is changing, the world is warming and humans are the cause of it. But that does leave 3 percent of climate studies that are skeptical. And that sliver of skepticism is where Barry Smitherman, the head of Texas’ oil and gas drilling regulatory agency, has decided to plant his feet.
At a conference of utility commissioners in Colorado yesterday, Smitherman, chairman of the Railroad Commission of Texas, and now a candidate for state Attorney General, took some time to trumpet his skepticism. “Don’t be fooled — not everyone believes in global warming,” Smitherman tweeted from the conference.
“Given the incredibly high percentage of fossil fuels used to make electricity in America and given electricity’s fundamental role in powering our U.S. economy, we should be 100 percent certain about CO2’s role – or lack thereof – in ‘changing the climate’ before President Obama, by Presidential directive, dismantles our power generation fleet,” Smitherman said.
To buttress those claims, Smitherman turned to Dr. William Happer, a climate change skeptic and Chairman of the George C. Marshall Institute, a conservative think tank that has received funding from the oil and gas industry. Happer was the only scientist on a panel at the conference, moderated by Smitherman, called ‘The Myth of Carbon Pollution.’ A press release from the Railroad Commission called it a “key panel” and “well-attended.” (In an interesting bit of scheduling, a panel titled ‘Learning from the Regions: Cap and Trade, Carbon Tax, and the Way Forward‘ immediately preceded it.)
But Happer is not a climatologist, rather his specialty is physics — he’s a professor at Princeton, where he studies atoms and nuclei. He does not appear to have authored any peer-reviewed studies on climate change. And his claims have been refuted by many in the climate science community. Continue Reading →
Turn one, with its steep hill, was a big challenge for the racers
The shell of a solar racing car is lifted up after a car comes into the pit for repairs.
The race isn’t about speed, it’s about endurance. Whichever team does the most laps in 3 days, wins.
Taking a look inside the car
If the teams race too fast, the batteries will drain too quickly
A solar car approaches the pit
The battery, up close
It’s a sweltering Texas summer day in late June, and here at the Circuit of the Americas Formula 1 race track in Austin, the stands are empty. Just last fall, they were filled with fans witnessing the deafening roar of cars going upward of 200 miles an hour.
But if you were to listen closely this summer day, you’d hear a barely audible zooming on the track. Peek down from the stands, and you’d see little pods zipping along the track at a brisk 45 miles an hour. They’re solar-powered cars, part of the annual Formula Sun Grand Prix competition, where several teams of college engineering students race against each other, and the constant drain of batteries.
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Texas is changing — with more people, less water, and a surge in oil and gas drilling that is changing communities. To see some of that change up close, we here at StateImpact Texas have embarked on an occasional trip across the state — what we’re calling a “Road Show” — to engage with those communities. We’re traveling to hear from local, everyday Texans directly about how issues of energy and the environment are impacting them.
