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.
Federal agencies announced Wednesday that Shell Oil has agreed to pay $115 million to install pollution controls at their refinery and chemical plant in Deer Park, Texas to resolve alleged violations of the Clean Air Act. On top of that, the company will pay a $2.6 million civil penalty, and spend another million installing a monitoring system to detect benzene levels at the edges of the plant, which are near a neighborhood and school. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says those levels will be available to the public online.
The major spending for pollution controls will be on reducing and cleaning up flaring, a process where gases are burned off. Â As StateImpact Texas has reported, flaring of waste near fenceline communities like the one in Deer Park is suspected to have detrimental health effects and in some cases create dangerous conditions. The EPA says Shell will “recover and recycle” waste gases (it isn’t clear how much), which the agency says is the first time a chemical refinery has agreed to do so.
EPA says the new agreement will reduce pollution and carbon dioxide emissions.
“This case is part of EPA’s nationwide enforcement effort to protect fenceline neighborhoods by significantly reducing toxic pollution from flares and making information about pollution quickly available to affected communities,” said Cynthia Giles, assistant administrator of EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance, in a statement.
The deadly explosion ripped through the fertilizer plant late on April 13, injuring more than 200 people, destroying 50 homes and damaging other buildings.
In a letter to Texas Governor Rick Perry and governors of other states today, Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) called on state leaders to do more to prevent disasters at fertilizer plants like the one last April in West, Texas.
“The federal government isn’t doing enough right now, and I’m going to lay out what I think we should do,” Boxer, chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said at a press conference in Washington today. “But until that time, if there’s even one more tragic death from improper storage of ammonium nitrate, we’ll have lost this opportunity.”
At a hearing of the committee in late June, testimony showed that the fertilizer plant in West had no sprinkler system, stored ammonium nitrate in a wood building, and wasn’t subject to a fire code.
“I want the people of West, Texas to know that I don’t intend to stop after one hearing,” Boxer said. “I am keeping my focus on this issue because I know what has to be done to save lives.” Continue Reading →
A Conversation with Kate Galbraith and Asher Price
Texas is the oil and gas capitol of the country, with more rigs than any other state. With all that fossil fuel comes other industries, like refining and manufacturing, which also means Texas is the biggest polluter in the country. But in a surprising twist, the state has also become a leader in green energy: Texas has more wind energy than any other state, more than most countries even.
In their new book, ‘The Great Texas Wind Rush,’ reporters Kate Galbraith and Asher Price tell the story of how Texas became an unlikely leader in wind energy. It’s a story of dust bowls, “windcatters” and strange political and ideological bedfellows.
“I just thought it was incredible that the oil and gas state had become, in 2006, number one in wind energy, surpassing California of all places,” Galbraith, a former reporter for the Texas Tribune (a partner of StateImpact Texas), says of their inspiration to write the book. “Somehow they planted all these turbines in the Western Plains, and there it went!”
The heat has returned to the Lone Star State, and once again the AC is revving up and the state’s power grid is stretching more and more to meet the demand.
A new report out this week from the federal Energy Information Administration (EIA) shows that while prices are going to be down for power across much of the county this summer, Texas is the one place where they’re expected to go up by a fairly significant amount.
If you live in the Northeast, your power bills are expected to be down nearly three percent this year, mostly due to cooler temperatures. Overall, the country’s electric bills on average are projected to be the cheapest in four years. But here in Texas, they’re projected to be up nearly two percent. Continue Reading →
In a speech in Washington today, President Barack Obama unveiled a plan to deal with climate change, one that focuses on reducing emissions from the energy sector, building up the nation’s renewable energy and increasing energy efficiency. It also calls for the country to prepare for the impacts of climate change, like rising sea levels, and for the U.S. to become a leader in addressing increasing carbon emissions.
And for the first time, Obama is proposing to limit carbon emissions from existing power plants, which is sure to generate controversy in Texas, with a large fleet of aging coal power plants and state officials ready to fight federal regulation at every turn.
The plan says:
“… Climate change is no longer a distant threat – we are already feeling its impacts across the country and the world. Last year was the warmest year ever in the contiguous United States and about one-third of all Americans experienced 10 days or more of 100-degree heat. The 12 hottest years on record have all come in the last 15 years. Asthma rates have doubled in the past 30 years and our children will suffer more asthma attacks as air pollution gets worse. And increasing floods, heat waves, and droughts have put farmers out of business, which is already raising food prices dramatically. These changes come with far-reaching consequences and real economic costs.”
You can read the 21-page plan in full after the jump: Continue Reading →
A new report shows how rising sea levels, less water and a warming world will impact humanity.
The world is warming, sea levels are rising, and that isn’t likely to change anytime soon. In Texas, the heat waves of 2011 have been “explicitly attributed” to man’s impact on the climate, according to a 2012 World Bank report, ‘Turn Down the Heat.’ And the extreme drought of that same year — the driest year in recorded Texas history — was much more likely because of the changing climate.
A new report from the group this week follows up on that earlier one. It looks at the human cost of climate change, zeroing in on the areas of Sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia:
“Regular food shortages in Sub-Saharan Africa … shifting rain patterns in South Asia leaving some parts under water and others without enough water for power generation, irrigation, or drinking … degradation and loss of reefs in South East Asia resulting in reduced fish stocks and coastal communities and cities more vulnerable to increasingly violent storms … these are but a few of the likely impacts of a possible global temperature rise of 2 degrees Celsius in the next few decades that threatens to trap millions of people in poverty.”
To break down the full report, the group put together an infographic to visualize that impact: Continue Reading →
Oil and gas companies and businessmen are big contributors to campaigns and lobbying in Texas.
Oil and gas and energy special interest groups outspent others by a large margin during the regular session of the Texas legislature this year. 19 cents of every dollar spent on lobbying belonged to the energy and natural resources industry, according to a new report by Texans for Public Justice, a state watchdog group. And oil and gas and energy companies and businessmen were big contributors to campaigns in the state last year, according to a separate report from the group.
Together, the two reports claim to show a “list of who sits in the owner’s box at the Texas Capitol,” says Andrew Wheat, research director at Texans for Public Justice. “These are the people who get their calls returned first.” The top lobby clients list is a who’s-who of oil and gas and power companies (and their interest groups) in the state. In a way that makes perfect sense, as much of the state’s economy is riding high from a fracking boom.
With such large amounts of money spent on elections and lobbying, did the interest groups get their money’s worth this session? Continue Reading →
The aftermath of the explosion in the small town of West, Texas. FEMA has denied the state's request for funds to rebuild a school and repair roads.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) will not provide relief funds requested by Texas to help rebuild the town of West, which was badly damaged (and in some parts, destroyed) by a fertilizer plant explosion in April. As the Associated Press first reported today, Texas’ request for FEMA money to help rebuild roads, a school and a damaged sewer system was denied by the federal agency. In a letter from FEMA to Texas Governor Rick Perry, the agency’s administrator writes that “the impact from this event is not of the severity and magnitude that warrants a major disaster declaration.” You can read the letter in full below.
The explosion in April killed 15, injured hundreds, and destroyed several buildings and homes, including two schools.
FEMA has provided aid to individual residents and households, but a major disaster declaration and public  would provide money needed to rebuild parts of the city. The agency will also not provide unemployment assistance, crisis counseling, legal services and other aid. Continue Reading →
Without most rice farming, municipal use made up a much greater share of LCRA water in 2012.
In 2012, for the first time in history, most rice farmers on the Lower Colorado River in South Texas were cut off from water for irrigation. According to an emergency drought plan, there wasn’t enough water in the Highland Lakes of Buchanan and Travis to send water downstream. In the months since, those lakes have continued to drop, and this year rice farmers were cut off once again. New numbers from the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA) show just how much was at stake in the decisions to withhold water: if normal amounts had been sent downstream for rice farming, the lakes could very well have dropped to their lowest levels in history.
In a typical year, agricultural use makes up more than twice the amount of water as municipal use on the Lower Colorado. But last year, after cutting off most rice farmers downstream, that situation was reversed. Without most rice farming, water use in Central Texas was nearly cut in half last year, going down 45 percent from 2011. Continue Reading →
Ranchers and farmers were undeniably the worst-hit when it came to the Texas drought of 2011. After over $7 billion in losses in the agricultural sector that year (with most of those losses in cattle and cotton), some never recovered. Over a million head of cattle were sold out of the state in 2011, and ranching hasn’t made a comeback since:
Graph by USDA
As of January 1, cattle and calf numbers were at their lowest levels since 1967, with a drop of 11 percent in beef cattle from the year before. Earlier this year, the Cargill Beef Processing Plant in Plainview closed, laying off 2,000 employees. That was about ten percent of the town’s population.
As the drought that began in October 2010 persists in most of the Western half of the state, there’s good reason to worry that another dry year will be devastating for many Texas ranchers.
StateImpact seeks to inform and engage local communities with broadcast and online news focused on how state government decisions affect your lives. Learn More »
A Conversation with Kate Galbraith and Asher Price
The heat has returned to the Lone Star State, and once again the AC is revving up and the state’s power grid is stretching more and more to meet the demand.
