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 spill was the largest environmental disaster in history, killing eleven and spewing 206 million gallons of oil into the Gulf.
“EPA is taking this action due to BP’s lack of business integrity as demonstrated by the company’s conduct with regard to the Deepwater Horizon blowout, explosion, oil spill, and response, as reflected by the filing of a criminal information,” the EPA says in a statement. The agency says they’re doing this in an effort to conduct business “only with responsible individuals or companies” and the suspension is “standard practice.”
While the suspension only applies to new contracts, it could do some financial damage. This morning, the federal government is holding an sale of more than 20 million acres of offshore oil and gas leases in the Western Gulf of Mexico. Update: BP will not be awarded any leases from today’s auction until the suspension is resolved, the Bureau of Oceanic Energy Management, which is running the sale, confirms to StateImpact Texas. The Bureau says that “unless and until” the suspension is resolved, no leases from today’s sale will go to BP.
Yes, Midland is the second-weatlhiest metro area in the country (measuring personal income per capita in 2011), according to new data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
Over on the East Coast, though, that ranking raised some eyebrows. That’s where The Atlantic‘s Derek Thompson was at first surprised to see Midland ahead of Washington, DC and San Francisco.
But for Texans, this news may not come as that big of a surprise.
Midland has been home to several oil booms, one of which went bust in a big way in the mid-eighties. This latest boom, thanks in large part to hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) drilling technology, is well under way. In Odessa, personal income rose 14.8 percent last year. As we reported earlier this year, there aren’t enough homes to house all the oilfield workers. Midland has the lowest unemployment rate in the state, and sales at the local BMW dealership are up 50 percent from two years ago. Continue Reading →
Wind turbines like this one in France are popping up in parts of Texas, but the loss of a tax credit could stall the green energy growth.
Many Texans woke up to a breezy, cool morning today, and when they turn their lights on and start doing their laundry or nuke a breakfast taco, many of them will be doing so with the help of that breeze: wind power.
Texas leads the country for installed wind power, and is one of the largest wind energy producers in the world, with more wind capacity than France, Italy or Great Britain as of the beginning of this year. A few weeks ago, the state set a new record for generation. Nearly 26 percent of the state’s power on the morning of November 10 came from Texas wind power, beating the previous record set in June.
The amount of power generated by wind that morning was 8,521 megawatts, or enough to power some 4.3 million Texas homes during times of average electricity use, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which manages the grid that supplies much of the state.
“We have surpassed previous wind power records several times this year,” Kent Saathoff, ERCOT’s vice president of Grid Operations and System Planning, said in a statement. “While added capacity is one reason for this growth, experience and improved tools also are enabling ERCOT to integrate this resource into the grid more effectively than ever before.” Continue Reading →
Loblolly pine seedlings take root in the shadow of destroyed trees in Bastrop.
During the Labor Day Wildfires of 2011, tens of thousands of acres burned in Central Texas, destroying over 1,600 homes and killing 1.5 million trees. Some of those trees were true Texas treasures: the Lost Pines of Bastrop State Park, a unique forest nearly a hundred miles apart from the Piney Woods of East Texas. Ninety five percent of the forest was turned to ashes during the fire.
And now they’re on their way back.
This week, nearly a half a million loblolly seedlings will make their way back to the soil of Bastrop State Park, with plans to plant 1.5 million next year and another million in the year following.
But those loblolly pine seedlings, which are now beginning to rebuild the Lost Pines, were close to almost being lost themselves.
Coal exports are on the rise, largely due to demand in Europe.
Coal is on the decline in the United States. As a domestic drilling boom has opened up vast supplies of natural gas and coal has become more expensive to mine, coal power plants have become less and less viable. New environmental regulations that require coal plants to upgrade their equipment are also a factor. There are very few new coal plants being proposed in the country right now as a result.
But that doesn’t mean that the country’s coal is staying underground. It continues to be mined, and will continue to be burned for power, just not as much domestically. Rather, our coal is being sent abroad. Surprisingly, to Europe. And coal exports are on track to reach record highs, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA).
“Despite growing demand in Asia, the United States exports slightly more coal to Europe than it sends the rest of the world combined,” the EIA says in a new report on coal exports. Continue Reading →
The latest U.S. Drought Monitor Map shows worse conditions for the state.
While many lawns in Texas might have recovered since last year’s record drought, the lakes and reservoirs that supply water to the state have not. According to recent data from the Texas Water Development Board, just 66 percent of the state’s water supply reservoirs are full.
And judging by the latest U.S. Drought Monitor Map and agricultural reports, a very dry October is beginning to take a toll on the state. A week ago, 60 percent of the state was in some stage of drought. Now that’s climbed to 70 percent, with nearly twenty percent of Texas in the two worst stages, ‘extreme’ and ‘exceptional.’
“Higher temperatures and winds dried out soils,” reads the latest report on crop and weather conditions in North Texas from Texas A&M Agrilife. “Soil-moisture levels were very short to adequate.”
Leonid Multi-Instrument Aircraft Campaign captured this image during the 1999 Leonid meteor storm
AZRAK, JORDAN: Photo dated 18 November 1999 shows a Leonid meteor storm over the Azrak desert, 90km east of Amman. The storm packed up to some 1,500 meteros per hour visible with the eye. The Leonids – so called because they appear in the sky in the region of the constellation of Leo – are a stream of minute dust particles trailing behind the Tempel-Tuttle comet, which is visible from earth every 33 years.
Image was taken during the 1999 Leonid meteor storm as part of NASA’s Leonid Multi-Instrument Aircraft Campaign
Four Views Of The Leonid Meteor Shower Of 1966, A Peak Year For This Active Yearly Shower. The Next Leonid Peak Is In The Years 1998 To 2000. The Leonids Make Their Appearance, And Take Their Name, From A Point In The Constellation Leo. These Pictures Were Taken On November 18Th, 1966, From The Kitt Peak National Observatory Near Tucson, Arizona.
SHERBORN, UNITED STATES: The green streak of a meteor seen in the southern sky of New England photographed in Sherborn, Massachusetts early 18 November, 2001 and was one of thousands that entered the earth’s atmosphere during a major meteor shower. The shower, which occurs over several days every mid-November, is called the Leonids because it appears to come from the constellation of Leo.
This Bright Leonid Fireball Is Shown During The Storm Of 1966 In The Sky Above Wrightwood, Calif. The Leonids Occur Every Year On Or About Nov. 18Th And Stargazers Are Tempted With A Drizzle Of 10 Or 20 Meteors Fizzing Across The Horizon Every Hour. But Every 33 Years A Rare And Dazzling Leonids Storm Can Occur But, Astronomers Believe The 1999 Edition Of The Leonids Probably Won’T Equal 1966, Which Peaked At 144,000 Meteors Per Hour.
Stars of the racetrack won’t be the only lights in the firmament this weekend. It’s also peak time for viewing the Leonid meteor shower. “The shower should produce perhaps a dozen or so “shooting stars” per hour,” UT’s StarDate at McDonald Observatory writes. “The best view comes in the wee hours of the morning, as your part of Earth turns most directly into the meteor stream.”
Peak viewing times should be between midnight and dawn Saturday night.
“Just remember, a meteor shower peak prediction is not an ironclad guarantee,” EarthSky writes. “If it’s clear, you might see nearly as many meteors in the predawn darkness on Friday, November 16 or Sunday, November 18. The days before and after that might feature meteors as well, as we pass through the Leonid meteor stream in space.”
If you were making your way across parts of Texas last year, you would be forgiven for wondering if it all wouldn’t simply burn up and turn to dust. A new documentary shows how that literally happened to a wide swath of the country during the thirties because of human actions.
“The dust bowl was the greatest manmade ecological disaster in the history of the United States, and perhaps the world,” says documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, who has a new two-part series on the dust bowl airing Sunday and Monday on PBS. In Texas, the dust bowl hit the panhandle hard. And during the drought last year, dust storms once again kicked up around Lubbock, with an amazing intensity you have to see to believe.
In the interview above with Inside Climate News, Burns talks about some of the lessons to be learned as we enter a new era where manmade activity is once again changing the climate.
Fire boat response crews battle the blazing remnants of the off shore oil rig Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico on April 21, 2010 near New Orleans, Louisiana.
In the largest criminal penalty in history, BP will pay $4.5 billion to settle a federal case over the April, 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
The settlement will resolve numerous criminal claims against BP brought by the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). As part of the agreement, BP also agreed to plead guilty to 11 felony counts related to the 11 workers killed in the disaster, two misdemeanors, and one additional felony count for obstruction of Congress. Announcing the deal on its website, BP says that all but one of these charges “are based on the negligent misrepresentation of the negative pressure test conducted on board the Deepwater Horizon.” BP says they acknowledged this two years ago when they released an internal investigation of the disaster.
There’s still the open question of ongoing civil claims against BP for the spill, as well as several outstanding state and private claims. BP says in a statement today that it will “vigorously defend itself against remaining civil claims” and that they weren’t “grossly negligent.”
So where will those billions go, and when does BP pay them?
A proposed rate increase could cause water bills in San Antonio to go up over eleven percent.
A proposed rate increase will hike up water bills for folks in San Antonio; one man is trying to use mini solar power units to help those still without power after Hurricane Sandy; and eight environmental rules to watch out for after the election, all in your morning Meter Reading:
If At First You Don’t Succeed …Â Kate Sheppard reports in Mother Jones on eight environmental rules that didn’t get passed in President Obama’s first term and environmental groups are pressuring to move forward in the second. It’s a handy list of federal regulations to keep an eye on, including finalizing greenhouse gas emissions rules and new regs for coal ash disposal.
The Sunny Side of Sandy: Forbes tells the story of a man who runs a solar powered-generator business and how he’s gone to some of the areas hit the hardest by Hurricane Sandy to help provide power. Continue Reading →
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