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.
Dr. Jay Famiglietti says groundwater in parts of Texas is depleting "at a pretty rapid clip."
The myriad issues of water and drought in Texas are often confusing. There’s the hundreds of pages in the Texas Water Plan, numerous surface water districts, and then the completely different set of rules that applies to water underground.
Trying to sort through that confusion is Dr. Jay Famiglietti, a professor at UC Irvine. He and a team of scientists, including researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, use satellites and computer models to track freshwater availability.
“I wish I could say the outlook was super-positive, but there are some real hot spots,” Famiglietti says. “Groundwater is depleting at a pretty rapid clip” in parts of Texas, and the state’s population will only continue to grow. Dr. Famiglietti will speak tonight at UT’s Environmental Sciences Institute, part of their ‘Hot Science: Cool Talk‘ series (all the info is here, it’s free and open to the public). We sat down with him to learn more about what’s happening to Texas’ water supplies, and why cultural changes may be necessary for the state’s survival.
Q: We’ve spent a lot of time looking at the drought, and when we came across this monitoring system of groundwater, it was fascinating.  You’re essentially looking from space at what’s happening with water underground. Can you explain to us how it works?
A: Yeah, it’s pretty amazing stuff. So really GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) isn’t sensing water. What it’s measuring is mass. It’s a satellite that was designed to measure earth’s gravity field and how that changes over time.
So anything that has mass, exerts a gravitational attraction. So if you’re over the mountains say, compared to the plains, you’re going to have a stronger gravitational attraction over the mountains compared to a flatter region with less mass.
The way that relates to water is, the gravitational field actually changes over time. If you think about Texas, a dry Texas with no water, and then imagine covering Texas with a foot of water, it’s going to be much heavier. Water is super heavy. Continue Reading →
Higher limits for wholesale power prices were approved by the Public Utility Commission today.
The Public Utility Commission of Texas, which oversees electricity in the state, voted today to raise the limit on how much power providers can charge.
That price – known as the offer cap – happens when the grid gets stretched to capacity. It’s essentially the maximum amount companies can charge for wholesale power. Today the commission tripled the cap from its level of $3,000 earlier in the year to $9,000. (Earlier this summer the commission increased the offer cap to $4,500.)
The hope is that higher profits for generators will result in new power plants. The Texas grid is predicted to fall below its target level of power reserves in a few years, and with low profits for power plants right now, new plants just aren’t being built in Texas’ private, energy-only market.
Some consumer and trade groups are opposed to the change, as it isn’t clear what kind of impact the higher wholesale prices could have on residential customers. The Texas Industrial Energy Consumer group said in a memo to the commission that if the $9,000 price caps were in place during the long, hot year of 2011, it would have added 80 percent to wholesale power prices, an overall increase of $13.3 to $14 billion.
Good news for Texans: there's likely to be more power available over the next few years than previously thought.
Texas may have some more time before its electric grid gets stretched to the point of blackouts. An updated forecast from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) today says that after the announcement of several new power projects and some other revisions, the outlook for keeping the lights on over the next few years is “significantly different” than they had previously thought.
In May, ERCOT released its latest report on the state of the grid. And it caused some nervousness for saying that by 2014, the grid’s reserve margin would fall below ten percent. The reserve margin is the amount of excess power available at times of peak demand, and the state has a goal of keeping it above 13.75 percent. The further the reserve margin falls, the greater the chance of blackouts when Texas has periods of extreme weather and unexpected power plant shutdowns.
Part of the issue behind the state’s power woes of late is that low natural gas prices (thanks to a fracking boom) also mean lower profits for power producers, as natural gas tends to set the price they can charge for power. In the mostly deregulated Texas market, power plants are built privately. Without the promise of profit, plants simply weren’t being funded. So this summer, the Public Utility Commission of Texasraised the rates power companies can charge during times of peak demand to encourage new generation. Continue Reading →
Rice farmers downstream of the Lower Colorado may get water for their fields next year.
Once again, the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA)Â is coming under fire from some Central Texans. The reason? A recommendation by agency staff that could lead to water being sent downstream next year for rice farming.
The LCRA controls some of the more hotly-contested water in the state of Texas. There is business and real estate upstream that relies on good lake levels to thrive; agriculture, power generation and ecosystems downstream that also need a certain amount of water to get by; and in the middle, the City of Austin. Striking a balance between the many interests and finite resources available for them to share has been an ongoing difficulty in recent years for the agency.
Pipe is stacked at the southern site of the Keystone XL pipeline on March 22, 2012 in Cushing, Oklahoma.
This week, the Keystone pipeline had to shut down for days because of possible safety issues on a portion of the line between Missouri and Illinois. The existing Keystone pipeline, which has only been running for a few years, takes heavy oil harvested from sand pits in Canada to refinieries in the Midwest and a massive oil depot in Cushing, Oklahoma. The Keystone XL pipeline will be a large addition to that existing network, and a southern leg is already under construction from Cushing to refineries on the Gulf Coast, facing protests and questions about how the company is using eminent domain to seize private land for the pipeline.
We reached out to Dr. Lara Skinner, Associate Director of Research at Cornell University’s Global Labor Institute, to get her perspective on the current shutdown and some of the safety issues particular to pipelines transporting “diluted bitumen.” That’s heavy, sour oil harvested from the sand pits of Canada and mixed with hydrocarbons so it can flow through a pipeline. Many of the issues with the existing pipeline are relevant to the impending Keystone XL pipeline. Skinner has co-authored two studies on the economic and environmental impact of the new pipeline and is openly critical of the risks that it may pose.
Q: Can you describe for us what’s happening with the existing Keystone pipeline right now?
A: You know, my expertise is really in the Keystone XL pipeline. But in the process of trying to figure out some of the implications of that pipeline, we looked at phase one of the pipeline, Keystone. Specifically looking at what was the potential from spills.
And we looked at the proposals TransCanada was putting in about the projected spill rate of the Keystone XL pipeline. So we looked back and said, ‘Okay, what did they project for the first one and what actually happened?’
Stargazers are in for another treat this weekend. The Orionid meteor shower, an annual occurrence, will make its way across the sky late Saturday night into early Sunday morning.
The best hours to see the meteor shower will be at midnight Saturday until early Sunday morning, with a peak around 2 a.m. StarDate magazine says you can expect to see some 25 meteors per hour. And some of them may look “familiar” — the meteor shower is composed of leftover debris from Halley’s comet.
The sky watchers at StarDate, a publication of the University of Texas at Austin’s McDonald Observatory, recommend getting as far away from cities as possible to see the shower. “Look for state or city parks or other safe, dark sites,” they write. “Lie on a blanket or reclining chair to get a full-sky view. If you can see all of the stars in the Little Dipper, you have good dark-adapted vision.” The big, open skies of Texas — if you can get far enough away from city lights — should be perfect for witnessing the event should skies stay clear. No rain is forecast for much of the state for Saturday night into Sunday. And the moon is only at a quarter and will set before midnight, so it shouldn’t interfere with seeing the shower.
More on the astronomy behind the celestial wonder from StarDate: Continue Reading →
100 tons of iron dust were dumped into the Pacific in a misguided effort to combat climate change by fostering the growth of plankton. In this NASA satellite image, an enormous bloom of phytoplankton are seen off the coast of Norway in 2004.
A California environmentalist is in hot water after dumping over a hundred tons of iron sulfate into the cold currents of the Pacific.
George spent part of July in a fishing boat off the Haida Gwaii islands of British Columbia, scattering the red dust in an effort to cause a growth of plankton and help reverse climate change, according to various media reports. The story was first published in The Guardian.
The eco avenger justified the caper to the New York Times by saying that the iron dust was used as a “fertilizer” to cause plankton growth, which can help eat up carbon in the atmopshere. (And he also noted that plankton could help salmon recover in the region.)
Before the Clean Water Act, two-thirds of waterways were deemed unsafe for fishing and swimming, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In a look back at the act today, EPA Acting Assistant Administrator for the Office of Water Nancy Stoner writes that until the act was passed, “municipal and household wastes flowed untreated into our rivers, lakes and streams. Harmful chemicals were poured into the water from factories, chemical manufacturers, power plants and other facilities.”
There was public pressure at the time to sign the act into law. In June 1969, an oil slick on the Cuyahoga river in Ohio actually caught fire, burning for half an hour and causing fifty thousand dollars in damage. Lake Erie was deemed a “giant cesspool,” with only three of its 62 beaches rated completely safe for swimming.
The candidates sparred over energy and the economy at last night's debate, and fact-checkers have been busy looking into their claims.
Last night’s presidential debate saw a lot of claims and assertions about energy and environmental policy, so we sat down to sift through what the candidates are saying. It may not surprise you that there were some questionable assertions from both sides.
It’s worth noting that any policy, and energy policy in particular, doesn’t typically boil down into easy sound bites or attacks like the ones being used by both campaigns. The factors are often complex and nuanced. Take gasoline prices, for instance: the White House has little control over whether prices go up, and becoming “energy independent” isn’t likely to do much to bring them down. Oil is traded on a world market, so what happens in the Strait of Hormuz is likely to have an impact at the pump in Des Moines.
Using various fact-checks by PolitiFact, FactCheck, and the New York Times, here’s a list of some of the truths, untruths and half-truths delivered in last night’s debate:
Half-True/Half-False: Drilling on Federal Lands Down Under Obama. Romney said that “oil production is down 14 percent this year on federal land.” PolitiFact rates that half-true, saying the number is factually correct but “cherry-picked.” “There’s nuance in the number,” they write. “Production under Obama was hobbled due to the Deepwater Horizon disaster, making a one-year figure subject to cherry-picking. And it’s not at all clear that the president in charge when the oil is taken out of the ground deserves full credit or blame; years of prior policies on exploration and drilling had an impact.” The New York Times concurs: “Oil and gas production on public lands has fluctuated during the Obama administration, but it has increased modestly (about 13 percent for oil and about 6 percent for gas) in the first three years of the Obama presidency, compared with the last three years of the administration of President George W. Bush, according to an analysis from the Energy Information Administration,” the paper writes. Continue Reading →
If you live around Dallas-Fort Worth, you may have noticed some shaking last night. No, it wasn’t Obama and Romney sparring over energy policy and the economy. It was another earthquake in an area that up until a few years ago had been seismically silent.
Around ten o’clock Tuesday night, a 2.7 magnitude earthquake struck near the town of Midlothian, Texas, according to the US Geological Survey. “It really shook our house too plus a loud boom,” one commenter on the website Texas Storm Chasers said.
Midlothian is part of the Barnett Shale, an area of drilling for natural gas. That natural gas is drilled by a process known as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” where a mix of water, sand and chemicals is injected at high pressure deep underground to break up rock formations and release oil and natural gas. After a well is “fracked,” some of that liquid mixture comes back up. And it has to be disposed of.
Enter disposal wells. They’re essentially waste dumps that go even deeper underground, used to dispose of fracking liquids, and several scientific studies have made a definitive link between injecting fluids into these disposal wells and manmade earthquakes in the region (as well as other parts of the country).
It isn’t immediately clear if there’s any connection between this quake and disposal wells in the region. It can take months and even years to make such links scientifically, as we’ve reported earlier. But in the meantime you can read our earlier report: How Fracking Disposal Wells Are Causing Earthquakes in Dallas-Fort Worth
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