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.
A new infographic shows how tar sands oil is produced.
Construction is currently underway on the Keystone XL pipeline, which will take heavy oil harvested from sand and tar pits in Canada to refineries on the Gulf Coast of Texas. The pipeline and the oil that will flow through it have drawn controversy for several reasons: it’s a carbon-intensive process to drill for the oil; if oil were to leak, it would be very difficult to clean up; and the company behind the pipeline has used eminent domain to route it through private land, against the wishes of some landowners. This week a Texas farmer lost her court case fighting the pipeline company’s claims of eminent domain.
But just how does this heavy oil get out of those sand pits and into the pipeline? NPR has put together a helpful infographic on how the tar sands oil gets produced.
Trucks with the natural gas industry drive through the countryside earlier this year in Springville, Pennsylvania.
With the good can also come the bad, and that’s certainly been the case with the drilling boom going on in various parts of Texas these days. As drillers use thousands of trucks — hauling millions of gallons of water and other supplies to rigs — roads inevitably suffer. Naturally, people are questioning who is going to be responsible for repairing them.
And those roads — built in the fifties and sixties — weren’t constructed for heavy use, Wilson tells the Tribune. “They were built as farm-to-market roads for country trucks and for agriculture,” he says. “They weren’t built for 18-wheelers … so a road was built for 25 years and you get that level of traffic, it can diminish it down to six or seven years.” Damage from drilling trucks in the Eagle Ford Shale of South Texas alone was recently estimated at $2 billion by TxDOT.
Some possible solutions? Wilson says the agency is looking at ways to do more about the issue: Continue Reading →
Julia Trigg Crawford has several hundred acres of land in northeast Texas. And the Keystone XL pipeline will likely go through it.
The ruling came by iPhone.
Late Wednesday evening, Judge Bill Harris of the Lamar County Court at Law released his decision in the case of the North Texas farmer, Julia Trigg Crawford, versus the Keystone XL pipeline, owned and operated by the Canadian company TransCanada.
In an email to lawyers involved in the case, the judge announced he was granting TransCanada’s motion for summary judgement and denied Crawford’s plea. The message ended with “Sent from my iPhone.”
After Crawford refused to allow the pipeline on her land, TransCanada used eminent domain last fall to seize her property. She fought back in court, and the case finally came before Judge Harris a few weeks ago. In the meantime, construction began on the southern leg of the controversial pipeline.
“It is absolutely unbelievable to me eminent domain abuse continues in Texas given the revelations made during our court case,” Julia Trigg Crawford says in a statement. Continue Reading →
Pipe is stacked at the southern site of the Keystone XL pipeline in Cushing, Oklahoma. Construction of the southern leg began last week.
For the third time, The Texas Supreme Court has ruled against a pipeline company’s use of eminent domain.
But the oil and gas industry did not give this one up without a fight.
Here’s some background: In a landmark ruling at the Texas Supreme Court last August, a rice farmer in Beaumont (along with a rice farming consortium, Texas Rice Land Partners) won his case against the Denbury Green pipeline company, which had used eminent domain to route a carbon dioxide pipeline across his land. The 24-inch line stretches from Donaldsonville, Louisiana to the Hastings Field, outside of Houston, Texas. The farmer, Mike Latta, argued that the pipeline wasn’t in the public interest, as it was a private pipeline that would only be used by one company. The Supreme Court of Texas agreed. (But the case took several years to make it to the Supreme Court, and in the meantime the company built the pipeline anyways.)
Then the pipeline company — joined by the Texas Oil and Gas Association and several others associated with the industry (including notable names like the Koch Pipeline Company, Kinder Morgan and Occidental Chemical) —  asked for an entire rehearing of the case, something of a rare move. In March, the Supreme Court said no, the decision stands. Then the pipeline company Denbury Green asked again for a rehearing.
This week comes the latest answer: No. And as the decision still stands, it could become the basis for more legal arguments against pipelines using eminent domain to seize private land. Continue Reading →
Robert Cervenka, a neighbor of the troubled coal power plant, has been ranching here for over seventy years.
What happened at the Sandy Creek power plant? The new coal-powered generator, one of the few developing coal projects in the state, had a strange malfunction last fall, setting back construction on the plant a year, and pushing the Texas electric grid even further into a tight spot. The power station in Riesel was set to produce 925 megawatts of electricity for Texas, enough to power an estimated 900,000 homes.
But what exactly happened wasn’t clear. The companies behind the project wouldn’t talk. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which oversees the grid that serves much of the state, said they couldn’t discuss it because it would be bad for market competition. And a video taken during a test startup seemed to show something going wrong. (It has since been removed.)
On Monday, Standard and Poor’s (S&P)Â downgraded the credit rating of the project, and for the first time we have some answers about what went wrong at the plant. In a press release explaining their reasons for a negative outlook on the project, S&P says that an October 17, 2011 accident set back the plant’s start date by nearly a year. On that day, “a number of tubes overheated that badly damaged the broiler,” S&P says. Now the plant is expected to come online in Spring 2013.
But the financial stability of the project is still in question. Continue Reading →
The rule was defended in a suit from the American Lung Association, several cities and states, and several environmental groups, including the Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council and Sierra Club. Fighting against the new rule were the Texas Attorney General, Texas power companies and several others.
Now the reactions are rolling in, so it’s time for another “Reax Roundup.”
First, the state Attorney General’s office says that the rules would have been especially bad for Texas:
“As the CSAPR regulations were specifically applied to Texas, the EPA’s overreach was especially onerous. First, the EPA failed to provide Texas the advance notice that is required by federal law when it did not include the State in key aspects of the proposed rule that was published in August 2010 – but then added Texas to the final regulations without notice. Further, Texas’ last-minute inclusion in the EPA’s CSAPR regulations was based upon a single air quality monitor in Granite City, Illinois – which was fundamentally flawed not only because a nearby steel mill necessarily impacted that location’s air quality, but because that very location actually satisfied federal air quality standards.”
But the Sierra Club says that the rules would do more good than harm. Continue Reading →
It’s welcome news for Abbott, who just last week bragged that he likes to “sue the Obama administration” for fun. The state of Texas was joined by dozens of others, including some Texas power companies, in challenging the rule. Abbott quickly tweeted this:
The proposed rules (you can read more about them here) would limit pollution (sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide) from older coal power plants that ends up in other states. The rule would apply to 28 states, and would utilize a cap-and-trade system for the plants to come into compliance. Of particular concern to Texas were several aging coal plants that threatened to shut down because of the rule.
The EPA claims that if enacted, within two years, the rules would prevent “13,000 to 34,000 premature deaths, 15,000 nonfatal heart attacks,” and “400,000 aggravated asthma attacks.”
You may have been encouraged to read a widely-circulated story last week that declared “CO2 Emissions in U.S. Drop to 20-year Low.” The report from the Associated Press largely credits cheap natural gas for the change, and says that “many of the world’s leading climate scientists didn’t see the drop coming, in large part because it happened as a result of market forces rather than direct government action.”
But is that really the full picture?
If you read the government report that is the basis for the Associated Press article, you’ll find some more nuance, as well as cause for both optimism and concern. The report by the Energy Information Administration (part of the Department of Energy), says that yes, energy-related CO2 levels are at their lowest levels in twenty years, if you’re looking at the first quarter 2012 compared to the same time periods in previous years.
But those are just first quarter results. If you look at year-over-year annual CO2 emissions (shown in a graph above), from a separate report released last week, the picture isn’t as rosy: Continue Reading →
Hazy smog blankets Houston during a hot summer day in 2000.
If your daily jogging routine sometimes calls for a respirator, you’ll want to check this out: a new interactive map that shows you smog levels throughout the Houston area.
The map, a joint project of the University of Houston, the American Lung Association, and the environmental group Air Alliance Houston, displays current smog levels from six monitoring stations throughout the Houston area. The information comes from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. Smog info is already available through government agencies, but there’s one caveat: the data available is 1.5 hours old. With this new map, the data is real-time. “This is important because ozone values can change quickly,” Air Alliance Houston notes in a press release, “and people in sensitive groups need to know actual exposure levels.”
Smog is the same thing as ozone. In the higher levels of the earth’s atmosphere, ozone is a good thing. But at the lower levels of the atmosphere, pollutants from vehicles, refineries, and power plants result in bad ozone, aka smog. When those chemicals react with sunlight, they become harmful. Continue Reading →
Photo by Tony Reisinger/Courtesy of Parks & Wildlife
Dead redfish along the shores of the Brownsville Ship Channel during a red tide in September 2011.
A red tide in the Gulf has killed nearly a million fish on the beaches of Galveston, according to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. The fish — most of them Gulf menhaden, but some species of catfish as well — are washing up on the Galveston and Surfside beaches, as well as the Bolivar Peninsula.
The department says that they haven’t seen any red tide on aerial flights over the upper or lower coasts, but that “does not mean that the red tide is gone, but rather that cell counts are not high enough to discolor the water.”
Samples taken at other Texas beaches, like Mission Bay and Padre Island, haven’t turned up any red tide, either.
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