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.
Park officials say they’re looking to partner with banks, hotels and sporting-goods stores. Soon, you could be the proud owner of an official Texas Parks & Wildlife cooler. The corporate sponsorship was approved during the last legislature.
“This is the first time, as far as we know, that a state agency has done this,” Darcy Bontempo, the department’s marketing director, says.
So does this mean someday soon a visitor to Garner State Park might see a sign saying, “Brought to you by McDonald’s”? Continue Reading →
Governor Rick Perry speaks at the unveiling of the remodeled Texas Governor's Mansion on July 18, 2012.
Four years after a fire bomb nearly incinerated the entire building, the Texas Governor’s Mansion is rebuilt and running. And you may be surprised to learn that it boasts several new eco-friendly features.
“I think it’s not unlike the State of Texas having a diverse portfolio of energy,” Governor Rick Perry said at a tour of the restoration last week. “The Governor’s Mansion could be a showcase for that.”
As Jay Root reports in the Texas Tribune, there are 53 wells reaching 300 feet below the mansion for a geothermal heat pump that will help heat and cool the building. And solar panels on the roof will help heat most of the mansion’s water.
“Both solar and geothermal are some of the energy sources of the future,” Perry said at the ceremony. While Texas has a healthy fossil fuel base that adds to the economy, Perry said, it’s good for the state to have a “diverse portfolio” including wind, solar, geothermal and other types of energy.
In May, a Travis County District judge sent a letter to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) saying that he intended to revoke an air permit for a proposed coal plant in Corpus Christi. This week Judge Steven Yelenosky of the 345th Judicial District Civil Court made the order official, setting back construction on one of the few coal plants still being planned in Texas.
The plant, called Las Brisas, would use petroleum coke — carbon solids left over from refining — for power generation in a way much like coal, with much the same emissions. It was first proposed in 2008, and is the only proposed coal plant within a city’s limits in the entire country, according to the Sierra Club. It would sit on the northern side of the Corpus Christi ship channel, across from a residential area known as “Refinery Row,” which already sits in the midst of six major refineries.
The plant was given an air permit in January 2011 by the TCEQ. A challenge to that permit was brought by a coalition of environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), the Corpus Christi Clean Economy Coalition, and several Texas cities. Now Judge Yelenosky has ruled in those groups’ favor, reversing the air permit.
In his May letter, the judge found several things wrong with how the TCEQ processed the permit, and said it failed to meet the requirements of the Clean Air Act, among other issues. Tuesday’s order lays out in detail what the TCEQ did wrong. The TCEQ would not agree to an interview about the ruling, and would only give StateImpact Texas a prepared statement. Continue Reading →
Photo courtesy of the University of Texas at Austin's Energy Institute
Dr. Charles "Chip" Groat, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, has come under scrutiny for failing to disclose financial ties to the drilling industry.
University Will Have Outside Review of Fracking Study
A University of Texas at Austin professor came under scrutiny yesterday after revelations that he did not disclose significant financial ties to a drilling company while leading an academic study of hydraulic fracturing (also known as “fracking”).
A report by the Public Accountability Initiative, a non-profit watchdog group, revealed that Dr. Charles “Chip” Groat, professor at the Jackson School of Geosciences at UT Austin, also sits on the board of Plains Exploration and Production Company. That company conducts fracking operations in Texas and elsewhere in the country, including the Haynesville Shale of Louisiana, one of the drilling areas examined in the study. Since 2007, Groat has received cash and stock compensation from Plains Exploration and Production totaling over $1.5 million.
So the questions remaining are: Why didn’t Groat disclose this in the study? And did he fail to tell anyone at the University about it?
The professor would not agree to an interview, but in an email to StateImpact Texas he says the Public Accountability Initiative report is “a mixture of truths, half truths, and unfounded conclusions based [on] incorrect interpretations of information. I don’t want to discuss it.”
The University of Texas requires that financial conflicts of interest be disclosed by employees when it has “potential for directly and significantly affecting the design, conduct, or reporting of … research or is in an entity whose financial interest appears to be affected by that research.”
Dean Sharon Mosher of the Jackson School of Geosciences says that Groat submitted the financial conflict of interest form to her office in previous years, but that he had not done so this year. “I was not aware that he was still a member of the board,” Mosher tells StateImpact Texas. “Had I known he was still a member of the board and being paid, I would have insisted that he disclosed it.”
And she says the forms Groat did submit in the past do not indicate how much he was being paid by Plains Exploration and Production. “The level of compensation, I think, is unusual for someone at UT,” she tells StateImpact Texas. So why didn’t Groat disclose a major financial tie to a drilling company in the report? Continue Reading →
Photo courtesy of the University of Texas at Austin
Dr. Charles "Chip" Groat, who led a study on fracking and groundwater contamination, didn't disclose over a million dollars in compensation and stock from a drilling company.
But according to a new report out today by the Public Accountablitiy Initiative (PAI), a nonprofit watchdog group, the conclusions in Groat’s report aren’t as clear cut as initially reported. And Groat himself did not disclose significant financial ties to the fracking industry.
Groat, a former Director of the U.S. Geological Survey and professor at the Jackson School of Geosciences at the University of Texas at Austin, also sits on the board of Plains Exploration and Production Company, a Houston-based company that conducts drilling and fracking in Texas and other parts of the country. According to the new report (and a review of the company’s financial reports by Bloomberg)Â Groat received more than $400,000 from the drilling company last year alone, more than double his salary at the University. And one of the shales examined in Groat’s fracking study is currently being drilled by the company, the report says.
Since 2007, Groat has received over $1.5 million in cash and stock awards from the company, and he currently holds over $1.6 million in company stock, according to the PAI report. (Update: we clarified with PAI, and that $1.6 million in stock comes from the stock awards over the years. PAI says Groat’s total compensation from the company is close to $2 million.) Continue Reading →
Photo by Flickr user GrungeTextures/Creative Commons
The Texas drought has killed an estimated 5.6 million urban trees and 500 million forest trees, roughly 10 percent of the trees in Texas.
The numbers of trees estimated to have been lost to last year’s drought were, in a word, troubling. Up to ten percent of Texas’ urban trees were thought to be lost, a total of up to five million. In the forests the situation was the same, with up to ten percent — 500 million — of Texas’ trees estimated to be lost.
But the drought may not be entirely to blame, according to a new report by the Agrlifie Extension Service at Texas A&M University.
“Drought is the primary contributor to tree kill, but it may not be exactly the way you might be thinking,” Dr. Eric Taylor, Texas AgriLife Extension Service forestry specialist, Overton, says in the report. “You may find this hard to believe, but relatively few trees likely died directly from dehydration in 2011. Instead, the 2011 drought severely weakened mature trees, making them susceptible to opportunistic pathogens like hypoxylon canker and insects like pine bark engraver beetles.”
As the extreme heat and drought of stressed-out older trees, they stood less of a chance against the opposition. “Just like humans, a healthy organism is able to fight off the problems that are trying to come in and attack them,” says Jim Hauser, a Forest Health Coordinator with the Texas Forest Service.
It was a line of questioning straight out of the Barry Smitherman for Railroad Commission of Texas campaign last night on the faux news show ‘Colbert Report.’ Lisa Jackson, Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), was a guest on the show. And host Stephen Colbert brought the tough questions. Tough questions like “Why do we collectively have to worry about all of the environment? That sounds socialist.”
Photo courtesy of Barry Smitherman for Railroad Commission of Texas
A campaign ad from Railroad Commission Chair Barry Smitherman's Facebook page.
It would be funnier if the questions weren’t so familiar. Distrust and outright disdain is the status quo between much of the Texas oil and gas industry (and its state regulators) and the EPA. Smitherman, chair of the Railroad Commission, is running for re-election with campaign slogans like ‘Send the EPA Packing‘ and ‘Liberty First: Stand Against the EPA’s Growing Threat to Our Freedoms.’ For many on the right, despite the fact that EPA regulation has been virtually the same under Republican and Democratic administrations, the agency has become a convenient political punching bag, especially during an election year.
“The EPA’s been around 41 years,” Jackson noted to Colbert. “We were started by Richard Nixon.”
Dr. Robert Hebner has pioneered a method of extracting oil from algae.
Algae. It’s smelly, but a new study from the University of Texas at Austin says it could be a significant source of energy. A team of researchers found that, theoretically, it’s possible algae could produce 500 times more energy than it takes to grow it.
That’s an important number, because the efficiency of fuel depends on how much energy it takes to produce it. Oil and gas, for instance, creates 30 to 40 times as much energy as it takes to produce (i.e. drill) them. “But it’s getting harder and harder to get fossil fuels out of the ground,” Robert Hebner, a professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering and director of the Center for Electromechanics, said in a release accompanying the report. “With algae, the theoretical maximum is extremely positive.”
But don’t get too excited about algae yet. Another study from the same group at the University, emphasized that this level of efficiency is still theoretical. Currently, algae produces only one-five hundredth the amount of energy that it takes to grow it. Continue Reading →
It’s a heavy question: Where is all of our energy going to come from? That puzzle is at the center of a new film and education project, ‘Switch,’ featuring Scott Tinker, Director of the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas at Austin.
“The world’s population just passed seven billion,” Tinker said at a presentation on the film earlier this year. “And we’re adding a billion people every thirteen years.” As that population grows, energy demands grow with it. While developed nations’ energy use will flatten, Tinker said more and more countries are industrializing, which means more power demands. “There are several billion people just getting access to energy for the first time.”
So where’s all that energy waiting? In the film and presentation, Tinker looks at all of the options: coal, oil, natural gas and renewables. Let’s start with coal. “Coal is available, affordable and reliable,” Tinker said. “But it’s also dirty.”
Up until now, the commission had followed what’s already in the state employee ethics handbook. The new rules, proposed by commission chair Barry Smitherman, take things a bit further. “Adopting this policy is an important step to maintaining the public trust,” Smitherman said in a statement.
“Since [Smitherman] became chair, he’s been reviewing all the policies and procedures at the commission, and this is one that he found was deficient,” says Casey Haney, the chairman’s chief of staff. “So we thought it was important to address it sooner rather than later.”
Under the new policy, for the first two years after leaving the commission, former commissioners and executive directors must send all of their communications with the agency through the open records coordinator at the commission, just as any outsider would. The idea is to set up a more formal barrier. Continue Reading →
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