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 Bachelorâs Degree in International Relations from Brigham Young University.
The carcasses of two Hereford cows that perished on the Patterson Ranch.
On Thursday evening, Texas Monthly magazine hosted a panel from our Life By the Drop series, which looks at the history and impact of drought and water issues in Texas. The panel, led by Texas Monthly senior editor Nate Blakeslee, was a “dream team” of water experts from the state. They all took questions about the ups and downs of the state water plan, how agriculture and cities will work out their water differences, and some of the intricacies of Texas law that are holding us back.
The Sky Isn’t Falling, and That’s A Problem
âI think we all accept we have a crisis on our hands,â Jake Silverstein, editor of Texas Monthly, said in his introduction. “But the silver lining is that it has focused more people.” The question before us, he said, is will the great drought of 2011 have the same stimulative effect as the drought of record in the 1950s?
For the rest of the evening, the panel attempted to answer that question, and many related to it. The first hot topic that came up was where exactly all of our water in Texas is going. Continue Reading →
Tomorrow night at the Cactus Cafe we’ll be hosting a special free listening session for our documentary on the drought, ‘Life By the Drop: Drought, Water and the Future of Texas,’ a collaboration with Texas Monthly and KUT News.
We’ll be on hand, along with Texas Monthly Editor Jake Silverstein and KUT’s Matt Largey, as part of a panel discussion on the documentary and the issues behind it. You’ll be able to ask questions of us and listen to the documentary in its entirety. Please join us if you can make it. (And if you can’t, you can always listen to the full show right here.)
If you’re a Texan interested in green building, smart grids and solar panels, there’s probably no better place to see them in action than the Pecan Street Research Institute in Austin’s Mueller neighborhood.
That neighborhood, just northeast of downtown Austin, is home to hundreds of green-built homes, all tied into a smart grid, with many of them even outfitted with solar panel arrays. It’s become a test ground for some of the most advanced home technologies in America.
In the video above from PBS NewsHour, you can take a look inside the project that’s become a vital incubator for the green building and tech communities. And to learn more about the Mueller development, you can read our earlier story, Green Experiment Takes Root in Austin.
Scientists have drawn definitive links between hydraulic fracturing disposal wells and induced earthquakes. The photo above shows a crack in a road after a natural earthquake in 2011 in Christchurch, New Zealand.
They’re small, and so far mostly just a nuisance, but one thing is clear: there are more of them, and their intensity may be increasing.
Fortunately, the data is readily available. Using the US Geological Survey’s Earthquake Database (and with plenty of help from a friendly scientist at the USGS), we pulled up all of the quakes in the area, going back to the eighties.
Here’s what we found: Since 2008, there have been thirty earthquakes in the area measured by the USGS. Before 2008? Zero. What else hadn’t been in the area until a few years before that time?* Deep injection wells, used to dispose of wastewater from hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” Continue Reading →
Scientists have drawn definitive links between hydraulic fracturing disposal wells and induced earthquakes. The photo above shows a crack in a road after a natural earthquake in 2011 in Christchurch, New Zealand.
“There is definitely a credible link between wastewater disposal, primarily related to production of gas from the Barnett Shale, with earthquakes,” William Ellsworth, a seismologist with the US Geological Survey, tells StateImpact Texas. But it’s important to note that for the most part, these quakes have done little damage. “At this point the earthquakes are a bit of an annoyance, certainly, and there’s always the possibility that something larger might occur,” Ellsworth says.
That group looked at quakes measuring 3.0 or higher on the Richter scale. It found that quakes have increased in frequency and intensity, beginning in 2001. In 2009, there were 50 quakes in the midcontinent region. In 2010, 87. And last year, the number jumped to 134. That’s a sixfold increase over earthquake frequency in the 20th century, according to the report. Continue Reading →
Workers sift through debris at the BP facility in Texas City 35 miles south of Houston, 24 March 2005, after an explosion that killed 15 the previous day.
On March 23, 2005, an explosion rocked the Texas City BP refinery outside of Houston. Fifteen people were killed and 170 more were injured. Since then, BP has paid over $2 billion in settlements. And last November the company and the state reached an agreement on a $50 million payment from BP for the tragedy.
And today comes news of a $13 million settlement between BP and the Occupational Safety Hazard Administration. That’s on top of a $21.3 million fine assessed by OSHA shortly after the incident, according to the Houston Chronicle.
The agreement settles 409 of the 439 citations that the agency leveled against BP following the 2009 follow-up inspection. At that time, BP agreed to pay $50.6 million in fines to resolve other citations.
BP, however, was facing more than $30 million in fines for the 439 citations. In Thursdayâs agreement, most of the citations were either withdrawn, or re-classified as serious, repeat and unclassified. Only 57 remained classified as willful citations, according to the OSHA announcement.
BP has been trying to sell the plant but hasn’t had much luck finding a buyer because of the ongoing OSHA dispute.
Yet another earthquake has rattled North Texas. Early Tuesday morning, the city of Keene, 25 miles south of Fort Worth, experienced what the U.S. Geological Survey says was a 2.4 magnitude earthquake.
“We’ve been looking at the question of whether the number of earthquakes occurring across the mid-continent has changed in recent years. And we find that there is a statistically significant increase in the rate just over the past several years. And many of these are in areas where we know there is a lot of energy activity,” U.S. Geological Survey geophysicist Bill Ellsworth tells StateImpact Texas.
Thursday night at the University of Texas at Austin you can attend a special event from our ‘Life By the Drop’ series, Solutions for the Looming Water Crisis in Texas. Texas Monthly senior editor Nate Blakeslee will moderate a panel of experts and officials discussing what Texas can do to ensure it has enough water in the future.
(Free parking is available in the Library visitorsâ lot #38 after 5 p.m.)
Panelists:Â Kip Averitt, former Texas legislator, founder, Averitt & Associates Laura Huffman, State Director, The Nature Conservancy Robert R. Puente, President/CEO, San Antonio Water System Andrew Sansom, Executive Director, Texas River Systems Institute Todd Staples, Texas Commissioner of Agriculture
On a certain level, you have to feel a bit of sympathy for the Texas grid, managed by the Electric Reliablity Council of Texas (ERCOT).
It’s a well-known fact that there isn’t enough power in the state to meet the grid’s guidelines. The group behind the grid would like to have a “reserve margin” (how much of a cushion of generation capacity there is during times of peak demand) of 13.75 percent. But this summer it’s projected to get down to twelve percent, and drop even further in the coming years. So they’re being cautious, telling people that things are going to be tight.
But at the same time, you don’t want to scare everyone. And you don’t want to look weak.
This quote pretty much sums it all up:
âYou know, we want to get the message out of reduced usage during peak demand. At the same time, we want to get the message out that âTexas is open for businessâ,â Donna Nelson, the chair of the Public Utility Commission, said at a meeting last month. âWe want to get the message out, peak demand, turn your thermostat up a couple degrees, donât do your laundry, those kinds of things. But we donât want to say, âif you donât weâll have rolling outagesâ, OK? So, itâs a fine line to walk.â
What will the future of energy look like? Will natural gas make a rebound? What about oil? Will our dependency on it continue, or will it wane?
We recently put some of these questions to Steve Coll of the New Yorker, whose new book, Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power looks at the oil giant and its role in the energy economy. Where the Texas-headquartered company goes next, and how it prioritizes its development, can offer insight on where our energy future as a whole is headed.
Coll notes that ExxonMobil has made huge investments in unconventional oil and gas in the United States, most notably with their purchase of the Fort Worth company XTO in 2010, one of the largest producers of unconventional natural gas deposits in the country. “ExxonMobil produces so much oil and gas every day, so just replacing the amount they produce and sell and remaining whole without shrinking is an enormous challenge,” Coll says. ExxonMobil also has had to look for oil and gas in developing countries like Nigeria, and in unconventional ways in the United States and Canada.
You can read the first two parts of our interview here and here.
Q: I think if you look at natural gas right now, people are really concerned. Hitting the lowest prices itâs seen in a decade in April. And people are saying: ‘Well, weâve really developed this rapidly, and weâve got this huge glut of natural gas now, and thereâs not a lot of ways to use it.’ So I was curious: why you think Exxon Mobil made that choice to develop so much natural gas?
A: Well, I think they looked out over the next 30 or 40 years and they saw through their kind of projections of electric power demand in the United States, the future of the economy, and also the constraints on heavy carbon fuels like coal and also oil as a result of rising concerns about global warming, they assumed that eventually a price on carbon would come into play in the United States. All of that led them to natural gas. Continue Reading →
About StateImpact
StateImpact seeks to inform and engage local communities with broadcast and online news focused on how state government decisions affect your lives. Learn More »
