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 sun sets behind two offshore oil platform rigs under construction in Port Fourchon, Louisiana, June 14, 2010, as cleanup continues on the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
The sun is setting for drillers wanting a new piece of the Gulf. There’s one more day to bid on leases to drill offshore in the Gulf of Mexico.
The Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE) will hold a sale of nearly 38 million acres of offshore leases Wednesday.
Those leases run in an area from three to 230 miles off the coast, the BOEMRE says, and range anywhere from nine feet to more than two miles deep. The bureau estimates that there’s somewhere around 31 billion barrels of oil and 134 trillion cubic feet of natural gas waiting there that are “currently undiscovered and technically recoverable.” (But they say the actual production would likely be much less, resulting in 1 billion barrels of oil and 4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.)
The sale goes down Wednesday, June 20th at the Mercedez-Benz Superdome. But bids must be submitted by mail no later than Tuesday. The Department says that the minimum bid for deepwater leases is $100 per acre. Once the leases are sold, it will mark the end of the government’s 2007 – 2012 Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Natural Gas Leasing Program.
For students at Stephen F. Austin High School’s Media Arts program, the one subject they all wanted to report on this year was the drought. As part of PBS Newshour’s Student Reporting Labs project, which pairs public media mentors with high school students learning reporting around the country, several Austin students produced four different videos on the drought.
The first video, above, looks at the impact of the Bastrop Complex fires that began on Labor Day weekend 2011. Those fires burned more than 1,500 homes, took 2 lives and were the sixth-worst fires in U.S. history. Students Audrey Kuhl, Samantha Melomo, Olivia Mendez, Connor Johnstone and Madison Fare traveled to Bastrop to see firsthand the destruction, and learn how citizens are rebuilding after the fires. That video won the award for “PBS Package of the Year” at the Reporting Labs awards ceremony in May.
If you were one of the sixty thousand people at the Austin City Limits festival last year, you may have been surprised to find acres and acres of lush, thick grass covering the grounds. To find out how the festival has learned to adjust to drought (and even create an oasis in the midst of it), students Cailyn Lewis, James Cumby, Ben Swisher, Catalina Lizaraga, Robin Livesay and Haley Barlow produced a video called “ACL & The Drought:”
Volunteer firefighter Jason Collard prepares to fight a running wildfire on April 19, 2011 in Strawn, Texas.
During Texas’ worst wildfire season on record last year, more than 16,000 emergency responders and firefighters came to the Lone Star State to help battle the blazes. Today the Texas Forest Service announced that they’re going to send some of their own to help fight the Little Bear Fire near Ruidoso, New Mexico. That fire has burned nearly 38,000 acres and is only 45 percent contained. So far, more than 200 homes have been lost, with damages estimated over $22.5 million.
“Following the fire season we had last year, this is an opportunity for Texas to give back to those who helped us,” Bob Koenig, chief response training coordinator for Texas Forest Service, said in a statement today.
Koenig and fourteen others will head to New Mexico this weekend.
Photo Courtesy of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
The Dunes Sagebrush Lizard is being kept off of the endangered species list. For now.
The dunes sagebrush lizard is tiny, and brown, and hides in the dunes of East New Mexico and West Texas. And until recently, it seemed like it could threaten the drilling boom in the Permian basin as the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service considered adding the lizard to the endangered species list.
But this week the oil and gas industry breathed a huge sigh of relief when it was announced that the lizard won’t be added. Thanks to a conservation plan brought forward by stakeholders in the region and approved by the state comptroller, Fish & Wildlife was convinced that the lizard would be just fine.
But how does the plan work? And what about it convinced Fish & Wildlife that it would be enough to save the lizard? For some answers, we turned to Dr. Benjamin Tuggle, the Southwest Regional Director for Fish & Wildlife.
Q: What is it about the Texas conservation plan that led to the lizard not being listed by the Fish and Wildlife Department?
A: Well, I wanna go back to where the habitat is. About two-thirds of the habitat was in New Mexico, and about one-third was in Texas. And we had the candidate conservation agreements and candidate conservation agreements with assurances that covered over 90 percent of the habitat that is in New Mexico. The remaining one third of that habitat that was critical for the survival of the species and also for the long-term sustainability of the species didn’t have any protection at all in Texas, and it was all on private lands.
An upcoming workshop will teach West Texas residents how to have healthy, drought-resistant landscapes.
Curious how you can have a healthy landscape in West Texas, a land besieged by drought and heat? Well, the Agrilife Extension Service wants to help. They’re holding a Landscape Drought Management Workshop on June 23. Speaking will be Dr. Dotty Woodson, AgriLife Extension water resources specialist at Dallas.
“The purpose of this program is to help homeowners develop a healthy, beautiful landscape that won’t wither under our blistering summer heat and limited water,” Allison Watkins, AgriLife Extension horticulture agent in Tom Green County, said in a release. “We’ll demonstrate ways to keep a landscape healthy in heat and drought without wasting water.”
The workshop will be held from 9 a.m.-12:30 p.m. June 23 at the Tom Green 4-H Center, located at 3168 North U.S. Highway 67, San Angelo.
The Authority manages the groundwater district of the Edwards Aquifer, which includes San Antonio and many of the surrounding counties, producing drinking water for more than 2 million people in Central Texas.
At a board meeting Tuesday, the EAA appointed Roland Ruiz to serve as interim general manager. The board said Ruiz will be in that position until they decide on a “permanent successor.”
Ruiz handles communications for the EAA, and has been with the authority since May 2006. “He will assume the responsibilities of the general manager on an interim basis effective immediately,” the EAA said in a release late Tuesday.
It still isn’t clear why Dreher was placed on administrative leave. He was appointed general manger of the Authority in early 2010. Previously he was a director of water resources for Idaho and consulted on groundwater disputes in the Republican River Basin.
Update: The San Antonio Express-News reports that the board voted 8 to 6 to terminate its contract with Dreher. The paper writes that Chairwoman Luana Buckner said that ““Karl actually did a very good job for our agency. But he lacked the management skills to reach the goals of the board.”
We’re excited to announce today that our lead radio station, KUT Austin, has received a National Edward R. Murrow Award for continuing coverage of the Texas drought. One of our StateImpact Texas reports on how hunters have fared during the drought is part of the award. So a shout-out is in order to our own Mose Buchele for that story, and another to StateImpact Texas editor Emily Donahue for her piece on a rancher going hungry to keep her horses fed during the drought. And congrats to all our colleagues at KUT.
You can listen to all of the radio reports that won the award for best ‘Audio Continuing Coverage’ in the embedded player above.
And it goes without saying that such stories wouldn’t exist in the first place without you, our readers and listeners, especially the many of you that have shared your stories of the drought with us.
Rows of tomatoes at the new Village Farms greenhouse in Monahans.
A few weeks ago we reported on the grand opening of a massive 15-acre greenhouse growing tomatoes in the Texas desert. The innovative facility from Village Farms uses little water, lots of diffused light and no soil. It also works by keeping Mother Nature (in the form of pests, floods and drought) out.
But sometimes, she’ll just fight her way back in.
Three Village Farms tomato greenhouses in Marfa suffered major damage during an extreme hailstorm on the night of May 31st. According to the company, about 82 acres of greenhouses were affected. Many of the glass windows that form the roofs were shattered.
“It’s a mess. Nothing’s happened like this before,” says Doug Kling, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer with Village Farms. “Occasionally you lose some glass to a bad storm. But nothing like this. The good news is, nobody was hurt.”
Kling says the greenhouse is closed temporarily and the company is calculating how much damage was done. Continue Reading →
The National Guard's C-130s help deal with major emergencies in Texas and along the Gulf Coast.
They were part of the wildfire-fighting force that helped push back Texas’ worst year of fires in history, and now they may be leaving the state’s armada.
The U.S. Air Force wants to move eight C-130s from Fort Worth to Montana. But Texas feels differently.
As Era Sundar of StateImpact Texas lead station KUT reports, some state officials are criticizing the Air Force’s plans. They say it could hamper Texas’ ability to fight wildfires like the ones in Bastrop and West Texas last year.
But an Air Force spokesperson told KUT that the military has budget cuts to deal with and “has to distribute its diminishing airlift capabilities more evenly.” The Air Force says Montana has a shortage of the planes, but there would still be C-130s available to Texas from bases in Arkansas and Mississippi. Continue Reading →
Al Armendariz was the regional administrator for the EPA. He resigned after comments he made about enforcement came to light.
Earlier this week, Al Aremendariz was back in the news. The former Region 6 administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had been scheduled to appear at a House subcommittee hearing on the EPA, but canceled at the last minute. Texas regulators and other energy industry figures spent much of the hearing blasting him and the EPA anyway.
Armendariz resigned from the EPA in April after comments he made two years earlier came to light, where he talked about his philosophy of enforcement: making a big example of lawbreakers. But his language was coarse. “It was kinda like how the Romans used to conquer those villages in the Mediterranean,” he said in the video. “They’d go into a little Turkish town somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw, and they’d crucify them. And you know, that town was really easy to manage for the next few years.” Within days of that video becoming public, Armendariz resigned.
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