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.
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Photo courtesy of RRC
Barry Smitherman, Chairman of the Railroad Commission of Texas
It would be a stretch to say it was a nail-biter, but two races for the Railroad Commission are headed for a runoff on July 31.
To take a primary in Texas, you must get fifty percent plus one vote, and in the Republican Primary races for two seats on the Railroad Commission, no candidate made those numbers. (The Railroad Commission of Texas is the state agency that regulates oil and gas drilling and pipelines in the state. It has nothing to do with Railroads.)
Incumbent commissioner Barry Smitherman took 44 percent of the vote in his primary race, with roughly 28 percent going to his challenger, Greg Parker. Whoever wins that runoff in July (which will likely be Smitherman) will not have a Democratic challenger this November in the general election.
The race for the open seat on the commission will be a runoff between Christi Craddick and Warren Chisum. Craddick got roughly 36 percent of the vote, while Chisum won around 27 percent. Whoever wins that runoff will face Democratic challenger Dale Henry this fall.
Alas, Houston Attorney Roland Sledge got less than ten percent of the vote, behind four others in the race, meaning we won’t have any more ads like these: Continue Reading
Photo by Hunter Martin/Getty Images
Chesapeake CEO Aubrey McClendon has come under fire for using his company's wells to finance over a billion dollars in personal loans.
If you’ve been hearing a lot about Chesapeake Energy Corporation and its CEO Aubrey McClendon as of late, you might have some questions. What is this company? Who is McClendon and whatâs the deal with his wine and antique map collection?
To tackle some of those questions and more, StateImpact reporters in Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Texas teamed up to create a reading guide to Chesapeake Energyâs recent financial woes.
Itâs a drilling company, the second-largest natural gas extractor in the country.
Chesapeake is an energy producer that focuses on unconventional onshore oil and natural gas plays in the U.S. The company’s roots are in natural gas: Chesapeake is the nationâs second-largest natural gas extractor. However, near-record low prices for natural gas have forced the company to shift focus to oil and production of other valuable liquids. Continue Reading
Photo by Filipa Rodrigues/KUT News
The community just outside of Austin has been living without water for ten years.
Earlier this week we posted a video and audio report from Andy Uhler of KUT News (one of the public radio stations in the StateImpact Texas project) about a small community ten miles outside of Austin that lives without running water, the colonia of Las Lomitas. In the second and third part of the series, Uhler and fellow KUT-er Danny Guerra report on why they don’t have water, broken promises to them about supplying it, and how the community is now banding together to secure it.
Guerra writes:
“When families moved into the Las Lomitas subdivision back in 2002, they had no idea theyâd live without running water for 10 years.
âIâve seen houses get built two miles down the road, they have everything,â said Las Lomitas resident Victor Soto. âHere we are, weâve been here a lot longer than that and we still canât water. I donât know, I didnât think it would be such a big deal, but it is.â
Las Lomitas started out as 150 acres of unincorporated land just north of Creedmoor. The land developer, Hank Peavler, split the land into 10-acre parcels and put them up for sale. But the law didnât require him to run water lines into the neighborhood.”
And Uhler says that there’s hope that water could be coming to Las Lomitas soon. Continue Reading
While some Texas towns ran dry during the drought, or came close to doing so, one community has been living without water regardless of how much rain falls in the state. In a rural subdivision less than ten miles outside of Austin, some thirty families live without running water. Most of them are low-income and don’t speak English. Andy Uhler of KUT reports the first of three stories in a series on the community of Las Lomitas. (You can also watch a video story above by KUT’s Jorge Sanhueza-Lyon.)
More from his story:
“Driving up the dirt road to Norma Escalanteâs trailer home, you pass a string of double-wides in varying states of disrepair. Her yard is dotted with odds and ends: an old tube TV, a rusted-over kitchen range perched beside the front door, and the skeleton of a burned-down trailer thatâs been converted into a chicken coop.
Inside the home, a couple of sofas with red slipcovers flank a big-screen TV. The ceiling is cracked and stained from water leaks. Norma, her husband and their 9-year old son have lived here for five years.
âI like living out here, I do,â Norma said. âBut not having water here, in the United States, in the city â itâs like ridiculous.â”
You can read the full story at KUT.
Photo courtesy of the University of Texas at Austin
Dr. Danny Reible will chair the 2012 Texas Water Summit.
Water, water everywhere. Let’s keep some drops to drink. But how? That’s why scientists, politicians, and water utility leaders are meeting up today for the 2012 Texas Water Summit from the University of Texas at Austin’s Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science. It will feature prominent statewide leaders on water issues like state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon, San Antonio Water System’s CEO Robert Puente and Robert Mace of the Texas Water Development Board.
To get a preview of the summit, StateImpact Texas’ Terrence Henry talked to its director, Danny Reible. He works at the University of Texas’s Center for Research in Water Resources. He is also the program chair for the summit. The interview was edited for clarity and content.
Q: Tell us about what people can expect from this conference.
A: The Texas Water Summit is an effort to explore the consequence of our drought. What is our availability of water? What are our needs for water? And ultimately how can we match the gap between the two now and in the future?
Q: What are some of the issues youâll be looking at? Continue Reading
Next time you buy a Texas tomato, check where it was grown. The answer might surprise you. That’s because ninety percent of the stateâs tomatoes come from a few greenhouses in the arid deserts of Far West Texas. (You can see a detailed breakdown of how the process works in the slideshow above.)
The latest addition to that group is a massive glass facility in Monahans, outside of Odessa. It officially opened for business this week.
âWell, when you look at this, this is like a giant, 15-acre, indoor garden,” says Doug Kling, Senior Vice President for Village Farms, which owns and operates the greenhouse. âPollinated [by] bees, and grown naturally. Where the sunlight comes in and you can smell the calyx. Itâs kind of exciting. Thereâs a peacefulness to it.âÂ
So how exactly do you grow tomatoes in the desert? Continue Reading
You’re going to need something better than wayfarers this weekend. The first annular solar eclipse of the 21st century for the continental U.S. is coming to Texas Sunday. You can see photos of some notable eclipses in the slideshow above.
The eclipse will start in Eastern Asia and cross east over the Pacific, ending in Central Texas. Here’s an interactive map of where the eclipse will pass, with peak viewing times. NASA says the eclipse will begin at 7:35 pm in Texas and peak at sundown. The best views will be from West Texas, particularly Amarillo, Lubbock and Midland-Odessa, where the eclipse will peak right around 8:30 pm. For those of you in the big cities of Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston and San Antonio, you won’t get to see the full peak phase of the eclipse because the sun will have set by then. But you’ll still be able to see some of it.
An annular eclipse is close to a total eclipse, but not quite. With an annular solar eclipse, the moon directly passes between the earth and the sun, casting a shadow on the earthâs surface. For a viewer on earth, the light from the sun is almost fully blocked creating a âring of fireâ around the moon.
NASA cautions viewers to not look directly at the sun and to not rely on standard sunglasses. Looking directly at the eclipse can cause permanent eye damage. “The ring of sunlight during annularity is blindingly bright,” Fred Ezpenack, an eclipse expert at NASA, warns on their website. Continue Reading
Photo By Getty Images
The Pennzenergy Company Oil Exploration Drilling Rig In The Gulf Of Mexico.
If you were hoping to get in on some of the action in offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, time is running out. On Thursday the Department of the Interiorâs Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) gave final notice of an upcoming sale of nearly 38 million acres of offshore leases.
Those leases run an area from three to 230 miles off the coast, the BOEM 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 takes place June 20th at the Mercedez-Benz Superdome. But bids must be submitted by mail no later than June 19th. The Department says that the minimum bid for deepwater leases is $100 per acre.
The sale had been put on hold following the 2010 BP Oil spill disaster at the Deepwater Horizon rig. So what’s being done to prevent that from happening again? Continue Reading
Photo by Lizze Chen for KUT News.
Wind turbines provide a sustainable source of energy in that they don't emit carbon dioxide or require water.
Texas has lots of ambition. Some Texans strive to open the world’s largest convenience store. But of more interest to us is another goal: the state wants to have10,000 megawatts of the power in its portfolio come from renewable energy by 2025. And according a new report by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the state continues to well exceed that.
While the state first achieved the goal, known as the renewable portfolio standard, in 2009, green energy in the grid continues to grow. Thirteen percent more power on the state’s grid came from renewables in 2011 than it did in 2010. In all, renewables provided enough power for about 31,000 Texas homes last year. (The state grid supplies about 85 percent of the juice in Texas.)
The big winners? Solar and biomass. Solar energy production jumped up 153 percent from 2010 to 2011, while biomass went up 40 percent. In the middle? Wind, which went up fifteen percent. But it still accounts for the majority of renewable energy generation in Texas, which has the most wind energy in the nation (and is the fifth-highest producer of wind energy in the world). Wind provided 30.8 million of the 31.7 million megawatt hours of renewable energy in Texas last year. Fossil fuels still produced about 80 percent of energy in Texas last year.
The big loser? Hydro-electric generation, which went down a whopping 56 percent in 2011. ERCOT says that “due to the ongoing drought in most of the state, generation of hydroelectric power decreased by more than half.”
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