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 Rio Grande River in Eagle Pass at sunset, looking west toward the International Bridge to Piedras Negras, Mexico.
Our friends at the Texas Tribunereport today that the Kickapoo Traditional Tribe of Texas has dropped its opposition to a coal mining project along the Texas-Mexico border.
While some people in Maverick County welcome the jobs that could bring, many, including city and county governments, are vehemently opposed to it. Several locals have formed the Maverick County Environmental and Public Health Association to fight the mine.
“We’re sending coal over there that the United States will not use because it’s so low quality, and then we’re sending it to Mexico so they can burn it over there, and it pollutes us over there and it pollutes us over here when it goes through town every day,” Association member Martha Baxter told StateImpact Texas earlier this year.
Piles of petroleum coke sit uncovered on the ship canal in Corpus Christi.
On the northern end of the Corpus Christi ship canal, in the shadow of six major oil refineries, sit several large black mounds. They’re piles of petroleum coke, the carbon solids left over from the process of refining. Across the canal there are several hundred homes where locals live, known as Refinery Row. And until this week, the Las Brisas Energy Center was close to building a power plant that would burn that coke for energy.
In a letter Monday, Judge Stephen Yelenosky of the 345th Judicial District Civil Court said he intends to reverse the potential plant’s air permit. The Las Brisas power plant was given the permit in January 2011 by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ). But in his announcement, 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.
“The letter basically says that he found a number of legal errors in the TCEQ’s decision to grant the permit,” says attorney Erin Fonken with the Environmental Integrity Project, which was one of the parties that brought the case to court. “These aren’t just little things where they didn’t check a box. There are substantial analyses that [the TCEQ] failed to have the applicant do at all. These are some pretty serious errors.”
Without the air permit, which the company called “an important project milestone” when it was issued, things get set back significantly. Continue Reading →
Photographer and author Thomas Bachand put the Keystone Mapping Project together. While he only has data for four states, he’s still hoping to map out the rest. In an email to StateImpact Texas he wrote that he started the project because “neither TransCanada Corporation nor the U.S. Department of State (DOS) have been forthcoming with this project’s GIS information. This has made it impossible to evaluate the potential environmental impacts of the Keystone XL pipeline,” he wrote. “While it’s a good start, the scarcity of data underscores the lack of transparency and inadequacy of the Keystone XL review process.”
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 Texas Forest Service plans to take a long look at Texas’ trees to see how much damage the ongoing drought has done.
Last December, the forest service released a preliminary estimate of between 100 and 500 million trees killed by the drought. A later estimate of tree losses in urban areas of Texas have been pegged at more than five million. Both of those surveys relied on satellite imagery of trees in Texas.
Workers prepare to remove a sailboat washed up onto the edge of the highway into Galveston by Hurricane Ike September 21, 2008 in Galveston, Texas.
Summer is almost here, and that means hurricanes are just around the corner, too. To help prepare for evacuations, a new digital billboard system went into action today in three counties in and around Houston at the start of Texas’Â Hurricane Preparedness Week.
The billboards will usually carry ads (they were paid for by Clear Channel Communications), but in times of emergency and evacuation the billboards will carry messages specific to each county.
“The message in Galveston County may be a little bit different from the message in Harris County or Fort Bend County,” Lee Vela, Vice President of Public Affairs for Clear Channel Outdoor said at an unveiling today. “So the emergency management coordinators who work at the county level in the emergency management offices will determine what messages go where.”
Right now there are 11 billboards up and running in the Houston area that are able to display messages. In the next several weeks, four more will go up. The ads will change every eight seconds, but during emergencies, counties can “freeze” alert messages on the billboards.
And there are more digital resources for disaster preparedness. The Texas AgriLife Extension Service has posted many of its resources on disaster preparedness as free e-books online. They can be downloaded to your phone, tablet or computer. There are pamphlets on protecting range land from wildfires, disinfecting water after a disaster, and how to treat and care for livestock after a hurricane, among others. You can find all of them here.
Laura Rice of KUT News contributed to this article.
Photo courtesy of Roland Sledge for Railroad Commissioner
Candidate Roland Sledge says he's "gaining momentum" from an online ad that went viral.
The Railroad Commission of Texas, which, despite its name, actually oversees oil and gas drilling in the state, has two seats up for election this fall. One of them will likely be re-taken by its current inhabitant (and chairman of the commission), incumbent Barry Smitherman.
But the other seat is wide open after Elizabeth Ames Jones resigned from the commission earlier this year to run for state Senate. (In the interim, Governor Perry’s appointee Buddy Garcia is occupying the seat until the election.) There’s a close race for it in the Republican Primary between Rep. Warren Chisum, R-Pampa and Austin attorney Christi Craddick, daughter of state Rep. Tom Craddick. (There are several others running for the seat but without much traction, with one exception, which you can read about below.)
Both seats will be determined in the General Election this fall when the Republican and Democratic primary winners face off (the open seat has only one Democratic candidate running unopposed in the primary; Smitherman’s seat has no Democratic challenger). With that out of the way, let’s take a look at some of the video ads the candidates have put forward.
As much as three inches of rain have fallen on the state in the last 24 hours
Blue skies over a lake outside of Houston, Texas
The National Weather Service is predicting more rain today
Water trickles down from Clear Lake in Houston
A fan waits after Game Two of the American League Championship Series at Rangers Ballpark in Arlington was postponed due to inclement weather on October 9, 2011 in Arlington, Texas.
Cattle stand in high water on a flooded farm after Hurricane Ike hit September 15, 2008 in Winnie, Texas. Ike caused extensive damage along the Texas Gold Coast, leaving millions without power.
A steer is reflected in water as it sits on the high ground of Rt 10 because pastures are filled with brackish flood waters from the storm surge of Hurricane Ike September 17, 2008 in Jefferson County Texas, Texas. Hundreds of cattle have died and more are expected die after drinking the brackish water. Hurricane Ike caused wide spread damage and power outages on the Texas coast.
Cattle stand in high water on a flooded farm after Hurricane Ike hit September 15, 2008 in Winnie, Texas. Ike caused extensive damage along the Texas Gold Coast, leaving millions without power.
A young boy cools off in the Volcano Lake slide, July 20, 2000, at the Wet ”N” Wild Waterworld in Anthony, Texas. A heat wave that stretches from Arizona to the southeast coast, is being blamed for at least 12 deaths in Texas and another six in Alabama and Louisiana. Health officials in some states say they won”t know how many people have died from sweltering temperatures until autopsies are complete. High humidity is making heat in the Southeast even deadlier than the dry heat of the Southwest.
It’s raining (and in some cases, flooding) across Texas. A popular question this morning will be: Is the Drought Over? And the answer to that largely depends on where you are. If you’re in East Texas, the answer is a qualified yes. (Many reservoirs still haven’t recovered.) In West Texas? There’s still a ways to go.
But regardless of whether or not the drought is technically abating, the issues behind it are here to stay. Texas is growing rapidly, and will not have enough water to meet its needs unless changes are made. (For an invigorating discussion of those issues, check out this Twitter chat from earlier in the week.)
For now, it’s nice to take a breath and appreciate the wet winter behind us and the hopefully-wet Spring/Summer ahead. Above is a slideshow of scenes of water in Texas to feast your eyes on in the meantime.
The extreme drought lowered levels in Lake Travis, revealing formations not seen above water in some time.
A reader asked us this question today: as rain is falling and more is in the forecast, just how much would it take to get the Highland Lakes full again? Those lakes, Buchanan and Travis, are vital source of water for Central Texas, and are currently less than half full (or more than half empty, depending on your outlook).
The lakes neared historic lows during the drought last year, as massive amounts of water were sent to rice farmers downstream; as it got hotter and drier, more water evaporated out of the lakes than the City of Austin used in the entire year. So what would it take to get them back up?
“In order to fill Lake Travis, it’s going to take a really significant storm system, or series of storms,” Bob Rose, meteorologist for the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA), tells StateImpact Texas. “Because, you gotta remember, Lake Travis is 41 feet below full right now. So you’d have to generate a lot of water across the Hill Country to make this happen.” Lake Buchanan would be an easier fix, as that’s only 17 feet below average.
Rose says a storm system somewhere between fifteen to eighteen inches could completely fill the lake. But there’s no “magic number,” he says, because it depends on where exactly the heavy rain would fall.
“An individual rain storm like that would likely cause some catastrophic flooding,” Rose says. “Spread out over two or three storms would be much better.”
But a massive deluge like that wouldn’t be unprecedented. Continue Reading →
Is it legal to kill Bigfoot in Texas? Parks and Wildlife has given an official, unequivocal answer.
We’ve been talking a lot about invasive species in Texas as of late, paying special attention to the issue of feral hogs, which are growing in number and cause widespread damage (but taste delicious). Texas has responded by making it very, very easy to kill feral hogs. You can hunt them with a handgun. You can hunt them whenever, regardless of the season. And you can even hunt them from the skies (an undertaking known as “pork chopping”), if that’s your thing.
But what about that most legendary of invasive species, Bigfoot?
Yes, someone actually asked Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, which regulates hunting in the state, whether or not it would be legal to capture and kill Bigfoot.
As the state grows and it seems to rain less and less, where are our water supplies going to come from? The three tackled the issues of desalination, water used in fracking and wastewater reuse during the half-hour chat. Plenty of other tweeters joined in, and for a while there #texaswater was trending in Austin.
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