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.
Millions of dollars from the oil and gas industry go into the campaign coffers of those elected to regulate the industry.
Most Candidates for Texas’ Oil and Gas Regulator Want Changes
Take a peek a little ways down your ballot in the primaries this year and you’ll see the race for a spot on the Railroad Commission, the state’s powerful oil and gas regulator. We’ve been working to get the candidates to “eat their vegetables” when it comes to the policy issues at stake, asking each to answer a questionnaire on issues ranging from manmade earthquakes to eminent domain.
Each day this week we’ll be posting their answers — well, at least from six of them. Out of the four Republican candidates in the race, only one — Becky Berger — responded to the questionnaire. (To the campaigns of Malachi Boyuls, Wayne Christian and Ryan Sitton — we’re still hoping to hear back from you.)
Today’s questions deal with ethical and campaign finance reforms for the commission. The three Railroad commissioners get most of their campaign funds from the very industry they regulate. One of the candidates this race, Republican Ryan Sitton, has even said that he plans to keep working at his oil and gas consulting firm if elected to the commission.
Should lines be drawn? Should commissioners refuse campaign contributions from companies with cases before the commission? If elected, will they serve their full six-year term before running for another office? Those questions and more were put to all of the candidates. They’re based on reforms that the Texas legislature failed to pass during the last session under pressure from current Railroad Commissioners.
Questioning the Candidates for Texas’ Oil and Gas Regulator
The Republican race for a seat opening up on the Railroad Commission of Texas has focused on issues that have little or nothing to do with the commission: abortion, gun rights, and even Obamacare. That’s because — and we’re writing this now for what seems like the hundreth time — the Railroad Commission is the state oil and gas regulator, and has nothing do with railroads.
We here at StateImpact Texas were curious what the Republican candidates had to say about the real policy issues facing the commission, as well as the candidates from other parties. So we put together a questionnaire that did just that, and every candidate save one, Republican Ryan Sitton, agreed to participate. (Despite requests to Sitton’s campaign and to a consulting firm he hired, we have not received any direct response.) The powerful commission is the only state regulatory body run by elected leaders; all other major state regulators are run by gubernatorial appointees.
But if you’re hoping to hear what most of the Republican candidates have to say about manmade earthquakes linked to drilling activity, the use of eminent domain for routing private oil and gas pipelines, or ethics reforms, you may be disappointed. While all of the Democratic, Libertarian and Green candidates responded to the questionnaire as promised, only one Republican candidate, Becky Berger, did so. The campaigns of Republicans Wayne Christian and Malachi Boyuls both agreed to answer the questionnaire, but despite being giving an extra week to do so (and follow-up emails and phone calls), they have not yet turned in their responses.
Each day this week we’ll be posting the responses we did receive from six of the nine candidates. Today’s issue? Where the candidates stand on changing the name of the commission. The commission got its start regulating railroads in the 19th century, but the railroad industry in Texas peaked in the 1930s, and the commission hasn’t had anything to with railroads since the eighties. The commission’s name was supposed to be changed as a package of reforms during the last legislative session, but under pressure from Railroad Commissioners, those reforms didn’t pass. Continue Reading →
The drought has affected Texans across the state. Haskell Simon, a rice farmer in Bay City, could go without water a third year in a row.
Update: State administrative law judges recommended today a higher trigger point for cutting off water from the Highland Lakes for rice farmers this year, saying “emergency conditions exist which present an imminent threat to the public health and safety.” If adopted, these recommendations would mean there is almost no chance of most rice farmers downstream on the Lower Colorado of getting water for irrigation. This would be the third year in a row of water cutoffs for the rice farmers. Under the proposed cutoff, unless the lakes are nearly 70 percent full, water will not be sent downstream for most farmers. The lakes are currently 38 percent full.
Original Story, Feb. 13: There’s less and less water in the Highland Lakes of Central Texas these days, and the fight over who gets what’s left has laid bare the ugly politics of drought. With each passing day, it seems the comity and compassion between groups competing for the water drops in step with the falling lake levels. Now those interests will need to wait longer before regulators make a decision on giving water to farmers this year.
The story comes from the Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Gilbert, who learned that Tillerson has joined his neighbors in Bartonville (a Dallas suburb) in a suit against a water tower that would be used in part for fracking and drilling operations. Tillerson (along with former U.S. House Majority Leader Dick Armey) is actually showing up in person at town hall meetings to protest the tower. “He and his neighbors had filed suit to block the tower, saying it is illegal and would create ‘a noise nuisance and traffic hazards,’ in part because it would provide water for use in hydraulic fracturing,” Gilbert reports.
More from the Wall Street Journal on Tillerson’s objections: Continue Reading →
“Texas’ air monitoring system is so flawed that the state knows almost nothing about the extent of the pollution in the Eagle Ford. Only five permanent air monitors are installed in the 20,000-square-mile region, and all are at the fringes of the shale play, far from the heavy drilling areas where emissions are highest.”
“Thousands of oil and gas facilities, including six of the nine production sites near the Buehrings’ house, are allowed to self-audit their emissions without reporting them to the state. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), which regulates most air emissions, doesn’t even know some of these facilities exist. An internal agency document acknowledges that the rule allowing this practice “[c]annot be proven to be protective.” Continue Reading →
Larry Burns is the Emergency Coordinator for the town of Timpson, in East Texas. “If the quakes get much over a 5.0 [on the Richter scale], then we suspect we’ll have some damage. It could be anything from broken lines, broken mains to a water tower on the ground.”
Cliff Frohlich of UT Austin has studied the quakes. “It’s like smoking and lung cancer,” Frohlich says. “Some people smoke and never get lung cancer. Some people get lung cancer and don’t smoke. And that’s sort of the situation with injection wells.”
The water tower in Timpson wasn’t build to withstand earthquakes. “After 4.0 [on the Richter scale], we get pretty nervous,” says Debra Smith, the mayor. “We have buildings in town that are over a hundred years old.”
One of the disposal wells outside of Timpson. Oil and gas drilling wastewater is sent into this well that goes nearly two miles underground.
Disposal wells like this one are the point where a small operation could turn out to be causing big tremors that can be felt miles away.
The Gator Services disposal well outside of Timpson in East Texas.
On a busy day, several tanker trucks will pull up and unload wastewater from fracking and drilling.
The North Texas towns of Reno and Azle have seen over thirty earthquakes since November, sometimes more than one a day. It’s been unsettling for residents like Barbara Brown.
“Damage to my home, sinkholes on my property. Nerves! And a lot of angst,” she said. “Because you just don’t know when they’re going to happen again.”
And it’s not the only town in the state that’s been hit with tremors. Texas has seen the number of recorded earthquakes increase tenfold since the drilling boom began several years ago. While studies have linked the quakes to oil and gas drilling activities, but state regulators and politicians say the science is far from settled.
So what does the science really say? Take a listen to the radio story:
“I’m not a dope smoker, okay?” he says with a point of his trademark unlit cigar. “Except with Willie [Nelson]. More as a Texas etiquette kind of thing.”
First, his argument for hemp. It is in the same family as marijuana but is its industrial form and doesn’t have the medicinal or recreational uses of marijuana. Friedman argues that if cotton farmers in Texas were allowed to grow hemp instead, the trade-offs would be attractive.
“Hemp requires half the water that cotton does, while producing two and a half times the fiber. All with zero pesticides needed,” he says. “Now if you were to pitch that as a pilot program to a cotton farmer, they’d take it.” Continue Reading →
ERCOT is asking Texans to conserve power until noon Friday.
Update:At some point Friday morning, the conservation alert was canceled. ERCOT says there have been localized outages, but they weren’t related to “overall grid conditions.”
Original story: The group that operates much of the Texas electric grid is calling on people to conserve energy. Electric use is getting close to setting a new winter record because of the cold weather, but that’s not the only reason grid operators are worried.
While summer is usually the time when supplies can be stretched thin in the state, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) has already declared two energy emergency alerts already this winter. In those cases the cause wasn’t just electric demand, it was because power plants went offline when the grid needed them most. Cold weather can cause mechanical failures that shut plants down, and that’s one thing grid operators worry might happen again. Continue Reading →
The likely culprit behind the quakes isn’t fracking, but rather a byproduct of it — hundreds of billions of gallons of wastewater from oil and gas drilling. The disposal of that wastewater deep underground has been known to cause faults to slip, triggering earthquakes in parts of Texas. There were under a hundred recorded earthquakes (measuring 2.0 or higher) in Texas during the three decades before the current drilling boom began in earnest in 2007, according to records from the United States Geological Survey (USGS). Since then, there’s been two hundred quakes recorded by the agency, along with hundreds more smaller ones.
The rate has increased from an average of three quakes a year in Texas before 2007 to nearly 30 a year since. “The increase in earthquakes is very clear, so it’s not an instrumental artifact,” says William L. Ellsworth, a seismologist with the USGS. “This we’re really quite confident of.” And the rapid increase in quakes isn’t unique to Texas: our neighbors to the north in Oklahoma have had an average of 40 quakes measuring 3.0 or higher a year since an uptick in drilling (and oil and gas wastewater disposal) in 2009. Before that, the state had one to three quakes a year of 3.0 or higher on average.
But to establish a link to drilling activity (and specific disposal wells) in each earthquake swarm, scientists need data. And they need a lot more of it when it comes to Texas. To look at how earthquakes are measured in the state and better understand the numbers, StateImpact Texas reached out to Ellsworth, who’s been studying the manmade quake phenomenon in Texas and other parts of the country. Continue Reading →
One big factor in that slowing consumption trend is something called demand response, programs that get participants to use less power when supplies on the grid are tight, like during the hot Texas afternoons when air conditioners across the state are running full-time. Some utilities and power companies give rebates for using less power during that time, or to shift power use to other times of the day.
These demand response programs are on the rise in Texas. In Austin, enough participants are expected this summer that the city is saving itself from using an entire power plant.
So we’ve put together a list of the available programs we could find in Texas for demand response: Continue Reading →
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