Tracking the players in the ever-growing energy and environmental world.
To show where the Keystone XL pipeline will go — how many rivers, wetlands and streams it will cross, for instance — one photographer started the Keystone Mapping Project.
In what will be welcome news to environmental groups, on Tuesday the Texas grid gave the green light to Luminant to idle two units at their Monticello coal power plant and lignite mine in Northeast Texas for the winter. Earlier this fall, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which runs the grid, announced they would review […]
This week, the Keystone pipeline had to shut down for days because of possible safety issues on a portion of the line. One academic says that’s just the beginning of problems with tar sands pipelines.
Another earthquake has struck in an area that up until a few years ago had been seismically silent.
Two reporters for The New York Times were detained Wednesday while covering protesters at the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline in Wood County in East Texas. The two reporters, Dan Frosch and Brandon Thibodeaux, who identified themselves as members of the media, were handcuffed by a pipeline company security guard and a local police officer. After […]
Abandoned wells in Pennsylvania are putting landowners at risk for drilling-induced explosions and water contamination, according to a new investigative series by our fellow StateImpact reporters in Pennsylvania. After a methane geyser erupted in the Pennsylvania countryside last year, StateImpact Pennsylvania is now looking into the dangers of abandoned, aka âorphaned,â wells in their Perilous […]
UPDATE: The latest on this story can be found here. The massive (and controversial) Keystone XL pipeline, which will take heavy crude harvested from oil sand pits in Canada to refineries on the Gulf Coast, is currently under construction. And it’s also under protest. For weeks, protesters have chained themselves to tractors and fences in […]
The University of Texas at Austin is wrapping up the final stages of a new study that looks at how much methane is released during the drilling process known as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” Understanding how much methane is released is important to decreasing emissions overall, as methane is a known âgreenhouse gasâ that contributes to […]
As Texas moves away from coal and towards natural gas for its power plants, it stands to save billions of gallons of water in the process, according to a new study by the University of Texas at Austin’s Webber Energy Group. And in planning for the future, switching to gas will save even more. You can […]
A radioactive rod belonging to Halliburton has finally been found. The, rod, which had been missing since September 11, is used for hydraulic fracturing, aka fracking, to find the best areas of rock to break up and drill for oil and gas. As we reported a few weeks ago, the rod contained americium-241/beryllium, or Am-241, classified as […]
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