In Rosenberg, even the manhole covers have a train insignia on them. Railroads are the town’s heritage.
In this city 20 miles west of Houston and at the edge of South Texas, three rail lines converge. Add to the trains all the trucks the cross the town’s south side on the Interstate 69 corridor.
It all makes this small city a big hub of transportation. But should something go wrong, the firefighters who’d be first to arrive weren’t sure they’d be prepared.
“One of our major concerns was being able to suppress the vapors if there was a fire. And we identified that as a high risk,” said Darrell Himly, Rosenberg’s assistant fire chief.
It’s a risk the county didn’t want to take. Not only is rail being used more to haul crude oil from the booming oil fields of South Texas, there’s also more petrochemical shipments passing through as refineries expand along the Gulf Coast, giving Rosenberg officials more reason than ever to wonder “what if”. Continue Reading →
Well in Rusk County in one of the oldest oil fields in Texas
But Are They Being Penalized Enough?
The state’s regulator for oil & gas drilling, the Railroad Commission of Texas, said it’s charged over $2.1 million in penalties called “severance fees” to drilling violators so far this fiscal year that ends August 31. That’s almost double the amount in 2010.
“The severance fee charges are up, because in May 2012 the commission instituted a 150 percent surcharge on most fees paid to the commission, including severances,” wrote the commission’s spokesperson, Ramona Nye, in an email to StateImpact Texas.
The fees result when the Railroad Commission uses one of its harsher enforcement methods: an order to shutdown production because a well operator has failed to correct violations. The Railroad Commission says the majority of violations are corrected before that happens.
But when operators correct problems only after the severance order has been issued, they then have to pay the fee before they can legally resume production after bringing wells into compliance with state laws. Continue Reading →
When it comes to settling disputes over who owns the oil & gas in Texas, the state’s law struck a federal judge as anything but fair. After reviewing an opinion by the Texas Supreme Court, he said it was more like theft.
“The Garza opinion gives oil and gas operators a blank check to steal from the small landowner,” wrote John Preston Bailey, a United States District judge in Wheeling, West Virginia.
Bailey had been asked to throw out a case involving a dispute between a landowner in West Virgina and a company drilling a horizontal well for natural gas. The company’s lawyers cited the Texas case, Coastal Oil & Gas v. Garza Energy Trust. Continue Reading →
Turn one, with its steep hill, was a big challenge for the racers
The shell of a solar racing car is lifted up after a car comes into the pit for repairs.
The race isn’t about speed, it’s about endurance. Whichever team does the most laps in 3 days, wins.
Taking a look inside the car
If the teams race too fast, the batteries will drain too quickly
A solar car approaches the pit
The battery, up close
It’s a sweltering Texas summer day in late June, and here at the Circuit of the Americas Formula 1 race track in Austin, the stands are empty. Just last fall, they were filled with fans witnessing the deafening roar of cars going upward of 200 miles an hour.
But if you were to listen closely this summer day, you’d hear a barely audible zooming on the track. Peek down from the stands, and you’d see little pods zipping along the track at a brisk 45 miles an hour. They’re solar-powered cars, part of the annual Formula Sun Grand Prix competition, where several teams of college engineering students race against each other, and the constant drain of batteries.
Unal Okyay at the University of Houston analyzes satellite images of Utah indicating oil & gas seeps
It’s part of the popular lore of how to get rich by finding oil: all you have to do is look for it bubbling to the surface. That’s actually how some of the biggest oil fields were discovered many years ago.
Now, scientists are again trying to find oil and gas deposits by looking for them at the surface, albeit with sophisticated satellite and digital technology.
Colorado now has what the drilling industry there calls “the most rigorous statewide mandatory groundwater sampling and monitoring rules in the United States.” Wyoming is considering similar regulations to make oil and gas well drillers test the groundwater on nearby property before they begin to drill.
Texas has over 800 rigs at work, far more than any other state, but has no such requirements for what’s called baseline water testing.
“I think it is a good idea to do baseline studies instead of figuring out ways to blame something or someone for something they might do. It might be better to figure what we have in our own backyard already,” said Don Van Nieuwenhuise, a former oil company geologist and now Director of Petroleum Geosience at the University of Houston.
Efforts to overhaul land rights failed in this years regular legislative session.
This is part two of a three-part series devoted to looking at efforts to overhaul eminent domain in Texas and what may come next for landowners, pipeline companies, and the oil and gas industry. Read Part One here.
At the outset of this year’s regular legislative session, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle filed a handful of bills to change how pipeline companies can take land in Texas. While the bills tackled the issue differently, they had one thing in common: they sought to move some of the debate over a pipeline’s use of condemnation from county courthouses to state agencies. In the end it was that commonality that became a sticking point in the debate over Texas land rights.
Along the way, some very big names in politics and industry got involved.
Right now, a company that wants to lay a pipeline in Texas can check a box on a form declaring itself a “common carrier.” The idea is that it will provide its services for hire to transport oil and gas. It’s that role  – which some say makes it similar to a utility – that gives it the right to take land.
Jake White, a Jefferson Country farmer, looks at a section of the Crosstex NGL pipeline before it is buried under his field.
This is part one of a three-part series devoted to looking at efforts to overhaul eminent domain in Texas and what may come next for landowners, pipeline companies, and the oil and gas industry. Read Part Two here.
At Margaret O’Keefe’s farm, outside of Beaumont in East Texas, they grow high quality Bermuda grass. The fields are flat, vibrant light green and dotted with crawfish burrows. They’re surrounded by woods of a darker, richer green.
The land has deep significance to the family. O’Keefe inherited it from her mother who divided it among her eight children.
“She used to call it ‘Enchanted Valley,'” O’Keefe reminisced on a muggy summer afternoon while driving through her fields. “Sometimes it rains here and it won’t rain anywhere else. And sometimes it rains outside of here and rain never touches here.”
Her ‘Enchanted Valley’ also lies in the path of the Crosstex NGL Pipeline. That’s a 130-mile, multimillion-dollar project to funnel natural gas liquids from Texas to processing plants in Louisiana.
All across the state, a rush is on to build up infrastructure to transport the vast reserves of oil and gas unleashed by hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” Pipelines are the preferred method. But, as is the case at the O’Keefe’s farm, the plans of the pipeline companies often clash with the desires of landowners. Continue Reading →
Coal on its way to Luminant's Big Brown power plant in Freestone County
Last fall, a newspaper article caught the eye of staff members at the Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates coal mining.
“Analysts: TXU-Luminant bankruptcy possible next year,” read a headline in the Dallas Morning News.
That caused concern at the Railroad Commission because a related company, Luminant Mining, is on the hook to cover around $1 billion to restore Texas land damaged by strip mining for coal.
Luminant — operator of eight of the 20 coal mines in Texas — maintains it can cover the cost of reclamation despite any possible reorganization under Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code.
The newspaper article would eventually be mentioned in an official order from the Railroad Commission that, in part, called for tighter monitoring of Luminant’s financial status.
As the Railroad Commission’s spokesperson Ramona Nye explained in an email to StateImpact, Luminant Mining is “now required to submit quarterly unaudited statements to the Commission and certify that they continue to meet the financial requirements of the Texas Coal Mining Regulations.”
The Galveston Seawall was built to protect a portion of the Island after the massive hurricane of 1900
Petrochemical companies are spending billions of dollars to expand facilities along the Texas Gulf Coast. Which means when the next hurricane hits, there will be just that much more expensive infrastructure that could be damaged by the massive amount of seawater — or “storm surge” — pushed inland by the hurricane.
“There’s more development, more industrial development, just more things that need to be protected,” said Helen Young, Deputy Commissioner of Coastal Resources at the Texas General Land Office.
After Hurricane Ike destroyed 8,000 homes and apartment units in Southeast Texas and did $10 billion in overall damage in Harris County alone, researchers said it would be cheaper in the long run to spend money now to build barriers to reduce storm surge flooding from future hurricanes. Continue Reading →
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