After two years of nail-biting and speculation by land owners, conservationists, policy experts and a small army of lawyers, the ruling came down Friday afternoon. Andrew Sansom, director of the River Systems Institute, was attending a water law conference in San Antonio at the time. “It was like a bomb went off in the middle of the conference,” he says. All those carefully-prepared presentations suddenly seemed pretty out-of-date.
Exactly how it will change the game is what everyone is trying to figure out. The case clearly established two things. First, that landowners legally own the groundwater underneath their land, and second, that landowners may be owed compensation if state or local regulations go too far in limiting the amount of groundwater landowners can pull.
Photo courtesy hsld at http://www.flickr.com/photos/26555823@N08/
Texas power generation struggles to keep up with growing demand.
As Texans start packing away their winter clothes and looking ahead to months of heat, here are a couple of sobering facts: Texas has a booming population, and a strained electrical grid.
After last summer’s record breaking heat, the threat of rolling blackouts has become almost commonplace in the minds of many. The easy solution is building more power plants, but that’s not happening.
People point to all sorts of reasons for the dearth of new electrical projects coming online. Some blame EPA regulations; others say advances in renewable energy are coming too quickly to justify the investment. But the main cause is the low cost of natural gas. The same thing thatâs driving down electric bills appears to be driving away investment in power plants.
“It affects the incentive to build new generation,â Kent Saathoff, Vice President of system operations with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas [ERCOT], told StateImpact Texas. Continue Reading →
Prices creep towards $4 a gallon at a Houston gas station
With oil surpassing $100 a barrel, drivers are feeling the pain at the pump and some wonder if it’s simply a case of supply and demand. Or maybe something else.
“It’s sad, but people are very greedy,” said Houston driver Jodie Minear as she put $60 of fuel into her Jeep SUV at a Chevron station along Highway 59.
Does she have suspicions as to how prices are set?
Carbon dioxide will be captured and piped to an oilfield
In past years, the W. A. Parish power plant outside Houston in Fort Bend County has ranked near the top of national lists for “Most Polluting Power Plants.” It has also been lauded for it’s efforts to reduce emissions.
Now, this power behemoth, the biggest power plant in Texas and second biggest fossil fuel-burning plant in the nation, is planning to build one of the country’s more innovative pollution control projects. It will use some of its pollution to pump oil out of the ground.
Plant owner NRG said it will begin construction next year of its “carbon capture” system. The system, made up of  pipes and flues and sprayers, will be installed on one of the plant’s four coal-burning power generation units (four other units burn natural gas).
“This will be the first commercial-scale carbon capture on a power plant in the United States,” said Jeff Baudier, CEO of Petra Nova, NRG’s wholly-owned carbon capture business.
Downton Abbey, the Masterpiece Theatre television show from across the pond, has captured the hearts and fashion sense of many Americans this year. People have fallen in love with the period piece for its drama, romance and history, but the show may also provide a glimpse into our energy future and provide lessons for how to best adapt to major innovations in energy and technology.
In case you’re one of the few people left on earth who haven’t fallen in love with the show, Downton Abbey tells the story of a rich family that lives in a castle (the “Abbey” of the title) during World War I. While dealing with the intricacies and politics of inheritance, servile romance and afternoon tea, the characters of the show also have to adapt to a time of rapid innovation.
Telephones, automobiles and electricity all make their way into the world of Downton Abbey during the show, and the at times feeble response of the characters to these new technologies is part of its charm. “First electricity, now telephones,” Violet the Dowager Countess of Grantham, the matriarch of the family says in the first season. “Sometimes I feel as if I were living in an HG Wells novel. But the young are all so calm about change, arenât they?â
But while Downton Abbey is an affectionate look at the past, the show may actually tell us something about the future of electricity and the best way to adapt to it. Continue Reading →
The Highland Lakes have come dangerously close to reaching historic lows during the drought.
Thousands of gallons of water are trucked in each day to keep the taps flowing in Spicewood Beach
Although Spicewood Beach sits on Lake Travis, falling lake levels have led the community to run dry.
Longtime resident L.J. Honeycutt says TK.
Receding waters have ravaged communities in the Highland Lakes.
A volunteer “security guard” goes on patrol in Spicewood Beach
Dr. Jack Sharp studies hydrology at UT’s Jackson School.
Will Silver Creek Village be the next town to run dry during the Texas drought?
Nelson Brock works for the community water system in Silver Creek Texas, He’s watched wells dry up as nearby lake Buchanan recedes.
Residents in Silver Creek Village worry their wells, which depend on Lake Buchanan, will soon run dry.
After a year of record-breaking heat and drought, it began to seem inevitable that a town in Texas would run dry. What might have come as a surprise is that the town would have a name like âSpicewood Beach.â
âWe didnât get any warning!â said Robert Salinas on a recent afternoon.
Itâs an example of the way the Texas drought is throwing into question the usefulness of old distinctions between surface water from Texas lakes and rivers, and groundwater from Texas wells.
If it happened at Spicewood Beach, could it happen to another Highland Lake well?
A case before the Texas Supreme Court could have big consequences for landowners and pipeline companies.
The Texas Supreme Court could decide by later this week if it will reconsider its opinion on the use of eminent domain by companies to take private land. At issue: companies that want to build pipelines to transport oil and gas as the need surges with increased drilling.
Those companies say the opinion the Court issued last August is now allowing the owners of private land to hold pipeline companies “hostage” and “extort” money from them.
In a petition filed by a pipeline company ETC NGL Transport, the company contends that “without the right of eminent domain, acquiring easements is a much more lengthy and expensive process—if it can be done at all.”
In a petition filed by the Texas Oil and Gas Association (TXOGA), the group predicts there will be “a devastating impact on an industry that serves as the economic engine for the State’s economy.”
As drilling for oil and gas has surged in Texas, so have injuries and deaths at drilling rigs and well sites. It has become a significant concern to Federal regulators and to the industry. But there are promising efforts to reduce accidents. One of those was hatched in South Texas.
The number of workers killed in Texas “mining”, as the Department of Labor classifies oil and gas drilling, has risen in the past decade. Deaths rose from 35 in 2003 to a high of 49 in 2007 and totaled 45 in 2010.
In South Texas, where drilling has surged in the Eagle Ford shale with its rich deposits of gas and oil,  seven workers died on-the-job last year alone, up from three in 2010 according to Michael Rivera, director of the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA’s) office in Corpus Christi. Continue Reading →
Today, StateImpact Texas spoke with Larry Ogden of Hamilton Pool H20, one of two haulers that bought water from the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA) in Spicewood Beach. The community doesn’t actually own their own water — they gave it over to the LCRA over a decade ago. The LCRA now owns and manages the wells, which began to fail Monday.
The LCRA says most of the water sold from the system wasn’t taken out by Ogden’s company. It was likely taken out by the other contractor, Hills of Texas Bulk Water, which hauled out 1.3 million gallons of water from Spicewood Beach last year. Hank Cantu, who owns the company, has not returned our calls.
Ogden agrees that his water hauling operation probably took out much less. “I would guess it was probably in the neighborhood of 60-80,000 gallons of water [last year]. Weâre not one of the big haulers in the area.” Ogden says his 2,000-gallon trucks would pull into Spicewood Beach, hook up to a fire hydrant, fill up, and then haul it off to their customers.
âGenerally, itâs for primary source of water for a home. Showers, toilets, maybe some drinking water if they have the proper setup.” Ogden says almost all of the water went to private customers within ten miles. And the LCRA didn’t charge him a lot for it.
“Waterâs cheap,” Ogden says. And he has a point. For the roughly 1.4 million gallons of water trucked out of Spicewood Beach last year, Ogden says the LCRA was probably paid a little over $11,000. And that’s if the haulers paid on the high end. Continue Reading →
Eagle Pass and Piedras Negras are seperated by the Rio Grande and the international border. Neither barrier stops air pollution from traveling from one side to the other.
At first glance it might seem like good news. Carbon emissions in the US have dropped in recent years. Texas, the countryâs biggest CO2 polluter, has started turning away from coal as a source of electricity. But that doesnât mean the coal is staying in the ground. More and more often it’s shipped to other countries with weak records of environmental enforcement.
That trend is especially troubling for communities on the Texas-Mexico border.
In the rural parts of Maverick County all sorts of things still manage to move unhindered between Mexico and the US. Some welcome, some not. Residents like Rosa OâDonnell recall a day last year when the air was filled with smoke from agricultural fires.
“All the neighbors, we were out on the road driving, trying to drive back and forth down the road until the deputy stopped and said âdonât worry the fires are in Mexico,â O’Donell remembered recently. “Because we were worried.”
These days, smoke from burning fields seems like the least of their concerns. For around 20 years a site for a strip mine has sat essentially unused next door to OâDonnellâs property. The Mexican owners of the Dos Republicas mine are now ready to start digging. They want to ship coal to Mexico and burn it in power plants outside the City of Piedras Negras, right across the border. And while some people in Maverick County welcome the jobs that could bring, many, including city and county governments, are vehemently opposed to it. Continue Reading →
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