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 →
Rice farmer Billy Mann says that in the future, they'll have to grow more rice with less water.
New numbers put into perspective just how much water rice farmers in southeast Texas used out of the Highland Lakes for their water-intensive crop compared with city-dwellers in Austin last year. The Highland Lakes consist of two large reservoirs, Lakes Buchanan and Travis, and several pass-through lakes. Buchanan and Travis are still only half-full, despite a wetter-than-average winter.
A new report from the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA), which manages water in the Highland Lakes for the city of Austin and farmers downstream, shows that rice farmers used 367,985 acre-feet of water from the lakes in 2011. (An acre-foot is a measurement of water, i.e., how much water it would take to cover one acre with one foot of water, which is roughly equivalent to 325,800 gallons.) Another 65,266 acre-feet of water was released from the lakes downstream but not used, due to evaporation, seepage, or “conditions changed that eliminated the need for the water,” according to the LCRA, bringing their total to 433,251 acre-feet used from the Highland Lakes.
The city of Austin, on the other hand, used 106,622 acre-feet of water from the Highland Lakes, less than a third of the amount used by rice farmers. And the same pretty much holds true for previous years. (Another 192,404 acre-feet of water straight up evaporated from the lakes last year.)
Damaged beach front homes are seen on Galveston Island after the passing of Hurricane Ike September 13, 2008 in Galveston, Texas.
Planning to go to a Texas beach this summer? If you’re hoping to hit the public beach at Galveston’s West End, you might find it’s now private property, thanks to a new ruling from the Texas Supreme Court.
In a 5-3 opinion, the Court ruled that “the State claims that it is entitled to an easement on privately owned beachfront property without meeting the law’s requirements for establishing an easement.”
“It seems that the Open Beaches Act — at least for Galveston’s West End — is dead, thanks to the Supreme Court,” Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson said in a release. “This is truly a sad day.” He also said that the ruling “gives a pretty big club to anyone who wants to challenge the Texas Open Beaches Act anywhere else along the coast.”
“As we acknowledge continuous and natural physical changes in the West Galveston shoreline, we must also recognize ages-old private property rights that are protected by law,” the Court wrote in its decision, which you can read below. Continue Reading →
A new EPA rule puts future coal power plants at a crossroads.
The Environmental Protection Agency issued the first standard on greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act today for future power plants. The agency also says the rule “does not apply to plants currently operating or new permitted plants that begin construction over the next 12 months.” The bottom line: building a coal power plant is going to be a very unattractive option.
Under the new rule, which you can read in the embedded EPA fact sheet below, new fossil-fuel based power plants generating 25 megawatts or more of energy would be limited to emissions of 1,000 pounds of CO2 per megawatt-hour. Essentially, the rule favors natural gas power plants over coal. The EPA estimates that “95 percent of natural gas plants built since 2005 would meet the requirement.”
But for coal plants it’s another story. Drawing the line at 1,000 pounds of carbon emissions per megawatt-hour would eliminate most new coal power plants. According to the Washington Post, “coal plants emit an average of 1,768 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt.” Natural gas, on the other hand, “emits between 800 to 850 pounds.” Continue Reading →
Photo by Flickr user Stuck in Customs/Creative Commons
Pipeline companies are finding themselves with a new obstacle: defenders of private property rights.
Once again, the farmer fighting the Keystone XL pipeline has had her restraining order against the company behind the pipeline dissolved. You can read the ruling by the Sixth Court of Appeals in Texarkana, below.
The court says in the new decision that they had reinstated the restraining order “in an abundance of caution” and now that they’ve had time to review the appeal, they believe the it should be dissolved. Continue Reading →
How do you get eminent domain in Texas? Just check a box.
Texas is a state that prides itself on its independent spirit and rugged individualism, particularly the rights of landowners to use their land as they please. But it’s also a state that has a long history of drilling for oil and gas and a tradition of cooperation with the industry. Where the two traditions intersect, and at times collide, is when the oil and gas industry needs private land for their projects. That’s been the case in two instances recently, both involving pipelines and farmers.
One involves a rice farmer that didn’t want a carbon dioxide pipeline on his land, which went all the way to the Supreme Court of Texas. They sided with the landowner in that case. In the other, a farmer in northeast Texas is fighting an eminent domain claim by the company behind the Keystone XL pipeline. That pipeline would go through her farm, and today the head of the company behind it, TransCanada, announced that they intended to start construction as early as this spring on the section from Cushing, Oklahoma to Port Arthur, Texas.
In both cases, the companies claimed they had eminent domain to build their pipelines on the respective properties because they were “common carrier” pipelines, which would be used to transport oil and gas from other companies in addition to their own.
But who decides if the pipeline deserves that status? In essence, the companies do. Continue Reading →
Stacy Martin hopes community college course will lead to a better job
If you want to see where the best job prospects are, look who’s putting in the overtime. In Houston, the world’s energy capital where new finds in oil and gas are boosting the economy, it’s workers in manufacturing.
“Right now, the way we’re growing is we’re working people longer hours, the people who have the skills,” said Patrick Jankowski, an economist with the Greater Houston Partnership, a group that promotes the city’s businesses.
Photo by Flickr user pedrosimoes7/Creative Commons
The reinstated restraining order prevents the company behind the Keystone XL pipeline from entering a Texas farmer's land.
Just a week ago, a temporary restraining order taken out by a farmer in northeast Texas against the company building the Keystone XL pipeline was dissolved. But late on Friday this week, that restraining order was reinstated by an appellate court.
The landowner fighting the pipeline is Julia Trigg Crawford, who owns a farm in Lamar County, northeast of Dallas. As we reported in an earlier story, her family has been there since the forties, where they grow soybeans, corn and wheat. A few years back, TransCanada approached her family about running the Keystone XL pipeline through her farm. The controversial pipeline would take unconventional oil deposits from Canada to refineries on the Gulf Coast of Texas. “Well, we didn’t sign initially, and it’s kinda drug on and on,” she told StateImpact Texas. “Each year they sent another letter saying there’ll be more money to kinda sweeten the pot.”
After Crawford repeatedly refused to allow TransCanada onto her land, the company sought eminent domain last fall. Crawford is appealing that claim of eminent domain in a court hearing scheduled for late April.
The reinstated restraining order this week from the Court of Appeals, Sixth Appellate District in Texarkana says that TransCanada “is restrained from entering on the Crawford Family Farm Partnership land and from performing any and all on-site activities that disturb the surface or subsurface of the land.” TransCanada has five days to respond to the restraining order. Continue Reading →
Photo by Flickr user Stuck in Customs/Creative Commons
Pipeline companies are finding themselves with a new obstacle: defenders of private property rights.
Dave Fehling of StateImpact Texas contributed reporting to this article.
The Texas Supreme Court sure is busy as of late. Today they released an updated opinion in the Texas Rice Land Partners v. Denbury Green Pipeline-Texas case that could have big implications for the oil and gas industry and private landowners in Texas. The bottom line is this: the court reinforced their original ruling today and denied a request to hear the case again, and that’s unwelcome news for the pipeline industry in Texas.
The decision was originally made last fall. At issue was who decides whether or not a pipeline is a “common carrier,” i.e. one that can be used by other companies and is therefore considered a public project. If a pipeline company can justify that it’s a public project, that allows it to use eminent domain to construct and operate pipelines on private property, regardless of how the landowner affected may feel about it. (Read more on the case in our earlier story, Pipeline Companies Fight for Right to Take Property.)
In the Denbury decision, as it’s come to be known, the Texas Supreme Court sided with landowners, stating that “private property is constitutionally protected, and a private enterprise cannot acquire condemnation power merely by checking boxes on a one-page form.” That one-page form is what pipeline companies send to the Railroad Commission of Texas in order to get “common carrier” status, which is what they use to justify their use of eminent domain.
Today’s opinion strengthens the court’s siding with landowners. Continue Reading →
Just how did the company beat the restraining order?
TransCanada’s motion to dissolve it (embedded below) outlines the argument that won over the judge. Under Texas law, temporary restraining orders can’t be given unless the “adverse party” (in this case, TransCanada) is given notice. The exception is if “immediate and irreparable injury, loss, or damage will result to the applicant before notice can be served.” Crawford’s attorney argued that Caddo Indian artifacts on her land would be damaged, but TransCanada’s assurance that they wouldn’t appears to have won over the judge.
The company argues that since it had deposited twice the amount of the money it feels is fair market value for the land with the court, it was entitled to proceed with condemnation of Crawford’s property. In its motion, TransCanada estimates the amount it owes Crawford for the land and damages is $10,395.
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