A stock pond south of Dallas, TX, dries up due to drought.
The drought has meant different things for different people in Texas. For many, it meant a brown lawn and fewer trips to the car wash. For others, it meant the loss of a crop, the sale of a ranch, or the disappearance of a lake. A new report gives us the opportunity to look at some of the science behind the drought that affected every Texan, and what may lie ahead in the future.
At a meeting of the board of the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA) last week, Bob Rose, LCRA’s meteorologist, presented a report on the drought and his forecasts for the months ahead.
Texas had its driest year on record in 2011, he said, with an average of 14.88 inches of rain. It was also the driest the state has been in nearly a hundred years: the previous record was set in 1917 with 14.99 inches. It was also the second hottest year on record, with an average temperature of 67.2 degrees. The hottest year ever in Texas also came nearly a century ago, in 1921. Continue Reading →
The new ruling favors landowners over water authorities.
The Texas Supreme Court has reached a ruling in a case that will have widesweeping implications for the way groundwater is regulated across the state. The Edwards Aquifer Authority and the State of Texas, V Burrell Day and Joel McDaniel, centered on whether property owners could be compensated if a water authority limited the amount of groundwater they could pull from their land.
The decision found that Ranchers Burrell Day and Joel McDaniel could be compensated by groundwater regulations from the Edwards Aquifer Authority. This means that other landowners in Texas could seek compensation in similar cases. Under Texas law, groundwater has traditionally been considered the property of the owner of the land it sits on top of.
Rail is being laid down to bring oil in and out of Port Arthur, Texas.
Dave Fehling of StateImpact Texas and David Barer of KUT Austin contributed reporting to this article.
It’s not often you find the Tea Party and environmentalists on the same side of an issue. But both are busy this week protesting the Keystone XL pipeline, a 1,700 mile-long project that would bring oil harvested from sand pits in Canada to refineries on the Gulf Coast of Texas.
The Tea Partiers, on the other hand, held a series of press conferences across the state, alleging that the company behind the pipeline is using eminent domain to force landowners to allow the line to be built on their property. The activists have joined forces with other political groups and several landowners who have refused to give the company building the pipeline, TransCanada, permission to go through their land.
Julia Trigg Crawford is one of those landowners. Her family has had a farm in Lamar County, northeast of Dallas, 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. “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.”
Water demand in Texas is expected to rise 22 percent by 2060, according to the state’s Water Development Board. They say if we have another drought like the one of record from the 1950s, losses could total $116 billion by then.
One part of the report worth noting doesn’t come until the end, and that’s what can Texas learn from other places that have had to deal with growing populations, less water, and persistent drought. Letâs take a look.
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Photo by Getty Images
The city of half a million discovered twenty years ago that its “aquifer was being drawn down twice as fast as nature could replenish it,” the report says. After enacting “aggressive” conservation and education campaigns, the city’s per capita usage fell by almost 38 percent. How’d they do it?
Pass on Grass. The city passed strict requirements on landscaping for new devlopments, “such as prohibiting the use of high-water-use grasses on more than 20 percent of a landscaped area.” Continue Reading →
Railroad Comissioner David J. Porter believes the report is flawed, but says more research should be done.
Looks like those hoping the conflict between Texas and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would cool down after Rick Perry’s departure from the presidential race are in for some disappointment. On Tuesday, the Railroad Commission of Texas, which regulates drilling in the state, fired a shot across the bow of the EPA. The message? Don’t touch our fracking.
In a letter to the EPA, all three members of the Railroad Commission call to re-classify a December draft report that found a link between fracking and water contamination in Wyoming. Instead of labeling it a “draft” report, they want the EPA to call it a “highly influential scientific assessment,” a request also made by several Republican senators in late January.
Why do they want the new language? The commission says that under White House guidelines, if an investigation or report is “controversial or precedent-setting” then it is first released as a “highly influential scientific study” before becoming a “draft” report.
If this seems like semantics, and you’re scratching your head as to why the Railroad Commission of Texas cares about an EPA report on wells in Wyoming, there’s a clear explanation. Continue Reading →
Lt. Governor David Dewhurst wants the Texas Senate to look at several issues before the next legislature.
On Monday afternoon, Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst released his interim charges to the Business & Commerce, Natural Resources and Government Organization Committees. What are interim charges? They’re issues that the respective senate committees look at leading up to the next legislative session, which is less than a year away. Some of these issues are being examined now so a bill will be ready to go once the legislature convenes. Essentially, the interim charges are a preview of what will be important for the next session, and as such, give us a sneak peak of what energy and environmental issues will be in the mix.
Dewhurst is currently running for the U.S. Senate, campaigning heavily against many policies of the Obama administration.
So let’s take a look.
Dewhurst directed the Natural Resources Committee to look at the potential effects of new and upcoming Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rules on:
“Electric reliability in Texas”
“Affordability of electricity in Texas”
“Competitiveness of energy intensive sectors of the Texas economy, and make recommendations to reduce the regulatory burden and maintain a business-friendly climate.”
That last one is likely to get some attention. Dewhurst listed the specific EPA regulations he wants the committee to look at, and they mirror almost exactly the EPA rules that the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation lambasted yesterday at a conference, calling it an “approaching regulatory avalanche.”
The Lieutenant Governor also directed the committee to look at several other issues. Here are just a few that caught our eye: Continue Reading →
The president said in a statement that his decision was ânot a judgmentâ on the merits of the Keystone XL pipeline, rather it was based on the âarbitrary nature of the deadline.â
But after making that statement the administration also sent a report to Congress detailing why they decided against the pipeline, and there are more reasons than just the deadline. The report is short, just five pages, and it’s actually readable (we’ve embedded it below), but here are a few quick takeaways:
Many estimates of the potential jobs created by the pipeline are way off. “Regarding employment,” the report says, “the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline would likely create several thousand temporary jobs associated with construction; however, the project would not have a significant impact on long-term employment in the United States.” It goes on to note that while some have projected hundreds of thousands of jobs as a result of the pipeline, “this inflated number appears to be a misinterpretation of one of the economic analyses prepared on the pipeline.” Continue Reading →
May 2010: Shrimp boat deploys oil boom around slick in Gulf of Mexico
The Federal government’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) held a public hearing last week in Houston on the environmental impact of its plan to sell more leases to drill in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Texas. But almost nobody showed up to testify.
Pump jack in Pierce Junction oilfield south of downtown Houston
The Texas Comptroller’s office is adding auditors to increase scrutiny of tax breaks claimed by drilling operations.
“We are currently re-deploying resources and hiring auditors so that five auditors will work on oil and gas audits,” said Comptroller spokesperson R.J. DeSilva in an email to StateImpact Texas.
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