Texas could be looking at spending possibly hundreds of millions of dollars for road repairs and improvements to cope with the surge in oil and gas drilling.
“We have a task force [that] in the next 90 days is going out and talking to all the partners involved in the activity to see what we can do,” Mark Cross, spokesperson for the Texas Department of Transporation (TxDOT) told StateImpact Texas.
Cross said the state has already made $40 million available for immediate paving of ripped up roads in the areas of heaviest drilling activity: the Barnett Shale in North Texas and the Eagle Ford Shale in South Texas. Continue Reading →
Technology that can reduce the amount of water a power plant needs to create energy and cool down has never been more important. Ashlynn Stillwell, a civil and architectural engineering PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin with the Webber Energy Group, sat down to speak with us recently about her research into water use by power plants and how it will affect Texas’ water supply.
Q: Can you give us a brief description of how thermoelectric power plants use water?
A: So, thermoelectric power plants use some sort of fuel to create steam and then that steam turns a turbine. Usually, the water that is used is very high-purity, so we don’t want to lose that water. We want to condense it and recycle it and reuse it. The way that we condense it is to use some method of cooling. So, that is either using a river or a lake for cooling directly, or using cooling towers.
Photo courtesy of the National Weather Service. This photo has been edited to only depict the continental U.S.
Seasonal drought forcast from the national weatehr service.
Today the National Weather Service offered a glimmer of hope to Texans bracing for another hot and dry summer.
In its three month seasonal drought outlook the service has moved much of Central Texas out of the area where the service is predicting “persistent drought.”
Instead that portion of Texas is now bathed in glorious green on the service’s map, indicating that the region may actually see drought improvement.
“I’ve never seen this on the maps in a long time,” said LCRA meteorologist Bob Rose.
A lone angler fishes Lake Buchanan, February 2012.
The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department announced today that the Dundee State Fish Hatchery in Wichita Falls, Texas, will be “suspended effective immediately” because there isn’t enough water to operate during the ongoing drought.
“Although many parts of the state recently received good rains, the area west of Wichita Falls around Lakes Kemp and Diversion did not,” Todd Engeling, director of hatchery operations for the department, said in a statement. As we reported in February, the hatchery is responsible for much of Texas’ striped bass supply. More from our earlier report:
“There are four hatcheries in the state run by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department and supplies up to five million striped bass fingerlings (or baby fish) per year. Unlike most other species of sport fish in Texas, striped bass do not naturally procreate in the state. Without the stocking program the populations will steadily decline and disappear in Texas.”
Texas Parks and Wildlife says they will adjust production at their other hatcheries to shift away from largemouth bass “to produce striped bass and hybrid striped bass fingerlings.”
Where do school buses go when they die? It might surprise you to learn that most American school buses don’t die at all; they’re often reborn as public transportation south of the border.
The story of one aging school bus that was sold off and driven to Guatamela to begin a new life as an ornate shuttle is the subject of a new film that premiered at the SXSW Film Festival this week, La Camioneta. Through this one bus, the film examines how one country’s trash becomes another’s treasure, the importance of mass transportation in a country with widespread poverty and how violence and gang warfare threaten the safety and viability of that transportation.
Arthur Berman is the head of Labryth Consulting, a Geological consulting firm.
People see a lot of different things when they look at the American natural gas industry. Some see potential environmental dangers. Others see it as a bridge to renewable energy. President Obama envisions more than 600 thousand new jobs from it. But when Arthur Berman looks at the natural gas industry, he sees an iceberg on the open sea.
“We gotta turn to miss that iceburg, but we sure better start turning ten or 15 miles away from it or else we’re gonna hit it,” Berman, a geologist who consults for energy companies, told StateImpact Texas.
So it’s no surprise that lately Berman’s developed a reputation as the “Debbie Downer” of the natural gas industry. For one thing, he doesn’t think the U.S. has as much of it as has been estimated (up to a hundred years). Berman estimates that reserves could only meet demand for the next 23 years.
For another, he believes that all the cheerleading for gas has left U.S. financial markets in danger. Here’s how: the rush to extract has brought down natural gas prices. That’s meant less profit for drillers and gas companies. But some of those companies continue to drill. Berman says you’ve got to leave the shale fields of South Texas, and pay a visit to Wall Street to figure it out.
Under Secretary of the Army, Dr. Joseph W. Westphal, toured UT Austin last week.
If you happened to see an entourage of uniformed military personnel touring the University of Texas at Austin earlier this month, it might have been a visit by Dr. Joseph Westphal, the Under Secretary of the U.S. Army.
Westphal was on campus touring research facilities and talking about military-academic research partnerships. With President Obama recently touting the Department of Defense’s progress in “clean energy” in his State of the Union address, it seemed like a good time to ask the Under Secretary some questions about what the Army’s doing when it comes to renewable research.
StateImpact Texas’ Mose Buchele got the chance to speak with him after the tour.
StateImpact Texas: What role do you think the Army could play in research into renewable energy?
Al Armendariz is the regional administrator for the EPA.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced today that it wants to add Willow Park, Texas (a small town east of Fort Worth), to its National Priorities List (NPL) of Superfund sites. Those sites are specially-designated areas of hazardous waste pollution that receive priority funding and cleanup assistance from the federal government.
What happened in Willow Park? Here’s the EPA release:
“In 2006, routine sampling of a well in the city of Willow Park’s water system showed concentrations of trichloroethene (TCE) to be above health-based safety levels. Subsequent tests showed that public water supply and five private wells all had elevated TCE levels. These water sources are all within a one-mile radius of the site, which extends for a half-mile along Russell Road. The city of Willow Park shut down the wells and installed a carbon filter to provide safe drinking water for affected residents. The source of the contamination has not been identified.”
“Today we’re taking an important step toward restoring contaminated property and protecting people’s health and our environment,” EPA Regional Administrator Al Armendariz said in the release. “Cleaning up hazardous waste in our communities and returning properties to environmental and economic vitality are EPA priorities.”
The EPA says they will have a public comment period on the decision for 60 days.
Standing outside her tidy house in Pasadena, Texas, Patricia Gonzales succinctly sums up her community’s dilemma: “No one is saying we don’t want the jobs. It’s just that we don’t want the pollution coming with it.”
Her home is just two miles from the Houston Ship Channel, which is lined with the biggest concentration of petrochemical plants and oil refineries in the nation.
Gonzales was talking about her latest concern: the Keystone XL pipeline. If completed, it will bring millions of barrels of Canadian crude to refineries in Houston and Port Arthur. But the crude, from the tar sands mined in Alberta, is a heavier, dirtier variety than “sweet crude” from places like West Texas.
“We’re already in the highest level of the polluted [places in] the United States and you bring in more. And you want us to accept that?” Gonzales posed to StateImpact Texas.
LCRA General Manager Becky Motal says the new plan will help protect LCRA customers during severe droughts
A new plan that would significantly change how water is managed in the Highland Lakes region of Central Texas was sent to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) for review and approval today. The plan was adopted by the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA) in late February. The TCEQ now has up to a year to look over the plan, but the actual approval may only take a few months.
The new plan would change how water is allocated from Lakes Buchanan and Travis, the two main reservoirs for water in Central Texas (including the city of Austin). Under the changes being proposed, less water would be diverted for agricultural use during dry periods (when certain requirements aren’t met for how much water is in the lakes at a given time), and more water reserved for municipal and commercial use.
It took 18 months for a group representing the various interests that depend on the lake — farmers, municipalities, industry and lake residents and businesses, to name a few — to agree on a plan to present to the LCRA. The board at the LCRA approved that plan on February 22, with ten on the board in favor and five against, with all of the against votes coming from LCRA board members that represent counties downstream of Austin and the Highland Lakes. Continue Reading →
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