NOAA, the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, has revised the number of named storms to between 7 and 12, and that maybe 2 of those named storms could be major, with winds greater than 110 mph.
An average season can see up to 12 named storms.
Dennis Feltgen, a meteorologist with the National Hurricane Center in Miami, says overall atmospheric conditions just don’t favor a lot of storm development this year. It led NOAA to update its forecast.
“There’s some below average temperatures across the tropical Atlantic, which are exceptionally cool, relative to the remainder of the global tropics,” says Feltgen. “And we still believe there’s an El Nino forming, and that’s likely to really show itself as we get deeper into August, and continue on into October.” Continue Reading →
Wind turbines provide a sustainable source of energy in that they don't emit carbon dioxide or require water. Photo by KUT News
You thought you might never hear it, but wind power is becoming a formidable price competitor with fossil fuels in Texas, and Austin’s public utility is revamping its programs to suit.
In the year 2000, Austin Energy unrolled a program giving consumers the option to fund wind energy development and the city became a recognized leader in energy innovation.
The GreenChoice program let homes and businesses pay slightly more for their power and buy directly from wind farms, hoping to finance and encourage development.
It worked so well that, by 2009, it was in trouble, and the program was scaled back. Texans in Austin and beyond were demanding more wind energy than power lines could carry, and clogged transmission infrastructure sent prices skyrocketing. Continue Reading →
Luke Metzger, Environment Texas, who testified at EPA hearing, passing by a photo of a refinery explosion in California.
People who live near refineries along the Gulf Coast are calling for tougher, federal rules to curb air pollution. The pleas were made at a Federal Environmental Protection Agency, (EPA), public hearing held Tuesday in Galena Park. The community is on Houston’s east side is in the heart of the oil-refining complex along the Ship Channel.
The industry says the new EPA rules would be a waste of money. But residents like Yudith Nieto say they are desperately needed.
“I’m from a community in Houston called Manchester which is surrounded on all fours by industry,” Nieto testified. She and other residents told a panel of federal EPA officials how childhood leukemia, asthma and bronchitis are unusually common here, citing health studies to back up their claims.
“This is something that is a disparity, an obvious disparity because other parts of the city, other parts of the area don’t bear that same burden,” said John Sullivan with the Sealy Center for Environmental Health in Galveston. He was talking about the burden of breathing what may be coming from refineries. Continue Reading →
Do Hydrogen Cyanide Leaks Show Weakness of Current Regs?
Dave Fehling
Houston's Ship Channel is home to one of the nation's biggest oil refining and petrochemical complexes and is the site of the EPA hearing
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will set up its microphones for an all day hearing Tuesday in Galena Park, a community on Houston’s east side in the heart of the enormous Houston Ship Channel refinery complex. It’s the second of two such hearings with the first held last month in a similar community in Los Angeles.
At issue: new EPA rules that would make oil refineries invest in better equipment to reduce pollution emissions from storage tanks and to improve the efficiency of flares that burn emissions during plant “upsets”. Refineries would also have to increase fence-line monitoring to track exactly what pollution is blowing into adjacent communities.
Wind and solar energy now routinely surpasses hydroelectric generation as an energy source in the United States, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Photo by Daniel Reese for KUT News.
Hydroelectricity generated by Austin's Tom Miller Dam is a renewable resource. Photo by Daniel Reese for KUT News.
Hydropower is the largest source of renewable energy in the U.S. (but, not surprisingly, not in Texas). The state’s online Window on State Government calls it “a tiny portion of the state’s electricity supply with little economic impact and limited prospects for expansion.”
However, Texas is actually a leader in clean energy development. Programs like state renewable portfolio standards and federal tax credits for renewable energies have encouraged the growth of wind and solar power generation, according to the EIA. The effect has been particularly pronounced in Texas, the nation’s biggest wind energy producer. Continue Reading →
Big freighters and small barges in the Houston Ship Channel.
Tensions between the government of Iraq and Kurds in the northern part of the country have once again reached a boiling point. Now, Baghdad is cutting off payments to Kurdistan because of a controversy involving an oil tanker off the coast of Texas.
The semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan has successfully exported several shipments of oil this year. Baghdad opposed those exports, claiming that the oil belongs to the Iraqi people, and the use of its natural resources should be decided by the central government. Most recently, Baghdad successfully filed for a court order to keep one million barrels of crude oil from being unloaded in Galveston.
The Texas Standard’s David Brown recently spoke with Terry Wade, Houston Bureau Chief for Reuters, about how the tanker came to be there in the first place. Continue Reading →
Commercial wind turbines stand more than a hundred feet tall, with blades nearly as long. The wind turbines developed by engineers at the University of Texas at Arlington are a bit smaller… just half than the size of an ant.
In a cold lab room at UT Arlington electrical engineering professor J.C. Chiao shows off a windmill. It’s mounted on a grain of white rice. The micro windmill is a tiny speck of metal with a rectangular base and three shiny blades the size of ant antenna.
“Just think about it this way,” Chiao says, “My interest and research focus is to shrink things.”
The windmills aren’t for a science fiction project. They’re meant to harvest wind energy and deliver small bursts of energy to compact devices like remote sensors or cell phones. Continue Reading →
The beer menu sits on the bar in Luckenbach, Texas.
The drought has tested industries across Texas in the last few years — and it’s even had an impact on beer.
One of MillerCoors’ mega-breweries is in south Fort Worth, and last year it produced 9 million barrels of beer. Environmental and sustainability engineer Lairy Johnson says the plant cut its water use by 9 percent.
Highlights from the Interview with Lairy Johnson:
On how much water the Fort Worth plant uses a year:
“In a year we use about 750 million gallons, but what we like to do is talk about how many barrels of water does it take to make a barrel of beer. In this past month we were about 3.18 barrels per barrel, 3.27 I think was our number last year for the average, and 3.21 is the year to date.” Continue Reading →
Earlier this year, the earth hit a frightening milestone: carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached its highest level since humans have inhabited the earth. The last time there was this much carbon on the planet was nearly a million years ago.
As the heat-trapping gas proliferates, the world warms, and the climate effects domino: droughts intensify, floods increase, ice melts and seas rise. The question now isn’t whether human activity is changing the global climate; the question is what to do about it.
The Obama administration proposed new rules last month that would take a first step in curbing carbon emissions from power plants in the U.S. Their target? Coal power plants. The response to the rules from Republican leaders in Texas was predictable: Gov. Rick Perry said the regulations “will only further stifle our economy’s sluggish recovery and increase energy costs.” And Attorney General (and candidate for Governor) Greg “I  go into work to sue the Obama Administration” Abbott vowed to fight the “job-killing” rules just as he’s fought other rules from the EPA.
But Texas may want to sit the fight over the new carbon rules out: because they could be an economic windfall for the state, to the tune of billions of dollars a year.
Video shown to Denton City Council by citizens concerned that flares at drilling sites threatened neighborhoods
In Texas, a government official has warned that groups opposed to fracking might be acting on behalf of Russia.
In Colorado, a TV ad portrays fracking opponents as goofy idiots who believe the moon may be made of cheese.
The attacks on drilling opponents may reflect how deeply concerned the industry has become over citizen-led efforts to curb fracking, the now widely-used drilling technique that’s dramatically increasing oil & gas production from shale rock formations.
Texas law also officially promotes oil & gas drilling. The state’s Natural Resources Code says the “mineral resources of this state should be fully and effectively exploited.” But the code also says local governments have the right to regulate drilling.
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