Scott Anderson says there are many environmental risks associated with fracking.
A report from UT’s Energy Institute on shale gas drilling found no link between hydraulic fracturing and water contamination, but the findings might not all be good news for oil and gas drilling.
“The report shines a light on the fact that there are a number of aspects of natural gas development that can cause significant environmental risk,” Scott Anderson, a policy advisor for the Environmental Defense Fund, a group that contributed to the study, told StateImpact Texas.
While the study found no direct link between water contamination and fracking itself, it did cite surface spills of fracturing chemicals as a risk to groundwater. It also found blowouts underground during fracking operations have been under-reported. In a blog post yesterday, Anderson enumerated some other continuing concerns.
Late last year the EPA released a draft report on the effects of fracking in Pavillion, Wyoming that appeared to find a link between fracking and water contamination. Continue Reading →
What happens when “drill baby drill” meets peak oil prognostication? An audience found out firsthand this week, when two power policy pugilists faced off at the University of Wisconsin.
In one corner was Texas’ own Dr. Tad Patzek, incoming president of the Association of the Study of Peak Oil, and Chair of UT’s Department of Petroleum & Geosystems Engineering. In the other corner, former CEO of Shell Oil Company and domestic drilling proponent John Hofmeister.
Highlights include Hoffmeister’s prediction that gasoline is likely to reach $5 a gallon this summer, and that America’s energy crunch will lead to new lows in political partisanship. Continue Reading →
Photo by Flickr user tarsandsaction/Creative Commons
Environmental groups have been vocal opponents of the pipeline.
This article was reported and researched by David Barer, an intern at StateImpact Texas.
The 1,700-mile long Keystone XL Pipeline would connect the Alberta oil sand fields in Canada to refineries in Texas. The project has become a hotly-contested issue between environmentalists and big-oil companies. Democrats and Republicans have also wrangled over the pipeline due to the upcoming presidential election.
The Texas leg of the Keystone pipeline would run south from Cushing Oklahoma through East Texas to refineries near Houston and Port Arthur. The company behind the pipeline, TransCanada, has secured the vast majority of easements and land rights to place their pipeline, but several holdouts refuse to allow the pipeline to be built on the property, which has lead to eminent domain disputes.
We recently spoke with David Weinberg, the Executive Director of the Texas League of Conservation Voters, to learn more about the Canadian tar sands, the environmental movement’s stance on the project, and hear Weinberg and his political organization’s thoughts on the issue. (To read an opposing perspective on the pipeline, read our interview with Jim Prescott, project representative for the pipeline.)
Q: What concerns you more: the Keystone XL pipeline or the tar sands?
A: Clearly, building the pipeline enables the production of this resource, so they kind of go together. There are concerns about the processing and the production of tar sands in general. The particular pipeline route which was proposed to the State Department got nixed; that raised its own set of environmental concerns based on where it was located in terms of oil spills over the Ogallala Aquifer in the central United States. So, there’s a very serious concern about production of the resource regardless of where it is sent, where it is processed and where that fuel is used. Continue Reading →
The Keystone XL pipeline would take oil from sand pits in Canada to refineries in Texas.
It’s never out of the news for long. This week the Keystone XL Pipeline, a 1,700-mile, multi-billion dollar project that would connect the Alberta oil sand fields in Canada to refineries in Texas, has come back into the spotlight. There was maneuvering at the Capitol to override the President’s denial of the pipeline. In Texas, a farmer took out a restraining order against the company, TransCanada, after they used eminent domain to route the pipeline through her property.
TransCanada, a Canadian energy company, has been trying to get a permit for the pipeline for over three years. They’ve encountered environmental concerns in Nebraska and political wrangling at the highest levels of government. The project is currently delayed, but TransCanada says it will soon reapply for the permit it needs to build across the U.S.-Canada border.
We sat down recently to speak with Jim Prescott, a project representative for TransCanada, about the company’s views on the pipeline. He spoke of the advantages the company sees of building Keystone XL, the pipeline’s difficult permitting process and the inner workings of oil and gas transportation in America. (To read an opposing perspective on the pipeline, read our interview with David Weinberg of the Texas League of Conservation Voters.)
Q: Why is there a need to transport all these tar sand oils to America? Why can’t this oil just be refined up in Canada?
A: Well, they don’t have the refinery capacity up there, for one thing. The largest concentration of refineries in the world is from Corpus Christi, Texas to the Mississippi River along the Gulf Coast through Texas and Louisiana. So, this is where the demand is. This is where the refinery production capabilities exist.
Q: There are already a lot of pipelines crisscrossing the U.S. It’s not unusual to have new oil or natural gas pipelines from state to state. Did it surprise you to see how big of a national issue this has become?
A: I don’t know if surprise is the right way to say it.
The skeleton of a fish sits on the dry shores of Lake Buchanan, which is nearing historically low levels.
Another week, another update from the National Drought Monitor. While there hasn’t been much movement this week, there are some signs of continued improvement: Three percent of the state moved out of the highest level of drought, “exceptional,” meaning now only twenty percent of Texas is in “exceptional” drought. That’s the lowest level since last April, and a far ways from the peak of 88 percent of the state in “exceptional” drought in early October.
Above-average rains in much of the state have brought real progress, particularly for Texans in urban areas. Dallas/Fort Worth has become drought-free, while much of Harris County (and Houston) and all of El Paso are now in the lightest stage of drought, the “moderate” level. Austin and San Antonio have moved from the second level of drought, “severe,” from levels of “extreme” and “exceptional” before that.
Some more details from the drought monitor give both good and bad news: Continue Reading →
Where the Keystone XL pipeline would go through Texas.
Tomorrow morning in Paris, Texas, the company behind the Keystone XL pipeline is facing a farmer in court.
At issue? As we reported earlier this week, the company, TransCanada, wants to route the pipeline through the farmer’s land. The farmer, Julia Trigg Crawford, refused.
Crawford’s farm is in Lamar County northeast of Dallas. She says she looked into some environmental issues with the pipeline and how it would go through her farm and decided she wasn’t on board. “One of my first concerns was, to go the path they had planned, they had to horizontally drill under the creek that I have water rights to,” Crawford told StateImpact Texas. “So, I didn’t exactly want this sludge being pumped underneath the creek.” Crawford also said that if the pipeline was buried underneath her property it could create a “vegetative dead zone” for her crops, because the temperature of the line can get up to 140 degrees, she said.
After repeatedly refusing to sign an agreement with TransCanada, the company filed for eminent domain last fall, and won the right to route the pipeline through Crawford’s farm. While eminent domain is typically used for public projects, in this case the private company argued that since the oil passing through the pipeline would ultimately be used by the public, then the pipeline itself was a public “common carrier” and not a private pipeline, even though it’s privately owned and operated.
As a last-ditch effort, Crawford filed and won a temporary restraining order in Lamar County preventing the company from going on her land earlier this week. TransCanada wasted no time in asking for that restraining order to be dissolved, and tomorrow morning both the company and Crawford will be in court to argue their case. We’ll be reporting more on this story tomorrow.
Electric vehicles, whether they be plug-in hybrids like the Chevy Volt, or completely electric, combustion-free cars like the Nissan Leaf, are often heralded for their low emissions and high mileage.
While these plug-in vehicles have seen lower-than-projected sales since their debut in late 2010, there’s the possibility that we’re still in the “early adopter” phase. As oil prices go up (and plug-in car prices come down) we’ll likely see more and more of them on the road and at the charging station.
Which is a cause for concern. All of those cars have to charge their batteries somewhere, and that means more energy demand on an already-strained electric grid in Texas. More energy could come from coal or gas power plants, which means though the cars are emitting less, they are still relying on fossil fuel energy to run (and causing emissions in the process).
How can the grid deal with this? Karl Rábago, the Vice President for Distributed Energy Services at Austin Energy, addressed the issue yesterday at the 2012 Wind, Solar and Storage conference at the University of Texas School of Law. Rábago is a plug-in owner himself after purchasing a Chevy Volt in November. “I’ve used 8 gallons of gas since then,” he says.
Austin Energy predicts that by 2020, there’ll be between 10,000-35,000 new plug-in vehicles in Austin. To charge all those batteries, Austin Energy wants to use “clean, renewable and efficient energy.” But there are some difficulties with that goal. Continue Reading →
Photo by Flickr user GrungeTextures/Creative Commons
The Texas drought has killed an estimated 5.6 million urban trees and 500 million forest trees, roughly 10 percent of the trees in Texas.
A new study from the Texas Forest Service has bad news about the trees in your neighborhood. They estimate that 5.6 million trees in the urban areas of Texas – those leafy providers of shade around your home and dotting your parks – are now dead. This number could be up to ten percent of the urban trees in Texas. (A separate study late last year of forest trees in non-urban areas said that 500 million of those could be dead due to the drought.)
The Forest Service sent out “urban foresters” to conduct the study last month. Foresters looked at satellite photos from before and during the drought, “counting both live and dead trees in randomly selected plots on both public and private land,” according to the study. “All cities and towns in Texas were included in the study with the exception of the Trans Pecos region, where tree mortality was determined to be a result of a February 2011 cold snap; not the drought.”
“This estimate is preliminary because trees are continuing to die from the drought,” says Pete Smith, Texas Forest Service staff forester and lead researcher, in a release accompanying the study. “This means we may be significantly undercounting the number of trees that ultimately will succumb to the drought. That number may not be known until the end of 2012, if ever.”
And removing the dead trees (a safety hazard) will be costly, with an estimate of $560 million. The Forest Service also says the lost economic benefit of the trees (in the form of energy lost because the trees are no longer cooling homes, cleaning air and water, and keeping property values higher) is $280 million a year.
What do you do when wells run dry? That far-off question has become a sudden reality for the residents of Spicewood Beach, the first town to run dry during the Texas drought. This video, shot by Jeff Heimsath for StateImpact Texas, tells the story of how the wells began to fail in Spicewood Beach, and how residents there are trying to cope with an uncertain future.
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.”
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