Fire and water may seem at odds with each other, but Austin’s city-owned water utility is using prescribed burning in an effort to help more rainfall make its way underground to the Edwards Aquifer.
Courtesy of Austin Water's Wildland Conservation Division
A fire official with the Wildland Conservation Division starts a blaze with a drip torch at a 2009 prescribed burn on Water Quality Protection Lands in Hays County.
Austin Water’s Wildland Conservation Division is conducting the burns on over 380 acres of Hay County that feed into the Barton Springs Segment of the Edwards Aquifer. The goal of each blaze is to remove brush, cedar, large plants and invasive species that can crowd the land and displace the native grasses. The division oversees prescribed fires on between 2,500 and 5,000 acres of preserved land each year.
“If there’s a woodland environment and it rains, about 30 to 40 percent of that water will be captured in the canopy of those trees,” says Amanda Ross, spokeswoman for the Wildland Conservation Division. “But grasses will allow the water to come down to the ground and run off slowly into nearby creeks or percolate into the soil through the deep root systems of the grasses.”
The fires mimic naturally-occurring wildfires in order to maintain a grassland habitat, Ross says. Continue Reading →
Carbon dioxide will be captured and piped to an oilfield
Here’s a head-scratcher: Over a million of tons of carbon dioxide a year will be captured from a coal plant near Houston, Texas. Then that captured carbon will be used to get more fossil fuels out of the ground, specifically from an old oilfield that’s been in use since the 1930s. Construction has begun on the Petra Nova Project, which the U.S. Department of Energy is calling “the first commercial-scale post-combustion carbon capture retrofit project in the U.S.”
The carbon capture will take place at the NRG W.A. Parish coal plant in Fort Bend County, the largest coal plant in Texas. The carbon capture project has quadrupled since its conception, now aiming to capture 90 percent of the emissions from one of the generating units at the plant. That carbon dioxide will be compressed and sent via pipeline 80 miles away to the West Ranch Oil Field
Presidio Economic Development Director Brad Newton says the city could partner economically with Mexico by selling supplies for oil and gas exploration taking place across the border.
For most of its life, the small border city of Presidio, Texas has been on the edge of the electric grid.
This rugged part of West Texas has seen a major upgrade of its transmission lines over the past five years, but Presidio’s Economic Development Director Brad Newton says before that, it was pretty much the Wild West of the grid.
“We were working off the old wooden poles that were put about the same time they were filming Giant,” he says, “and electrical outages were very common in Presidio.”
As part of our look at solar power in Texas this week, we went to see how after those new lines were put in, the city turned to the sun to make what used to be regular blackouts and power surges a thing of the past. Continue Reading →
A Chesapeake natural gas production facility in Fort Worth, Texas.
The city of Denton could take another step Tuesday toward becoming the only Texas city to permanently ban hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.
The city of Denton sits above the Barnett Shale, one of the country’s largest natural gas fields. There are already nearly 300 active gas wells.
But concerned citizens filed a petition in May with nearly 2,000 signatures forcing a vote on the city council whether to ban fracking.
Resident Cathy McMullen, who helped organize the initiative, says in the past month, Denton has been inundated with people employed by outside opposition.
“It’s hard being the first,” McMullen says, “And what’s making it particularly hard for us is that the fracking is [already] there. We’re trying to get it out.” Continue Reading →
As the mercury rises in Texas, so does our energy use. Air conditioners will work overtime to keep your house cool. And when that happens, the Texas grid can become stretched thin. One solution is to build more power plants to meet growing demand. Another is to simply get Texans to use less energy.
“The cheapest and cleanest electricity is the electricity you don’t use,” says Kate Zerrenner, a Project Manager in the Texas office of the Environmental Defense Fund that focuses on energy efficiency and the energy-water nexus.
To see how far efficiency can go, I visited one of the newest – and smallest — power plants in Austin. Forget smokestacks and huge transmission lines: this “power plant” is actually a modest three-bedroom house in the Allandale neighborhood, right off Burnet Road. It’s classified as a “Net Zero” home, meaning it produces as much energy as it uses. Or in this case, it actually produces more energy than it needs. Continue Reading →
Houston's proposal to throw everything in one bin -- trash and recycling -- is meeting opposition from environmental groups.
The City of Houston hopes to eventually do away with curbside recycling and allow residents to throw all of their trash and recycleables into one bin. The items would then be sorted and separated at a processing facility and city leaders claim they can divert 75 percent of the waste from landfills using this method.
But a group of environmentalists have formed a coalition against the plan. Texas Campaign for the Environment Program Director Melissa Scruggs says it will be a boondoggle for the city.
“There’s no way that they’re going to be able to divert 75 percent of waste from landfills with this type of technology. Our report shows that no facility that claims to separate recycling from trash has ever exceeded 30 percent recycling,” Scruggs said.
Proponents of the city’s plan says that information is outdated. Continue Reading →
With reports of drilling activity approaching the Big Bend region, some residents of Marfa are concerned about the city’s practice of selling its water supply in bulk, sometimes to drilling companies.
On Thursday, protesters parked and left their cars in front of city fire hydrants, hoping to block trucks from accessing the water supply.
Marfa resident Buck Johnston spearheaded the effort. She feels it’s a short-sighted move to sell city water in bulk, especially in a drought-stricken desert region.
“Ask any rancher, and they’ll tell you their wells are dropping and going dry,” she says. “I don’t really care what anyone’s feelings are about fracking or oil exploration, my concern is water.” Continue Reading →
The world is warming, and there’s heated debate over what to do about it, or if it’s even warming at all. (Hint: It is.) Amidst this debate, some opponents of government regulations and environmental policy have taken up protest by retrofitting their diesel trucks to spew billowing clouds of black, noxious smoke. When the soot gets blasted, it’s called “rolling coal.” Some save the move for those special moments when they’re in front of a Prius, then post the video online.
“[Diesel engines] will smoke during acceleration, gear changes, some travel conditions, vehicle loading, and those exceptions are covered under the law,” Vinger said.
There are several ways to make your truck “roll coal,” ranging from removing factory-installed emissions regulators to reprograming the small computer that coordinates fuel injection.
But according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Air Act, it is illegal “to manufacture, sell, or install a part for a motor vehicle that bypasses, defeats, or renders inoperative any emission control device.” Continue Reading →
The House of Representatives has passed a bill to extend anti-terrorism protections for chemical plants through 2017. The bill’s lead sponsors included two Houston congressmen – Republican Rep. Michael McCaul and Democratic Rep. Gene Green.
The rules governing security for high-risk chemical facilities have been in place since 2007. But under current legislation, they must be renewed annually, along with appropriations for the Department of Homeland Security. That’s led to some problems.
“Last year, because of the budget problems, when we shut down the government for thirteen days, this law was not into effect,” says Rep. Green. “We want to give it its own freestanding law, so there can be some certainty.” Continue Reading →
Coal is the dirtiest fossil fuel and the most widely used for power generation.
El Paso’s public utility announced plans to run the city coal-free in two years. It’s a bold proposal since no major U.S. city can run without coal power yet, but it seems possible, and it puts El Paso ahead among Texas cities that have sought to end their dependence on coal.
The announcement mirrors an initiative in Austin. But El Paso, with less investment in coal plants, less dependence on coal power and substantial recent development of other energy sources may find it easier to get out of the coal game completely.
“Our overall portfolio for generation has a very small percentage of coal,” said Eddie Gutierrez, spokesman for El Paso Electric Company. “In our region we have the right kind of sun for the optimal type of solar energy, so moving forward solar energy and cost effective forms of technology is what were going to go with.”
El Paso Electric Company services about 400,000 customers and has doubled its solar power production capacity in the last year. The utility signed a 20-year contract to get power from Macho Springs, a New Mexico solar farm as big as 300 football fields, which started operation in May. They have also started construction on a new natural gas plant.
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