A barge loaded with marine fuel oil sits partially submerged in the Houston Ship Channel in this U.S. Coast Guard picture taken March 22, 2014. The barge leaked oil into the Houston Ship Channel after colliding with another ship near Texas City on Saturday and emergency responders laid down floating barriers to contain the spill, U.S. Coast Guard officials said.
With no end in sight to containing a spill that may have dumped 150,000 gallons of fuel oil into Galveston Bay on Saturday, the hit to Texas’ economy and environment is already huge — and sure to grow.
The 50-mile Houston Ship Channel, one of the world’s biggest waterways for the transport of petroleum products, chemicals and other materials, remains shut down. Cruise ships can’t depart from key ports. Galveston Bay’s multibillion-dollar recreational and commercial fishing industry is off limits during a peak tourist season. And the scores of vulnerable species in Galveston Bay, most notably birds that are soon to begin their northward migration along the upper Texas coast, are at grave risk.
The type of oil that spilled — a marine fuel oil known as RMG 380 — is black, sticky and particularly heavy. That means that instead of evaporating from the surface of the water like gasoline would, much of it will sink, persisting in the environment for months or even years. While this heavier oil is not acutely toxic, it can smother wildlife, to devastating effect.
“Fuel oil is not easy to clean off anything,” said Jim Suydam, a spokesman for the General Land Office, the state agency that is leading the response and cleanup efforts in conjunction with the U.S. Coast Guard. “It sticks to things.” Continue Reading →
The white fruit of the cotton plant is known as the boll. Texas has led the nation in cotton production for over a century.
Every year Texas farmers are faced with a choice: should they focus on growing corn, cotton, or sorghum? Gaylon Morgan has an inkling what kind of year 2014 will be.
“I think we’ll see an increase in cotton, just due to the price difference,” Morgan, a cotton specialist at Texas A&M, tells StateImpact Texas.
It’s simple economics. The prices of grains and corn are down. Farmers want to grow what makes the most money, so they’re planting cotton.
“It’s just supply and demand,” says Morgan.
But if you dig into why corn and grain are down, and cotton up, things get complicated quickly.
John Robinson, a professor in cotton marketing, also at A&M, says there are two main reasons.
Though the rise of fracking (and the chemicals used in the fracking process) has raised concerns about groundwater contamination, the source of a majority of Texas’ cases is far more mundane.
Gasoline is the most prevalent source of groundwater contaminant in Texas, according to a Joint Groundwater Monitoring and Contamination Report put out last year by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ). Of 2,083 total cases in the last five years, almost half (922) were because of a gasoline leak. The map above plots every reported contamination case from 2008 to 2012, the most recent year of data.
A glow over the northern horizon at McDonald Observatory near Ft. Davis,Texas. The light is generated by round-the-clock oil and gas operations in the Permian Basin.
FT. DAVIS, Texas — World-class observatories like Mount Wilsonnear Los Angeles and Palomar north of San Diego are cramped by the intrusion of urban light to once unspoiled night skies.
Facing the same problem in the 1970s, scientists at Kitt Peak National Observatory south of Tucson persuaded that city and others in Arizona to pass lighting ordinances.
Now, the McDonald Observatory in remote West Texas — home to the largest telescope in North America — is suddenly dealing with unwanted light. The Texas oil and gas boom is responsible. Cutting edge research could be at risk. But the observatory is trying to convince industry to retool using a relatively simple solution. Continue Reading →
In Ector County, officials say roads like this have been used for years to dump oilfield waste, leaving lanes coated with slippery fluids.
A case of alleged dumping of possibly thousands of gallons of chemicals into Odessa’s sewer system has local officials wondering who’s supposed to police the drilling industry.
“We’re finding that there’s so much confusion in this area of law regarding who is responsible for what,” said Susan Redford, the Ector County Judge. “So in Ector County, we have taken the lead upon ourselves to investigate the more serious illegal dumping cases and to prosecute those cases both civilly and criminally.”
The Texas Water Development Board now shares groundwater levels in an interactive map on its website.
Texans don’t need statistics to tell them what the drought is like – they can feel it in their bones.
Residents, manufacturers and farmers all depend on both reservoirs and groundwater in Texas, but up until recently only surface reservoir levels were public in Texas. The Texas Water Development Board (TWDB) updates those reservoir levels on their online archive daily in an easily accessible format.
Now concerned Texans easily access information about groundwater levels through the TWDB site as well. Groundwater and surface water levels are now both being shared with the public by the TWDB and can be viewed in an interactive map.
Texas Parks and Wildlife's Todd Robinson holds a rock covered with zebra mussels in Lake Texoma, Texas. The mollusk can stick to nearly anything, posing problems for power plants and fishing boats.
At first glance, zebra mussels appear harmless, perhaps even cute. But the tiny creatures are anything but cute for Texas lakes.
Originally from Eurasia, zebra mussels made their first appearance in North America in the Great Lakes in the early nineties. The mussels have since made their way to Texas, and over the years, this invasive species has proliferated in the state, killing off alarming numbers of native species and clogging pipes used for power plants, drinking water, manufacturing and boating. Now they may have finally met their match, in the form of microscopic bacteria.
Currently, zebra mussels are combated with several strategies, including chlorine and metal-based solutions, filtering systems and hot water. But none have proven capable of wiping them out.
“There is not one silver bullet that is effective in killing the mussels in all situations that won’t harm other species and keep our waters safe,” says Brian Van Zee, from the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.
Now Texas is looking into an up-and-coming pesticide that attacks zebra mussels and zebra mussels alone. Continue Reading →
A small pool of water is all that remains in a portion of Bridgeport Lake in September 2013.
Texans looking for relief from the drought are eagerly anticipating the chances of an El Niño event starting this summer, which could bring much wetter conditions. But the focus should actually be on the near-term, according to Victor Murphy, climate service program manager for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Fort Worth. Murphy says that the next three months, April, May and June, will be crucial to staving off another critically dry—and hot—summer.
April, May and June are typically the wettest months of the Texas year, and little to no rain could lead to dry soil and hot days.
“What happens during those three months, between now and June, is going to be just huge going forward into the summertime, but unfortunately we do not have any kind of a clear climate signal to hang our hats on with regards to making a forecast,” he said. Continue Reading →
We’re coming up on four years since the worst accidental oil spill in history: the blowout at the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico.  Over two hundred million gallons of oil spewed into the Gulf. Eleven men were killed in the blast, all from a tight-knit group of rig workers. A film premiering at the SXSW Film Festival this week focuses on the effects of the disaster on the survivors and their families, adding a human dimension missing from much of the coverage of the spill. It’s called ‘The Great Invisible.’
If you want to learn more about what exactly went wrong on the rig, and what could have been done to prevent it, this film will leave you wondering. Its subjects talk about staff reductions and corners being cut on the rig, but specifics are sparse — it doesn’t really explain what went wrong that day, or even what a “blowout” is. But where ‘The Great Invisible’ shines is by casting light on the human victims of the industrial disaster.
Director Margaret Brown said at a Q&A after the film’s first screening in Austin that she “wanted to use people, not graphs” to tell the story. “We lost the opportunity to talk about the lessons of the disaster because of political pressure.” (Brown’s representatives declined an interview request from StateImpact Texas to discuss the film.) Continue Reading →
A Chesapeake Energy natural gas drilling site near Steubenville, Ohio.
This story comes from the non-profit investigative newsroom ProPublica, co-published with The Daily Beast:
At the end of 2011, Chesapeake Energy, one of the nation’s biggest oil and gas companies, was teetering on the brink of failure.
Its legendary chief executive officer, Aubrey McClendon, was being pilloried for questionable deals, its stock price was getting hammered and the company needed to raise billions of dollars quickly.
The money could be borrowed, but only on onerous terms. Chesapeake, which had burned money on a lavish steel-and-glass office complex in Oklahoma City even while the selling price for its gas plummeted, already had too much debt.
In the months that followed, Chesapeake executed an adroit escape, raising nearly $5 billion with a previously undisclosed twist: By gouging many rural landowners out of royalty payments they were supposed to receive in exchange for allowing the company to drill for natural gas on their property.
In lawsuits in state after state, private landowners have won cases accusing the companies like Chesapeake of stiffing them on royalties they were due. Federal investigators have repeatedly identified underpayments of royalties for drilling on federal lands, including a case in which Chesapeake was fined $765,000 for “knowing or willful submission of inaccurate information” last year. Continue Reading →
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