The Texas Ag Commissioner's role is about much more than just farming.
When Texans – mostly farmers and ranchers – sat down to write the state constitution in the 1800s, they didn’t see the need for an elected Agriculture Commissioner.
That oversight was quickly remedied.
Texas agriculture, crops and cattle are known across the country and around the world. Its “Go Texan” campaign can be seen in grocery stores and TV ads across the state: Why buy vegetables from California, when you can pick from that (noticeably labeled) batch from Texas?
But the office does more than sell the product. It also helps farmers and ranchers successfully grow it.
Controllers make daily forecasts of the next day’s electric demand and supply down to every five minutes.
Texans have lived for years with a looming energy crisis. Experts always saw it on the horizon and warned, periodically, of its arrival. The state was growing, they observed, and the electricity supply was not keeping up. When the reckoning came, it would come in the form of rolling blackouts. Such predictions often yielded reporting like this (by yours truly).
Then, this month, things stopped looking so bad.
The news came as the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) released its annual forecast of how much electricity Texas will have in the coming years. ERCOT has traditionally warned that, in the future, there may not be enough energy on reserve during times of peak use, like hot summer days. This year, the message was different.
“Our view is that the growth in peak hour demand on hot summer afternoons will not be as strong as we had forecasted in the past,” Warren Lasher, ERCOT director of System Planning, told reporters on a Friday press call.
What changed is not the just amount of energy available (that’s growing, but slowly), it’s the fact that Texans’ electricity use has stopped rising with Texas’ economic growth. What’s behind it? Continue Reading →
Tomorrow is primary day in Texas, and in the race for the open seat on the Railroad Commission, the state’s oil and gas regulator, you might be curious to know where exactly the candidates stand on the issues. Those issues include swarms of earthquakes linked to oil and gas drilling activity; property rights battles with pipeline companies; and potential ethics reforms for the commissioners.
In a series of articles last week, we rounded up the candidates positions on these and other issues. Six of the candidates for Railroad Commissioner responded to our questionnaire, but three of the candidates, Republicans Malachi Boyuls, Wayne Christian and Ryan Sitton did not respond.
Each question below links to the candidates’ answers:
The primary is tomorrow, March 4. Unless one of the candidates receives more than fifty percent of the vote in each party, the top two candidates will go to a runoff, with voting on May 27.
Turbulence is a menace to more than just airplane passengers. As wind power grows in Texas and beyond, its impact on wind turbines is becoming a challenge for energy generation.
In a recent study released by the University of Texas at San Antonio, mechanical engineering professor Kiran Bhaganagar found that placing  turbines too closely together in a wind farm causes a wake effect that reduces productivity. In some cases it turbines can lose up to 90 percent of the power they are capable of producing.
Turbulence, a term that gained its reputation by shaking up airplane rides, is known in the science world as a bumpy effect caused by air with conflicting velocities.
On any given wind farm, Bhaganagar says, turbulent wind gains momentum and has an increasingly negative impact as it moves down the line of turbines.
A Cabot Oil and Gas natural gas drill is viewed at a hydraulic fracturing site on January 17, 2012 in Springville, Pennsylvania.
If you know what the water in your wells was like before drilling started on your land, you have a better understanding of whether drilling has changed the water. That’s the basic idea behind “baseline testing” of groundwater before drilling starts.
That’s also one reason why some states, like Wyoming, have enacted rules based on recommendations by the American Petroleum Institute to require baseline testing of water quality and nearby water wells before drilling operations begin at well sites.
Texas has no such requirements.
As part of our candidates questionnaire we asked all of the people running for a seat on the Texas Railroad Commission – the agency that regulates the Texas oil and gas industry – whether they think Texas should enact such requirements. Six of the nine candidates responses are below, all of the candidates that responded are in favor of baseline testing. Republican candidates Malachi Boyuls, Wayne Christian and Ryan Sitton did not respond.
Cooling towers of a nuclear power plant in Grohnde, Germany. An interim charge for the Texas legislature could change the United States' management of nuclear waste.
The United States’ total high-level radioactive waste could fit inside a football stadium with room to spare. Right now, it’s distributed between the country’s 100 commercial nuclear power plants and stored on site. But all that waste could be headed to Texas in the coming years.
One of Texas House Speaker Joe Straus’ interim charges for the 83rd legislature (basically study material that could come in handy during the next session when it comes time to file legislation) has exactly that goal in mind.
The charge, addressed to the House Committee on Environmental Regulation, says to “make specific recommendations on the state and federal actions necessary to permit a high-level radioactive waste disposal or interim storage facility in Texas.” While Texas already allows low-level radioactive waste storage, this new suggestion has drawn its fair share of controversy, intrigue and confusion. So let’s take a look at the ins and outs of nuclear waste storage, and how it could pan out in the Lone Star State.
Jefferson County Court at Law Judge Tom Rugg listens to arguments in the property rights case.
Eminent domain. It’s been a political hot potato at the Railroad Commission of Texas for years. As regulators of the state’s oil and gas industry, commissioners give pipeline companies the right to take private property for their projects. That pits one of Texas most important industries — oil and gas — against one of Texas’ most cherished political ideals — private property rights.
Under the current system, pipelines get the power to take property from an unwilling Texas landowner simply by checking a box and submitting a form to the commission. That form amounts to a promise that the pipeline will be a “common carrier,” that it will make itself available for hire to whoever wants to use it. But the commission does nothing to verify that the pipeline will act accordingly. Once it grants “common carrier” status to the pipeline, the company can go ahead and use eminent domain to take land for its project (after paying a price determined by the courts), whether the landowner likes it or not.
After a 17-hour hearing last week, State Administrative Law Judges William Newchurch and Travis Vickery came to the conclusion that the LCRA-requested trigger level of 1.1 million acre-feet was actually insufficient, and recommended modifying the order to an even higher leve, to 1.4 million acre-feet. Right now the Highland Lakes have 761,700 acre-feet of water.
“The likelihood of reaching either of those trigger levels is almost negligible at this point, and so that certainly diminishes the importance of having a trigger level,” TCEQ chairman Bryan Shaw said. “The issue of properly managing water in the Lower Colorado River and these releases is much more complex than simply pulling a trigger number out of the air.” Continue Reading →
Disposal wells like this one are the point where a small operation could turn out to be causing big tremors that can be felt miles away.
Texas has seen the number of recorded earthquakes increase tenfold since 2007, the same time a drilling boom spurred by hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” took off. Scientific studies of those quakes has linked many of them to oil and gas drilling activity. In North and East Texas, peer-reviewed studies have pointed the finger at oil and gas wastewater disposal wells, where fluids from drilling are injected underground. The state oil and gas regulator has been slow to respond to the phenomenon, maintaining that links between the quakes and oil and gas activity are “hypothetical.”
But that’s beginning to change after residents of the towns of Azle and Reno in North Texas got vocal about the earthquakes in their region. It’s seen over 30 earthquakes since the beginning of November, and in response, the Railroad Commission has announced it’s hiring a seismologist to study the issue. A committee of lawmakers will be doing so as well. Other states have been more active in their approach to the issue, however.
In our third installment of questions for the candidates for Railroad Commissioner, we asked each of them where they stand on the science and potential solutions to the tremors. We reached out to candidates from all parties, but three of the Republican candidates did not participate. (Again, Malachi Boyuls, Wayne Christian and Ryan Sitton — we’d still like to hear back from you.)
The six candidates that did respond had varying answers and views on the quakes and regulating disposal wells: Continue Reading →
Millions of dollars from the oil and gas industry go into the campaign coffers of those elected to regulate the industry.
Most Candidates for Texas’ Oil and Gas Regulator Want Changes
Take a peek a little ways down your ballot in the primaries this year and you’ll see the race for a spot on the Railroad Commission, the state’s powerful oil and gas regulator. We’ve been working to get the candidates to “eat their vegetables” when it comes to the policy issues at stake, asking each to answer a questionnaire on issues ranging from manmade earthquakes to eminent domain.
Each day this week we’ll be posting their answers — well, at least from six of them. Out of the four Republican candidates in the race, only one — Becky Berger — responded to the questionnaire. (To the campaigns of Malachi Boyuls, Wayne Christian and Ryan Sitton — we’re still hoping to hear back from you.)
Today’s questions deal with ethical and campaign finance reforms for the commission. The three Railroad commissioners get most of their campaign funds from the very industry they regulate. One of the candidates this race, Republican Ryan Sitton, has even said that he plans to keep working at his oil and gas consulting firm if elected to the commission.
Should lines be drawn? Should commissioners refuse campaign contributions from companies with cases before the commission? If elected, will they serve their full six-year term before running for another office? Those questions and more were put to all of the candidates. They’re based on reforms that the Texas legislature failed to pass during the last session under pressure from current Railroad Commissioners.
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