Citizens opposed to gas drilling in Dallas made their voices heard about Trinity East's plans during city meetings
Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings says a $30 million lawsuit filed Thursday by Trinity East Energy is the latest in a “game of poker.” The gas drilling company is suing the city, claiming it breached a contract that would have allowed it to drill on city property.
In 2008 Trinity East Energy paid the City of Dallas $19 million for the right to drill for natural gas on 3,600 acres in Northwest Dallas.
The Fort Worth company filed three zoning applications to drill but the city plan commission and the city council rejected the sites because two were located in a park and floodplain and a third was near a new soccer complex.
Trinity East’s President Stephen Fort says city officials including Former City Manager Mary Suhm assured his company it would be able to drill, then they broke their promise. Continue Reading →
An empty rain gauge is strapped to a fence post on the edge of a pasture this summer near Canadian, Texas
In Spanish, El Niño means “the boy child.” But if El Niño predictions for late 2014 prove correct, winter rainfall in Texas could be anything but little. The deceptively-named weather pattern generally brings rain to Texas. Lots of it.
El Niño occurs when warm water buried below the surface of the Pacific rises up and spreads along the equator towards America. It often causes storms that devastate parts of Latin America, Indonesia and Australia, but it could also bring relief to drought-stricken Texas.
“It tends to cause the jetstream to be farther south than normal, which means we may get more rain events, generally cool temperatures and lots of run-off, which would be good for reservoir levels,” John Nielsen-Gammen, Texas State Climatologist, tells StateImpact Texas.
Now, a new study from Stanford University gives the El Niño weather pattern a 76 percent chance of returning this year. What exactly does that mean?
Acid solutions are trucked to drill sites and injected deep underground
Read about the history of oil drilling in Texas and you’ll find references to how wildcatters would pour barrels of hydrochloric acid into their wells. The acid would eat through underground rock formations and allow more oil to flow up the well.
That was decades ago. While a lot has changed in the drilling industry since then, using acid has not. It’s only gotten bigger. And in Texas, no one seems to have any idea of just how much hydrochloric, acetic, or hydrofluoric acid is being pumped into the ground.
“During my years with Shell, we did not have to go to the Railroad Commission [the state oil and gas regulator] to get approval for an acid job,” said Joe Dunn Clegg, a retired engineer who now teaches at the University of Houston. In his well drilling class, you’ll learn all about what the oil and gas industry calls acidizing.
“I’m not a dope smoker, okay?” he says with a point of his trademark unlit cigar. “Except with Willie [Nelson]. More as a Texas etiquette kind of thing.”
First, his argument for hemp. It is in the same family as marijuana but is its industrial form and doesn’t have the medicinal or recreational uses of marijuana. Friedman argues that if cotton farmers in Texas were allowed to grow hemp instead, the trade-offs would be attractive.
“Hemp requires half the water that cotton does, while producing two and a half times the fiber. All with zero pesticides needed,” he says. “Now if you were to pitch that as a pilot program to a cotton farmer, they’d take it.” Continue Reading →
Researchers from Southern Methodist University say folks shouldn’t rush to conclusions about what’s been causing the swarm of more than 30 earthquakes northwest of Fort Worth since November.
Scientists have installed a temporary seismic network in and around the earthquake swarm to help gain a better understanding of the quakes.
On Friday, in the basement of SMU’s Department of Earth Sciences, professors gathered in front of colorful waves from seismic stations.
Professor Brian Stump is part of SMU’s research team. He said those waves are what they use to pinpoint earthquakes, and more carefully examine each acceleration.
“Talking about how earthquakes generate waves,” Stump says. “That may be too technical, but it does help you understand what you’re feeling.” Continue Reading →
Hal Alper of UT examines a sample of his new yeast-based biofuel.
For years, soybeans have been the predominant base for biodiesel fuel in the United States. But the crop has a major limitation — it can’t grow everywhere, preventing its widespread adoption as a fuel.
Hal Alper, a chemical engineering professor at the University of Texas at Austin, has come up with a replacement. It’s found in your bread: yeast. After it undergoes some chemical tinkering and mixes with sugar, Alper and his team of researchers say yeast can then be converted into what he calls “sweet crude biofuel.”
He says yeast has been transformed into unlikely products such as alcohol for “thousands of years,” now it can be transformed into fuel. Alper says soybean and yeast have almost identical genes, which makes yeast an easy alternate for biodiesel. Continue Reading →
ERCOT is asking Texans to conserve power until noon Friday.
Update:At some point Friday morning, the conservation alert was canceled. ERCOT says there have been localized outages, but they weren’t related to “overall grid conditions.”
Original story: The group that operates much of the Texas electric grid is calling on people to conserve energy. Electric use is getting close to setting a new winter record because of the cold weather, but that’s not the only reason grid operators are worried.
While summer is usually the time when supplies can be stretched thin in the state, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) has already declared two energy emergency alerts already this winter. In those cases the cause wasn’t just electric demand, it was because power plants went offline when the grid needed them most. Cold weather can cause mechanical failures that shut plants down, and that’s one thing grid operators worry might happen again. Continue Reading →
Scientists study the make up of stalactites and stalagmites to learn about ancient climate trends.
Banner (right) and researcher Barbara Wortham.
This mirror like pool of water was dry during the great Texas drought of 2011.
Formations like these tell the story of the earths climate history.
Barbara Wortham recently presented new research on how to determine the age of speleothems..
Dr. Banner’s research team measures the length of time for a single drop of water to fall in this cave.
Dr. Jay Banner and Barbara Wortham in a part of the caverns closed to the public.
Barbara Wortham at the lowest part of the caves.
Rock formations.
Researchers venture off the public passages to learn carry out their work.
Paleo ‘Rain Gauges’ in Texas Caves Help Show How Our Climate is Changing
It’s easy to imagine that attitudes towards climate change would be different if everyone owned a device like the one Dr. Jay Banner showed me this winter in Georgetown, Texas. It’s a small instrument, about the size and shape of a walkie talkie, that measures carbon dioxide wherever you go.
“You can see that outside here, the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is 403 parts per million,” Banner says, holding it up for inspection on a frigid morning. “That’s a number we’re really worried about in our society today. Because, at the onset of the industrial revolution, we were at about 280 parts per million. We’re on our way towards doubling it.”
Scientists agree that carbon dioxide contributes to climate change. What researchers like Banner, a Professor of Geological Science at the University of Texas at Austin, want to understand is what climate change means for the world around us. That search has put him in some tight spots during his career, often deep underground, in the caves of Central Texas. Continue Reading →
Texas leases submerged coastal land for oil & gas wells and also wildlife projects
As Texas decides how it will spend millions of dollars from a multi-state agreement with BP following the Deepwater Horizon spill, the Texas General Land Office (GLO) is proposing a fee on projects that restore damaged coastal areas.
Some of the non-profit environmental and wildlife groups involved in the projects are not happy.
Nine groups including Ducks Unlimited, the Galveston Bay Foundation, and the Sierra Club Lone Star Chapter met last week with GLO staff members. The groups had expressed their opposition in a letter sent this past December to Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson. Continue Reading →
The likely culprit behind the quakes isn’t fracking, but rather a byproduct of it — hundreds of billions of gallons of wastewater from oil and gas drilling. The disposal of that wastewater deep underground has been known to cause faults to slip, triggering earthquakes in parts of Texas. There were under a hundred recorded earthquakes (measuring 2.0 or higher) in Texas during the three decades before the current drilling boom began in earnest in 2007, according to records from the United States Geological Survey (USGS). Since then, there’s been two hundred quakes recorded by the agency, along with hundreds more smaller ones.
The rate has increased from an average of three quakes a year in Texas before 2007 to nearly 30 a year since. “The increase in earthquakes is very clear, so it’s not an instrumental artifact,” says William L. Ellsworth, a seismologist with the USGS. “This we’re really quite confident of.” And the rapid increase in quakes isn’t unique to Texas: our neighbors to the north in Oklahoma have had an average of 40 quakes measuring 3.0 or higher a year since an uptick in drilling (and oil and gas wastewater disposal) in 2009. Before that, the state had one to three quakes a year of 3.0 or higher on average.
But to establish a link to drilling activity (and specific disposal wells) in each earthquake swarm, scientists need data. And they need a lot more of it when it comes to Texas. To look at how earthquakes are measured in the state and better understand the numbers, StateImpact Texas reached out to Ellsworth, who’s been studying the manmade quake phenomenon in Texas and other parts of the country. Continue Reading →
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