As oil and gas production and processing increases, who wins and who loses in Texas?
Texas Land Commission Jerry Patterson told a political luncheon in Houston that “oppressive federal government regulation” was a big threat to the Texas energy economy. Especially pollution regulation by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
“And more specifically, (by) the U.S. Wildlife Service and their Endangered Species designations for critters that probably ought to die anyway,” Patterson said, referring to federal efforts to protect species including salamanders, lizards and prairie chickens. The designations could restrict oil & gas drilling in West Texas.
Come to Texas
It’s an anti-regulation stance repeated by the state’s top officials including Governor Rick Perry. Perry has used radio ads to try to lure businesses from other states to Texas where he said there is “limited government” and a “pro-business environment.”
As the fracking drilling boom continues in Texas and other states, a shift has taken place. While the beginning of the surge saw a rush for natural gas, in recent years the focus has moved to oil. And in the process, a lot of natural gas is being wasted. Billions of dollars worth, enough to power an entire nation.
When an oil well is drilled, it can also produce methane. But in drilling areas like the Eagle Ford Shale in Texas and the Bakken Shale in North Dakota, methane isn’t what drillers are after. One option is to simply vent it, releasing it directly into the atmosphere. Another is to “flare” it, combusting the methane instead. There’s enough flaring and drilling going on that you can see it from space.
“Flaring is infinitely more preferable than just venting those emissions into the atmosphere,” Drew Nelson, Manager of Special Projects for the Environmental Defense Fund, says. “Methane is much potent than carbon dioxide.” If methane were released directly in the air, it would have a much more detrimental climate effect. By burning the methane, it converts to carbon dioxide. “Which is still a greenhouse gas,” Nelson says, “but one molecule of methane is anywhere from 24 to a hundred times more potent than one molecule of carbon dioxide, depending on the time frame you’re looking at.”
NASA data contrasts average Spring temperatures for the 1950s and 2090s.
There’s no shortage of maps or data sets that show the long-term climatic effects of rising temperatures. But what about a map showing the temperature of your block in 2087?
You could find that in newly released temperature projections from NASA. Using information from historical measurements, local geography, and greenhouse gas statistics, the maps derived from the data display the most localized climate change picture to date.
Up to this point, the smallest scale for a climate change model has been 100 kilometers. But NASA’s new data zooms in to project changes at a much higher resolution. The result is a data set that localizes climate change to the scale of 800 meters, around the size of a neighborhood.
David Maidment says many rural parts of Texas lack proper floodplain maps.
Floods have devastated parts of Colorado and both the Gulf and Pacific Coasts of Mexico in the last week. While Texas had some rainfall during that time, it’s been years since the state has seen weather comparable to those disasters.
But that doesn’t mean that extreme stormy weather is gone for good.
“We know it’s coming, we just don’t know when,” Roy Sedwick, the Executive Director of the Texas Floodplain Management Association, told StateImpact Texas.
That’s the reason for mapping floodplains, so that when the rains do come, people will be ready.
“Think of a floodplain as a railroad track,” explained Sedwick. “Just like the track is put down to carry the train, a floodplain is put down by mother nature to carry the flood waters.”
“The only difference is we know the schedule of the train, we don’t know the schedule of the flood,” he added.
A Cabot Oil and Gas natural gas drill is viewed at a hydraulic fracturing site on January 17, 2012 in Springville, Pennsylvania. A domestic drilling boom has led to concern that more methane is leaking into the atmosphere.
A new study of natural gas drilling sites out today offers mixed results on methane leakage during the drilling and production process, one issue in an ongoing debate over the safety and risks involved with a new surge in domestic drilling.
Since domestic drilling for oil and natural gas has taken off with the help of techniques like fracking and horizontal drilling, a constant question has been how much methane (aka natural gas) is leaking into the atmosphere during the process. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, says Drew Nelson with the Environmental Defense Fund, who helped coordinate the study. “For every molecule of methane that is emitted into the atmosphere, that molecule has the potential to undermine and erode the benefits of natural gas compared to other fossil fuels,” Nelson says.
Increased supplies of natural gas mean less coal (which has nearly twice the greenhouse impact of gas) is being burned in the country. But if too much methane is leaking, those climate gains could be lost.
The study, authored by David Allen of the University of Texas at Austin, is unique in its methodology. While previous studies have relied on estimates or downwind measurements, Allen’s team is the first to monitor emissions at nearly 200 drilling sites across the country directly for a year and a half. Previous studies of methane leakage had found varying rates, some as high as 8 percent. But Allen says direct access to the drilling sites themselves provided researchers with more accurate measurements. Continue Reading →
Attendees filled the Alexander Convention Center on Tuesday evening for a Texas Department of Transportation hearing in Cotulla, TX on their controversial plan to convert some paved roads to gravel to save money on maintenance.
COTULLA — At a convention center in this city 70 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border, Dimmit County Judge Francisco Ponce said this week what many of the 200 people in the room were thinking.
Texas Department of Transportation officials explained why the agency needed to move forward with plans to convert some well-used paved roads around South Texas to gravel. For Ponce, the explanation exposed a long-standing problem in the agency’s perspective.
“TxDOT’s priorities are not in the rural counties,” he told the agency’s leadership, drawing cheers. “I don’t know how they can sit here and say it’s safer to gravel a road than it is to fix a road.”
Amid financing challenges, TxDOT announced seven weeks ago that it planned to convert 83 miles of farm-to-market road in the heart of the oil-drilling boom to gravel, most of that in the Eagle Ford Shale. Following a public outcry, the agency issued a 60-day moratorium on converting any roads. That has turned the end of October into a grim deadline for county officials hoping to find a way off the so-called gravel list. And as they consider options that include taking over the maintenance of the roads or soliciting donations from the energy sector, the officials say they are being punished for their region’s boom. Continue Reading →
Power pole in Houston with antenna and equipment to allow remotely controlled switching
In the five years since Hurricane Ike knocked out power in most of metropolitan Houston, the city now has more high-tech power poles and fewer trees in power line rights-of-way. But there’s no real assurance of a better outcome the next time a big storm hits.
“If you get another direct hit from a large category hurricane such as Ike, you will probably still have the same amount of people impacted,” said David Baker, CenterPoint Energy’s Vice President in charge of 50,000 miles of wires and poles. “But we’ve tried to apply lessons learned from Ike to speed the recovery up and make that go faster.”
Hurricane Ike was a strong Category 2 storm when it made landfall in Galveston, leaving 95 percent of CenterPoint’s 2.26 million customers in the dark. Ten days later, 75 percent of them had power restored. It would take a week longer to get to everyone else.
Dominic Krus was among them. After two and a half weeks, the lights came back on in his home in Houston’s Sharpstown subdivision.
“My wife says the lights are on. I said, ‘Oh great, we can sleep with AC tonight.’ It was a pretty happy event,” said Krus. Continue Reading →
An old windmill at Monahans Sand Hills State Park.
Texas is still in a drought, and it’s to the point where reservoir levels in the state may soon reach an all-time collective low.
“If they keep going down at the present rate, it will only take about two more weeks before they will set an all-time record for the difference between how much water they were designed to hold and how much they water they actually have in them,” state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon tells Texas A&M Agrilife this week. “We continue to set records levels for this time of year, but this will be an all-time record low.”
While the state has seen some good rains since the long, dry summer of 2011, they haven’t been enough to fill many reservoirs back up. The state’s reservoirs are currently less than 60 percent full, according to the Texas Water Development Board.
But you can’t buy a Tesla in Texas from the dealership. You can’t even take it for a test drive. If you want to buy a Tesla in Texas, you have to order it online. (But once you do, you’ll find more and more Tesla charging stations to get you across the state.)
That’s because of state law (similar to those in many other states) that protects the franchise dealership system. Essentially, car manufacturers are not allowed to run and own dealerships. Tesla operates all of its own dealerships, however, and runs a different business model than traditional automakers and dealerships. It argued before the state legislature this past session that it deserved an exception to the rule: the state should allow it to have its own direct dealerships in Texas.
The legislation went nowhere, with lawmakers never even taking a vote. And a new report by the watchdog group Texans for Public Justice tells us why: it likely comes down to money. Continue Reading →
MIDLAND-ODESSA — It’s happened before, and it could well happen again. The current surge in drilling in West Texas is a product of advancing technique and technology, but it’s also a function of price and demand. So if the market will pay a certain price for oil or gas, it makes sense to drill. If it doesn’t? Well, that’s the side of the boom that people don’t like to talk about. Welcome to The Bust.
The last time a major bust hit Midland-Odessa was in the early eighties. Leading up to that time, high oil prices brought prosperity (including a Rolls Royce dealership) and development. High rises went up, and there was so much demand for housing that “newcomers to the city were living in tents, cars, and trailers,” according to the Texas State Historical Association. But when the price of oil dropped rapidly and supply greatly increased, drilling pretty much came to a stop in the Permian Basin. The Rolls Royce dealership closed. Three banks failed, causing depression-style runs on deposits. Offices became vacant, and new houses sat unsold.
Now, several decades later, things are booming again. Midland is now the second wealthiest city per capita in the country. Mercedes and BMW dealerships are open along Andrews Highway. A job at McDonald’s here starts at $14 an hour, with a signing bonus. Unemployment is at one of the lowest rates in the country. But there’s also a palpable fear the boom could bust again. All it would take is a drop in the price of oil. If that happens, Texas’ boom could be the victim of its own success.
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