Michael Webber of UT Austin says energy and water are highly dependent on each other.
A Conversation with Michael Webber
We’ve arrived in the dog days of summer in Texas, when air conditioners across the state stretch our power supplies thin. It’s also dry: the state is in a third year of drought, with reservoir levels at 63 percent full overall, down significantly from a year ago. In short, Texas needs more water and more power, and the two are highly dependent on each other.
Where those thirsts for more power and water collide is referred to as the ‘Energy-Water Nexus,’ and it’s a subject University of Texas at Austin professor and Deputy Director of the UT Energy Institute Michael Webber has spent a lot of time on. “Energy uses a lot of water, and water uses a lot of energy, and this fact is surprising for a lot of people, just how much they use of both,” Webber says.
For instance, energy needs water to grow biofuels, drill and produce oil and gas, cool power plants and power hydroelectic dams, Webber says. And water needs energy to be heated, treated, cleaned and moved. Getting water cleaned up and into our homes makes up over 12 percent of our nation’s energy use, Webber says.
We sat down with Webber to talk about these issues in advance of a lecture in Austin Tuesday, August 6 about “The Global Nexus of Energy and Water.” The talk is free and open to the public, at 5:45 pm at the AT&T Conference Center. (More details here.)
Q: So energy needs water, and water needs energy, and I would imagine that this nexus is even more pronounced here in Texas.
A: These days in Texas, it seems like we’re worried about the grid being on edge. We’re worried about drought, and these things sort of play into each other’s hands in a bad way. As we have more drought, we have less water available for our dams to make electricity, we also have less water available for cooling our power plants. And as that water gets hot from heat waves, water is less effective as a coolant, and so the power plants perform with lower efficiency. So a water strain or water constraint becomes an energy constraint, so it’s true also that if you have an energy constraint – if you have a power outage or a rolling blackout, your water infrastructure might be hindered as well. So the energy-water nexus means they rely on each other, and that means — bad news — they inherit each other’s vulnerabilities. A constraint in one becomes a constraint in the other. Continue Reading →
The Denver, Colorado skyline in January 2012. Denver, located on the dry side of the Continental Divide, has instituted a number of programs to encourage water conservation.
As the region looks at a future of growing population and shrinking supplies, many cities are trying to adapt. We decided to take a look at ten of them, including several in Texas.
A few caveats: many of the cities listed here share similar water conservation programs, such as outdoor watering restrictions or pricing systems that charge heavy water users more per gallon. And the programs described here do not reflect all the water programs that exist in each city. Continue Reading →
A chemical trailer sits among the remains of the burning fertilizer plant in April.
A few months after a deadly explosion at a fertilizer plant in the town of West, Texas, President Barack Obama signed an executive order today that aimed at increasing safety and oversight of chemical plants across the country. In a series of measures, various federal, state and local agencies would share more information and look for best practices to reduce risks from such facilities.
The explosion in April at the West Fertilizer plant took 15 lives and destroyed hundreds of homes and schools. While the origin of the fire that led to the explosion has still not been determined, investigators have said that it was ammonium nitrate stored at the plant that exploded. Among several issues believed to have been a factor in the fire and explosion are the facts that the facility had stored the chemical in wood buildings, and had no sprinklers.
Many of those killed in the explosion were first responders, who had rushed towards the plant to fight the fire after it ignited. Today’s executive order calls for improving coordination with local governments and first responders, and make sure they have “ready access to key information in a usable format” about chemical facilities.
The order also calls for government agencies to find chemical facilities that haven’t provided all the information they’re required to or are not following federal safety requirements. Continue Reading →
Photo Illustration by Miguel Villagran/Getty Images
Despite a domestic drilling boom, gas prices are still relatively high.
The drilling processes of hydraulic fracturing — or “fracking” — and horizontal drilling have made it possible to access previously unreachable deposits of fossil fuels, creating a surge in domestic oil and natural gas production. So why are prices at the gas pump still relatively high? (Last week, the average national gas price was $3.68 per gallon.)
Graduate research assistant Kyle Knust holds a water chip.
It would be easy to mistake the small, translucent, object in Kyle Knust’s hand as just another cheap piece of plastic. With dozens more scattered around his section of a buzzing graduate assistant’s lab at the University of Texas, the thumbnail-sized chips don’t appear to be worth much.
And that’s because they’re not. At 50 cents apiece, the chips are pretty cheap to make. But the technology inside of them – a method of water desalination that’s potentially cheaper and more efficient than any other – could prove to be invaluable.
Along with other researchers and private companies, Knust is helping to develop a desalinating “water chip” that uses a charged electrode to separate salt from water. The new technique could revolutionize how people get water, as well as how much they pay for it.
With new regulations potentially on the horizon, will the fractious relationship between Texas and the federal government likely continue? Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott (and now candidate for Governor) has spent over $2.5 million suing the federal government. Many of those lawsuits, including 14 which are active, have been directed against the EPA. (Texas lost the latest round, fought over whether the EPA has the right to regulate greenhouse emissions.)Â
And the state’s U.S. senators, John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, voted against McCarthy’s appointment. However, Texas environmentalists consider her confirmation a victory. Continue Reading →
When it comes to settling disputes over who owns the oil & gas in Texas, the state’s law struck a federal judge as anything but fair. After reviewing an opinion by the Texas Supreme Court, he said it was more like theft.
“The Garza opinion gives oil and gas operators a blank check to steal from the small landowner,” wrote John Preston Bailey, a United States District judge in Wheeling, West Virginia.
Bailey had been asked to throw out a case involving a dispute between a landowner in West Virgina and a company drilling a horizontal well for natural gas. The company’s lawyers cited the Texas case, Coastal Oil & Gas v. Garza Energy Trust. Continue Reading →
William Christian is a lawyer with Graves Dougherty Hearon Moody. Part of his practice involves representing landowners in condemnation cases.
Texas is a funny place when it comes to property rights.
State Supreme Court rulings have said pipeline companies are not doing enough to prove they can take private land. Meanwhile, an unprecedented boom in oil and gas drilling means those same companies are scrambling to put more pipeline in the ground. The result has been an explosion in litigation over how and when companies are able to take private land.
But while Texas may be ground zero in the struggle over eminent domain, industry representatives and legal experts are seeing more Texas-style battles in other parts of the country as drilling and pipeline building expand.
Courtesy The Greater San Antonio Chamber of Commerce
Attorney General Greg Abbott has filed multiple lawsuits against the EPA.
What does Texas Attorney General (and now candidate for Governor) Greg Abbott like to do for fun?
“What I really do for fun is I go into the office,” Abbott said at a speech last year, “[and] I sue the Obama adminstration.”
Abbott has been openly bragging on the campaign trail of his many lawsuits against the Obama administration and federal agencies — at last count there were 28 of them. But today an appeals court rejected one of those suits against the Environmental Protection Agency over the regulation of greenhouse gases.
In a follow-up to an earlier ruling last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia denied Abbott’s lawsuit. That suit challenged federal requirements that states regulate greenhouse gases when permitting pollution new industrial facilities. Today’s ruling essentially says that letting the EPA regulate carbon emissions will do no harm to Texas. Continue Reading →
State Rep. Sylvester Turner helped create the System Benefit Fund. He will now see the fund drawn down.
Over the next three years, low-income Texans will receive approximately $800 million from the state to help pay their summer electric bills. However, on September 1, 2016, that money will run out. As a result, Texans who cannot afford to pay their electric bills are likely to go without air-conditioning during the summer.
The money comes from the System Benefit Fund, which the Texas Legislature created to assist low-income Texans with their electric bills after the state’s electricity markets were deregulated over a decade ago. (In Austin and San Antonio, where electricity markets are still regulated, residents are not eligible to receive this funding.)For years, however, though the state collected fees for the fund from Texas electric ratepayers, it often reduced or withheld the money that was supposed to go to low-income Texans. Keeping the money in the treasury helped state lawmakers certify that the budget was balanced.
During the 2013 regular legislative session, lawmakers ended the collection of fees for the program, but increased the electric bill discount for qualifying low-income households from 16.5 percent to 82 percent. The existing fund will be used to help pay the remaining 18 percent of those households’ electric bills for the month of September 2013, and the period from May to August 2014.
Once the fund is gone, there are concerns about what could happen to elderly and low-income Texans who cannot afford to pay their electricity bills during the hot summer months. Continue Reading →
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