Jake White, a Jefferson Country farmer, looks at a section of the Crosstex NGL pipeline before it is buried under his field.
This is part one of a three-part series devoted to looking at efforts to overhaul eminent domain in Texas and what may come next for landowners, pipeline companies, and the oil and gas industry. Read Part Two here.
At Margaret OâKeefeâs farm, outside of Beaumont in East Texas, they grow high quality Bermuda grass. The fields are flat, vibrant light green and dotted with crawfish burrows. They’re surrounded by woods of a darker, richer green.
The land has deep significance to the family. OâKeefe inherited it from her mother who divided it among her eight children.
âShe used to call it ‘Enchanted Valley,'” O’Keefe reminisced on a muggy summer afternoon while driving through her fields. “Sometimes it rains here and it wonât rain anywhere else. And sometimes it rains outside of here and rain never touches here.â
Her ‘Enchanted Valley’ also lies in the path of the Crosstex NGL Pipeline. Thatâs a 130-mile, multimillion-dollar project to funnel natural gas liquids from Texas to processing plants in Louisiana.
All across the state, a rush is on to build up infrastructure to transport the vast reserves of oil and gas unleashed by hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” Pipelines are the preferred method. But, as is the case at the O’Keefe’s farm, the plans of the pipeline companies often clash with the desires of landowners. Continue Reading →
The most recent Texas drought map released by the US drought monitor on Tuesday.
Texas is now in its third year of droughtâbut is the end in sight, or are conditions getting worse?
Far more of the state is in extreme or exceptional drought now than in July 2012. The Panhandle and the Southeast Texas coast, which are important regions for ranching and agriculture, have been especially hard-hit. According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, over 90 percent of Texas is in drought, and about 35 percent is in extreme drought.
To prevent water shortages, 665 public water systems have implemented mandatory water restrictions, according to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. In many rural areas, farm and pastureland soils are dry, and grasshoppers, which eat crops, have become a problem. (The insectsâ populations increase during droughts because the fungus that naturally limits their growth does not grow without moistureâalthough an extreme drought can prevent grasshopper eggs from hatching.)
The drought is not just a Texas problem. Most of the American West is in drought. The worst-affected regions are the state of New Mexico, and the entire Ogallala Aquifer region, stretching from the Texas Panhandle to Nebraska.
Federal agencies announced Wednesday that Shell Oil has agreed to pay $115 million to install pollution controls at their refinery and chemical plant in Deer Park, Texas to resolve alleged violations of the Clean Air Act. On top of that, the company will pay a $2.6 million civil penalty, and spend another million installing a monitoring system to detect benzene levels at the edges of the plant, which are near a neighborhood and school. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says those levels will be available to the public online.
The major spending for pollution controls will be on reducing and cleaning up flaring, a process where gases are burned off. Â As StateImpact Texas has reported, flaring of waste near fenceline communities like the one in Deer Park is suspected to have detrimental health effects and in some cases create dangerous conditions. The EPA says Shell will “recover and recycle” waste gases (it isn’t clear how much), which the agency says is the first time a chemical refinery has agreed to do so.
EPA says the new agreement will reduce pollution and carbon dioxide emissions.
âThis case is part of EPAâs nationwide enforcement effort to protect fenceline neighborhoods by significantly reducing toxic pollution from flares and making information about pollution quickly available to affected communities,” said Cynthia Giles, assistant administrator of EPAâs Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance, in a statement.
This year, students at Rice University in Houston developed a shoe that can charge a batteryâand may someday be able to recharge cell phones and pacemakers. At Rice and other universities, electronic clothing (aka “smart clothes”) is being developed that has the potential to change how people monitor their health, protect themselves from disease, and address a variety of other problems.
Riceâs generator shoe is still a prototype. The shoe cannot yet produce enough usable power for portable electronics, and it is made impractical by a clanking metal bar around the heel. In the fall, however, a new group of engineering students will begin refining the existing model.
But some electronic clothes are closer to becoming part of Americansâ wardrobesâif their inventors can find corporate partners. Electronic fibers already developed by researchers at Cornell University in New York can detect disease and radiation, control the release of pesticides, kill bacteria, and capture hazardous gases. Cornell has filed patents for these fibers, and in the not-so-distant future, some of them may be found in medical clinics, disaster zones, and even ordinary clothing stores. Continue Reading →
The deadly explosion ripped through the fertilizer plant late on April 13, injuring more than 200 people, destroying 50 homes and damaging other buildings.
In a letter to Texas Governor Rick Perry and governors of other states today, Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) called on state leaders to do more to prevent disasters at fertilizer plants like the one last April in West, Texas.
“The federal government isn’t doing enough right now, and I’m going to lay out what I think we should do,” Boxer, chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said at a press conference in Washington today. “But until that time, if there’s even one more tragic death from improper storage of ammonium nitrate, we’ll have lost this opportunity.”
At a hearing of the committee in late June, testimony showed that the fertilizer plant in West had no sprinkler system, stored ammonium nitrate in a wood building, and wasn’t subject to a fire code.
“I want the people of West, Texas to know that I don’t intend to stop after one hearing,” Boxer said. “I am keeping my focus on this issue because I know what has to be done to save lives.” Continue Reading →
Rice has been growing in Texas since the 1800s, but for the past two years most rice farmers in Southeast Texas along the Lower Colorado River have been cut off from their usual water supplies because of the ongoing Texas drought. It’s possible they will be cut off a third time next year, leading to the question: can rice farming continue along the Lower Colorado River?
It they are cut off again next year, rice farmers on the Lower Colorado expect to lose the crop insurance benefits that have helped sustain them through the last two years without water. Some have begun planting less water-intensive alternative crops, such as sorghum and soy beans, to generate income on farms that are otherwise in economic limbo. But in this humid, once-swampy region stretching to the Gulf Coast, some rice farmers say that growing crops other than rice is not a permanently viable solution.
Coal on its way to Luminant's Big Brown power plant in Freestone County
Last fall, a newspaper article caught the eye of staff members at the Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates coal mining.
“Analysts: TXU-Luminant bankruptcy possible next year,” read a headline in the Dallas Morning News.
That caused concern at the Railroad Commission because a related company, Luminant Mining, is on the hook to cover around $1 billion to restore Texas land damaged by strip mining for coal.
Luminant — operator of eight of the 20 coal mines in Texas — maintains it can cover the cost of reclamation despite any possible reorganization under Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code.
The newspaper article would eventually be mentioned in an official order from the Railroad Commission that, in part, called for tighter monitoring of Luminant’s financial status.
As the Railroad Commission’s spokesperson Ramona Nye explained in an email to StateImpact, Luminant Mining is “now required to submit quarterly unaudited statements to the Commission and certify that they continue to meet the financial requirements of the Texas Coal Mining Regulations.”
A Conversation with Kate Galbraith and Asher Price
Texas is the oil and gas capitol of the country, with more rigs than any other state. With all that fossil fuel comes other industries, like refining and manufacturing, which also means Texas is the biggest polluter in the country. But in a surprising twist, the state has also become a leader in green energy: Texas has more wind energy than any other state, more than most countries even.
In their new book, ‘The Great Texas Wind Rush,’ reporters Kate Galbraith and Asher Price tell the story of how Texas became an unlikely leader in wind energy. It’s a story of dust bowls, “windcatters” and strange political and ideological bedfellows.
“I just thought it was incredible that the oil and gas state had become, in 2006, number one in wind energy, surpassing California of all places,” Galbraith, a former reporter for the Texas Tribune (a partner of StateImpact Texas), says of their inspiration to write the book. “Somehow they planted all these turbines in the Western Plains, and there it went!”
Harvey Gebhard, CEO of the Lone Star Barbecue Society
Listen to Harvey Gebhard talk about grilling and you can almost smell the smoke. Gebhard is the CEO of the Lone Star Barbecue Society, a group that organizes charity cook-offs.
âGet the smoke going, and stand over it and let the smoke get in your eyes,â he advised me in a recent interview. â[Your eyes] get to watering, and your nose gets to running, and all your friends come around. âHey man, what are you cooking!? Hey man, when’s it gonna be ready!?â
âItâs a Texas thing, man!â He concluded, almost lost in revery.
As you can tell, the appeal of grilling isnât all about the food for Gebhard. Itâs about the smoke. For him, recent research from The University of California, Davis is about as unwelcome as rain on the Fourth of July. The study highlights the danger of smoke from outdoor grilling to public health.
Tom Bragg, left, of Sunpro Inc., works on finishing filling his truck with water as Gary Wortman takes off the filler hose from his truck after filling up with water at a Chesapeake Energy Corporation fresh water collection station at a sand and gravel pit, May 31, 2012, in Carroll County, Ohio.
From ProPublica:
When the Environmental Protection Agency abruptly retreated on its multimillion-dollar investigation into water contamination in a central Wyoming natural gas field last month, it shocked environmentalists and energy industry supporters alike.
In 2011, the agency had issued a blockbuster draft report saying that the controversial practice of fracking was to blame for the pollution of an aquifer deep below the town of Pavillion, Wy. â the first time such a claim had been based on a scientific analysis.
The study drew heated criticism over its methodology and awaited a peer review that promised to settle the dispute. Now the EPA will instead hand the study over to the state of Wyoming, whose research will be funded by EnCana, the very drilling company whose wells may have caused the contamination.
Industry advocates say the EPA’s turnabout reflects an overdue recognition that it had over-reached on fracking and that its science was critically flawed.
But environmentalists see an agency that is systematically disengaging from any research that could be perceived as questioning the safety of fracking or oil drilling, even as President Obama lays out a plan to combat climate change that rests heavily on the use of natural gas. Continue Reading →
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A Conversation with Kate Galbraith and Asher Price
