Electric cars can be three times cheaper to fill up than traditional gas-powered vehicles.
The next time you’re pumping gas on a hot, sticky summer day, watching the numbers tick upward as you fill the tank with fuel that can sometimes run $4 per gallon, you may be surprised to learn that the person cruising past in an electric car is not only avoiding stopping at the pump entirely—they’re also paying about one third of what you are to “fill up” their tank.
Charging an electric car costs the equivalent of paying about $1.14 per gallon at the pump, according to a new tool from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) called eGallon. In other words, the average electric car can travel the same distance on $1.14 of electricity as a similar, gasoline-powered car can travel on $3.65 of gas, which is the average national cost for a gallon of gasoline. In Texas, the costs of fueling both types of vehicles are slightly lower. Texans pay an average of $3.37 per gallon to fill up at the gas station, and $1.09 per gallon to charge an electric car.
Driving an electric vehicle, then, costs about three times less than driving a gasoline-powered one. And it may become a little easier to drive an electric car in Texas this year. Continue Reading →
Without most rice farming, municipal use made up a much greater share of LCRA water in 2012.
In 2012, for the first time in history, most rice farmers on the Lower Colorado River in South Texas were cut off from water for irrigation. According to an emergency drought plan, there wasn’t enough water in the Highland Lakes of Buchanan and Travis to send water downstream. In the months since, those lakes have continued to drop, and this year rice farmers were cut off once again. New numbers from the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA) show just how much was at stake in the decisions to withhold water: if normal amounts had been sent downstream for rice farming, the lakes could very well have dropped to their lowest levels in history.
In a typical year, agricultural use makes up more than twice the amount of water as municipal use on the Lower Colorado. But last year, after cutting off most rice farmers downstream, that situation was reversed. Without most rice farming, water use in Central Texas was nearly cut in half last year, going down 45 percent from 2011. Continue Reading →
In the war on air pollution in Texas’s smoggiest cities, investigators say the state has slashed their funding even as they continue to find illegal vehicle inspection operations thriving in their communities.
“Hundreds of thousands of vehicles have fraudulent inspection stickers on them right now,” said Lt. Eddie Hazel who heads an emissions fraud task force run out of the Harris County Precinct 4 Constable’s office. And he’s talking about just in the Houston area. Continue Reading →
The nation's first offshore floating wind turbine launched recently off the coast of Maine. Is Texas next?
In the race to establish the country’s first offshore wind farm, the University of Maine’s Advanced Structures and Composite Center drifted across the finish line recently, when it launched a small, floating-platform research wind turbine off the coast of Castine, Maine. The Center hopes to connect a full-size turbine to their power grid by 2016.
In Texas, however, where steady winds and a gently sloped shoreline could make for ideal conditions to harvest wind, offshore wind is racing to catch up.
Offshore wind farms are typically more efficient than their onshore counterparts because there’s fewer physical obstructions and a more predictably consistent flow of wind. But critics of offshore wind cite potential problems, like impacts on wildlife and scenery. Then there’s the hefty price tag: offshore turbines can be twice as expensive to build as onshore ones.
The Texas Gulf Coast was at one point thought to be the best candidate for the country’s first offshore wind farm, but efforts by companies such as Coastal Point Energy and Baryonyx have yet to launch. But that might change in the next few years. Continue Reading →
Landowner Stuart Carter, in Central Texas near the town of Luling, has years of abandoned oil equipment on his property. Here, two oil wooden oil tanks that he says date to the 1920s.
LULING — Amid the dry weeds on a 470-acre ranch here, a rusted head of steel pokes up, a vestige of an oil well abandoned decades ago. Across the field stand two huge, old wooden oil tanks, one of them tilting like a smokestack on the Titanic.
“Basically I get 61 acres here I can’t do anything with,” said Stuart Carter, the landowner, who is in a legal dispute with the oil producer operating on part of his ranch over who should clean up the site. Carter fears that the oil well, probably dating to the 1930s, could create a pathway for saltwater or oil to contaminate the groundwater.
Abandoned oil field equipment is a common problem in Texas, which is home to vast numbers of old wells that were never properly sealed. Some remain from the heady decades of the early- to mid-20th century, before current standards kicked in. In recent decades, regulators have worked to plug the old wells so they do not act as a conduit for liquid pollutants to enter groundwater. But some fear that the recent surge in oil drilling, brought about by the modern practice of hydraulic fracturing, will set off worrisome encounters with the old wells.
“Not every unplugged well leads to pollution, but a high percentage of wells that are left unplugged do present pollution hazards,” said Scott Anderson, an oil and gas expert based in Austin with the Environmental Defense Fund. Continue Reading →
State Rep. Sylvester Turner helped create the System Benefit Fund. He will now see the fund drawn down.
At the start of the year, over $800 million sat unused in a state fund designed to help low income Texans, and state Rep. Sylvester Turner, D-Houston, thought there was nothing he could do about it.
“If you had asked me in January, did I envision these dollars going to the intended population? I would have said ‘No,'” Turner, a Houston attorney, says now. “I simply did not think that that legislature, with the leadership that was in place, would take those dollars and put them towards poor people.”
Now, months later, the money is likely going where he did not think it would, into discounts to help poor Texans pay their electric bills. But the budget deal that freed the money up ensured that all assistance will disappear within a few years. That’s left some low income Texans, and their advocates, unsure whether to claim victory or defeat.
Ranchers and farmers were undeniably the worst-hit when it came to the Texas drought of 2011. After over $7 billion in losses in the agricultural sector that year (with most of those losses in cattle and cotton), some never recovered. Over a million head of cattle were sold out of the state in 2011, and ranching hasn’t made a comeback since:
Graph by USDA
As of January 1, cattle and calf numbers were at their lowest levels since 1967, with a drop of 11 percent in beef cattle from the year before. Earlier this year, the Cargill Beef Processing Plant in Plainview closed, laying off 2,000 employees. That was about ten percent of the town’s population.
As the drought that began in October 2010 persists in most of the Western half of the state, there’s good reason to worry that another dry year will be devastating for many Texas ranchers.
Drought is forecast to continue in hard-hit areas of the state.
The rain in South Texas has been fickle this spring. “Oh, we’ve had some rain,” says Ed Walker, Manager of the Wintergarden Groundwater Conservation District. “But it’s been an inch here, a half-inch there. It’s really dry.”
Walker’s work involves managing the underground water in the counties of Dimmit, La Salle and Zavala, a part of the state in the worst stages of drought, according to the latest U.S. Drought Monitor Map out today.
Ranchers are finding they need to lower the pumps in their livestock and irrigation wells, Walker says, as water tables drop. But “the lower the pumps get, the more it costs to pump [water]. And the deeper the pumps are, the less they work.”
According to a new federal forecast out today, over the next three months the drought is likely to continue in Walker’s region, and develop in other parts of South and West Texas. The eastern half of the state, however, is predicted to improve, and cease completely in some regions: Continue Reading →
Scientists warn that wildfire risks could be increasing in the Southwest due to climate change.
Major wildfires could occur across the Southwest this year, including in Texas, according to several scientists on a Climate Nexus panel Tuesday. Now that Texas in its third year of drought, the state is likely to experience a longer fire season as a result of dry conditions and rising summer temperatures. High fire risk conditions raise the concern that Texas could again experience severe wildfires. Fires on Labor Day weekend in  2011 destroyed more than 1,600 Texas homes. And this week, wildfires raged in California and New Mexico, charring the landscape and forcing 2,000 residents to evacuate an area north of Los Angeles.
According to Dr. Valerie Trouet, an Assistant Professor of Dendrochronology (the study of tree rings) at the University of Arizona, wildfires in the American Southwest during the previous century were much less frequent and severe than fires have typically been throughout the region’s history. However, that reality may not hold for this century.
“The 20th century has been extraordinary relative to previous centuries in terms of fire suppression,” Trouet said. “Our experience in the 20th century is not the natural state of fire frequency throughout the Southwest, and the West in general.” Continue Reading →
In 2008, Hurricane Ike damaged tanks at petroleum facilities along the Houston Ship Channel.
It was their fear and they had a name for it: toxic gumbo. It seemed fitting as officials braced for Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
What would be left in the water and soil after Katrina’s storm surge flooded New Orleans, a city known for its Cajun cuisine but also home to petrochemical plants, refineries and EPA Superfund sites?
“That very word was used, toxic gumbo, and there certainly were issues,” said Danny Reible, an environmental researcher at the University of Texas.
And yet, after studying the results of tests run on floodwater, soil and sediment, Reible wrote in a research article that “By and large…the environmental problems in the city are not significantly different now from environmental conditions before Hurricane Katrina.”
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