A tower at Abengoa solar plant at “Solucar” solar park
Photovoltaic solar panels (foreground) with the PS10 concentrated solar tower in the background at the Abengoa Solucar complex outside of Sevilla, Spain.
Towers at Abengoa solar plant at “Solucar” solar park are seen in Sanlucar la Mayor, near the Andalusian capital of Seville
A view of the tower with the pressurized steam tank that allows for the production of solar energy after the sun goes down.
About an hour’s drive outside of Sevilla, Spain’s old city, past grazing black-footed pigs and olive orchards, sits the Abengoa Solucar complex, and it’s truly a sight: Imagine cresting a hill and then all of the sudden seeing several large towers, over 500 feet high, with hundreds of beams of light striking them — solar rays from an army of mirrors arrayed in a circle on the ground below. They’re called heliostats.
“These heliostats are reflecting solar radiation toward the receiver that we have at the top of the tower,” says Valerio Fernandez, manager of the complex. The rays from the heliostats strike the top of the towers, like hundreds of magnifying glasses focused on one point in mid-air. The top of the tower shines so bright, you can’t look at it without sunglasses.
Once the solar radiation gets to the top of the tower, it’s used to heat up water. And it’s at this step that innovation turns to a technology that’s been around for well over a century: turbine technology. The solar radiation creates heat, that heats up water, which creates steam, which moves the tubines, which generates energy.
In the summer, there’s enough sun for 12, sometimes 13 hours of energy that can power up to 100,000 homes. And the towers can keep providing solar energy for several hours after the sun goes down, by heating and pressurizing steam for later.
Texas Department of Public Safety Sergeant Jason Reyes walks past the site of an apartment complex destroyed by the deadly fertilizer plant explosion in West.
Accidents at facilities that handle dangerous chemicals in Texas were at the center of a hearing in Washington.
Accidents at facilities that handle dangerous chemicals in Texas were at the center of a hearing in Washington. Some senators are pressing for quick action to reduce the risk of deadly chemical leaks and explosions. They wanted to know if there’s been any progress since President Obama issued an executive order to improve chemical safety, an order that followed the fertilizer explosion in the city of West.
Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-California, said she was disappointed that “little progress” had been made.
“And we know there are problems because they keep happening. And people are dying, and people are going to the hospital,” said Boxer.
Other members of the Senate committee used a recent example of yet another deadly chemical accident. Continue Reading →
An aerial view shows investigators walking through the aftermath of a massive explosion at a fertilizer plant in the town of West, near Waco, Texas April 18, 2013.
The U.S. Chemical Safety Board says the industry it oversees is experiencing a safety crisis. The board investigates industrial accidents. It says recent deadly explosions and chemical leaks in Texas make a strong case for action.
It’s been a tragic couple of years for some people who work around dangerous chemicals in Texas.
“Fertilizer plant on fire, there was an explosion; we have several buildings that have been destroyed,” said a dispatcher to first responders headed to a fertilizer business in the city of West. It was on the evening of April 17, 2013. Ten volunteer firefighters would be among the 15 people killed by the explosion.
Then last month in La Porte, workers at a DuPont pesticides plant called for help. From a 911 call from the plant: “We have five people unaccounted for; we have had a chemical release.”
Four of those workers would later be found dead, apparently overcome by chemical fumes. Continue Reading →
El Nino heats up parts of the ocean, and begins a pattern that can bring rain to North America.
The Climate Prediction Center is out with an update on El Nino.  The weather pattern is often associated with heavy rains, so watching for its arrival has become something of an obsession in drought-stricken parts of the country like Texas.
In October, the center was giving odds that the pattern would form before the end of the year.  That hasn’t happened yet. The reason is that warmer than average temperatures in parts of the Pacific Ocean have not heated up atmospheric temperatures as they’re expected to do.
On Thursday, the weather service said El Nino was still likely to appear, but might come later than previously thought. Researchers now give a 65 percent chance of El Nino forming some time this winter, but not necessarily by the end of the year.
Forecasters are also predicting that the El Nino will not have a particularly strong impact on the weather.
Todd Caldwell works on a soil moisture monitoring station in Central Texas.
Stanley Rabke’s family has lived and worked on their Hill Country ranch since 1889. Generations of Rabkes have struggled with the extremes of Texas weather, but one storm sticks out in Stanley’s memory: it came after the drought of the 1950s.
“It rained and rained and rained,” he says. “Back then we raised turkeys, we lost thousands of turkeys that washed away in the creek.”
The disaster underscores an irony of life in Texas. “You hope and pray that you’re going to get a good rain, [but] on the other side of it, you hope you don’t get a flood,” says Rabke.
A quick walk from where the turkeys met their fate, some new technology that will help manage that risk is being installed — soil monitoring sensors in the ground.
Jim Willis restored his land in Colorado County with native grasses
Helped by $6 million from the State of Texas, prairies west of Houston are being restored with native grasses to increase the population of Bob White Quail.
There’s something missing these days around ranches and farms just west of Houston: the unmistakable call of the Bob White Quail.
“Everybody knows that sound, “said Robert Perez, a game bird specialist with Texas Parks and Wildlife.
He does a great imitation of the Bob White Quail whistle which you can hear by clicking below.
“That sound has become something folks don’t hear as much. We’ve seen massive declines,” Perez told StateImpact Texas.
The Keystone XL pipeline under construction in East Texas in the Spring of 2013.
Congress’ attempts to force approval of the Keystone XL pipeline have re-ignited debate over the project, which would allow more crude oil to flow from the tar sands of Canada to refineries on the Gulf Coast. It’s also re-ignited debate over what could happen to that oil once it gets to Texas.
President Obama and opponents of the pipeline say it will be used as a funnel to export Canadian crude to international markets. TransCanada, the company building the pipeline, has been unequivocal when asked about that.
“It makes no sense to see anything getting shipped offshore,” CEO Russ Girling said about a year ago when the southern leg of the pipeline opened in Texas. “And those that continue to make those kind of comments, there’s no factual underpinning, no evidence, no basis for those kind of claims.”
Survey says: energy executives see U.S. oil & gas outlook bright and getting brighter but worry about new EPA regulation.
Dave Fehling/StateImpact Texas
John England, Deloitte’s Vice Chairman Oil & Gas Sector, at the company’s conference in Houston
It’s been a big week already for Houston’s oil & gas industry with the proposed takeover by Halliburton of Baker Hughes. Economists say it’s one sign the industry is optimistic about the future.
Some other signs are what you’ll find in a new survey by the consulting firm Deloitte, which took the pulse of energy executives earlier this fall. The share — who felt the U.S. has already achieved energy security because it’s producing so much oil & gas — shot up to 40 percent of them from just 12 percent two years ago.
Eighty percent of them said the U.S. energy business is doing better now than it was five years ago.
Not that there weren’t any worriers. Over half the executives said they were concerned that oil prices might collapse — and this was what they said back in September, before prices dropped some 15 percent in recent weeks. Continue Reading →
The agency in charge of running the state's energy grid says the EPA's plan to reduce carbon emissions could put strain on the grid and raise rates for consumers.
The clean energy plan put forth by the Environmental Protection Agency aims to combat climate change by reducing the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by power plants. But it may come at a price, according to a report released Monday by theElectric Reliability Council of Texas, the group that manages much of Texas electric grid.
The report says electricity bills could rise as much as 20 percent because of the carbon reduction goals, adding that the goals could also endanger electric reliability. Part of that is due to the way the plan would change Texas’ energy mix.
“What we found is that the likely impact of the clean power plan is going to be the retirement of a significant portion of the coal-fired capacity in ERCOT,” says ERCOT Director of System Planning Warren Lasher.
The goal of the EPA’s clean energy plan is to reduce Texas carbon emissions by 30 percent by 2030. Continue Reading →
A new deal between the US and China would reduce carbon emissions from the two countries over the next several years.
The deal that the U.S. and China have struck to curb carbon emissions has been hailed as a breakthrough by many concerned with climate change, and panned by politicians opposed to President Obama. But it’s also captured the interest of a group of researchers — some in Texas — who specialize in carbon capture and sequestration technology.
The deal is short on specifics. But it commits the U.S. and China to continue investing in carbon capture, use and storage. That’s technology that filters CO2 from coal power plants and then pumps the carbon underground. Texas has been doing it for decades to get oil out of the ground in a process called enhanced oil recovery.
“It’s always poor form for Texas to do too much boasting, but the source of expertise for injecting CO2 for enhanced oil recovery lies mostly in Texas,” says Susan Hovorka, a senior researcher scientist at UT’s Bureau of Economic Geology, who works on carbon sequestration.
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