Juan Rico culls cotton plants growing between rows in an irrigated cotton field July 27, 2011 near Hermleigh, Texas. A new bill would require most farmers to report their water usage to the state.
A Texas lawmaker has introduced a bill that would help the state keep better track of how much water it’s using. State Senator Kel Seliger, R-Amarillo, has filed a bill, SB 272, requiring most farmers to report their water usage to the Texas Water Development Board.
“It’s important to have an empirical measure of groundwater being removed from the modeled available groundwater,” Seliger tells StateImpact Texas. “So we know where we are at all times.”
Most of the water in Texas is used for farming and ranching, 56 percent of it. And much of that water comes from sources underground. So water planners need to understand how much is being used from those resources they can’t necessarily see. The Ogallala Aquifer in the Texas Panhandle, for instance, experienced its largest drop in 25 years in 2011.
Water in many parts of the state is managed by Groundwater Conservation Districts (GCDs), which number near a hundred and are mostly created by the legislature to help balance water needs and supplies. At the moment, neither the Texas Water Development Board or groundwater districts require water withdrawal reporting, according to the bill’s analysis by the non-partisan Senate Research Center. (Some groundwater districts already require reporting, but this law would make it mandatory.)
So does this mean farmers and ranchers would have to install meters on their wells?
The Webberville Solar Project outside Austin is the largest in Texas
In such a sunny place as Texas, some people think it’s a real shame to waste all that solar energy. They point out the state ranks 13th in the nation for total solar power generation, behind such often gloomy places as New Jersey (#2) and New York (#11) according to the Solar Energy Industries Association.
What’s more, Shell just predicted that solar might be the top energy source globally by 2070.
“It is a waste.Texas has the best potential in the country and we’re just falling behind,” says Luke Metzger. His group, Environment Texas, found that some of the state’s only bright spots for solar are Austin and San Antonio. The two cities had four times more solar power than the rest of Texas combined. He says it’s no coincidence those are the the two biggest cities in the state that are not in the deregulated market for electricity. Continue Reading →
Rep. Gene Wu, D-Houston introduced HB 1863 to increase maxmim penalties from the Railroad Commission.
Freshman State Representative Gene Wu, D-Houston, introduced a bill this week that would substantially increase many penalties oil and gas companies would have to pay for violating state rules.
HB1863 would increase the maximum fines The Railroad Commission of Texas, the agency that oversees the state’s oil and gas industry, could impose on rule-breaking drillers and pipeline operators.
“There are bad actors out there that are violating state law and Railroad Commission policy,” Wu says. “The Railroad Commission fines them, and they say, ’You know, business is so good that were going to take these fines as a cost of business, and keep doing what were doing.’ These bad actors are giving the rest of the industry a black eye.” Continue Reading →
Graphic courtesy of UT Austin/Jackson School of Geosciences
A map from the research shows the most (red) and least (blue) productive areas of the Barnett Shale drilling area near Dallas-Fort Worth.
A common question arises when people talk about “fracking,” the colloquial term for the drilling process of hydraulic fracturing — how much oil and gas is really down there? New research led by the University of Texas at Austin says it’s not as much as some expected, but not as little as expected, either. And it can largely depend on where you drill.
A team of researchers, led by UT’s Bureau of Economic Geology Director Scott Tinker, took a “bottom-up” approach in measuring the production of wells drilled using fracking in the Barnett Shale of Texas. “We were looking at shale gas potential in the United States, and we asked the question: what is the production and what are the reserves of natural gas in that shale over the next couple of decades?” Tinker tells StateImpact Texas.
They got production data for 16,000-plus wells in the region, every single well that had been drilled up until that point, and then looked at what areas still hadn’t been drilled. “When that was all said and done, we came away with the conclusion that a lot of gas has been produced up there,” Tinker says. “But there’s still quite a bit left to produce over the next couple of decades.”
Two years ago Texas’ booming Barnett Shale region was facing a slew of challenges that came along with increased oil and gas drilling. Heavy drilling trucks were destroying the roads, employees were getting poached from their everyday jobs to go work on the rigs, and residents of North Texas worried about what kind of impact all that drilling was having on the environment.
Those problems persist. But as the price of natural gas has declined, much of the drilling activity has moved south, to the Eagle Ford Shale region, where drillers can extract more valuable crude oil and liquids from the ground.
Photo courtesy of ANTONY DICKSON/AFP/Getty Images)
Workers process shark fins drying in the sun covering the roof of a factory building in Hong Kong on January 2, 2013. A new Texas bill could ban shark fin products and sales in Texas.
Update: On March 5, the Senate version of the shark fin bill got a hearing at the Capitol. Read about that here.Â
Early next month, shark fins will bring a rare mix of folks together at the Texas Capitol.
That’s when Rep. Eddie Lucio, D-Harlingen, Hollywood star (and “Friday Night Lights” alum) Kyle Chandler, his daughter and the Humane Society of the United States will meet to tout Lucio’s recently-filed bill that would, if passed, ban shark fin products in Texas.
“Protecting our sea life has become a critical issue in today’s society. We need to prevent our marine life from being harmed,” said Rep. Lucio in a statement.
A fallow deer watches from the cover of a bracken thicket after sunrise during the autumn rutting season at Richmond Park on October 10, 2011 in London, England. New legislation proposed for Texas would help clarify deer breeding regulations.
Deer breeding as a commercial enterprise is expanding in Texas, and breeders say it’s time to firm up the permitting process.
Sen. Tommy Williams, R-Woodlands, filed a bill this month, SB 820, that could overhaul some permitting for breeders. Gilbert Adams, President of the Texas Deer Association, said as breeding businesses grow across the state, permitting and permit-revocation processes need to be clarified.
“It’s a long-term proposition, raising deer …you’ve got to have some certainty in this business,” Adams said. “This gives the breeder some due-process rights that other professions have had for years.”
At a panel of lawmakers Tuesday evening, legislators offered different takes on how to fix roads damaged by drilling trucks. But they all agreed something needs to be done.
This legislative session lawmakers are considering various ways to manage the oil and gas drilling boom, from reducing tax breaks to encouraging less water use. And at a conversation with several lawmakers hosted by StateImpact Texas Tuesday night, there was bipartisan agreement that something needs to be done on one issue in particular.
Fracking can get a lot of oil and gas out of the ground. But it’s a needy process. Each well can require as much as five million gallons of water to be drilled. That water is often brought to a well site with trucks. A lot of them.
“It has to be hauled in, it has to be hauled out,” State Representative Phil King, R-Weatherford, said at the panel. He represents part of the Barnett Shale region. “To move a full rig unit may take as many as forty truck trips. And on those thin blacktop county roads, it’s tough.”
Road damage from drilling is estimated to have cost counties in South Texas two billion dollars. Democratic State Senator Carlos Uresti, D-San Antonio, who represents large parts of the Eagle Ford shale in South Texas, thinks a fix for the problem should include some state money. Continue Reading →
In a radio ad, Texas Governor Rick Perry disses California as a place where it’s “next to impossible” to build a business.
“Come check out Texas,” Perry implores his listeners.
Some states are taking the governor up on his offer: They’re coming to Texas, but they’re not looking to bring business to the state. Rather, they want to take Texas business back home with them.
One state doing this North Dakota which, like Texas, is enjoying a booming economy thanks to horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing that are freeing up huge quantities of crude oil. Continue Reading →
A truck with the natural gas industry, one of thousands that pass through the area daily, drives through the countryside to a hydraulic fracturing site on January 18, 2012 in Springville, Pennsylvania.
There’s a land grab going on in America, as the advent of drilling techniques like hydraulic fracturing (aka “fracking”) and horizontal drilling unlock domestic deposits of oil and gas that had earlier had not been economical to drill. New numbers collected by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), an environmental group, show the massive amount of land involved.
“At the end of 2011, 70 of the largest oil and gas companies operating in the United States held leases covering at least 141 million net acres of American land—an area approximately the size of California and Florida combined,” the analysis, titled ‘Spreading Like Wildfire,’ says. “This is a minimum number of the acres leased nationwide because we only examined 70 out of hundreds of oil and gas producers in America.”
The report finds that of the 70 companies examined, eight of them were foreign, with leases totaling 8.5 million acres. The largest amount of land belonged to companies like Chesapeake Energy, ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips. “30 companies held at least 1 million acres,” the report says. Continue Reading →
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