Engineers on the drilling platform of the Cuadrilla shale fracking facility on October 7, 2012 in Preston, England.
A new University of Texas at Austin study has found that the amount of water used in the drilling practice known as hydraulic fracturing has risen sharply in recent years as oil and natural gas production has surged.
But the 97-page study, funded by the Texas Oil and Gas Association, also found that the amount of water used in hydraulic fracturing would level off sometime in the decade starting in 2020, as water recycling technologies matured and the industry’s rapid growth rate cooled.
Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is a water-intensive practice in which liquids are pumped underground at high pressure to retrieve oil or gas trapped in rocks, like shale.
The Texas Water Development Board circulated the study last week to regional water planning groups around the state. Those groups are preparing the state’s next water plan, due out in 2017. Continue Reading →
Nearly a year ago, the groundwater well serving the small lakeside community of Spicewood Beach, about 40 miles outside of Austin, began to fail. Ever since, the locals there, mostly retirees, have gotten their water trucked in several times a day to keep the taps flowing. As the levels of Lake Travis have fallen during the multi-year drought, the alluvial well that provides for the community has dropped so much that it no longer fully functions. “If the lakes come up, we get our wells back,” resident Wanda Watson told us last year. “If they don’t come up, we have no water.”
For residents, the distinction of being the first Texas community to run out of water during the drought has been a troubling one. People are moving away, and property values have dropped significantly, almost in tandem with lake levels. “There’s a lot of homes for sale out here right now,” Kathy Mull, who’s lived there ten years, tells StateImpact Texas. “We are definitely considering moving ourselves right now. There’s a lot of places that have come up for sale, but they’re not selling. Who’s gonna buy out here with no water?”
But for the first time since the well began to fail, an end may be in sight.
On Wednesday, the board of the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA) will vote on a $1.2 million project to build a surface water treatment plant to serve the community. It should work even if the lakes go lower, and provide ample water. The open question is who will ultimately bear that cost. Continue Reading →
Shrimp fisherman wait to board their boats following Hurricane Ike September 15, 2008 in Galveston, Texas.
Captain Dan, the ‘Flounder Man’ has been hunting flounder on the Texas coast for more than 30 years. In the dark of night, Captain Dan escorts his clients along the Gulf shore in his brightly lit skiff and stalks flounder laying on the sandy floor. Armed with miniature tridents set on poles, his clients wait until they see the tell-tale sign of a flounder, two reflective eyes peering up from the sand. Once the client is in striking distance, he or she plunges the trident down through the flat fish.
It’s called flounder gigging (yes, similar to the type of frog hunting where ‘Gig ‘Em‘ comes from) and it’s arguably the most popular way to catch flounder on the Texas coast. Unfortunately, commercial fishing, weather and certain types of gigging have put a hurt on Texas’ flounder. The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department is trying to stem the decline of flounder in Texas with a breeding program and stricter bag limits on flounder, and it seems to be working.
“I’m seeing a big increase in numbers,” says Captain Dan, who was a Gulf Coast commercial fisherman for 30 years before starting his own guide service three years ago. Continue Reading →
In a few months, a grouse known as the lesser prairie chicken will emerge from its West Texas winter hideaway. Males will do a loud and elaborate mating dance, delighting females — and birdwatchers.
“Clearly if there was some sort of moratorium on development, that would be catastrophic,” said Jeff Clark, executive director of the Wind Coalition, a regional advocacy group. He argues that wind power and prairie chickens can co-exist.
Lavaca Bay in Calhoun County is one proposed site for an LNG Terminal.
If you think the price of natural gas is too low and think the solution is to increase demand by exporting the stuff, who will benefit? Continue Reading →
One source of water in the Texas State Water Plan involves "seeding" clouds to create more rain.
The Texas legislature got underway this week, and one bit of spending that many seem to agree on, regardless of their political stripes, is water. Several proposals call for funding the 2012 State Water Plan, a bottom-up approach to Texas’ water needs. It relies on regional districts to come up with a wish list of projects that will provide the growing state with enough water for the next 50 years.
The water plan calls for a variety of techniques to harness more water in the coming decades, from new reservoirs to conservation, and some of the ideas are more offbeat than others. We’ve culled a handful of the more novel and obscure methods outlined in the plan.
Weather Modification: Cloud seeding involves blasting silver iodide, a chemical with similar composition to ice, into a thunderstorm, thereby increasing the cloud’s ability to produce rain. It may sound like science fiction, but it’s already being done around the world, particularly in China (and even here in Texas). Starting in 2020, the water plan earmarks about 15,000 acre-feet (or 4,8 billion gallons) of water to be procured each year through weather modification or cloud seeding. Most cloud seeding taking place in Texas today is done East of the Interstate-35 corridor. There’s just one (fairly significant) drawback: if there aren’t any rain clouds to seed, like much of the summer of 2011, there’s not much seeding can accomplish. Continue Reading →
Tom Ellis has been making mandolins in Austin since the 1970s. He says the restrictions on importing and exporting some rare tone woods have had a chilling effect on small traditional manufacturers.
Mandolins, guitars and banjos line the walls of the Fiddlers Green Music Shop in Austin, Texas. Every instrument has its own unique sound, something that depends on craftsmanship and musicianship and something else: wood.
“This is a Dreadnought. This would be in the style of a Martin, this has an Adirondack spruce top. And then Indian Rosewood back and sides. It’s all solid wood,” says employee Ben Hodges, as he tours the shop floor.
Each year, thousands of trees are harvested for the tonal properties of their wood, some of them so rare that they’re in danger of going extinct. But the law, created to help save rare species of trees, has had an unexpected effect on the musical industry. Ever since the U.S. government put endangered woods on its list of items restricted for import, some guitar makers, sellers, and even musicians have worried that they could be breaking the law simply by owning or trading in wooden instruments. Continue Reading →
Photo Illustration by Christof Koepsel/Getty Images
The small city of Brownwood, Texas, wants to build a water plant that will treat sewage and return it to the city's drinking supplies. But locals are having a hard time getting used to the idea.
The small city of Brownwood, Texas could soon have something in common with the African nation of Namibia: a wastewater treatment facility that cleans wastewater (including the stuff from the bathroom) and returns it directly to city water pipes, where it becomes drinking water.
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality approved construction of the wastewater facility, with conditions, in late December, Brownwood City Manager Bobby Rountree announced at a City Council meeting Tuesday. City officials don’t know when they will begin construction.
“Some people are extremely supportive, some are not,” Rountree tells StateImpact Texas. “It’s one of those issues: Unless you know all the facts, it’s a difficult issue to get concurrence on.”
Brownwood, population 19,000, has been gripped hard by the ongoing drought. Lake Brownwood, the town’s sole reservoir, is at about 50 percent capacity and dry weather patterns don’t seem to be changing much, Rountree says.
“We’ve been at stage-three water restrictions for 2 years. We don’t want to stay on that forever,” Rountree said. Continue Reading →
State Rep. Allan Ritter has introduced two new bills that would take cash from the Rainy Day Fund to capitalize the State Water Plan.
A state representative filed legislation today to start funding new water projects in Texas, as the state continues to struggle with water supplies and drought. In two House Bills, State Rep. Allan Ritter (R-Nederland), Chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, advocates taking $2 billion from the Rainy Day Fund to start “a new, dedicated revolving fund” to finance projects in the State Water Plan, according to a statement from Ritter’s office.
“It is vital for the future of Texas that a dedicated source of revenue be established for funding the State Water Plan,” Ritter said in a statement. “Our economy depends on it, our communities depend on it, and ultimately, our daily lives depend on it.”
That’s a whole billion more than previous proposals, and Ritter maintains that it would be enough to fund all of the projects needed today from the Water Plan. (The overall plan calls for $53 billion in projects over the next fifty years, with about half of that coming from the state. The lion’s share of money is needed for municipal water projects.) Continue Reading →
Extreme temperatures in 2012 brought plenty of extreme weather to the country.
As you’ve probably heard by now, the numbers are in: 2012 was the warmest year in recorded history for Texas (technically tied with 1921, due to rounding) and the country as a whole. New data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) show that 2012 was a full 3.2 degrees Fahrenheit above average, and a full degree hotter than the previous record year, 1998.
Smell climate change? You’re not wrong. The record warmth is part of an established trend linked to growing emissions of heat-trapping gases. “Climate change is a fairly large part of it,” State Climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon says. “There’s some contribution from La Niña, which tends to make for warmer temperatures, especially in the winter time. But we’ve seen temperatures statewide go up about a degree, a degree-and-a-half, Fahrenheit since the 1970s.” While 2011 had a record hot summer, overall temperatures were warmer this past year. Continue Reading →
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