A Cabot Oil and Gas natural gas drill is viewed at a hydraulic fracturing site on January 17, 2012 in Springville, Pennsylvania. A domestic drilling boom has left the U.S. flush with natural gas, which some want to start selling abroad.
A new report by energy market analysts at Deloitte’s Center for Energy Solutions downplays the risk that exporting natural gas will cause prices to go up for consumers in the United States.
“This shows why the government doesn’t need to put a lid on projects. This says you don’t need to artificially constrain this,” said Deloitte’s Peter Robertson at a media briefing in Houston.
With fracking producing unexpected quantities of natural gas in Texas and other energy states, there are proposals to build export terminals where the natural gas would be converted to liquid (liquified natural gas or LNG) and loaded on to tankers. One facility that has won government permission to export LNG is in Cameron Parish, Louisiana and is owned by Cheniere Energy. Another making its way through the permit process is Excelerate Energy’s project in Port Lavaca, Texas according to a news release from the company.
Natural gas sells in the U.S. for about $3.30 per thousand cubic feet. Even though the liquifying process and shipping would add roughly $6 to that cost, it could still make U.S. LNG competitive in Europe and Asia (natural gas in Japan sells for about $15). Continue Reading →
In a unanimous vote today, the Board of Directors at the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA) approved an emergency plan that could cut off water for most rice farmers downstream in order to protect supplies for the City of Austin. The plan is identical to the one that last year resulted in rice farmers being cut off for the first time in history.
The Highland Lakes of Buchanan and Travis, vital reservoirs for Central Texas, have suffered from record low inflows in recent years, beginning in 2006. They’re currently only 41 percent full. If they don’t rise to the level of 42 percent full by midnight March 1, water will not go downstream to most rice farmers this year.
Ronald Gertson, a rice farmer in Wharton County, testified that another year without water could be catastrophic for rice farmers.
A massive swatch of rain is coming to Texas. But you may not need that umbrella for long.
Soaking rains will hit Central Texas today and tomorrow, washing garbage, dirt and leaves down the drains. Flash flood and heavy rain warnings have been issed for a wide swath of the state, from Houston to Paris. But the drought will remain.
We are several years into a dry cycle and climate forecasters predict that will remain true for at least the next few months — despite today’s potential deluge. It’s going to take much more than a couple days of good rain to bust our current drought, according to weather watchers.
“We are hoping that a lot of this rain will soak into the ground and help with the aquifers. Hopefully some of it will actually run off into the rivers and reservoirs.” says Patrick McDonald, National Weather Service spokesperson.
A Texas flag tattered by Hurricane Ike flies over a home September 13, 2008 in Texas City, Texas. Climate science says that stronger hurricanes will result from global warming, with Texas at risk.
As any climate scientist will tell you, the world is changing. More greenhouse gases mean a warmer and warmer planet. Texas just ended what could be its warmest year in history, with an established trend of warming over the last few decades. So what will climate change mean for Texas?
“One thing we know just from basic theory is that as the climate warms, and as you put more greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, the intensity of hurricanes should go up,” MIT Professor of Atmospheric Science Kerry Emanuel says. Emanuel’s work looks at how warming affects hurricanes, which have a long history of bringing destruction to Texas. His work has found a very high correlation between hurricane power and the temperature of the tropical oceans where hurricanes form. That level of energy actually dropped from the 1950s to the 1980s, then began going up quite rapidly.  It’s more than doubled since then, Emmanuel notes, following the sea surface temperature.
“From the modeling studies that we’ve done, we expect to see an increase in hurricane risk in Texas,” Emmanuel says. That doesn’t necessarily mean more storms, but it does mean a larger number of the stronger ones. And bigger storm surges will have greater impact because of rising sea levels across the entire Texas coast. Continue Reading →
The small community of Port Lavaca got a boost a few decades ago with the opening of a plastics plant.
Oil and gas have always fueled dreams in Texas. Here’s one more.
“It feels like Port Lavaca is right on the verge of something really big happening,” says Bob Turner, the city manager for this coastal community of 12,000 people. Continue Reading →
2012 could end up being the warmest year in Texas since record-keeping began.
It’s time for our look back at the year in Texas weather for 2012. Although it was a time of improved precipitation for the state, Texas was still struggling to recover from its driest one-year period ever in 2011, and “improved” just wasn’t enough to bring the state back from drought in 2012. It was also an abnormally warm year, perhaps the warmest ever in Texas, and one filled with natural disasters that did billions of dollars in damage.
Likely Warmest Year Ever
Anyone that lived through the summer of 2011 in Texas will likely be surprised to hear that 2012 was actually warmer. Overall, it could be the warmest year in state history. Continue Reading →
As the 83rd Texas Legislature convenes next week, there’s considerable pressure on lawmakers to do something about the state’s water woes, whether it be funding water infrastructure, increased conservation or even desalination. The state’s population is booming, with over 100,000 people moving to Texas in 2011 alone. And as new forecasts out this week show, our extended dry spell could continue this year, exacerbated by a dry winter that was initially forecast to bring some relief.
The latest seasonal drought outlook from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) shows that for much of Texas and the rest of the Southwest, the drought is likely to “persist or intensify” over the next three months. Currently, 97 percent of the state is in drought conditions, with Texas’ water supply reservoirs only 65 percent full overall. And a late December briefing by NOAA on the climate notes that drought continues in over 61 percent of the country.
“During the upcoming three months, a much drier pattern is expected across the southwestern quadrant of the nation, limiting the prospects for further drought improvements during the wet season in California and Nevada,” NOAA says in its drought outlook. Continue Reading →
Under serious pressure by state legislators, the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA) has announced a new proposal that could result in more water for Austin and less for rice farmers this year.
The LCRA had initially planned to send water from the Highland Lakes downstream this Spring if the two main reservoirs, Lakes Buchanan and Travis, were 39 percent full. But after vocal, continuous opposition from state senators Troy Fraser and Kirk Watson, the LCRA appears to have reversed course. Now they’re considering a revised plan that’s essentially the same emergency plan that was in place in 2012. That resulted in most rice farmers downstream being cut off from water for the first time in history. Continue Reading →
Thick oil is seen washed ashore from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico on July 1, 2010 in Gulfport, Mississippi.
Less than two months after BP announced a record settlement over criminal charges for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the company that owned the rig has announced a civil and criminal settlement for a total of $1.4 billion.
While BP leased the Deepwater Horizon rig and owned rights to the Macondo well, a crew from Transocean Deepwater Inc. owned the rig and operated it. In a statement today, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says that “members of [the Transocean] crew onboard the Deepwater Horizon, acting at the direction of BP’s “Well Site Leaders” or “company men,” were negligent in failing fully to investigate clear indications that the Macondo well was not secure and that oil and gas were flowing into the well.”
The blowout on April 20, 2010 killed 11 workers, nine of them Transocean employees, and resulted in a 3-month oil spill that sent 206 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. It was the largest oil spill in U.S. history.
The Texas state legislature meets next week for another session, and there’s a sense that this time around, serious measures will be taken to fund water projects. Texas is, after all, an ever-growing state in the midst of an extended dry spell.
Hopes that the lege will act to fund water projects are high in West Texas towns like Spur, where Texas Tribune reporters Alana Rocha and Justin Dehn visited recently. But even if lawmakers do act, some in Spur aren’t convinced it will be enough to make a real difference for small Texas towns like theirs. You can watch their video report above.
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