Many rice mills and drying and storage facilities won't see much work this year.
Today the board of the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA) approved a second year of emergency drought measures for some of the major water supplies in Central Texas, and under the new rules many will have to keep an eye on both the weather and the calendar to see how it all plays out. Rice farmers could be cut off for a second year in a row, or they could end up receiving water, sending the Highland Lakes to possibly historic low levels.
The LCRA is the quasi-state agency that manages the Highland Lakes and the Lower Colorado River. It’s in charge of the two main reservoirs of Lakes Buchanan and Travis, which provide drinking water to the people of Austin and other municipalities, as well as industrial customers. But the lion’s share of the water (roughly two-thirds of it) collected by those lakes goes downstream to grow rice in Texas.
Today’s emergency plan could result in a curtailment of that water for rice farming, but it depends on how much water is in the lakes come January (and again in March).
Here’s the new plan: If on January 1, 2013, Lakes Buchanan and Travis have less than 775,000 acre-feet of water in them (or are roughly 39 percent full), then water will not be sent downstream to three of the four irrigation districts serving rice farmers downstream in South Texas. (An acre-foot is a unit of measurement for water: how much water it would take to fill up an acre of land one feet deep, equal to 325,851 gallons.)
Coal miners look on as Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney speaks during a campaign rally at American Energy Corportation on August 14, 2012 in Beallsville, Ohio.
The ‘Golden State’ launches a massive initiative to go green today; a big coal company made some big campaign contributions before laying off workers; and some skepticism on how long the U.S. will hold the crown of ‘Oil King;’ plus more, in this morning’s Meter Reading:
Sorry, I’m Going to Have to Let You Go (Right After This Campaign Donation): Murray Energy, the nation’s largest privately-held coal company and a major contributor to the campaign of Mitt Romney, announced shortly after the election that they’d have to lay off 163 workers because of potential new regulations during President Obama’s second term. But in September, the company made $100,000 in donations to a Republican Super PAC, Politicoreports, and a total of $2.8 million in donations and lobbying by the company and its employees during the election.
Quid Pro Coal: California begins the nation’s first carbon swap today, and many eyes are on the state to see how it will work. NPR’s Christopher Joyce breaks down the plan: “Big companies must limit the greenhouse gases they emit — from smokestacks to tailpipes — and they have to get permits for those emissions. The clock starts Jan. 1.” Continue Reading →
Receding waters have ravaged communities in the Highland Lakes.
Update: The LCRA Board approved the emergency plan with some last-minute tweaks on Wednesday. Read the details here.
Original Story: The LCRA’s plan for emergency drought relief revealed Monday at a board meeting in Fredricksberg has left many upstream interests with a bad taste in their mouths.
The plan is itself a change from an earlier LCRA staff recommendation to not seek drought relief this year. That reversal had buoyed hopes in many Central Texas communities that water would stay in the Highland Lakes as long as they sat depleted from last year’s record drought. But as details of the plan emerged, it became clear that Highland Lake interests had not gotten the plan they wanted.
The lakes are currently only 43 percent full. Under the staff plan unveiled Tuesday, around 145,000 acre feet of water will be released to rice farmers downstream on January 1, as long as the lakes sit around 38 percent full on January first. A second water release could be approved in March if water levels remain at or above that 38 percent level.
Snow falls on flowers in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan on October 29, 2011 in New York City. In the past 135 years there have been just three days of measurable snowfall in October in New York City's Central Park.
This week the International Energy Agency (IEA) released their annual ‘World Energy Outlook,’ and it’s getting a lot of attention for its predictions that the U.S. will soon outpace Saudi Arabia as a producer of oil.
That’s projected to happen by 2020, according to the report, thanks to a hydraulic fracturing-led boom in domestic drilling. Reserves of oil and gas in the U.S. and Canada once considered impossible to reach are now just a frack job away. But there’s a downside to this boom that hasn’t garnered much attention in the coverage of the report: climate change could be exacerbated as a result.
“The world is still failing to put the global energy system onto a more sustainable path,” the report says. The IEA says that factoring in emissions from new energy development will lead to a “long-term average global temperature increase of 3.6 degrees Celsius.” That’s largely due to the fact that increased drilling will meet new demand in China, India and the Middle East. As natural gas replaces coal in the U.S., that coal is being shipped to Europe, where gas is expensive. The fossil fuel industry enjoyed $523 billion in subsidies last year, the report says, more than six times the amount offered to renewables. The deck appears stacked in favor of continued reliance on fossil fuels. Continue Reading →
If a federal wind energy tax credit expires, Texas jobs could be at stake.
The potential expiration of a federal tax credit could have negative effects on Texas’ wind energy industry; as the U.S. develops more and more energy, some are taking a skeptical eye; and more, all in your morning meter reading:
Our neighbors at KUHF Houston take a look at what the expiration of the federal wind energy tax credit could mean for jobs in Texas. “EDP Renewables North America, a Houston-based wind developer, cut its workforce by 10% in September [2011],” they report. “Last month, Vestas Wind Systems announced it will close its research and development operations in Houston. Both companies cited uncertainty over the tax credit as the reason for the layoffs.”
Meanwhile, tax credits for the fossil fuel industry may be on the table as the country approaches the so-called ‘fiscal cliff.’ The Hill says deductions for the oil industry “haven’t been ruled out” as a way of increasing tax revenue. Continue Reading →
We recently sat down with a panel of land experts at theTexas Tribune‘s Oct. 29 summit on water to discuss agriculture and state water management. The panel featured Texas Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples, David Langford of the Texas Wildlife Association and Laura Huffman of The Nature Conservancy of Texas. You can watch it in full above.
Panels of a photovoltaic power station installed on the roof of a building in the new Clichy-Batignolles district in Paris.
A new report says renewables will continue to rise, Austin is becoming more attractive to the oil and gas industry, and why trees fall so easily in a storm. All in this morning’s meter reading:
Here Comes the Sun: Bloomberg looks at a new report from the International Energy Agency that predicts renewable energy will be on par with coal power in just a few decades. “Wind farms, solar parks and hydroelectric dams are forecast to become the second biggest power generator in 2015 and rise to almost a third of all generation in 2035, a level approaching that of coal,” they write.
Keep Austin Oiled: In the Texas Tribune, Kate Galbraith writes about how Austin is becoming a destination for the oil and gas industry. “Despite its “Keep Austin Weird” slogan and passion for clean energy,” Galbraith writes, “Austin is increasingly attracting oil and gas companies like Three Rivers, a small firm founded in 2009 that focuses on oil development in West Texas and New Mexico, aided by the high oil prices of recent years. Austin’s oil industry, about 4,000 workers strong, is still dwarfed by Houston and Dallas. But the city’s entrepreneurial bent and reputation as an attractive place to live, along with the top-tier petroleum engineering program at UT, have trumped the fact that Austin is far from the oilfields.” Continue Reading →
Wildlife officer Jim Yetter led a criminal investigation of a site in Jefferson County
Landfarms are privately-owned but state-regulated fields where “low toxicity waste” is thinly spread then tilled into the soil. The tainted waste is supposed to degrade naturally.
In Texas, landfarms are used to dispose of the drilling fluid used to reduce friction as the drill chews through thousands of feet of rock and sand.
But a criminal case involving the operation of a landfarm near Beaumont raises questions about how the Texas Railroad Commission (RRC) is enforcing the state’s pollution laws. Continue Reading →
A Texas company says they've figured out a commercially-viable way to turn pine tree wood chips into gasoline.
Got any dead wood lying around your yard? If a new Texas company’s claims turn out to be accurate, that pile could theoretically fuel your car soon.
In the New York Times, Matthew Wald reports on Pasadena, Texas-based biofuel company KiOR. They say they’ve come up with a process to affordably, cleanly process wood chips into crude oil. At their plant in Mississipi, the company says they can take that crude and refine it into gasoline and diesel, according to the Times. They say they’ll be selling it commercially within the month. “That would be a first for the cellulosic biofuel sector,” the Times writes.
On their website, KiOR says their goal is to use non-food source for their fuel, “such as wood and agricultural waste, while avoiding feedstocks such as corn or soy which are also used for food or are grown on land typically used for food production.” The company says they’ll only use trees that have been “grown and sustainably harvested for commercial use in its facilities.”
The project has already figured out the most difficult steps. Here’s how KiOR did it, and what it could mean for the nascent biofuels sector: Continue Reading →
A new study finds that because of rapid climate change, the planet will warm even faster than expected.
It’s a good time to buy into sunscreen futures, the ‘War on Coal’ ends in a defeat for the industry, and wind is optimistic once again, all in your morning Meter Reading:
Extreme weather is likely to get more extreme, according to a report in the Washington Post. “Warming is likely to be on the high side of the projections,” John Fasullo of the National Center for Atmospheric Research tells the paper. A new study by his group finds that “the world could be in for a devastating increase of about eight degrees Fahrenheit by 2100, resulting in drastically higher seas, disappearing coastlines and more severe droughts, floods and other destructive weather.” Texas is far from immune, as our report Thursday on higher and higher temps finds.
Remember the ‘War on Coal?’ It was one of Mitt Romney’s main energy policy attacks on President Barack Obama: overreaching environmental regulations were “killing coal,” Romney alleged. (The truth was far more nuanced, as we reported last month.) A report in Politico post-mortems the line of attack, finding that “millions of dollars in advertising [in coal states] later, Obama still picked up Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia — states Romney needed desperately, leaving him with only West Virginia.” And that went for several down-ballot races as well. Continue Reading →
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