Robert Cervenka, a neighbor of the troubled coal power plant, has been ranching here for over seventy years.
What happened at the Sandy Creek power plant? The new coal-powered generator, one of the few developing coal projects in the state, had a strange malfunction last fall, setting back construction on the plant a year, and pushing the Texas electric grid even further into a tight spot. The power station in Riesel was set to produce 925 megawatts of electricity for Texas, enough to power an estimated 900,000 homes.
But what exactly happened wasn’t clear. The companies behind the project wouldn’t talk. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which oversees the grid that serves much of the state, said they couldn’t discuss it because it would be bad for market competition. And a video taken during a test startup seemed to show something going wrong. (It has since been removed.)
On Monday, Standard and Poor’s (S&P)Â downgraded the credit rating of the project, and for the first time we have some answers about what went wrong at the plant. In a press release explaining their reasons for a negative outlook on the project, S&P says that an October 17, 2011 accident set back the plant’s start date by nearly a year. On that day, “a number of tubes overheated that badly damaged the broiler,” S&P says. Now the plant is expected to come online in Spring 2013.
But the financial stability of the project is still in question. Continue Reading →
The rule was defended in a suit from the American Lung Association, several cities and states, and several environmental groups, including the Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council and Sierra Club. Fighting against the new rule were the Texas Attorney General, Texas power companies and several others.
Now the reactions are rolling in, so it’s time for another “Reax Roundup.”
First, the state Attorney General’s office says that the rules would have been especially bad for Texas:
“As the CSAPR regulations were specifically applied to Texas, the EPA’s overreach was especially onerous. First, the EPA failed to provide Texas the advance notice that is required by federal law when it did not include the State in key aspects of the proposed rule that was published in August 2010 – but then added Texas to the final regulations without notice. Further, Texas’ last-minute inclusion in the EPA’s CSAPR regulations was based upon a single air quality monitor in Granite City, Illinois – which was fundamentally flawed not only because a nearby steel mill necessarily impacted that location’s air quality, but because that very location actually satisfied federal air quality standards.”
But the Sierra Club says that the rules would do more good than harm. Continue Reading →
It’s welcome news for Abbott, who just last week bragged that he likes to “sue the Obama administration” for fun. The state of Texas was joined by dozens of others, including some Texas power companies, in challenging the rule. Abbott quickly tweeted this:
The proposed rules (you can read more about them here) would limit pollution (sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide) from older coal power plants that ends up in other states. The rule would apply to 28 states, and would utilize a cap-and-trade system for the plants to come into compliance. Of particular concern to Texas were several aging coal plants that threatened to shut down because of the rule.
The EPA claims that if enacted, within two years, the rules would prevent “13,000 to 34,000 premature deaths, 15,000 nonfatal heart attacks,” and “400,000 aggravated asthma attacks.”
You may have been encouraged to read a widely-circulated story last week that declared “CO2 Emissions in U.S. Drop to 20-year Low.” The report from the Associated Press largely credits cheap natural gas for the change, and says that “many of the world’s leading climate scientists didn’t see the drop coming, in large part because it happened as a result of market forces rather than direct government action.”
But is that really the full picture?
If you read the government report that is the basis for the Associated Press article, you’ll find some more nuance, as well as cause for both optimism and concern. The report by the Energy Information Administration (part of the Department of Energy), says that yes, energy-related CO2 levels are at their lowest levels in twenty years, if you’re looking at the first quarter 2012 compared to the same time periods in previous years.
But those are just first quarter results. If you look at year-over-year annual CO2 emissions (shown in a graph above), from a separate report released last week, the picture isn’t as rosy: Continue Reading →
Hazy smog blankets Houston during a hot summer day in 2000.
If your daily jogging routine sometimes calls for a respirator, you’ll want to check this out: a new interactive map that shows you smog levels throughout the Houston area.
The map, a joint project of the University of Houston, the American Lung Association, and the environmental group Air Alliance Houston, displays current smog levels from six monitoring stations throughout the Houston area. The information comes from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. Smog info is already available through government agencies, but there’s one caveat: the data available is 1.5 hours old. With this new map, the data is real-time. “This is important because ozone values can change quickly,” Air Alliance Houston notes in a press release, “and people in sensitive groups need to know actual exposure levels.”
Smog is the same thing as ozone. In the higher levels of the earth’s atmosphere, ozone is a good thing. But at the lower levels of the atmosphere, pollutants from vehicles, refineries, and power plants result in bad ozone, aka smog. When those chemicals react with sunlight, they become harmful. Continue Reading →
(Update: Texas Department of State Health spokesperson Chris Van Deusen emailed StateImpact Texas to clarify that the department’s efforts would rely on data “that’s already out there.”)
Environmental researchers in Utah tracked a mysterious smog problem to natural gas wells. Colorado public health researchers said living within a half mile of gas well drilling sites could be dangerous to your health. And in Texas, national attention has recently focused on a rise in breast cancer in one area where drilling is booming.
But finding definitive research on the health impact of oil and gas drilling on nearby residents has been difficult.
Texas health officials have done limited surveys and testing which generally concluded that the dramatic increase in drilling, largely due to the technique called fracking, isn’t hurting people who live near the sites. But conflicting findings, like those in Colorado, are prompting new concern. Continue Reading →
Photo by Tony Reisinger/Courtesy of Parks & Wildlife
Dead redfish along the shores of the Brownsville Ship Channel during a red tide in September 2011.
A red tide in the Gulf has killed nearly a million fish on the beaches of Galveston, according to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. The fish — most of them Gulf menhaden, but some species of catfish as well — are washing up on the Galveston and Surfside beaches, as well as the Bolivar Peninsula.
The department says that they haven’t seen any red tide on aerial flights over the upper or lower coasts, but that “does not mean that the red tide is gone, but rather that cell counts are not high enough to discolor the water.”
Samples taken at other Texas beaches, like Mission Bay and Padre Island, haven’t turned up any red tide, either.
Larry Lambert and his grandson, Noah, cut hay near Weston, north of Dallas, in the August heat.
The latest U.S. Drought Monitor map shows no signs of improvement for much of Texas, and some portions of Central Texas have moved from moderate to severe drought.
Overall, the state is in much, much better shape than a year ago, when nearly 80 percent of Texas was in the worst stage of drought, “exceptional.” Less than one percent of the state is at that level now.
But despite a wet winter and some good rain events since, rainfall averages from June and July combined were a bit lower than normal for the state. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) new seasonal drought outlook says that in western parts of the state, dry conditions are are likely to “persist or intensify,” while in Central and East Texas, some improvement is possible over the next few months.
Farmers and ranchers are keeping a watchful eye on rain and weather conditions. Mostly, they’re seeing a lot of heat. On August 13, 15 high-temperature records were broken. “The heat has been hard on already stressed crops,” the Texas Agrilife Extension writes in its latest crop and weather outlook. “All dryland cotton has been abandoned in Hardeman County, as well as a quarter of the irrigated cotton.”  An Agrilife extension agent in the county said they’ve had four straight 112-degree days and “near-record” heat over the past few weeks.
But as the La Nina weather pattern leaves and her El Nino counterpart enters, Texas could be in for a wetter fall. Continue Reading →
Joe Crane in front of his rice drying and storgage plant. He expects business to be down drastically this year after water was cut off to rice farmers for the first time in history.
The solution? Building more buckets downstream to catch heavy rains when they do come. And now the LCRA has moved one step closer to that goal.
First, the LCRA is looking to purchase several parcels of agricultural land in Wharton and Colorado counties, where it could build “off-channel” reservoirs from the Colorado River. When excess rains fall, those smaller reservoirs could store the water and save it for rice farmers and others downstream to use. Continue Reading →
Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott has openly bragged about suing the federal government, despite a losing track record.
Speaking at a conference this morning in Houston, Texas Attorney General Gregg Abbott talked a bit about what he likes to do for fun.
“What I really do for fun is I go into the office,” Abbott said at the Texas Hispanic Leadership Forum, “[and] I sue the Obama adminstration.”
Abbott has openly bragged of his proclivity for suing the feds, with some 24 lawsuits at a cost over $1.25 million, several of them aimed at the Environmental Protection Agency, according to the Texas Tribune.
One of those lawsuits took a slight turn in Abbott’s favor this week, when an appeals court found that the EPA hadn’t properly rejected a state permitting program for a small number of industrial facilities. But of the 140 facilities under the old permitting program, all but six have moved, or are moving to, EPA-approved standard permits, making the lawsuit something of a moot point. Continue Reading →
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