Graywater recycling hasn't really caught on in Texas, mostly due to costs and permitting issues.
If water was gold, graywater recycling might be a watershed. But even in these drier times, a graywater recycling system remains a bit beyond the average homeowner’s budget and Texas’ water options. Graywater recycling captures water from showers, bathtubs, and washing machines for later use in landscaping and lawn irrigation.
While some subdivisions and cities in the state already give you the option to construct dual-plumbing in houses built from scratch, the burden remains with the homeowner to install the full system to start recycling. Dual-plumbing allows homeowners to receive two sources of water via two separate plumbing systems. One delivers fresh, potable water while the other delivers recycled water.
Long-time reclaimed water specialist Don Vandertulip tells StateImpact Texas that the dividends aren’t always enough to outweigh installation and maintenance costs, which can reach as high as several thousand dollars. (Vandertulip has been involved in reclaimed water projects since 1978 and is currently active in numerous conservation organizations including the WateReuse Association, Water Environment Federation, and the American Water Works Association (AWWA).)
Why Your Water Might Cost More the Second Time Around
Unlike commercial reclaim systems, graywater systems typically serve a single home. They’re permitted at either the city or county level and they’re maintained by their private owners. For simple systems, fancy engineering firms stay out of the picture. Continue Reading →
As Dallas debates how to regulate fracking within city limits, a new report sheds light on what exactly could be used to drill deep underground.
Hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” involves sending an awful lot of stuff into the ground. A new report by the Dallas Morning News examines just how much stuff is needed, and what exactly is in it.
Dallas’ City Council is currently considering regulation of fracking within city limits, so the Morning News decided to learn what they could about what kind of “stuff” would be sent underground. The paper’s environmental writer, Randy Lee Loftis, looks at one well in Dallas County, owned and operated by Chesapeake Energy, one of the country’s biggest drillers. The company had voluntarily disclosed much of what it used to frack the well last August, ahead of a new law passed by the Texas legislature mandating such disclosures.
So what did they find? It took 38 million pounds of stuff to frack the well and release the gas trapped deep below.
Most of that (32 million pounds, or nearly four million gallons) was water. A lot of it, close to four million pounds of the mix, was sand. Water and sand made up roughly 95 percent of the materials used to frack the well.
Then there are the chemicals, as much as 55,000 pounds of them: Continue Reading →
In South Texas, state environmental regulators are using helicopters equipped with infrared cameras to sweep across gas and oil well sites. They’re looking for toxic vapor leaks that otherwise would be invisible. The leaks are from open hatches or bad valves on tanks and pipes. But what the state is finding—and not finding—is part of the debate over whether fracking threatens to dirty the air in Texas towns where drilling is surging.
“We are being proactive in trying to look at and address these issues,” says David Brymer, director of air quality with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ). Continue Reading →
This map Map shows earthquake epicenters examined in the study (red circles), injection wells (squares and + symbols) in use since October 2006, seismic monitoring stations (white triangles), and mapped faults (green lines).
If you live in the Barnett Shale around Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas, you may have noticed the ground has become a bit shakier in the last few years. And a new study by a Univeristy of Texas seismologist says that the wells used to dispose of fracking waste water are responsible. What’s more, there have been more than eight times as many earthquakes in the area than previously thought.
The rapid expanse of hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” has also led to an increase in the number of wells needed to dispose of the water used in the drilling process. (Fracking is a drilling process that uses a mixture of water, sand and chemicals to fracture rock formations deep underground for oil and gas.) Once that waste water comes back up the well, it has to be disposed of, so drillers inject it into deep wells underground, as deep as 13,000 feet below the surface in the Barnett Shale.
The seismologist uses the analogy of an air hockey table to describe what’s going on. If the air is turned off, the puck won’t move even if you push it. But when you pump in the air, it moves easily. With disposal wells sending fracking waste water deep underground, liquid and pressure are migrating into a “stuck” fault. “It wants to move but it can’t,” Frohlich tells StateImpact Texas. “Until you pump fluids in there and it slips.” Over 6 millions gallons of fracking waste water a month was pumped into each of the wells near the epicenters examined in the study.
Last winter’s poor performance, along with other factors, has created an unexpected positive. The June monthly Energy Review by the U.S. Energy Information Administration says that carbon dioxide emissions from energy use for the first quarter of 2012 were the lowest they’ve been in two decades.
High demand for heat from fossil fuels usually pushes carbon dioxide emissions to their highest during the first quarter of the year. But as discussed in a Today in Energy article, several factors prevented this from occurring:
A mild winter that reduced household heating demand and therefore energy use
A decline in coal-fired electricity generation, due largely to historically low natural gas prices
Reduced gasoline demand
During the first quarter, U.S. CO2 emissions totaled 1,340 million metric tons – a figure down 8 percent from 2011. Between natural gas, coal and petroleum, coal represented the largest decrease in carbon dioxide emissions. Coal emissions were down by 18 percent (387 million tons) as utilities increasingly chose to use cheaper natural gas resources over coal.
In a new story on a metal refining plant in Freeport, a reporter for Texas Observer finds repeated environmental and regulatory offenses.
Cooked books, pollution controls cobbled together with duct tape, and holes burned in the ceiling by ammonia and chloride. A furnace design from the 1800s. Arsenic and nickel sent into the air, less than a mile away from an elementary school. Pollutants pumped into the Brazos River. Those are just a few of the problems found over time at the Gulf Chemical plant in Freeport, Texas.
“An Observer review of thousands of pages of court records and internal agency documents, and interviews with a former company executive reveals a company that operated outside the law for almost four decades, even as citizens, activists and TCEQ’s own investigators pleaded for action. The records and interviews show a facility that held its pollution control equipment together with duct tape and routinely pumped out hazardous metals including nickel, vanadium, and molybdenum in quantities considered potentially harmful to nearby neighborhoods and an elementary school less than a mile from the plant. A former Gulf executive and a former TCEQ official described to the Observer how the company blatantly polluted for years and got away with it.”
Now the company is being pursued by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) and state Attorney General, but some feel they aren’t doing enough. Wilder also reports that “the company has missed a deadline for putting a system in place to monitor its stacks’ emissions in real-time.” It’s an important story, one that speaks to many of the issues surrounding refining and regulation in Texas.
"Dead zones" in the Gulf of Mexico -- caused by algae blooms linked to fertilizer runoff -- can hurt crabs, shrimp and other animals.
The Midwest is going through one of the worst droughts in decades. The most recent US Drought Monitor map shows about a third of the Midwest experiencing extreme drought levels. More than 80 percent of Arkansas is in extreme drought, with 44 percent at the harshest level, exceptional drought, according to the map.
But while all of this dryness is hurting farming, it’s actually helping the marine life in the Gulf of Mexico.
Less rain in the Midwest means less runoff from fertilizers and other pollutants making its way into the Gulf. That’s good news for aquatic life, because it shrinks what’s known as the “dead zone” there, an area of lower oxygen.
Researchers at the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium (LUMC) found the area of hypoxia, aka “Dead Zone,” shrank this summer to one of the smallest zones recorded since the researchers began measuring it in 1985. (The size of the zone varies each summer.) Continue Reading →
A unit at a major coal power plant shut down yesterday, causing concern at the Texas grid.
Welcome to August, the month when we all keep a close eye on the Texas electrical grid. And it can be a difficult thing to keep an eye on.
For instance, we temporarily lost up to 750 megawatts of power yesterday when a unit of Luminant’s Martin Lake coal-fired power plant shut down in Northeast Texas. That’s enough power for 150,000 Texas homes at times of peak demand, and it comes at a time when the grid is already breaking monthly records for demand.
But the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which manages the state’s grid, wouldn’t confirm a short report in Reuters today about the shutdown. “We can’t comment on specific units,” Robbie Searcy, a spokesperson for ERCOT says. But more generally, Searcy does confirm that several units were “on forced outage yesterday.”
There’s no easy way for the public to know when power plants have shutdowns. We just tried to learn more about the Luminant shutdown. But like a game of musical chairs starring your favorite acronyms, ERCOT suggested calling the PUC (Public Utility Commission). And the PUC, in turn, said to call the TCEQ (Texas Commission on Environmental Quality). Guess who the TCEQ said to call? ERCOT and the PUC. Continue Reading →
PHOTO COURTESY OF TEXAS AGRILIFE EXTENSION SERVICE
Nine 'smart' irrigation controllers were tested during the 2011 drought.
A new report by the Texas AgriLife Extension Service says that only a few smart irrigation systems worked right during the drought.
What’s a smart irrigation system? Normal sprinkler systems require their owners to manually set irrigation schedules. But, smart irrigation controllers use an array of sensors to determine just how much water is needed and when, conserving water.
Ideally, the sensors on smart controllers measure water loss due to evaporation, rainfall, temperature, solar radiation, and even relative humidity. The system should then use these measurements to determine just how parched the landscape is and when is best to apply irrigation.
But many of the controllers failed to meet plant water requirements over a testing period of 152 sweltering days.
The reason? Dr. Guy Fipps, an AgriLife Extension irrigation engineer, suggests that some controllers were simply unable to adapt. Continue Reading →
As things heat up in Texas, everyone's wondering where more power is going to come from.
Everyone’s wondering where Texas is going to get more power.
On Tuesday, Texas hit another record. The grid became stretched, as the heat index rose and air conditioners worked overtime. And before long electric demand hit a record for the month of July, peaking at 65,790 megawatts. (To put that into perspective, one megawatt is enough to power some 200 homes in the state during times of peak demand, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, which manages the state’s grid.)
And the previous month was no different. On June 25, the grid hit record demand for that month. Then it broke that record the next day. That’s more than the previous record last year, which happened to be our hottest summer ever. And as this week is expected to get hotter, ERCOT is asking consumers to cut back on energy use during the late afternoon and early evening.
What’s going on? Well, to boil it down, we have more people and less power.
So why aren’t we building any new power plants? There’s a common answer: energy companies don’t want to build new power plants because fuel prices are too low. They can’t make enough profit with natural gas prices so low to make back the big investments required to build generating plants.
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