Science and Technology

Has the "God Particle" Been Found? Let's Ask the SMU Prof Who's Been Looking.

In the early morning hours Wednesday, physicists in Switzerland may announce that they've discovered the elusive "God Particle," aka the Higgs boson. For more than half a century, the Higgs has been the theoretical mechanism that imbued matter with mass after the Big Bang, so that the swirling chao ... More >>

I See Dead Scrolls

Texas Senators Demand EPA Review of Fracking Endangerment Order in Parker County

Six Republican members of the U.S. Senate -- including Texas' Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Cornyn -- have requested an investigation of the EPA's decision to accuse a natural gas producer of contaminating a North Texas water well. In a letter sent last week, the senators asked the EPA inspector ge ... More >>

Politics of Misdirection: Dallas-based Luminant and Coalition of Utilities Blame the EPA for Coal's Creeping Demise

Dallas-based Luminant, the electricity generation arm of Energy Future Holdings, and a number of other utilities that own coal-fired fleets are attempting to head off an EPA rule that would curb the amount of nervous system-disrupting mercury, cancer-causing dioxin, arsenic and lead emitted from the ... More >>

Why Does TXU Want Texas to Raise the Price Cap on the Electricity it Buys?

Here's a question for all you MBAs in Unfair Park Land: Why would an independent retailer operating in a free, deregulated market want the state to take steps to suddenly raise the retailer's costs? For example, say you own a mom-and-pop store that sells tomatoes. The government suddenly wants to i ... More >>

Trinity East Says Its Floodplain Fracking Plans Are Kosher With the Army Corps of Engineers

Join Unfair Park once again as we delve into the deep and thorny question: Where exactly can the fracking company Trinity East drill for natural gas in the city of Dallas? Today's episode: The Corps of the Matter. A

In Fight Over Flammable Parker County Water Well, Judge Decides Who Is, Isn't A Journalist

Tricky work deciding who gets the protections of a journalist in court. In the case of a natural gas production company suing a Parker County man who blames it for contaminating his water well, state district Judge Trey Loftin attempted to suss it out in a recent order compelling fracking blogger Sh ... More >>

Trey Loftin, the Judge in a High-Profile Fracking Case, is Bragging in Campaign Mailers About His EPA Nut-Kicking

Politics is politics, and incumbents running for re-election in conservative Parker County, Texas, where the local economy is fueled entirely by shale-gas production, want to look like champions of the industry. But what if you're a judge? And what if, at the very moment you put up fliers of Rush Li ... More >>

As Dallas Considers Fracking in Parkland and Floodplains, the Usual Suspects Speak Out

It was Dallas city council member Tennell Atkins who, during yesterday's discussion of the city's still-far-off gas-drilling regulations, posed the million-dollar question. "Do you think that it's safe to drill in the city of Dallas?" he asked task force chair Lois Finkelman. Finkelman was noncommi ... More >>

Q&A with Trinity East Manager: Leases, Floodplains, and the Money Beneath Dallas

Four years have passed since Trinity East signed on as the largest gas lease-holder with the city of Dallas, and the company still doesn't know when it will be allowed to drill its first well -- if ever. As the company's name suggests, Trinity East wants to drill for natural gas along the east side ... More >>

Trinity East Wants to Drill in the Floodplain

Ah, the Trinity River corridor, that swath of green that anchors urban Dallas to Mother Nature. How we cherish it. Unless, that is, someone -- Mayor Mike Rawlings, for example -- wants to build a toll road through its heart ... Or maybe dump a few hundred gallons of pig blood into the river ... O ... More >>

Ralph Hall Demands to Know What NOAA Spends on Magicians, Comedians, Mind Readers

Rep. Ralph Hall finally found his General Services Administration-style confab scandal. No, it doesn't involve EPA employees playing a blindfolded game of Crucify the Energy Executive during a conference at The Venetian. But it's the next best thing: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrati ... More >>

Welcome to Colleyville, Home of the Most Scrutinized Fracking Site in North Texas

The thing about air pollution is it doesn't heed county lines or city limits signs. Neither did the shale gas boom, until it moved into the cities and suburbs, where gas producers found themselves navigating a loud, patchwork quilt of municipal regulations that varied from town to town. It happene ... More >>

What the Pro-Drillers in Southlake Don't Get About the Shale Gas Market

Back in November, we wrote about Southlake, the well-heeled 'burb at whose city limits sign the fracking boom was knocking. In many ways, Southlake was emblematic of the difficulties gas producers faced as they followed the shale formation -- a mile underground -- out of the pastures and into densel ... More >>

The Call for Tighter Fracking Regulations in Dallas Got a Little Louder Last Night

Councilman Scott Griggs kicked off last night's festival of shared discontent over the possibility of drilling in Dallas under the ordinance changes recommended by the drilling task force. Two city drilling task force members, a former member of the Fort Worth drilling task force, members of environ ... More >>

Economides: Texas Lost $7.7 Billion By Not Using Natural Gas To Keep Lights On

Dr. Michael Economides, author, CNBC regular and University of Houston professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, says Texas lost out on some $7.7 billion between 2005 and 2011 primarily because we didn't use natural gas for electricity. Economides, it should be noted, is a vocal industry ... More >>

If You're a Republican Man, You Favor Fracking; If You're a Democratic Woman, Not So Much

You've likely noticed that gas stations have been changing the numbers on their signs to reflect an increasingly more expensive product, over and over again. As prices creep around the $4 mark while campaign season stirs, and energy continues its rise to the top tier of our national concerns, views ... More >>

State Begins Crunching Costs of Road Damage From Gas Exploration

The Texas Department of Transportation foots much of the bill for the road damage brought about by trucks traveling to and from hydraulic fracturing operations, and for the first time, the agency is collecting data with an eye to possibly recouping future funds. Short-term spending for TxDOT includ ... More >>

Environmental Chemist Wilma Subra on the Barnett Shale Bonanza and Its Costs

By 2008, the high price of natural gas, coupled with the novel combination of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, touched off a modern-day gold rush in the Barnett Shale. Regulators were caught on their heels. "They moved forward very rapidly, and state regulatory programs had a difficult ... More >>

Texas Lawmakers Bravely Stand For Astronauts' Rights ... To Hawk Space Souvenirs

NASA was perturbed when Apollo 13 astronaut Jim Lovell auctioned his checklist from the ill-fated mission through Dallas-based Heritage Auctions back in December. So perturbed, in fact, that NASA general counsel asked the auctioneer to halt the nearly $400,000 sale so that proof of ownership could b ... More >>

Rolling Stone Article Launches Fracking Fight with Chesapeake

Chesapeake Energy and Rolling Stone writer Jeff Goodell are battling over his March feature. The abridged version of the lengthy piece, unpacked further by Brantley, goes like this: Drilling appears to be a Ponzi scheme with Chesapeake's founder, Aubrey McClendon, as its leader. Neither McClendon no ... More >>

Did Climate Change Create Texas' Hellacious 2011 Summer, Or Just Make It Worse?

​Texas's pasture-desiccating, road-warping devil heat last summer has earned a spot alongside hot spells in Moscow (2010) and France (2003) as one of the wild outliers of a climate pushed to extremes. A study from the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the Columbia Earth Institute say g ... More >>

Fracking Boom a Ponzi-Inflated Bubble About To Pop? Rolling Stone Sure Thinks So.

Is the United States the "Saudi Arabia of natural gas?" as President Barack Obama has said. Or has the energy industry used fuzzy math to hype its estimated reserves to entice buyouts and Wall Street investment? Tough to say for sure, but last month the U.S. Energy Information Administration scaled ... More >>

The Market Speaks: Texas Coal-Fired Power Officially Unprofitable in January

Coal-fired power plants generated some 30 percent less electricity in January than they did during the same month in 2011 -- a huge drop for a a workhorse fleet that has historically fed this state's sprawling transmission system with a steady supply of baseload power since pretty much forever. Pro ... More >>

John Iskander's Got Big Ideas For Parade of Flesh

Welcome to Local Music 'Mericans, where we get to know the people behind the scenes in Dallas/Fort Worth music. John Iskander was "at dinner with a priest" when he came up with the name Parade of Flesh, his one-man live music "boutique." But it would be rather antiseptic to label what he does as si ... More >>

This Fracking Map: Activists Plot More Than 100 Drilling Leases on City-Owned Property

This afternoon, Dallas Residents at Risk, a coalition of of anti-fracking activists, will unveiling their map featuring what they say are more than 100 drilling leases on city-owned land totaling some 1,400 acres. The colorful visual shows that the extent of gas drilling leases in Dallas goes well b ... More >>

How Dallas Restaurants Manage Social Media

That restaurants are using social media to get their message out is nothing new. As soon as any business owner realizes that networks like Facebook and Twitter provide an outlet and advertising at a low cost -- only the man hours it takes to set up a feed and gather and interact with followers and f ... More >>

Pursuit of Shale Gas May Contaminate Water, Says UT Study, But It's Not Due to Fracking

The University of Texas Energy Institute cast a skeptical eye on the likelihood that the actual act of fracking could result in groundwater contamination. Particularly in the Barnett Shale, where aquifers sit thousands of feet above the shale rock, head researcher Dr. Chip Groat reasoned that the da ... More >>

ERCOT to City Council: Keeping the Lights On Means Sending the Right "Price Signals"

Council member Delia Jasso is officially disturbed by ERCOT's charts, particularly the bar graph showing a big gray empty space between the reserve margin we need to make sure the lights stay on during hot summer afternoons and the colored part that indicates how much generation capacity we'll actua ... More >>

Genetically Modified Salmon Coming to a Store Near You (Although You May Never Know It)

Short of earning a Ph.D in bio-tech science, making sense of genetically modified (GM) or engineered (GE) ingredients in America's food chain is almost impossible. Primarily because by law GM foods aren't required to be labeled as such. So you literally need that degree along with a boatload of data ... More >>

Keeping the Lights On In Texas is Really Starting to Scare State Lawmakers

We watch a three-hour House State Affairs Committee hearing so you don't have to! Seriously, though, the future reliability of the Texas electrical grid is really starting to freak state legislators the fuck out. The watchword these days is "resource adequacy" -- bureaucrat-ese for "Remember those o ... More >>

Rockwall's Rep. Ralph Hall Blasts EPA and Science at Fracking Hearing

Allow us to re-introduce you to the octogenarian congressman who's currently perched atop the catbird seat in the oversight hearings every fracker in America is watching with bated breath. His name is Ralph Hall. He's the chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. One of its s ... More >>

Shippin' Shale: Energy Independence Means Exporting It So We Can Import It. Got That?

Yeah, it doesn't make sense to us either. A couple of weeks ago we asked if America could stop pretending that politicians and their benefactors in the energy industry actually give two shits about "energy independence" or "energy security," or any of the other portent-laden, focus-grouped catch phr ... More >>

On Flood Control, Dallas Better Think Nationally or Be Ready to Drown Locally

Man, talk about whistling past the graveyard. At yesterday's Dallas City Council meeting, council members Tennell Atkins and Delia Jasso asked good questions about the city's flood control plans, and City Manager Mary Suhm and her assistant, Jill Jordan, gave good answers. But it was all deck chairs ... More >>

Dueling Research: Fracked Shale Gas Worse For Climate Change Than Coal! Or, The Opposite!

In the rarefied halls of Cornell, the atmospheric-science equivalent of the gauntlet has been thrown. At stake is nothing less than the suitability of one of the most plentiful, domestically producible forms of energy in North America to replace a fuel speeding climate change and emitting tons of kn ... More >>

Shippin' Shale, or: What's That You Say About Our Energy Independence?

​The days of lease-bearing landmen making it rain on the Barnett Shale are over. The industry became so proficient at fracturing the rock thousands of feet beneath the surface and extracting the gas trapped within that they glutted the market. Gas prices took a swan dive and have stagnated eve ... More >>

As Physicists Near Discovery of God Particle, A Word With SMU Prof Involved In the Search

Via.​You've probably heard that an international contingent of physicists in Switzerland is this close to identifying the Higgs boson, aka the "God particle." Currently, the Higgs is the theoretical mechanism that explains how matter obtained mass following the Big Bang. The theory is that it ... More >>

EPA Report Ties Fracking To Groundwater Contamination in Wyoming. But What Does That Mean For Texas?

Photo by Taryn Walker A gas well in Arlington​For folks in Dallas, where the council-appointed gas drilling task force is running to stand still, or in Southlake, the subject of a recent cover story on towns grappling with urban drilling, this EPA report released today tying fracking to ground ... More >>

What Does City Hall Have to Say About Levee Report? No. Really. I'm Asking.

​This is Day Two of Trinity River levee stories from me, which I realize is Day Too Many, but ... well, sorry. I'm just sorry about it, but I cannot let this moment pass without making an observation. Possibly an observation and a half. It'll be over quickly. First, half an observation. I sta ... More >>

Gas Drilling Task Force Mulls Over Possibility of Injection Wells For Frack Water Disposal

Via.​Injection wells, like most aspects of gas drilling, elicit conflicting opinions, contradictory data and the frequent, familiar demand: "Not in my backyard!". While the wells used for the disposal of produced fracking water are not currently allowed within Dallas city limits, the issue pro ... More >>

Fear and Fracking in Southlake

In one of America's wealthiest suburbs, an unlikely band of drilling opponents helped drive away the world's biggest energy companies. Did they save the town or ruin it?

UT Southwestern Docs May Have Found the Pathway to Revolutionary Cancer Treatment

Researchers at UT Southwestern published a study in the journal Nature Sunday identifying a cancer-specific metabolic pathway that fuels only the growth of certain kinds of kidney and adrenal tumors. This is a pretty remarkable finding, chiefly because if you can halt that specific metabolic process ... More >>

Local Anti-Gas Drilling Activist Catches Execs Pushing PSYOP to Deal With "Insurgency"

​Last week, during an oil-and-gas drilling confab at the Hyatt Regency in Houston, execs turned their attention to a very touchy subject: how to get folks decidedly against gas drilling on their side. At which point, according to audio first obtained by CNBC earlier this week, gas-drilling spo ... More >>

Rick Perry, Stem Cell Therapy and the Battle Between Medical Freedom and Opportunism

​The Texas Medical Board is putting off until April a vote on how to regulate adult stem cell therapy, which involves using tissues from one's own body rather than controversial stem cells cultivated from human embryos. We don't blame 'em. This issue is thornier than a Texas mesquite thicket, ... More >>

There Are No Texas Oysters in Your Near Future

Steven Doyle​Houston-based food journalist Robb Walsh wrote yesterday about the red tide outbreak, which has caused the delayed opening of Texas' oyster beds. Oyster harvesting was closed until further notice by the Texas Department of Health State Services (DSHS) on October 26, leaving Walsh ... More >>

"Frack is Whack" and Other Highlights From Gas Drilling Task Force's Public Hearing

Photos by Leslie MinoraAnti-drilling activists show their support for one of the public speakers.​At last night's Gas Drilling Task Force public hearing at Dallas City, citizens' outcries ranged from polite thank-yous to pleas for tighter restrictions all the way to full-on verbal assaults tha ... More >>

There's Another Gas Drilling Public Hearing Tomorrow. So Where Is City Heading, Anyway?

Photo by Taryn WalkerDrill, maybe, drill.​As chair of the city's gas drilling task force, Lois Finkelman has a pretty tough job, directing task force meetings, guiding discussions, fielding calls and emails from concerned citizens. (Did we mentioned she doesn't get paid? Strictly voluntary.). ... More >>

While Faraway Lenders Grapple with Fracking, a Word From Local Appraiser in the Trenches

Photo by Taryn Walker​A rig in ArlingtonThe New York Times ran an interesting story Thursday on the growing reluctance of banks to grant mortgages to owners of properties that have been leased for gas drilling in the northeast. Landowners often aren't giving banks a heads up before signing on ... More >>

After Months of Debate, Southlake Keeps 1,000-Foot Setbacks From Gas Wells to Homes

​The Southlake City Council Hall, once packed from floor to gallery with residents for whom gas drilling in town was either a looming menace or a windfall, had only a smattering of attendees a little after 11 last night. Many had already wearied of the debate, which had raged since February an ... More >>

What the Frack: Task Force Isn't Done, But City Moves Closer to Issuing First Drilling Permit

Click to enlarge this map from the city's April gas drilling ordinance presentation​XTO and Trinity East, two of the companies that have paid the city big money and signed leases to drill for gas within the city limits, have agreed to wait 30 months while the city rewrites its gas drilling ord ... More >>