A senator from New Mexico has proposed a bill that could change the face of Texas electric generation. And it has another interesting side-effect: It could reinvigorate a shale gas play depressed by tanking prices. U.S. Senator Jeff Bingaman, chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, envisions a…
Texas is in a tight spot. Electric supply simply isn’t keeping up with consumer demand in a state bursting at the seams. By 2013, grid operator ERCOT predicts we won’t have enough to cover peak demand, when we’re all sweating and dashing for our thermostats. Summer 2012, on the other…
City ordinances governing drilling are based on the perspectives, experiences and whims of the group gathered at the table. It’s the nature of creating rules governing a contentious issue with contradictory information and competing interests coming from both sides — the drilling industry and anti-drilling activists. With that come differing…
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 danger of fracking…
A Friend of Unfair Park dispatches this look at Addison’s new water tower, which is presently making the rounds on Reddit. And, yes, those are wind turbines on top — 10 total, each eight feet tall, the point of which is to operate the water tower and power the street…
Speaking of vacant buildings …Emily Simon at downtown-based ARCHITEXAS directs our attention to a competition being sponsored by Dwell magazine wherein folks are being asked to vote for their favorite endangered historic structure, after which the winning city’s chief preservation org will be handed a check for $10,000. In our…
The denizens of tony Southlake successfully defeated the fracking juggernaut, turning industry leaders like Chesapeake back at the city limit sign. Or maybe it was the low natural gas prices that did it. Tough to say, really. But what can they do when a derrick goes up a stone’s throw…
Zebra mussels are really Schutze’s thing; he likes his with saffron and a white-wine broth, though of late he’s taken to the far more exotic variation with aquavit, tarragon and cream. And per a release just dispatched by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service,…
OK, let’s get this straight: If a natural gas company wants to sink a well within 1,000 feet of your Dallas home, that would be bad. Not healthy. Not safe. Stop it. But what if you don’t care whether your neighbor is a drilling rig? Or, perhaps you’re a developer…
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 known carcinogens…
A Friend of Unfair Park dispatches this report from the U.S. Geological Survey: My near-neck of Northwest Dallas had itself a teensy-tiny earthquake in the wee small hours of the morning — at 12:11:49, to be precise. As in: “Magnitude 2.0.” Or, as Matt Peterson calls it, a “microquake.” Which,…
As we near the end of 2011, let us now look back on the year (without much fondness) and take stock. We racked up one of driest years in recorded history (more on that in a moment). The livestock and agricultural industries took a shuddering blow that, when the final…
StateImpact Texas is a National Public Radio-KUT Austin-KUHF Houston joint dedicated to environmental issues. This morning, reporter Dave Fehling out of Houston looked at the water coming out of his tap and wondered: Where’s it coming from? The answer: “It’s the roar of many showers and toilets using water in…
Over the course of the last month, both ERCOT and the North American Energy Reliability Corporation have warned of outages as early as next summer, due in large part, they say, to new regs issued by the EPA aimed at reducing the amount of mercury, sulfur dioxide and other pollutants…
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 groundwater contamination in Wyoming probably doesn’t mean much. We get…
Emissions of cancer- and central nervous system defect-causing toxic air pollution put Texas power plants atop the pile of serial polluters, a report based on EPA data finds. Nationwide, pollution controls such as smokestack scrubbers have reduced the rates at which air toxins are pumped into the air we breath…
Texas cattle country lost some 600,000 head this year — a 12-percent reduction in the herd — driven by a drought that withered grasses and baked river beds and stock ponds. It’s the kind of en masse decline the likes of which this state hasn’t seen since drought ravaged the…
Ever since the EPA announced new pollution regs that would come down hardest on dirty power plants, there’s been considerable Sturm und Drang from the industry, who’ve been making all sorts of dire predictions about rolling outages resulting from burdensome, onerous, expensive federal regulation. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation…
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 prompted a particularly lengthy debate at yesterday’s…
It was early November when watchdog group Downwinders At Risk found out that Dallas-Fort Worth had set off air-quality monitors more times than Houston in 2011. Yep, America’s petrochemical hub violated EPA standards less often than we did. Depressing, right? As you may recall, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality…
The most recent Dallas gas drilling task force meeting ended with mutterings of how to speed up the process of drafting drilling ordinance recommendations. Several task force members voiced concerns that they were crawling toward the finish line — even after the task force’s schedule for deliberation was extended by…
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 spokesmen offered some…
