Sierra Club on Tuesday sued Dallas-based Energy Future Holdings, the state’s largest unregulated generator of electricity, accusing the company’s Big Brown coal-fired plant near Fairfield of thousands of violations of Clean Air Act standards. The environmental group gave the company an ultimatum last fall when it discovered a litany of…
Before SMU prof Al Armendariz had even warmed the seat at his post as EPA regional chief, he was pilloried as an activist whose research into the air pollution caused by fracking operations made him unfit to run a five-state office overseeing some of the industry’s most important drilling grounds…
When President Obama appointed SMU prof Al Armendariz to the EPA regional post in Dallas back in 2009, it was to the sound of collective groaning from the energy industry and Republican politicos. Only months before, he’d authored a study citing oil and gas production as a major source of…
Let’s talk trees for a moment. They’re a bit like orphans or endangered species in that when people cry out to save them, there’s little push-back, even if little action is ultimately taken. But in an op-ed piece in today’s New York Times, one sentence amid an opus of tree-praise…
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 environmental advocacy groups and…
The city of Dallas has a bit of an issue with gas, one that anti-drilling activists call potentially silent but deadly and hydraulic fracturing proponents call a huge economic relief for the city — one that would provide an whopping amount of energy. The issue seemed to briefly and temporarily…
It was clear when A&M’s livestock economist said the drought had an agricultural toll of $5.2 billion back in August — which didn’t even really mark the nadir of the heatwave — that we hadn’t seen the worst this drought could do. Now we know: $7.62 billion in agricultural losses…
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…
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 time catching up,”…
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 nor Goodell are the type…
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…
