According to an article in The Texas Tribune, senators on the Senate Business and Commerce Committee were frustrated that the Railroad Commission had not done more to require natural gas producers, processors and pipelines to winterize their systems. In a committee hearing on Tuesday, they castigated Commission Executive Director Wei…
A recent report from Deloitte provides a good perspective on the prospects for wind and solar electricity. Some takeaways: Costs of wind and solar are now competitive with coal and gas. “Power purchase agreement (PPA) prices for wind and solar power are also competitive with other resources. The weighted average…
Here’s a novel idea: use gas that would otherwise be flared to generate electricity in the field and use it to mine bitcoin. Believe it or not, it is being done. In North Dakota, Equinor and Enerplus are among the operators using the process. New companies like Crusoe Energy have…
In a recent article, reporter Chris Tomlinson of the Houston Chronicle castigates Railroad Commission Chair Christi Craddick for testifying before a state legislative committee in March that the State’s oil and gas industry had no responsibility for the February power blackouts in Texas. Craddick testified: Some media outlets would have…
Here is an excellent article in which engineers discuss the crisis that almost shut down Texas’ electric grid: Texas Electricity Crisis: Engineers Explain What Went Wrong.
Article from Texas Tribune, by Erin Douglas, republished with permission: Deep underneath the ground, fluids travel down and shoot through ancient shale formations, fracturing rock and starting the flow of oil — the essential part of hydraulic fracturing technology that’s transformed America’s oil industry. But that’s not all that comes…
I read recently that, because of increased wind and solar generation capacity in Texas, no new gas-fired generating plants are being built, and some are being mothballed. Then I read this week of rolling blackouts in California, being blamed on the unreliability of wind and solar power and the need…
Read about most recent developments here. After failed efforts of the industry to self-police destruction of lizard habitat in the Permian, the US Fish and Wildlife Service has agreed to launch a full review of a proposal to classify the lizard as either endangered or threatened. The saga goes back…
Dr. Scott Tinker and Switch Energy Alliance have released their second documentary about energy, Switch On. A great film. Scott’s first documentary, Switch, debuted in 2012, an award-winning film that has now been seen by millions. It sought to educate Americans and the developed world about the sources and uses…
Two studies by University of Texas’ Jackson School of Geosciences analyzed data on water use in eight major US shale plays from 2009 to 2017. The first study, published in Environmental Science and Technology, quantifies how much water is produced from wells and how much is need for hydraulic fracturing.…