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 you believe that natural gas […]
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 up out of the earth. […]
Netty Engler Energy, LP has asked the Texas Supreme Court to review the decision of the Fort Worth Court of Appeals in Netty Engler Energy, LP v. Bluestone Natural Resources II, LLC, 2020 WL 3865269 (July 9, 2020). Engler owns a royalty interest in a section of land in Tarrant County on which Bluestone owns […]
Thomas M. Reavley, senior judge on the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, died today at age 99. Judge Reavley was on the Texas Supreme Court when I clerked there in 1975-76. The obituary below is from the Texas Supreme Court. Tom Reavley, who served for nine years on the Texas Supreme Court before President Carter […]
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 of energy in the developed […]
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. The second, published in Science of […]
I recently heard a presentation by Dr. Scott Tinker, head of the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas. He is the founder of the Switch Energy Alliance, about which I’ve written before. Switch Energy Alliance is “a 501(c)(3) dedicated to inspiring an energy-educated future that is objective, nonpartisan, and sensible.” It produced […]
Dr. Scott Tinker, the Director of the Bureau of Economic Geology, University of Texas, and the Texas’ State Geologist, produced and starred in a film a couple of years ago called Switch. It provides an overview of how we use energy in the world and the opportunities and challenges facing our future in trying to […]
I got the idea to start this blog after I made a presentation to a landowner group in which I distributed a checklist for negotiating an oil and gas lease. Soon thereafter, I began receiving calls from people who had found the checklist on the internet. The organization that sponsored my presentation had posted it […]
From Texas Tribune: A major metro paper endorses a third-party statewide candidate… The Houston Chronicle has endorsed Libertarian Mark Miller in the race to replace David Porter on the three-member Texas Railroad Commission. “Our editorial board interviews scores of candidates for political office every election year, but seldom do we find ourselves wholeheartedly endorsing a […]
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