Science and Technology

Frackers Have Launched an Aggressive Campaign to Kill Denton's Drilling Ban

If you've driven up I-35 to Denton in the last month, you may have seen one of the many billboards popping up around town. The billboards loudly proclaim the economic damage that a city ordinance banning natural gas and oil drilling could cause to the city, and encourage residents to vote against th ... More >>

Fracking Emission Carcinogens Found in Denton Playgrounds

A new report published by ShaleTest, an independent environmental research agency in Denton, found levels of benzene in several Denton parks that exceed the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality's long-term exposure limitations. Benzene is a carcinogen found in cigarettes, gasoline and is a comm ... More >>

Proposed Texas Social Studies Textbooks Get Climate Change Wrong Too

As if Texas social studies textbooks haven't been getting enough flack for pointed political and religious biases, a report released Monday by the National Center for Science Education highlights inaccuracies about climate change in proposed state textbooks. See also: SMU Academics Speak Out Agains ... More >>

Is Garth Brooks' GhostTunes Genius or Chris Gaines Part Two?

After at least six years of radio silence, Garth Brooks brashly stormed back onto the country music scene with with last week's announcement that he would be going on a world tour before releasing a new album in 2015. On the heels of that announcement, Brooks also released his first new music since ... More >>

Texas Leads the Nation in Illegally Injecting Diesel into Wells, Which Is Not a Good Thing

Regulation of the mysterious chemicals used in fracking fluid used in drilling for oil and gas has been pretty much off limits to the Environmental Protection Agency ever since Congress in 2005 stripped the EPA of its authority to regulate fracking fluid under the Safe Drinking Water Act. In a meag ... More >>

Environmentalists Say Dallas Is Trampling Nature to Build its Horse Park and Golf Course

There's a fundamental tension baked into Dallas' plans for the Trinity River corridor. On the one hand, it wants to open the vast, unconcreted lands of the Great Trinity Forest for people to enjoy -- average folks, too, not just the naturalists and horsemen and gonzo hikers hearty enough to bushwhac ... More >>

Plano Developers Won't Let Homeowners Install Solar Panels Because They're Just So Ugly

Darn those young vegan-organic-diet, yoga-loving hippies with their electric cars and their solar panels. They must all be moving up to Plano from Austin, and frankly the Plano home builders and developers won't stand for it. In 2011, state legislation forbade Home Owners Associations from banning ... More >>

Texas Is Actually Considering (Slightly) Tighter Fracking Regulations

Just a few weeks after Denton failed to pass a ban on fracking, the Texas Railroad Commission is proposing tighter regulation on oil and natural gas drilling in response to the north Texas earthquakes. At its monthly meeting yesterday, the commission accepted a new set of rule proposals regarding ... More >>

Denton Didn't Ban Fracking Last Night, but Voters Will Get a Chance to in November

After listening to testimony from hundreds of speakers stretching past 2 a.m. this morning, the Denton City Council ultimately voted not to ban fracking, instead sending a petition asking for a ban to voters. But while most on City Council were hesitant about passing an all-out ban -- it was defeate ... More >>

Gas Industry Is Looking Nervous About Denton's Proposed Fracking Ban

The initiative to ban fracking in Denton started out as many seemingly hopeless political campaigns often do, just a petition by angry homeowners fighting a well-funded industry that had already trampled the Denton City Council in court and follow-up negotiations. But now that little petition has ... More >>

Tight Budget Ends DISD's Successful Program to Keep College-Bound Kids Motivated by Texts

Between the excitement surrounding high school graduation and the ensuing laziness of the summer months, it's not uncommon for many college-bound students to flame out. In particular, first generation college students have trouble following through with their fall university plans in the summer mont ... More >>

As Texas Shakes and Regulators Stall, Midland Will Have its Water and Frack Too

If you live just a little northwest of Fort Worth, chances are you've felt an earthly rumble and grumble at least once in the last six months. In the cities of Azle and Reno, dozens of such small earthquakes have struck in the last year. For an area that has historically been short on seismic moveme ... More >>

El Niño Is Coming and It's Going to Be Good for North Texas

The National Weather Service and International Research Institute for Climate and Society at Columbia University announced Friday that the groups were bumping their estimation of the likelihood of a summer El Niño this year to 70 percent. Depending on where you get your online news, this was eithe ... More >>

More Evidence Shows Flaming Faucet Anti-Fracking Guy Has a Point, But the State Is Sticking With the Industry

If an angry homeowner-turned-environmental-activist keeps getting vindicated by research, but all the important government people just ignore it, does the research make a sound? Probably not. Steve Lipsky, the homeowner in Parker County who became famous for being able to set his water on fire afte ... More >>

The Sinbad of Science

As Denton Voters Come Out Against Fracking, City Council Passes Surprise Temporary Fracking Ban

After the Denton City Council had its butt handed to it in court by oil company EagleRidge last Fall, Denton civic leaders decided to pretty much stop fighting EagleRidge altogether and let it drill close to a few residential neighborhoods. Residents complained, but the city said it had no choice, b ... More >>

Texas Commission on Environmental Quality Still Doesn't Believe in Climate Change

Global climate change is real, it's caused by people, and it will have a significant, often unpredictable impact on the United States and the human beings who live here. Those are the takeaways from the third-ever National Climate Assessment, an 840-page, congressionally mandated tome released by t ... More >>

Dallas Jewish Group Target of Extremely Lazy Iranian Hackers

Sure, there are a few powerful American Jewish groups that blur the line between religion and politics, lobbying congress to spend political and financial capital protecting Israel at all costs. But all obvious signs indicate that Makom is not one of those groups. Makom, instead, is a loose congreg ... More >>

Downtown Dallas' El Centro College Now Has a Rooftop Wind Farm

For the past six years, apparently, El Centro College has been planning a rooftop wind farm for its Downtown Dallas campus. On Tuesday afternoon -- Earth Day -- the project went live as students watched on a student union video feed. It's a relatively modest effort as far as wind farms go. The proj ... More >>

Texas, Accused of Downplaying Cancer Fears, Grudgingly Re-examines Flower Mound Cluster

People who live in Flower Mound may or may not be at higher risk for developing cancer. The state already assured the public that there isn't a cancer cluster back in 2010, but after a UT-Austin researcher published a recent report challenging the state's methods, Texas has grudgingly agreed to look ... More >>

Tyler News Director Goes on Rant about Climate Change, Calls Global Warming "Laughable"

Tyler, Texas, which has produced many yellow roses and U.S. Representative Louie Gohmert, is also home to Neal Barton. Barton is the news director of KETK, the local NBC affiliate, who occasionally takes the liberty of delivering a bombastic on-air op-ed. Think Dale Hansen, minus the humor and self- ... More >>

Exxon Is Way More Optimistic on Climate Change Than the UN

We're all getting sophisticated enough to agree that climate change is real, climate-deniers are wrong and someone should do something about it. Good for us. But what any of that actually means is still a major point of debate. On Monday the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ... More >>

A North Texas Family Has Sent Roses for Every NASA Space Flight Since 1988

It took more than two years following the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion in 1986 for NASA to launch its next manned space flight. Shortly before it returned to earth, a bouquet of roses arrived at Johnson Space Center in Houston. "I didn't actually decide to do it until the day the STS-26 missi ... More >>

Denton Homeowners Are Suing to Stop EagleRidge's "Loud and Constant" Fracking Operation

It might seem like an obvious point: no, you can't just start a massive industrial operation right next to a middle-class residential neighborhood. Most homeowners aren't cool with that. But Dallas-based EagleRidge Energy has boldly gone ahead and extracted oil on sites next to a few Denton resident ... More >>

Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson is Suing to Stop a Fracking Development Outside Dallas

Just a few days after the Weather Channel published a damning, in-depth report documenting how natural gas drilling is wreaking havoc on Texas' air quality, a group of wealthy property owners outside Dallas are dealing with another dark side of the energy boom: a really ugly water tower. Residents ... More >>

Denton City Council Says It Must Allow Fracking Near Homes, so Homeowners Turn to Voters

Last fall, Eagleridge Energy won some permits to frack right next to a few Denton neighborhoods, despite a new city ordinance that was supposed to keep the company further away. The city said sorry, it was powerless to stop Eagleridge, because the company had found an extremely clever loophole. So n ... More >>

Wendy Davis' Opponents Say She'll Kill Texas' Oil Boom, but What Does Her Record Say?

We know that a Wendy Davis-governed Texas would probably be more into preserving natural resources than a Texas ruled by Greg Abbott, who has sued the EPA a modest 17 times. But in a state famous for its lax environmental regulations, how much tougher would Davis be? Local environmental issues, pa ... More >>

Behind Texas Electric Grid Emergency Alert, a Power Plant Failure, Not Demand

Grid managers at ERCOT, the manager of Texas' electric grid, issued an emergency alert Saturday. Apparently, a single power plant malfunctioned, went offline and single-handedly cut into the 2,300 megawatts of extra capacity we keep on reserve for just such occasions. To keep that number from plun ... More >>

Texas Comptroller: Fracking-Like "Game-Changer" Could Avert Looming Water Crisis

Few people are kidding themselves that the $2 billion voters set aside for water projects in November will be sufficient to quench Texas' growing thirst. The population is growing too fast and the prospect of drought looms too large. Coping with that will take some combination of new infrastructure, ... More >>

Inspector General May Have Cleared EPA in Flaming Water Case, But Parker County Man Says It Caved to Politics

The EPA inspector general dumped it right before Christmas, when the media had checked out on holiday auto-pilot. Because of this curious timing, the report didn't get nearly the play it should have. But it can be summed up like this -- given the EPA's statutory authority under the Safe Drinking Wat ... More >>

For Barnett Shale, 2013 Saw Drilling Activity at Its Lowest Ebb in a Decade

The Barnett Shale set off a national renaissance in the production of oil and natural gas through fracking. But as we look back on 2013, it's clear that the boom has left North Texas behind, for now anyway. Drilling and permitting activity in the area has fallen to a 10-year low. The Railroad Commi ... More >>

The EPA Says It Was Right About Its Range Resources Investigation After All

When a natural gas company is accused of making an oopsie during fracking, the EPA's response has typically been to come down hard on the company at first but then back away. That was one of the the major plot points of the "Gasland" documentaries. Environmentalists and homeowners accuse the agency ... More >>

Dallas Council Passes Tough New Fracking Rules Industry Calls a "Moratorium" on Dallas Drilling

Other cities sitting on the Barnett Shale are popular among the natural gas industry for quickly handing over their land to be fracked. But Dallas has turned out to be a surprisingly tough conquest. On Wednesday afternoon, the Dallas City Council finally passed its long-awaited fracking ordinance, a ... More >>

SMU Will Deploy Seismic Monitors Around Azle to Learn Source of Earthquake Swarms

The shaking around Azle and Reno, which I will hereafter refer to as "San Andreas MInor," has attracted the attention of the U.S. Geological Survey precisely because the area has almost no record of seismic activity. A few studies, including one recently from SMU, point to correlation between the ep ... More >>

SMU Researchers Link North Texas Earthquakes to Fracking Wells -- Again

A team of researchers at SMU has reached a conclusion that may seem obvious to those who have felt the 20-plus earthquakes that rattled North Texas last month: The recent bursts of seismic activity could be linked to fracking. The researchers, led by recent SMU grad Ashley Justinic, took a close lo ... More >>

Denton Residents Angry as EagleRidge Continues to Frack Near Homes

Earlier this year, the city of Denton approved regulations that would supposedly stop gas companies from drilling new wells near homes. Yet recently, residents in the Vintage neighborhood began noticing some suspicious noises and vibrations. They were coming from an old gas well site nearby. Denton ... More >>

Two Texas Congressmen Are Pushing to Strip the Feds of the Power to Regulate Fracking

According to the natural gas industry, states are doing a really, really great job of keeping a tough eye on the natural gas industry. "State regulators have done an awfully good job," says the CEO of one energy company. "States are doing a good job of regulating hydraulic fracturing," adds the ma ... More >>

This Electricity Market Change Could Cost Texans Billions and Pollute the Air

Last week, Governor Rick Perry's chief of staff Brandy Marty -- his newest appointee to the Public Utility Commission -- broke the deadlock between commissioners Donna Nelson and Ken Anderson over just how much intervention the electricity market needs right now. Both Nelson and Marty signaled their ... More >>

Energy Future Holdings, Texas' Biggest Power Generator, May File for Bankruptcy This Month

Dallas-based Energy Future Holdings, the electricity giant taken private in the biggest leveraged buyout in history, has been teetering toward bankruptcy for some time. Over-leveraged, with too much debt and not enough revenue in a weak electricity market, sources close to the negotiations tell Bloo ... More >>

In the Most Amazing Science Project Ever, a Sixth Grader Is Launching a Home Brew into Space

Science is Awesome has a story about 11-year-old Michal Bodzianowski from Colorado, who recently won a competition sponsored by the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education that will test the effects of zero gravity on brewing. There were a total of 744 science proposals submitted by al ... More >>

Dallas' Proposed Fracking Law Would Allow Gas Drilling in Parks

Dallas keeps promising not to drill on parkland, yet city officials keep look for ways to allow energy companies to do exactly that. The latest push comes in the form of draft of Dallas' proposed fracking law, a long-awaited proposal to outline how natural gas drilling should be regulated within ci ... More >>

Most Texans Believe Global Warming Is Real, Just Not that People Are Causing It

Good news: The vast majority of Texans think global warming is real. Seventy percent, according to a just-released study from the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication. That's way more than one might expect from listening to the people they choose for statewide office and proof that Texas' ma ... More >>

In Parker County, Regulators Forced to Revisit Allegations that Drilling Caused Contaminated Water

Last year, we brought you the story of Steve Lipsky, whose little slice of paradise in Parker County became a proxy in the war between the EPA and state regulators. It wasn't long after Range Resources began stimulating a nearby natural gas well by hydraulic fracturing that Lipsky noticed his water ... More >>

Dallas-based Luminant Calls Obama's Proposed Carbon Limits on Power Plants "Unworkable"

Following through his pledge to confront a changing climate, which an international body of scientists now says with 95 percent certainty is caused by human activity, President Barack Obama's administration has announced limits on greenhouse gases emitted by power plants. Nearly half of all energy ... More >>

Dallas-based Luminant Seeks to "Suspend Operations" at Martin Lake Power Plant Unit Due to Cheap Electricity Prices

Luminant, Texas' largest electricity generator, has applied to "suspend operations" at its Martin Lake coal-fired plant near Tatum. If the request is approved by grid operators, it will result in the loss of 750 megawatts hours, or enough to power about 750,000 homes. A Luminant spokeswoman says the ... More >>

More and More, Proposed Changes to Texas Electricity Market Just Look Like Windfall for Generators

The state's biggest power generators are agitating for an expensive change in the market model that dictates what your electricity bill looks like. Right now, Texas is the only state with an electricity-only market, which means generators like Dallas-based Luminant make a living based only on the pr ... More >>

Gas-Industry Funded Report Says Fracking Made You $1,200 Richer

Is the gas industry mature enough to have a serious discussion with the American public about hydraulic fracturing, one that explores the benefits of domestic natural gas drilling but also carefully considers methane leaks, groundwater contamination, earthquakes and other potential risks that peer-r ... More >>

The Last Ride of Legendary Storm Chaser Tim Samaras

He had an uncanny knack for finding tornadoes. Then one found him.

In South Texas, Researchers Say the Oil Boom, Not Fracking Fluid, Is Causing Earthquakes

Just as the Dallas City Council shot down an energy company's plans to drill for gas in the city limits, a new study raises further questions about the role energy exploration plays in small earthquakes shaking up Texas. Earlier research has linked quakes to the disposal of fracking fluid. So Cliff ... More >>

The Industry Unveils a New Tactic in the Dallas Fracking Debate: Calling Its Opponents Liars

Environmental activists, in spite of the lobbying of the energy industry and some sleight of hand by city staff, appear to be winning the fracking debate. The City Plan Commission has twice denied Trinity East Energy permits to drill on city parkland it leased for $19 million. Last week, it effectiv ... More >>