Early this January, a geyser in West Texas started spewing tens of thousands of barrels of salty water a hundred feet into the air and coating the nearby land with salt deposits. It took about 10 days to discover the culprit was an old, dry oil well plugged in 1957 by Gulf Oil. By the […]

This piece originally appeared in the Houston Chronicle The Texas Railroad Commission has a unique chance to save the state’s oil and gas industry from one of its own worst habits — setting fire to over 100 billion cubic feet of natural gas each year, transforming a valuable asset into waste and pollution with zero […]

This post originally appeared in the Midland Reporter Telegram.  Nowhere is the current energy boom more apparent than in Midland, Texas. But with this dramatic growth in oil and gas also comes a growing amount of wastewater. Texas oil and gas companies alone produce over 300 billion gallons of wastewater a year, twice as much […]

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the state of New Mexico recently announced an agreement to create a working group to explore the regulatory landscape regarding potential new options for managing oil and gas wastewater. In 2017, New Mexico’s oil and gas operators produced nearly 38 billion gallons of wastewater – also known as “produced […]

Southern California is now in month three of one of the country’s worst environmental disasters. In October 2015, a natural gas storage well operated by SoCal Gas sprung a massive leak hundreds of feet underground, releasing nearly 1,400 tons of gas into the air each day at its peak. Thousands of local residents impacted by […]

One study cannot answer every question about water pollution risks from oil and gas drilling, nor should it be expected to. But as my colleague Nichole Saunders pointed out, the oft-quoted statement of EPA’s water study – that it found no evidence of “widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water sources”– implied to some that activities […]

The Texas Senate is poised to vote on House Bill 40, new legislation that threatens to gut municipal rules and oversight of oil and gas drilling. The bill, an over-the-top reaction to the Denton fracking ban, stacks the deck in favor of industry and if passed, will undo almost 100 years of local home-rule authority. […]

We all want easy answers. And often times the harder the question, the easier we want the answer to be. Increased natural gas use, for example, can help decrease U.S. greenhouse gas emissions as it has a lower carbon content compared to coal or oil. Natural gas also can help transition our energy mix to […]

On February 28, 2013, something went very wrong on a well site in Hemphill County, Texas: According to Railroad Commission investigators, there was “one injury from well head being blown off when casing parted.” According to the investigators, it took almost two weeks before this “frac water” stopped flowing out of the wellbore, and another […]

It’s not often that a new regulatory idea becomes so popular that one or more states per month climb on the bandwagon. But that is precisely what has happened with the push to disclose which chemicals are pumped into the ground to stimulate oil and natural gas production during the process known as hydraulic fracturing, […]

The University at Buffalo’s Shale Resources and Society Institute issued a report yesterday, “Environmental Impacts During Shale Gas Drilling: Causes, Impacts and Remedies,” which offers a quantitative data review of Pennsylvania’s regulation of natural gas development in the Marcellus Shale. The press release notes that I was a reviewer for the report. While I was […]

I received a flurry of emails this morning congratulating me on comments I made that appeared in a Wall Street Journal article titled, “Faulty Wells, Not Fracking, Blamed for Water Pollution.” It is a good article. It suggests that even if artificial channels created by hydraulic fracturing have not yet been shown to have caused […]

Today, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Vancouver, the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin released a major report titled, “Fact-Based Regulation for Environmental Protection in Shale Gas Development.” The report’s conclusions are those of the authors, though Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) helped the […]

I wrote last month that Texas House Energy Committee Chairman Jim Keffer, sponsor of a measure that would require oil and gas drillers to tell the public what chemicals are added to hydraulic fracturing fluid, said "the world is watching" to see how Texas handles the issue. There has been a lot to see. The […]