Texas Environmental News - Week 42 (courtesy of West Texas Wind)

Protesters disrupted the annual Energy Transfer Partners shareholders meeting last week at a Hilton in Dallas. Holding signs outside the hotel and chanting “Water is Life,” the protesters seemed most irked about the ETP owned Bayou Bridge Pipeline that crosses 700 Louisiana waterways in route to the Mississippi River where North Dakota crude will be exported. Inside the meeting, protesters notified stock holders that ETP had the worst safety record in the industry, with toxic spills occurring every 11 days. The protesters also questioned the complicity of shareholder investment in profitable yet ostensible socially and environmentally bankrupt corporations. Billionaire and Chairman of the Board, Kelsey Warren, reportedly fled the room after a water main burst. Two arrests were made.

The EPA is now considering lowering the definitional standards of clean water under the Clean Water Act according to the Houston Chronicle. Should the water standards be lowered by the Trump Administration, it will enable the oil&gas industry to rid themselves of waste water more conveniently.  Lakes, streams, city water treatment centers and other surface settings could be environmentally challenged. Dirtier clean water discharged back into surface re-circulation keeps the water in the hydrologic cycle but contamination has always been the reason why oil field waste water has been injected into deep disposal wells, some as deep as 15,000 feet. Texas has over 250,000 of them. But now as the supply of deep waste disposal wells shrink as new concerns about earthquake pro-genesis and water table pollution become part of the Leave Fossil Fuels in the Ground debate, Permian operators are scrambling to find ways to be rid of the 660 million gallons of waste water generated per day in the region. Waste water pipelines to whoosh waste to cheaper dumping grounds and new filtering processes are some of the potential solutions but none represent as cheap an alternative to the industry as dumping lower quality water onto the surface environment.

Settlement funds for the BP Deepwater-Horizon Oil Spill of 2010 are slowly funding coastal restoration projects in Texas. The Texas share, 238 million dollars, has funded in part four big projects to date according to the Houston Chronicle. The cargo ship “Kracken” was sunk of the coast of Freeport as part of a series of artificial reefs to create habitat for recreational fishing. 10.7 million funded the redevelopment of Galveston Island State Park. Three rookery islands in Galveston and Matagorda Bays are the recipient of $20 million to help protect herons, pelicans and gulls at the Big Bogg National Wildlife Refuge. And another 20 million has been designated for Kemp’s Ridley Sea Turtle habitat. Although Texas nesting numbers were down for several years after the 3.1-million-barrel oil spill, a record number of nests, 353, were counted in 2017.

Pilgrim’s Pride poultry in Mount Pleasant is the third worst polluting meat packing house in the country according to Environment Texas. A report by the Environmental Integrity Project and Earth Justice, called, “Water Pollution from Slaughter Houses” shows that nearly 75% of the nation’s large meat processing plants have violated their pollution control permits in the last 24 months --with some dumping more nitrogen pollution than small cities. Peter Lehner, senior attorney at Earthjustice, said: “Slaughterhouses are another dirty link in the highly polluting industrial meat production chain.  From polluted runoff from over-fertilized fields growing animal feed, to often-leaking manure lagoons and contaminated runoff at concentrated animal feeding operations, and to industrial slaughterhouses, the way most of our meat is now produced impairs our drinking water and public health. We need to clean up every stage.” The report statistically arranges the slaughterhouse polluters in quantities of released nitrogen --which fuels algae growth and creates low-oxygen dead zones. Pilgrims Pride discharged 1,700 pounds of nitrogen a day, into Lake O’ the Pines last year. Brian Zabcik, a Clean Water Advocate with Environment Texas said, “Texans love barbecue — but nobody orders a side of water pollution with their meat.” He added, “The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality needs to issue stronger water pollution control permits for the slaughterhouses in East Texas and elsewhere — and then enforce them, so they stop contaminating our waterways.”

Physicist and author Jan Dash told the Houston Chronicle this week, “The biggest step in reducing global warming requires transitioning away from fossil fuels to renewable energies.” He went on to say, “It is scientifically certain that burning fossil fuels increases atmospheric carbon dioxide, which then produces the global warming trend observed over the last 40 years. While fossil fuels made modern civilization possible, fossil fuels have also led to the distinct possibility that the Earth may become unlivable sooner or later.” Meantime the Army Corp of Engineers predicts a 12-inch sea level rise in Houston by 2038. Dash commented, “Another foot of water at the shoreline means another foot of storm surge in a hurricane. One foot of extra water would be enough to flood New York City subways regularly. The U.S. Navy’s scenarios of sea level rise by 2100 go up to 6 feet. Sea level rise of that magnitude will flood coastal cities and farms, producing mass migrations of hundreds of millions of people worldwide with catastrophic consequences.” Meantime Houston city planning continues to issue building permits in flood zones.