Industry supports drilling on University owned mineral rights in Texas

Fuel Fix:
A pro-industry group is firing back at calls by environmental advocates to restrict drilling on university land in Texas, arguing that oil and gas revenue has provided massive financial support for the University of Texas and Texas A&M.

North Texans for Natural Gas, a loose coalition of people who support natural gas development, is circulating a petition urging UT Chancellor William McRaven and Texas A&M Chancellor John Sharp to support hydraulic fracturing and the extraction of oil and gas on University Lands, 2.1 million acres in West Texas set aside by the state’s constitution to create an endowment for the state’s two leading university systems.

“These funds have allowed the universities to keep tuition affordable and make investments in new facilities,” the petition by North Texans for Natural Gas says. “Now, a liberal environmental group is calling for a de facto end to drilling on lands that benefit both UT and A&M.”

Revenue from oil and gas leases helped push the Permanent University Fund to $19 billion last year,according to the Dallas Morning News. The two university systems saw their endowments swell by 70 in the past five years as the shale boom led to a flurry of drilling and production, the Morning News reported.

A joint report by Austin-based Environment Texas Research and Policy Center and the California-based Frontier Group released earlier this month argued that oil and gas development on the West Texas acreage, much of which sits atop the oil-rich Permian Basin, has harmed the environment and threatened public health. The flurry of hydraulic fracturing since 2005 consumed vast amounts of water during a drought, spilled 1.6 million gallons of pollutants and unleashed methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere, the report found.
...
The anti energy left's agenda conflicts with providing a quality education at reasonable costs to Texas students.  That energy development has allowed the University system to build one of the largest endowments in the country and it is used mainly for the construction of buildings on the campuses.

The reason Texas has the minerals rights to much of the Permian basin is because when the state came into the union the federal government refused to assume the national debt of Texas and allowed the state to keep the Republic owned lands in return for keeping the debt.  That turned out to be a very good deal for Texas and its students.  In states where the federal government owns the public lands they have been very miserly with the development of mineral resources.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t
Read more

Bin Laden's concern about Zarqawi's remains

James Robbins: ... Bin Laden suggests that President Bush should allow Zarqawi’s body to be returned to his family in Jordan, but this is a matter that is up to the Jordanian government, which so far has not shown much interest in facilitating a homecoming. Bin Laden mocks King Abdullah II, calling him a Coalition minion, and asking “w hat scares you about Abu Musab after he’s dead? You know that his funeral, if allowed to happen, would be a huge funeral showing the extent of sympathy with the mujahedin.” A large crowd would definitely turn out, though most people would be on hand to demonstrate their anger and disgust. Last November’s hotel bombings in Amman , masterminded by Zarqawi, are still fresh in people’s memory, and mentioning them to Jordanians has the same visceral impact as memory of the 9/11 attacks does here. Jordan has adopted a zero-tolerance policy towards those who choose to mourn the country’s least favorite son, and four opposition members of parliament who paid con
Read more