The Cable Company, Again

For a year our contractor-son-in-law has been building a house between “paying jobs” for Carol Ann and me. We have been “moving in” for about a week now and it will probably be another couple of weeks before we actually begin sleeping in the new house. There are so many little things to be done and we don’t want to move until we tie up most of those loose ends. Located next door to our daughter and son-in-law’s recently completed home, our new house is located on a hilltop, one of the highest spots in the county at a little over 400 feet above sea level. I know what you must be thinking about son-in-law Sam building his in-laws a house next door to his. But it was his idea and we hope he won’t regret it in a few years.

Carol Ann and I have been rattling around in a two-story 4,800 square foot house for about 15 years now. We probably use only about a quarter of the house, keeping most of it closed off. The new house is 2,800 square feet but will give us much more useable room than we currently have in the “big house.” The new house is also on one level with doors wide enough to accommodate wheel chairs should there ever be a need. We even had the taller toilets installed to make it easier to get up and down!

Sam and his crew came over with a trailer the other day and got a load of furniture and yesterday we had movers come and load up the remainder of the furniture we are taking with us. That still leaves a lot of furniture and “stuff” in the old house. We will use it to “stage” the house to help it sell faster (hopefully). Once the house is sold we will have a “we’re not dead yet” estate sale.

The yard is not yet landscaped, but we have planted a little close to 150 shrubs and trees around the house. I went a little wild at a wholesale nursery, buying what I liked (as long as the nurseryman said they were “drought resistant” and liked “full sun”). The bulk of the plants include 35 crepe myrtles (Red Rocket) and 28 jasmine (Carolina and Confederate). The remainder include Texas sage, red yucca, dwarf fountain grass, spirea (two varieties), rosemary, nandina, bottlebrush, forsythia, bee balm, Chinese pistache trees, Japanese maples, red oak, and a few others whose names escape me. I had to do something with them after they were delivered so I sketched out a landscaping plan and hired some guys to do the planting for me. There is not a blade of grass anywhere around the house and the soil is very, very sandy. It looks like someone planted trees and shrubs on a beach, except there is no water near the house.

I bought a soil testing kit at Lowe’s and tested the soil from eight different locations around the house. I quit after testing the first three samples. All three yielded the same results and I imagine the other five would have also. The pH is neutral (7.0), Nitrogen is VERY LOW, Potassium is VERY LOW, and Phosphorus is VERY LOW. Like I said, it’s sand. I have to water the plants at least once a day and sometimes twice because the soil is “very well drained,” as the landscaping articles like to say. The plants have quite a thirst with the Texas sun beating down on them all day creating temperatures bordering on the triple digits. It takes me about an hour to water all of them. I can’t use sprinklers because without a lawn it would be a terrible waste of water and Texas has been in a severe drought since the fall of 2010.

I’ve been reading up on drip irrigation, also called micro-irrigation, and have installed a “test” system for one flower bed about 50 feet long. It’s working great and the lantanas went from looking very droopy to standing up and blooming again. I’m working on a plan for the remainder of the plants. Our front yard is relatively small, about 1,000 square feet and I have just about decided to go with sod, zoyzia probably. It’s more expensive but a lot less trouble than seed. It is also getting late in the season and I need something growing on my front beach to keep it from washing away should we ever have a rainy season again.

I am something of a gadget freak and spend a lot of time on the computer and wanted to make sure we had a home network with fast Internet access. That meant installing a wired network in addition to Wi-Fi. I had the electricians pull Cat6 Ethernet cable (for Internet) and RG6 coaxial cable (for cable TV) to each room while they were wiring the house. The cables all terminate in a hall linen closet that I have commandeered for a “wiring closet.” I have a “structured wiring enclosure” (the “box” on the wall) for a power module, ethernet switch, cable TV splitter, a Power over Ethernet adapter, router, cable modem, and an NAS (Network Attached Storage) external network hard drive.

I removed one of the ethernet/coax wall plates to check the electricians’ work and couldn’t believe what I saw. I had assumed that someone running Ethernet Cat6 cable for the home network would have known what kind of terminator (connector) was required. I should have known better. The coax cable was fine, however, the Cat6 cable was attached to a four-wire telephone jack, an RJ-11. Cat6 cable has eight wires and requires an RJ-45 jack. To top this off, only two of the eight wires were attached to the four-wire phone jack! I showed this to Sam, who must have called the electricians immediately because they were at the house the next morning to replace the jacks. I asked them to just leave them with me and I would save them the trouble. I don’t think I can do any worse than they did.

After finally getting the cabling sorted out I made an appointment with my local cable provider to transfer my service to the new address. The lady I spoke with told me to have all of the devices/equipment at the new address for the installers. The appointment was for today (Friday), sometime between 8 AM and 12 Noon. Last night before bed I disconnected 3 TVs, a TiVo, 2 TiVo minis, a Blue Ray player, a Roku, and a Chromecast with all of the assorted remotes, cables, and power adapters. Then I unplugged my Wi-Fi router, the cable modem, MoCA network adapter, Ethernet switch, and external hard drive. I also removed a box that was attached to the wall and connected to the MoCA adapter by a power cord and an Ethernet cable. There were countless cables and power adapters accompanying these items also. I put all of it in a box and this morning I got up very early (7 AM is VERY early for me) so I would have time to get the box and 2 of the TVs to the new house before 8 AM. 

I unloaded everything at the new house, sorted it all on the floor, and began my wait. The pair of installer arrived about 9:15 AM. Not bad at all. I showed them around and told them about the home network I was constructing. They looked at it and informed they weren’t allowed to install any devices or cables that weren’t from the cable company. I said, OK, use your own splitter, and I will change it later. One of the guys then said that I would lose all of the recorded programs on the TiVo machines during the transfer of service. That would not go over well with Carol Ann. After the tour we went outside so I could show them where the cable came into the house. The house is a couple of hundred feet from the street so Sam had buried a conduit from the road to the house. There was twine running through the conduit to make it easy for the cable installers to pull the cable from the road to the house. The “Alpha” installer told me right away that they couldn’t do that. They were installers; they did not bury cable (apparently pulling it through a conduit was the same as burying it). I volunteered to pull the cable through the conduit but they said the conduit was not large enough. Because of the distance involved, they would have to run RG11 cable, which has a greater diameter due to the extra shielding. Another crew would be required to come out and bury the cable. He could make an appointment to have the cable run and buried, after which I would have to reschedule the installation. Seeing my disappointment, he suggested a temporary fix. He could run the cable, but not bury it, from the road to the house. It would lay atop the ground until the burial crew came and buried it. Tomorrow being a college football Saturday I agreed and they headed down to the street. 

Within a few minutes they were back at the house telling me there were only two “ports” at the street and both of them were in use. He would have to call his supervisor for instructions. The supervisor was there in about 10 or 15 minutes (this is a fairly small town) and after looking over the situation informed me that he would have to schedule a crew to come out and install a port at the street for my house. After that was done, the burial crew could be scheduled, and after the cable was buried, the installation could be rescheduled. I’m reading weeks into this and not real happy but what could I do. I called customer support and asked them to cancel the disconnect at my old address. I loaded one TV, a TiVo, router, cable modem, MoCA adapter and assorted cables, power supplies, and remotes back into the box and brought them back to the old house. As of this writing I still haven’t figured out which cable goes where, plus I seem to be one short, which requires a trip back out to the house. My team kicks off at 2:30 CST tomorrow, Saturday. Hopefully, I will have it figured out by then and will be able to watch the game.

Oil and Water Do Mix

Texas sits atop an estimated 30 billion barrels of oil. That’s a whopping 1.26 trillion gallons! At today’s prices, that oil is worth approximately three trillion ($3,000,000,000,000) dollars. Unfortunately, a great deal of that oil is trapped in shale rock at depths up to 12,000 feet, making it very difficult to access without taking rather drastic measures, such as “fracking,” or Hydraulic Fracturing. Fracking involves the injection of massive amounts of water, chemicals, and sand into the earth to “fracture” or break up the shale and free the oil and gas buried deep underground.

Typically, about 200,000 to 270,000 gallons of fresh water are used to create a single fracture. But a well can be fracked up to 18 times. High Volume (or super) fracking in the shale beds uses about 100 times more water than traditional fracking. Oil wells in the shale beds may use between one and ten million gallons of water per fracture. The San Antonio Express-News reported that in 2012, the industry used around 43,770 acre-feet of water in 3,522 Eagle Ford fracking wells. Since one acre-foot is equal to 326,700 gallons we are talking about more than fourteen billion gallons of water.

Unfortunately, the water used in fracking is considered as “consumed” because it is removed from the hydrologic cycle, never to be used again. Only about twenty percent of the water returns to the surface. The remaining eighty percent remains stuck in the shale deposit. The portion that returns to the surface is called “flowback” and is so polluted by large amounts of brine (salts), toxic metals, and radioactivity that it cannot be returned to the watershed. So, in addition to consuming tremendous amounts of fresh water, fracking leaves a massive amount of toxic wastewater to be disposed of. This leaves the oil and gas companies with a big problem: what to do with the stuff. Most of the “flowback” is trucked to injection wells (non-producing oil and gas wells), where it is injected deep underground and lost from the already-depleted water supply. Every day in the US at least 2 billion gallons of fracking fluids are injected into more than 172,000 wells, either to enhance oil and gas production or to dispose of “flowback.”

About seventy-five percent of fracking in the U.S. occurs in the arid western states where drought conditions are already causing a scarcity in the water supply. Since 2011 almost 97 billion gallons of water have been used in fracking wells in Texas, which is still in a severe drought that began in October of 2010.

New data suggests that oil and gas companies may soon find that water is hard to come by in Texas. Agriculture in many counties competes head to head with oil companies for water to maintain their operations.

Texas perennial drought conditions mean that the greatest concern regarding fracking is the permanent and substantial loss of freshwater. Even if the current drought conditions resolve, there is still the issue of increasing the water supply enough to deal with future population and economic growth. Portions of the state are suffering some of the nation’s worst drought conditions, while the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex and Houston areas continue to lead the country in population growth. In fact, the water crunch is so severe in the Dallas-Fort Worth area that local officials estimate they will need to double the supply of freshwater by 2050 to meet projected demand. At the same time, freshwater is becoming scarcer.

Reservoirs in much of the state are empty. The Panhandle is the worst off, with reservoirs at less than 2% capacity. The reservoirs in West and South Texas are at about a third of their capacity.

About sixty percent of the water used in Texas comes from nine major aquifers. Nearly 80% of the water is for irrigation and most of it is coming from the Ogallala Aquifer (which lies beneath much of the Panhandle and southward). The Ogallala has been dropping quite rapidly for decades, as water is being used faster than the aquifer can recharge. Since 1940, a volume of groundwater equivalent to two-thirds of the water held in Lake Erie has been depleted from the Ogallala.

Levels of aquifers that serve local communities near the Eagle Ford Shale oil fields have dropped by up to 300 feet since 2001 equaling one-third of the cumulative depletion during the entire 20th century. Some locations in Texas are trucking in water to meet local demand. Obviously, this pattern cannot continue forever.

The Edwards Aquifer, major source for San Antonio’s water is just barely above the level at which critical management restrictions kick in (which will require a 35% reduction in annual pumping amounts allowed for those with permits, including city water suppliers).

Midland, TX, in the Permian Basin, has long depended upon the oil and gas industry. However, two years ago the city came close to running out of water for its 120,000 residents to drink. For three straight summers, the drought sucked two Midland reservoirs virtually dry. In 2012 Midland rushed through a crash project to build a pipeline that is now pumping 4 million gallons of water a day from a new source that is 67 miles away. Needless to say, water rates have gone up drastically in Midland.

Wichita Falls in now using retreated wastewater (recycled sewage water) to meet between a third and half of the daily demand. I would imagine that a lot of bottled water is now being sold in Wichita Falls! Brownwood and El Paso have reuse plans under development.

In Dimmit County, TX, which sits on the Eagle Ford shale play, a recent study projected that fracking would account for more than half of all water used in the county by next year.

As groundwater tables fall, Texas oil and gas companies are stepping into the water marketing business. Oil and gas companies have the money to drive up the price of water by paying landowners much more than can be made from selling to public water utilities. Because of their money, oil and gas companies are able to obtain water in areas where water is scarce. As a result, a lot of companies are moving into Texas to market groundwater. I guess there are people who think that oil is more important than water. But can you drink oil?