Texas Economy Thread

[fredcalif]

Originally Posted by desertpunk

Texas Leads Nation In New Home Construction

GO TEXAS

[diablo234]

Houston Chronicle: Big bets on Eagle Ford next year

Houston Chronicle: ConocoPhillips looks toward Permian Basin investments

Houston Chronicle: Energy corps among top beneficiaries from tax incentives

[diablo234]

Just to give you an idea of the impact the Eagle Ford Shale is having upon South Texas, here is a satelite photo showing the light from the various oil/gas rigs already in place (it's that crescent just below San Antonio).


Photo courtesy of the Corpus Christi Caller.

[FLAWDA-FELLA]

Unbelievable image!!

[diablo234]

Yes it is and just to give you more perspective this is a NASA photo from 2007, which was before the Eagle Ford boom.



The contrast from these two photos is just unbelievable especially considering that they are only five years apart.

[desertpunk]

Oh I wanna see SA get a big tower out of all this!

[hannah_banana]

Those pictures are crazy! I really hope we see some tower action in SA due to this.

[diablo234]

Looks like there is a very strong possibility that the Port of Houston will be shut down thanks to a strike by the International Longshoremen's Association. If this does happen this will have an impact far beyond Texas since Houston is one of the busiest ports in the US.

Houston Chronicle: Looming strike worries port
By Kiah Collier | December 20, 2012

A looming strike by dockworkers in Houston and at 13 other ports on the East and Gulf coasts has the Port of Houston Authority worried, along with businesses and other entities that rely on workers covered under a soon-expiring contract.

Negotiations between the International Longshoremen's Association and the U.S. Maritime Alliance for a contract covering 14,5000 workers at ports from Texas to Maine broke down a week before the current contract is set to expire on Dec. 29.

The union sent a memo to members on Wednesday saying negotiations "are not progressing well" and that a strike on Dec. 30 is "expected."

The memo says that orders for container cargo would not be honored. That means other types of cargo including items such as steel that don't fit into containers and perishable goods would still be loaded and unloaded. Passenger cruise ships and oil tankers would not be affected.

Houston's Port Authority, which dominates in the container market among Texas ports, generates about 60 percent of its revenue at its two container terminals at Barbours Cut and Bayport, which employ a combined 80 to 150 of the union workers on any given day. Major private container terminals include Greensport Industrial Terminal and Texas Terminals. Containers typically carry consumer goods.

Leonard Waterworth, the authority's executive director, said one shipping line that he declined to name has already diverted two ships to California in anticipation of a strike.

"We will be monitoring this on a day-to-day basis," Waterworth said, noting he is hopeful of a speedy resolution. "I am concerned the impact it will have on us if it does happen."

Waterworth said any strike lasting longer than a week would have a significant effect, resulting in even more container ship diversions. Businesses that rely on container shipments would be forced to devise alternate plans for receiving them through other ports, he said.

....

[Bond James Bond]

Source

[desertpunk]

imagine all the local yokels who bought stripper wells in the 1990s when the oil majors gave up on those fields. Even at just 10 barrels a day production, that's nearly $1,000 per well each day!

[jonathaninATX]

And they said oil dried up back it the 80's. Just imagine what if there was no oil bust and the 1980's had our technology today.

[desertpunk]

A Boom in Houston Is Led by the Energy Industry

[desertpunk]

Apple's $300 mln Austin Campus Outlined


http://thenextweb.com/apple/2012/07/...as-investment/

In May, Apple gained approval from the Travis County Commissioners Court to bring 3,635 jobs to a planned North Austin campus by 2025. The deal would result in the company gaining an additional grant of between $5.4 million and $6.4 million over 15 years. Of course, Apple also has plans to expand its California headquarters with the development of its new ‘Spaceship’ campus.

The new campus will encompass 2.8 million square feet and hold 13k employees on four stories. It will also have a 1,000 seat corporate auditorium, a fitness center, central plant, parking and new 300,000 square feet research facilities.

The 155-acre land was acquired by Apple from HP. The mayor said that the review process for the project is the same as every project in Cupertino, taking into consideration the environmental impact, building quality and traffic, among others. The project will come to the city council for approval in fall 2012 and could also be completed by 2015.

http://www.macrumors.com/2012/07/18/...austin-campus/

[desertpunk]

Gov. Perry To California Businesses: "It's Better in Texas"

Texas governor Rick Perry knows how to start a rumble. Last week, he spent a mere $24,000 on radio ads in California, urging firms there to move to Texas, with its “zero state income tax, low overall tax burden, sensible regulations, and fair legal system.” The ad goaded Governor Jerry Brown into telling reporters that Perry’s effort wasn’t news. “It’s not a burp,” he sneered. “It’s barely a fart.”

But his insult generated dozens of stories about the differences between Texas and California, playing into Perry’s hands. He begins a four-day barnstorming tour of California today, touting Texas’s virtues to business owners.

...

Several observers acknowledged that Perry has gotten the better of the battle.

Indeed, in the last five years Texas has gained 400,000 new jobs while California has lost 640,000. The Lone Star State’s rate of job growth was 33 percent higher than California’s last year, even as the Golden State finally pulled out of the recession.

California liberals, including Governor Brown, respond to such criticism by saying that their state’s quality of life remains unmatched and that Texas specializes in creating jobs at or near the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. Texans respond that they are creating many middle-class jobs in the energy and manufacturing sectors, and that even minimum-wage workers have it better off in Texas than their counterparts do in California. “California has the third-highest cost of living, while Texas has the second-lowest,” says Chuck DeVore, a former California GOP state legislator who relocated to the Lone Star State to work as an analyst for the Texas Public Policy Foundation. “That means California’s $8 minimum wage buys $6.06 worth of goods and services, while Texas’s lower $7.25 wage buys the equivalent of $8.04.” One might even say that California’s high-tax, high-cost model is a form of class warfare against its poorest residents.

[...]

[desertpunk]

Texas HSR: Officials wrangle over high-speed rail study


A Japanese train manufacturer may foot much of the $10 billion cost for HSR between Dallas and Houston.

Everyone wants a station, and everyone wants an EIS...

[desertpunk]

Shipping Giant Sets Houston Expansion in Motion

Anticipating significant growth in the oil and gas sector, one of the world's largest shipping logistics companies has broken ground on a 181,000-square-foot warehouse with office space in north Houston to house a growing number of shipments and staff.

The American arm of the Dubai-based, Swedish-owned Gulf Agency Co., or GAC, Group opened a Houston office in May 2010 with just three employees, and it has grown rapidly as oil and gas production has ramped up domestically and globally.

--------------------------------------

Apache Corp Shifts Focus To Production

Apache is in the early stage of building a tower at BLVD Place...

[zaphod]

A Japanese train manufacturer may foot much of the $10 billion cost for HSR between Dallas and Houston.

Everyone wants a station, and everyone wants an EIS...

Yeah, and the sucky thing is there isn't much between Dallas and Houston, which also may be a good thing for costs. A San Antonio to DFW corridor would be cool, even if they did have to skirt towns and cities and build suburban stations. I suppose a planned system would be capable of super high speed, but also need to travel on slow speed tracks(albeit dedicated ones). I wonder how the line would get into either city. While a downtown station would seem to be a good idea, downtown isn't necessarily the center of either city. Best case scenario, something like DFW Airport-southcentral Dallas w/DART connection-IAH-DT Houston. Or, if they really cheaped out, a station near Hutchins, and a station around The Woodlands, maybe off 242. Going off Google Earth's latest imagery you could draw a straight line across nothing but undeveloped parcels between the two cities on that path. But that would be pretty useless.

Another radical idea is, why not go a little west and skirt Bryan-College Station. which is not actually going out of the way at all, actually Dallas is even further west of College Station if you look on a map. The nice thing about this is the ability to enter Houston from the northwest, perhaps along the 290 corridor. 290 is going to be widened eventually, and freight tracks next to it only get a few trains a day apparently. The only lame thing is I can't think of a good way to get the tracks into B/CS unless UP got it's bypass line. It's a shame that in the 1990s that the proposal to take the UP tracks and Wellborn road and put them in a trench to form a grade-separated quasi-freeway not unlike the Mopacs in Austin never got off the ground. If that existed it would be feasible to take over the path the freight tracks have now and make it a fully grade separated medium speed route for HSR as it approached the city.

[desertpunk]

The problem with HSR is that everyone wants a station but ridership is driven by speed, i.e. having a few stops as possible. We have a commuter rail line here that used to be fun to ride but got junked up by a bunch of crappy stops everywhere that killed the schedule. For HSR there should only be two stations: one in Houston and one at DFW. Local metro service can fill in any gaps.

But politicians want their own stations and when the result is slower service, people are going to wonder why they bothered in the first place.

[hannah_banana]

Texas is on its way to being “Saudi Texas”

By Vicki Vaughan, STAFF WRITER
Published 5:33 pm, Saturday, February 16, 2013

The Lone Star State is earning a new moniker: Saudi Texas.

Oil production in Texas is soaring, so much so that production jumped to an average 2.139 million barrels a day in November — the best showing in more than 25 years.

Analysts are chalking up Texas' booming production to shale plays, especially South Texas' Eagle Ford Shale where production was minuscule just five years ago, along with a revival of West Texas' Permian Basin.

Analysts are tossing around the words “phenomenal,” “amazing” and “unprecedented” when discussing the numbers.

Since production began in the Eagle Ford Shale, the state's oil output has doubled and Texas' share of domestic oil output “has reached new all-time record high levels,” said Mark J. Perry, a professor of economics and finance at the University of Michigan-Flint and a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.

Texas' oil production has jumped by 71 percent in the last two years, Perry said, based on data from the Energy Information Administration, the Energy Department's statistics arm.

“It's a huge, unbelievable increase,” said Perry, who has used the term “Saudi Texas” in his blog, called Carpe Diem. “It's amazing how fast it has happened. It's just phenomenal.”

To put Texas' oil production in perspective, Perry compared it to North Dakota, the nation's No. 2 oil-producing state. In November, Texas produced almost three times as much oil as North Dakota, home to the productive Bakken Shale.

Texas logged a 654,000-barrel-a-day increase in oil production in a 15-month period ending in November. “That's like adding another Bakken formation to the U.S. oil supply,” Perry said.

And the Permian Basin, once thought to be nearly played out, has reclaimed its status as a strong contributor to the state's production, experts said.

[FLAWDA-FELLA]

Great news, but when will we start to see gas prices fall as a result of all of this increase in oil production?