Texas Wind Energy Industry Makes Friends With Oil & Gas

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The Texas wind energy industry just got a little more crowded, now that the startup Nova Clean Energy is up and running. Nova has barely gotten off the ground and it already has a 1-gigawatt portfolio of Texas wind projects in the pipeline. If recent experience is any indication, Nova could encounter opposition from irate residents and fossil energy stakeholders…or maybe not, as the case may be.

Fossil Energy Does Love Wind Energy After All

A pattern of opposition to renewable energy projects has been emerging across the country, characterized by local Facebook groups that draw messaging from climate change denial think tanks funded by fossil energy stakeholders.

Hundreds of local county governments have also imposed new restrictions on utility-scale wind or solar projects, or both. However, not in Texas. According to an in-depth analysis undertaken by the Des Moines Register and USA Today earlier this year, Texas is among the group of states without any county-based restrictions.

Texas also has the advantage of stellar wind energy resources and a sprawling wind transmission line, all of which explains why wind energy developers continue to pile into the state.

In an ironic twist of fate, Nova Clean Energy cites another attractive aspect of Texas. The company cites “fast-growing demand” for wind energy on the part of the Texas oil and gas industries, and the state’s petrochemical industry, too.

How’s that for a switcheroo? I’m reaching out to Nova to see if any details are available for its wind projects and itss off-takers. In a press release dated October 29, the company simply noted that some of its projects are located in the Delaware Basin, a section of the Permian Basin. Covering 66 counties in Texas and New Mexico, the Permian Basin is widely known as the epicenter of oil and gas extraction in the US.

Wind Energy & The Permian Basin

So, what’s going on? Oil and gas operators are clamoring for more electricity in the Permian Basin, that’s what. The spotlight is on wind energy, which has already won over fossil energy stakeholders like Midland Energy. “Recently, the Permian Basin became the leader of our state and nation in wind and solar energy development,” Midland notes, citing its own portfolio of wind projects in the Permian Basin, which is expected to grow from 1,000 megawatts to 3,400 megawatts in short order.

Wind energy already has a decades-long history of providing electricity for oil and gas operations, on a limited scale. To get some perspective on the growing demand for utility-scale renewable energy in the Texas oil and gas industry, check out an article posted by the leading energy industry analysis firm Hart Energy back in 2018. At the time, Hart noted that oil and gas activities in the Delaware Basin were consuming the equivalent of 350 megawatts, three times the load of just three years earlier, in 2015.

Moving the timeline up a notch, last year ERCOT (the Electric Reliability Council of Texas) noted that oil and gas operators in the Permian Basin were leaning on electrification to satisfy their decarbonization commitments, contributing to a sharp increase in demand. ERCOT estimated that the total Permian load will reach 17.2 gigawatts by 2032, up from 4.2 gigawatts in 2022. That’s gigawatts, not megawatts.

“While the Midland Basin will require growth in load addition, much of the future Projected Load Demand growth will be in the Delaware Basin where production outlooks are double that of the Midland Basin and where associated gas and water ratios are also higher,” ERCOT reported.

More Energy Diversity For The Permian Basin

Another factor attracting wind energy developers to the Permian Basin is the potential for doing business in an environment where wind (and solar) projects are more likely to garner community support and less likely to spark shouting matches at public meetings.

With that in mind, the US Department of Energy has joined up with a consortium of academic and industry partners to collaborate on a newly launched nonprofit organization called the Permian Energy Development Lab, supported by the Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation. The centerpiece of the Lab is a 320-acre site earmarked for large-scale demonstrations of new technologies.

A leading technical advisor on the project, Sandia National Laboratories, notes that the Permian Lab prioritizes the concerns of energy communities, leading to a focus on programs that help transition the local energy workforce to new technologies. Community concerns over water resources are also front and center.

“If you take a systems approach, you see that water is actually integral to energy development. We plan to use the PEDL site to demonstrate how innovations in water treatment can bridge multiple technologies,” explains Thushara Gunda, who is the technical lead for Sandia.

One example cited by Sandia is the deployment of wind energy, solar energy, or both, to treat water pumped up to the service in the course of oil and gas drilling. “Such advances can convert energy waste streams into valuable resources for the region,” Thushara explains.

“The treated water could then aid in generating hydrogen from oilfield methane emissions,” the Sandia adds.

More Wind Energy For Texas: The Green Hydrogen Angle

If you caught that thing about producing hydrogen from water and methane, that’s a reference to steam reformation, which is the conventional way to produce hydrogen from natural gas. If the PEDL water project bears fruit, it could provide oil producers with an economically attractive means of capturing unwanted methane emissions from their wells, rather than simply burning them off.

The emerging green hydrogen industry could provide an additional pathway. In 2021, energy stakeholders in Texas began coalescing around the idea of harnessing the state’s renewable resources — wind energy, solar energy, and biomass or biogas — to run electrolysis systems, which jolt hydrogen from water with an electrical current.

One challenge facing the green hydrogen industry is availability of water pure enough to use in a conventional electrolysis systems without fouling the equipment, which dovetails with PEDL’s focus on water treatment systems.

For the record, Nova has expressed an interest in developing wind energy projects for the green fuels industry, in addition to serving oil, gas, and petrochemicals. The company is focusing part of its wind energy portfolio on the central Gulf Coast of Texas, a region where the US electrofuels industry has begun to take off.

CleanTechnica has been spilling a lot of ink on the environment for renewable energy developers in Texas, which has been complicated by partisan politics in recent years. However, that hasn’t kept investors away. Nova launched in 2022 as a portfolio company of the Chicago firm Bluestar Energy Capital.

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Image (cropped): Wind energy investors are finding a friendly home in Texas, partly on account of the rising demand for electricity from oil and gas operations (by Al Hicks, National Renewable Energy Laboratory via US Department of Energy).