How Texas’ environmental agency weakened a once-rigorous air pollution monitoring team

Sign up for The Brief, The Texas Tribune’s daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.

This story is published in partnership with Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for the ICN newsletter here.

When disaster affects the sprawling industrial complexes of Texas, the state’s environmental authority often posts pictures online of its white vans patrolling public streets, verifying the local air is safe to breathe.

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality calls this effort its mobile monitoring team, a unit of air pollution specialists based at agency headquarters in Austin. The TCEQ claims the effort is stronger than it’s ever been, but an Inside Climate News analysis of 20 years of agency records and interviews with former employees show it’s only a shadow of what it used to be.

“It’s all smoke and mirrors,” said Tim Doty, a former mobile monitoring team leader who spent 28 years at the TCEQ. “They’ve convinced the [Legislature] and the general public that they’re actually doing something of value when it couldn’t be further from the truth.”

Fifteen years ago, the mobile monitoring team was regularly surveilling the largest industrial complexes of Texas, documenting emissions violations and knocking on refinery doors unannounced. It used to issue reports detailing key findings, identifying polluting facilities by name and presenting evidence that sometimes led to enforcement actions or fines.

Today, the team spends more time monitoring ambient air after hurricanes, ice storms or industrial explosions. Instead of comprehensive reports making the findings intelligible, its projects more often produce scores of spreadsheets with thousands of lines of data.

“They just completely changed philosophies,” said Doty, who left the TCEQ in 2018 and now works as a private consultant monitoring pollution for environmental groups in Texas.

The changes date back to 2010, in the early fracking boom, when a scandal over unreported air pollution led the TCEQ to temporarily shut down its mobile monitoring program, unbeknownst to the general public.

“They worked hard to not know that there were problems,” said Jim Marston, a retired attorney who directed the Texas office of the Environmental Defense Fund for 32 years. “Maybe the best example of that is the elimination of the mobile monitoring program, which made it a lot easier not to know where pollution was and how it was affecting the public.”

In subsequent years the team re-emerged under new management with a new philosophy. The agency combined its emergency response and mobile monitoring programs into a single team. Even so, and despite expensive recent equipment upgrades, the new team would conduct fewer projects, monitor fewer facilities and issue fewer reports than the old team did.

The TCEQ credits these trends, in the last three years, to a transfer of agency resources from its central to regional offices. In 2021, after years of minimal monitoring activity, the TCEQ supplied monitoring vans to five of its 16 regional offices.

“Currently, TCEQ has one of the largest mobile monitoring fleets among state regulatory agencies,” TCEQ spokesperson Victoria Cann said in a written response to questions from Inside Climate News. “TCEQ uses a variety of approaches, equipment, and staff located across the state to perform monitoring operations.”

Cann rejected claims by former TCEQ employees that the mobile monitoring team was ever dismantled, or that the agency’s monitoring program has weakened. She declined to make mobile monitoring managers available for interviews.

“Monitoring throughout the state has increased through the use of additional mobile monitoring vehicles, handheld equipment, and stationary monitors,” Cann said. “Regional offices conduct a significant number of investigations using regional assets.”

Regional office investigations, however, are not nearly as intensive or extensive as projects by the mobile monitoring team, according to former employees. While mobile monitoring projects usually involved several days of scientific study and in-depth monitoring of various facilities, surveys conducted by regional office vans typically last an hour or two.

Regional investigators, often hired out of college with bachelor’s degrees, make up the infantry of the TCEQ, producing thousands of rapid on-site air quality investigations every year — the primary metric by which the agency is judged by state lawmakers. Yet from their introduction in late 2021 to Sept. 3, 2024, the new regional mobile monitoring vans contributed to just 195 of these investigations, according to agency records.

“They want investigators to pump out these investigation reports,” said Sheila Serna, a former TCEQ investigator who left the agency in 2022 and now works for the City of Laredo. “But they are not looking at the quality of the work, just the quantity.”

Furthermore, agency data doesn’t support the claim that investigations with air monitoring equipment have recently increased. The number of on-site investigations of air quality by regional TCEQ offices has declined in the past decade, according to an Inside Climate News analysis of agency data. Investigators have also made less frequent use of their optical gas imaging cameras, one of the primary handheld monitoring devices used to measure and visualize gas leaks and emissions.

The mobile monitoring team has completed significant projects in recent years, but it generally refrains from identifying polluting companies by name in reports. And although the monitoring team is quick to announce when it finds clean air during disaster response, it seldom publicizes the problems it finds during proactive efforts.

For example, in 2021 the team surveyed Channelview, a community on Houston’s industrial east side, studying levels of cancer-causing benzene in the air. Twice it detected benzene above the agency’s screening levels for short-term exposure within a quarter mile of residential neighborhoods. But the agency never notified Channelview of that.

“We weren’t aware of any study that TCEQ has conducted in Channelview,” said Carolyn Stone, founder of the Channelview Health and Improvement Coalition community group. “They have not provided us with any kind of findings.”

It’s not from a lack of acquaintance, Stone said. She includes several TCEQ representatives in her group’s regular email updates about pollution in the area.

Cann said the team’s findings helped the agency take enforcement action against companies to reduce local benzene pollution, but didn’t say which companies. She said communities weren’t notified of the findings because the concentrations presented no immediate threat to human health. The agency’s short-term screening level for benzene, 180 parts per billion, is only meant to trigger further investigation.

Indeed, that’s a modest concentration. Cigarette smoke contains benzene at more than 40,000 parts per billion. However, benzene causes cancer with no safe exposure level, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that lifelong exposure to benzene at 0.1 parts per billion will cause one excess cancer case in every 100,000 people exposed.

Also in recent years, the mobile monitoring team spent time in the Permian Basin, the nation’s top producing oilfield, where two people died of hydrogen sulfide poisoning in October 2019. Six weeks after that, the monitoring team completed its first of four weeklong projects over subsequent years studying hydrogen sulfide, a ubiquitous oilfield gas that is highly flammable and can be instantly fatal at high concentrations.

During each project, the team measured concentration levels above the 80 parts per billion nuisance limit set in Texas law, including one block away from city hall in the tiny town of Goldsmith.

During its last visit, on Oct. 12, 2022, the monitoring team measured hydrogen sulfide at 1,145 parts per billion at the fenceline of a gas plant a half mile outside Goldsmith, but it didn’t stop to take a 30-minute or one-hour average. Later that same day, on West 44th Street in Odessa, between homes and oil wells, the team measured a one-hour hydrogen sulfide average of 374 parts per billion with a maximum instant concentration of 21,400 parts per billion, both well above federal ambient air quality standards, though not an immediate threat to human health. The team returned the next day and measured a one-hour average of hydrogen sulfide at 6,616 parts per billion, with a maximum instantaneous concentration of nearly 62,000 parts per billion.

Texas law prohibits any facility from creating concentrations of hydrogen sulfide above 80 parts per billion, averaged over 30 minutes, that affect homes or businesses. Federal ambient air standards limit concentrations of hydrogen sulfide, also known as H2S, to 10,000 parts per billion in any instant or 200 parts per billion averaged over one hour.

“As far as I know, TCEQ has never done anything to acknowledge either a problem with H2S in the Permian or the results of these mobile monitoring reports,” said Jack McDonald, a research assistant at Oilfield Witness and co-author of a 2022 report on hydrogen sulfide in Texas.

Cann, in response, said the monitoring projects were part of larger agency processes, and that the situation required further investigation before the TCEQ could act.

“Although hydrogen sulfide concentrations were detected above regulatory limits by mobile monitoring vehicles, a specific source was not identified,” Cann said.

Public distrust, political pressure and a revolving door

The TCEQ holds a daunting mandate: to enforce federal and state environmental laws in Texas, home of the nation’s oil and gas industry and its leading fossil fuel producer. Headed by a panel of officials appointed by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, with almost 3,000 employees and a $400 million annual budget, the agency conducts tens of thousands of investigations per year and oversees hundreds of thousands of permits.

Last year, when the agency underwent Texas’ regular 12-year agency review, a Republican-led state commission found “a concerning degree of general public distrust and confusion focused on TCEQ.”

“Some community stakeholders and environmental advocates see TCEQ as a mere extension of industry, rubber stamping new and expanded facilities, seeming to ignore potential health impacts or public concerns,” wrote the Texas Sunset Advisory Commission, which advises the Legislature on agencies that may have outlived their usefulness and should be “sunset,” or abolished.

The oil and gas industry has long played a dominant role in Texas politics, ever since the discovery of oil here more than a century ago. But the fracking revolution of the last two decades breathed a new generation of life and wealth into Texas oil and gas, fueling a massive expansion of industrial activity across the state.

“The big increase in oil and gas that you saw in the 2000s has increased pressure on the agency to do what industry wants,” said Cyrus Reed, conservation director for the Sierra Club in Texas, who has spent more than 20 years lobbying for environmental interests at the Texas Capitol. “There has been a lot of money made. That means there’s more money in politics, there’s more money in the governor's race, and the governor’s the one who appoints the commissioners.”

Despite all that money, 44% of respondents told a 2023 poll by the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin that the state spends too little on environmental protection, while 25% said it spent about enough.

In an investigative series, Inside Climate News found last year that the TCEQ had neglected to consider cumulative effects of pollution in its target cancer risk rate, improperly used an unwritten “one-mile rule” to deny public objections to polluting facilities and enabled big companies to avoid the requirements of major source pollution permitting outlined in federal law.

Even environmentalists are quick to caution that many scientists, engineers and investigators at the TCEQ work earnestly for environmental quality. But for many of its top-ranking staff, they say, a business-friendly approach to environmental regulation often opens paths to lucrative employment at oil companies or industry groups after leaving the agency.

“They want to set themselves up to cash out — the commissioners and high-level staff — so that they can take that revolving door and get a big job as a lobbyist and make a lot of money,” said Robin Schneider, who has directed the Texas Campaign for the Environment since 2000.

Of the commission’s five previous executive directors since 2004, excluding interim directors, three became industry lobbyists, one joined a pipeline company and one became deputy chief of staff for the governor. Of the previous three commission chairs since 2003, one became an economic adviser to then-President Donald Trump and another now lobbies for the Texas Oil and Gas Association.

In response, Cann said the most recent departures from agency leadership have left, in large part, for roles in government, and that revolving-door laws prohibit former directors and commissioners from practicing before the agency for two years after they leave.

“TCEQ’s dedicated employees work long and hard to ensure the protection of public health and the environment,” Cann said. “The agency’s commitment to follow and execute the laws set out by the Legislature is not compromised in any way by its employees — former or present.”

The mobile monitoring team

Twenty years ago, a robust mobile monitoring team used to make regular visits to Texas’ biggest industrial hubs. According to logs obtained via records request, the team completed 36 monitoring projects between 2003 and 2005, including eight to Greater Houston, three to Beaumont and Port Arthur, three to Point Comfort and the Formosa Plastics complex there, three to El Paso and three to Corpus Christi.

“They were really great, a lot of very smart people in mobile monitoring,” said Buddy Stanley, a 73-year-old retired manager of the Corpus Christi regional office.

Regional office staff would conduct routine patrols with handheld monitoring equipment, Stanley said. If their findings suggested problems, they would call in mobile monitoring for further investigation. The team had trained scientists and lab-certified data, which means the data quality was strong enough to hold up as evidence for a citation or in court.

To pinpoint emission sources, Stanley explained, sometimes the team would set up simultaneously upwind and downwind of a facility in question, then compare the air sampling results. Sometimes that required using a boat. When companies saw the monitoring team setting up for such an operation, Stanley said, they often fixed their own emission problems without requiring a citation.

“They got rid of that,” Stanley said, referring to the upwind-downwind monitoring. “There was a lot of reduction in services that you could see coming.”

In 2006 the team returned twice to Corpus Christi and made a five-day survey of the nearby Formosa Plastics complex in Point Comfort, about 90 miles up the coast. In 2007 the team returned to survey 24 facilities in the area, and spent another three days at Formosa Plastics.

In 2008, the team again surveyed Formosa Plastics and made two visits to Corpus Christi and neighboring areas. A 70-page report from that year illustrates the rigor of monitoring projects back then.

Four vans spent eight days in the field around Corpus Christi studying 28 facilities. First the teams surveyed the area, searching for elevated chemical concentrations. Wherever they found chemicals in the air, they returned repeatedly, under varied wind conditions, to monitor the air for hours at a time.

The report included 52 gas camera clips depicting improper emissions and presented 12 key findings. Among them: benzene downwind of a Valero refinery, tank emissions at Magellan Terminals, gas odors downwind of a Citgo refinery and emissions from malfunctioning flares at Javelina Gas Company, Enterprise Products and a Valero refinery.

Since 1989, the report said, the mobile monitoring team had visited Corpus Christi and surrounding areas 42 times. After that, it would be back once, for one day, to monitor a pipeline fire in 2020.

Scandal in the Barnett Shale

The crippling of the mobile monitoring team followed events beginning in 2009 in the Barnett Shale of North Texas, where the early fracking boom was encroaching on residential areas.

Between August and November, the mobile monitoring team made three expeditions totalling 18 days to the Barnett Shale. At 21 of 94 sites, the team measured benzene above TCEQ’s screening level for long-term exposure. At one site, close to two houses, the team measured benzene well above the target for short-term exposure.

“Assessment of the Barnett Shale Formation became a priority for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, and efforts were focused on identifying specific natural gas and oil production emission sources,” read a report co-authored by Doty, the former mobile monitoring team leader.

Those projects coincided with a change in leadership at the TCEQ. In September 2009, the commission chair went from Buddy Garcia, a former Democrat from South Texas, to Bryan Shaw, a future oil lobbyist and former associate professor of agricultural engineering at Texas A&M University appointed by then-Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican.

Shaw, who said in 2014 as TCEQ chair that he was not convinced the earth was warming, would hold the position for nine years, longer than any previous chair in at least 30 years of agency history. (After leaving in 2018, Shaw went on to represent the French oil company TotalEnergies at public meetings in the Barnett Shale, and to lobby at the Texas Capitol for the Texas Oil and Gas Association.) Shaw did not respond to queries sent to Total, TXOGA and a personal email address.

In January 2010, a top TCEQ official addressed the city council of Fort Worth, the largest city in the Barnett Shale, to present the findings of the mobile monitoring team. He displayed eight spreadsheets showing no benzene was detected within city limits.

But that was inaccurate and misleading, a caller to the agency’s fraud hotline reported three weeks later. The call was publicly revealed in an internal audit subsequently leaked to news media. The complaint said the air sample analysis method used wasn’t sensitive enough to detect benzene at the screening level for long-term exposure, 1.4 parts per billion. When adequately analyzed, two samples from Fort Worth did show benzene above TCEQ’s long-term screening level. One sample measured benzene at 3.5 parts per billion and another at 2.1 parts per billion.

Doty remembers the day he was called into the chief auditor’s office to discuss the allegations, which came from someone in his division.

“I’m going to tell you the truth, but you know this is going to ruin my career,” he recalled telling the auditor. His managers were hiding air monitoring data, he reported, by selectively not analyzing certain air samples, and by failing to reveal the technical limitations of their analysis methods.

Even if those readings didn’t represent an urgent threat to public health, Doty considered it unethical not to report what the mobile monitoring team had found. He said it wasn’t the only time he encountered this issue. Over subsequent months, he would again report his managers to the TCEQ office of legal services for selectively reporting air quality data.

“You don’t get to pick and choose as a scientist what values you want to report and what you don’t want to report,” said Doty, who holds a master’s degree in environmental science. “It was an inconvenient truth when something was not beneficial to the agency, either it would cause media scrutiny, or more work or would cause elected officials to get excited.”

When the internal audit was leaked to the media later in 2010, a Republican congressman from North Texas, Dr. Michael Burgess, called for an investigation. WFAA, a Dallas television station, reported at the time that “Benzene detected near drilling sites wasn’t divulged.”

By January 2011, the TCEQ responded by enacting a sweeping set of new regulations that applied only to the Barnett Shale, tightening emissions limits and permitting requirements while expanding the regional network of stationary air monitors.

But unbeknownst to the public, TCEQ officials also slowly killed the mobile monitoring team responsible for those findings.

“They took a highly skilled mobile monitoring team and basically disbanded us,” Doty said. “It was total retaliation against me and my entire team.”

It happened gradually, according to Doty and other former employees. Over subsequent years, the team was given little work. Team members were transferred to the instrument repair shop, air laboratory or regional offices. Doty was eventually put in charge of optical gas imaging camera training for other staff.

Cann, the TCEQ spokesperson, rejected claims that the monitoring team was ever disbanded. “Accusations by former TCEQ staff regarding the dismantling of our mobile monitoring team are completely false,” she said.

Rather, Cann said, the mobile monitoring team was combined with the agency’s emergency response team in 2010, part of a larger agency reorganization.

“This was done to better utilize agency resources and enhance our monitoring capabilities for both routine and emergency events,” Cann said.

Jeff Lewellin, former head of TCEQ’s emergency response team who spent 25 years at the agency, disagreed that the reorganization enhanced capabilities.

“It was obvious that we had upset somebody. They put us all together and we became, in my opinion, ineffective,” said Lewellin, 69, who left the TCEQ in 2011 and later became emergency response director at the Center for Toxicology and Environmental Health, a private emergency response and environmental consulting firm in Arkansas.

“When I left, the team was pretty much disbanded and they hired a lot of high-level managers’ friends,” he said. “They hired other people that didn’t have degrees or any experience whatsoever, then they gave them a lot more money.”

A TCEQ organizational chart from 2009 shows monitoring operations under the office of compliance and enforcement, but a chart from 2010 shows no monitoring operation at all. Agency logs show no projects completed by the team in 2011 or 2012.

Monitoring reappeared on the org chart in 2013 under the Office of Compliance and Enforcement, now under new management. Records show the team completed one project that year, two in 2014 and none in 2015.

“We just stopped being able to go out and do things. [TCEQ leadership] said, ‘You’re not doing that anymore, that’s not federally mandated,’” said a former TCEQ employee who requested anonymity because they still do business with the agency. “We were just told we were lucky that we had a job and that this is going to be our new work.”

After 2016, the mobile monitoring team began to resume regular, if limited, activity. Over the next three years, the team ran four projects in Pearland, outside Houston, investigating complaints of trash smells from two nearby landfills, but was ultimately unable to pinpoint the source.

During those years it also focused on paper mills, a wastewater facility, a feedyard, a compost lot and an oil well blowout elsewhere in Texas. But the team’s approach had changed. It henceforth engaged primarily in the practice of surveying — driving around and measuring any elevated concentrations along the way. If it happened to find any such concentrations, it wouldn’t go back to investigate further.

“We were never allowed to go back and sit and sample in those peak areas to see if it was just one off, or if it was going on for hours, days and weeks,” the former employee said. “We’d write up a little thing saying we went and did surveys, we saw some stuff and there was no problem.”

The mobile monitoring team would no longer produce reports documenting emissions violations at specific facilities, or listing emissions violations observed in Texas’ biggest petrochemical and refinery complexes.

Agency "embarrassed" after Hurricane Harvey

The operation hit a low point in 2017 when Hurricane Harvey hit Houston, prompting the release of millions of pounds of industrial pollutants. TCEQ’s monitoring team was nowhere to be found. That and other problems prompted a blistering editorial in the Houston Chronicle.

“That really embarrassed the agency. That’s what kind of kicked them back into gear. They said, ‘OK, we need to start doing something,” the former TCEQ employee said.

After that, the mobile monitoring team began to spend most of its time engaged in disaster response. The team was told it was important to be seen in public after disasters, the former employee said.

While the team was quick to post on social media when it detected no dangers in the air, it seldom publicized when it found problems.

For example, in 2019 a petroleum tank farm outside Houston caught fire, sending a massive black plume of smoke over the city for days. The mobile monitoring team jumped into action. Two vans spent almost two months patrolling neighborhoods east of Houston, searching for chemicals in the air.

They measured benzene above the TCEQ’s long-term limit dozens of times, and several times above short-term limits, including in residential areas.

For example, in the early morning of March 31, two weeks after the fire started, a van measured benzene well above TCEQ’s long-term screening level for three consecutive hours in a neighborhood in Deer Park, according to the data. Benzene exceeded short-term targets for the final 25 minutes, then the van stopped recording.

It returned around midday and measured benzene at 180 parts per billion. For the next seven hours it detected benzene in the air, peaking at 270 parts per billion at 3 p.m. The team returned again five days later, remained for eight hours and detected no benzene in the air.

Although the TCEQ posted its 308 pages of mobile monitoring data online, it never included those findings in its reports to the public. That’s because a coalition of responding agencies, headed by the EPA, chose a different, far less stringent threshold to report: 1 part per million, or 1,000 parts per billion. Scientists who study benzene told The Texas Tribune last year that threshold was too low.

When TCEQ issued a retrospective report on its response eight months after the fire, it wrote that benzene readings only exceeded 1 part per million from stationary monitors near the fire on March 21.

“There were no other detections of benzene above 1 ppm reported in the community during the response,” the report said.

In a section titled “areas for improvement,” the TCEQ acknowledged it struggled to process the large volumes of data from its monitoring vans, and to effectively communicate it to the public.

“Further efforts could be made to make the information more understandable to a non-scientific audience,” the report said.

After Hurricane Laura hit East Texas in 2020, TCEQ produced a story map with pictures and descriptions of its monitoring response, but no information on what the monitoring teams detected. It linked its data in an interactive map that requires users to click on hundreds of geographic points to see what a van measured there.

In 2021, Winter Storm Uri knocked out power across the state, causing industrial facilities to release millions of pounds of pollution. TCEQ deployed monitoring vans to Texas’ refinery hubs but didn’t generate a monitoring report. Instead, it posted its findings online as dozens of spreadsheets, each with thousands of lines of data.

One year later, in a 200-page report titled “Ambient Air Monitoring Following Natural Disasters and Industrial Accidents, 2017-2021,” the TCEQ wrote that mobile monitoring vans spent 31 days in the field, analyzed 1.8 million air samples and detected exceedances of agency screening levels 156 times.

The mobile monitoring team also conducted test surveys in 2021 around refinery complexes of Beaumont and Houston for the purpose of comparing its results with the companies’ monitor data. Those projects did not generate reports.

In 2023 the team also spent three days monitoring a Shell Refinery fire in Deer Park, one day at a Sherwin Williams paint factory fire in Garland and two days monitoring a fire at Sound Resource Solutions in Shepherd. None of those trips generated reports, either.

Room for improvement

Former employees suggested several ways the mobile monitoring operation could improve. Foremost, when the team detects elevated chemical concentrations, it could try to locate the emission plume with its monitoring hardware, then trace the plume back to a source. Once identified, it could conduct upwind-downwind monitoring of the source to produce evidence of emissions violations and pressure the operator to clean up the operation.

Monitoring projects could produce summary reports like the team used to, providing information and documentation of emissions observed from specific facilities so regional offices could follow up with enforcement actions.

Instead of making efforts to be visible for the public, the monitoring team could strive to be more visible to industry, including by making unannounced visits to the sites they monitor.

“We certainly went inside the plants on occasion. We would knock on the door based on what our findings were at the fenceline,” said Doty, the former mobile monitoring team leader. “We would sit down and show them what we would see with the [optical gas imaging] camera and have a technical discussion.”

The facilities know when regulators are watching and will adjust their operations accordingly, former employees said.

Doty, who keeps in regular contact with colleagues at the TCEQ, also suggested the agency revive its formal solicitation process for mobile monitoring trips. Previously, he said, the team would ask various departments of TCEQ, including regional offices, the permitting division and toxicology, where they most needed monitoring. Then the team would prioritize requests and issue schedules for the year.

Currently, Doty said, monitoring projects happen “by personal request” to division managers.

“It’s the leadership and the vision of the people in charge of the agency,” he said. “Most of it’s just trying to not create work and to create a perception to the general public that they’re actually doing good work.”

Disclosure: Environmental Defense Fund, Texas A&M University, the University of Texas at Austin and Valero have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.