Research Library

This issue brief examines how produced water recycling in Texas oilfields threatens landowners’ ability to earn revenue from selling frac water and disposal services, a more lucrative revenue stream compared to raising cattle.

Faculty scholar Jim Blackburn proposes a series of realistic ideas that can substantially reduce misery and damage the next time a catastrophic storm like Harvey tears through the Houston-Galveston area. 

The Center for Energy Studies at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy and the Qatar Leadership Centre hosted a roundtable on February 15-16, 2017, in Doha, Qatar, to discuss some of the most pressing challenges facing market participants in the global energy landscape, with a focus on several issues of paramount interest to Qatar and the broader Gulf Cooperation Council.

Mexico initiated a series of structural reforms in 2013, including major changes to policies governing telecommunications. Nonresident scholar Clara Luz Álvarez explores the implications of a recent ruling by Mexico’s Supreme Court on one of the related laws passed by Congress in a blog post for the Baker Institute Blog.

Regional air quality and health cost models are used to assess how reductions in soil nitric oxide (NO) emissions from the use of biochar could influence U.S. air quality and health costs.

The authors present a vision for enhancing the efficiency and resiliency of urban water systems and discuss ways to overcome associated implementation challenges. Environmental Science & Technology: https://bit.ly/2O2I6wD.

Nonresident scholar Julie Cohn explores the history of the electric power industry and the turn to information technologies to better process and more efficiently use utility data: Information & Culture, July 20, 2017.

The relationship between the United States and its Gulf allies has evolved in important ways since President Jimmy Carter’s 1980 declaration of American “vital interests” in the Persian Gulf — the “Carter Doctrine” — and while many circumstances have changed, the rationale for maintaining U.S. protection for Gulf oil supplies remains strong, authors Gabriel Collins and Jim Krane write in this paper.

Public finance fellow Joyce Beebe discusses state and federal legislation aimed at granting states greater authority to collect sales taxes on remote online sales, as well as obstacles to those efforts.

This paper examines Mexican skilled migration to Texas, particularly to Houston, and explores the factors that motivate such migrants to emigrate, whether they intend to return to Mexico permanently or remain in the U.S. and in what ways they contribute to knowledge-transfer activities between the U.S. and Mexico in health care research.