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TERC Documents
 Adobe PDF (409 KB)
Strategic Plans
The Texas Environmental Research Consortium (TERC) is comprised of six County Judges, the Mayor of Houston, the President the University of Texas Medical Branch, the Director of Environmental Defense, a former Chairman of the Dallas Chamber of Commerce, a former director of the Texas Environmental Agency and TERC Chairman Bruce LaBoon of Locke Liddell & Sapp.
This prestigious and diverse stakeholder group oversees air quality research used to improve air quality in East Texas, especially in Houston-Galveston-Brazoria (HGB) and Dallas-Ft. Worth (DFW). These two areas are out of compliance with the current 8-hour ozone standard. Over the last four years TERC has administered over $10 million of research funds aimed at improving emissions inventories, air quality modeling and monitoring, and air regulations and policy. Its accomplishments include:
- Evaluation of benefits of controls on Highly Reactive Volatile Organic Compounds (HRVOCs);
- Identification of the level of resources required to successfully implement the Texas Emissions Reduction Program (TERP) to reduce NOx emissions from on-road and off-road diesel engines;
- Improvement of mobile source emissions estimates based on temperature and humidity effects and local census and activity data;
- Discovery of vastly under-counted NOx sources from small-scale diesel generators;
- Comprehensive evaluation and demonstration of novel and effective monitoring technologies for petrochemical facilities in the Houston Ship Channel;
- Development of an entirely new conceptual model for exceedances of the federal 8-hour ozone standard in East Texas;
- Enhancement of meteorological and air quality model performance;
- Attribution of ozone pollution in the DFW area to sources in nearby and distant counties, both within and outside Texas; and
- Provision of key infrastructure for the Second Texas Air Quality Study (TexAQS II), including real-time meteorological and air quality forecasting to support planning and execution of the field study.
The TERC program managed by the Houston Advanced Research Center (HARC) is innovative and unique because it provides air pollution research for a State government through an independent collaboration of civic, industry, environmental, and local and State government entities. HARC exhibits the characteristics of a boundary organization, accountable to both the "producer" community of scientists and the "user" community of decision makers, facilitating the inclusion of non-partisan science in public policy. HARC has collaborated effectively with stakeholders of competing interest in the development of air quality policy and regulations. These stakeholders include local government agencies and chambers of commerce, research universities, petrochemical companies and energy utilities, environmental organizations such as Environmental Defense, and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. In doing so, HARC has enabled TERC to provide a replicable model for other states and geographical regions to emulate.
The success of TERC's administration of air quality research management is measured by the impact research projects have had on the Texas State Implementation Plan (SIP) and on EPA regulatory decisions.
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| Page Updated/Reviewed: 04/20/2007 9:59 AM |
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© 2005 - 2008 Texas Environmental Research Consortium
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