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San Jac Saloon's outdoor doors were stolen a few weeks back. (Pedram Amini)
Have you seen San Jac Saloon's doors? Because co-owner Pedram Amini is offering a $500 reward to whoever can bring his missing custom-made treasure back.
It's the wild, wild west for the 300 East 6th St. bar, where Amini checked in over last weekend, in preparation for the first Longhorn football game, only to be told by his employees that the doors had been lifted a few weeks prior.
Desperate to get them back, Amini said he used his photoshop skills to design a flyer that he plans to post all-around 6th Street.
"It kind of feels like a personal hit to have this taken from us, you know, it's not a small item," Amini told Austonia. "I figure someone's got it and either they'll just come hand-in-hat and give it back or someone knows who took it and they'll take me up on the $500 offer."
There are two sets of saloon doors at the bar: a functional version on the interior and a decorative set that is put out during business hours to adorn the outside. The decorative set was stolen because they were likely left out one night Amini said.
Made by artist and friend Owen Trogden, who has created a number of pieces for the five-year-old bar, the doors hold a special meaning to Amini. He says he isn't looking for trouble, he just wants to be reunited with the pieces.
Trogden is a "classic cowboy," according to Amini. (Bunkhouse Art and Design)
The bar doesn't have any leads on who might have taken the doors, which Amini said are solid wood and easily weigh 25 pounds.
"To us, they're valuable but to anybody else, they're totally useless," Amini said. "One theory is that someone was just drunk, having a good time, they wanted to take a souvenir. I'm not looking to harm the person who stole these things—if I can get them back, that's great."
In fact, Amini hasn't gone to the police yet because he is hoping that a good samaritan will return them. Amini said he isn't ruling legal enforcement out but he is cautiously optimistic that the doors will make their way home.
"I know that (police) have got bigger fish to fry. It's just not really something that's going to be on their radar, nor should it be, they've got bigger priorities than my saloon doors," Amini said. "Worst case scenario, this will be more business for my buddy Owen. Maybe we'll improve on the design but in an optimal world, we'll get them back and it'll be a really fun story."
If you have any information about San Jac Saloon's missing doors, you can send them a message at bounty@sanjacsaloon.com.
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UT is developing technology targeted at power, steel, cement and other industrial plants to lower emissions. (UT Austin)
The ruling was brought after a challenge to a lower court opinion brought by Texas and more than a dozen other states.
Vaibhav Bahadur, an associate professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin called the SCOTUS decision significant, noting that Texas is the biggest energy producer in the U.S., and produces more energy than the United Kingdom.
“Power generation accounts for a significant fraction of U.S. carbon emissions, and the EPA loses its ability to control what's happening in about half of that sector,” Bahadur said. “And it's not just the U.S., I think people and environmentalists on pretty much anywhere on the planet will be disappointed because this is going in the wrong direction. We know we want to be decarbonizing, and this is essentially putting a roadblock on progress toward decarbonization.”
So, we’re going to need some insurance, Bahadur says. He’s carrying out work that’ll act as such through his research on carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), the process of sucking carbon from the air and burying it.
For the past five years, he’s been working on a novel approach to storing carbon. It involves supercharging the formation of carbon dioxide-based crystal structures and storing billions of tons of carbon under the ocean floor.
“If all of this is successful, then we will have another option for safely and responsibly storing carbon at the bottom of the seabed for essentially eternity,” Bahadur said.
Still, Bahadur talked about a different approach to responsibly cutting down emissions in the next decade, and doing so in a meaningful and substantial way, then the environment will eventually heal itself and we might not need CCS.
But that’s not the path we’re headed down.
“We're already starting to see temperature records being shattered this year, and we're still to hit peak summer,” Bahadur said. “All of this just makes me think that we need CCS to a larger extent, and possibly sooner than what a lot of scientists anticipate, especially if we can't keep our emissions in check.”
Gary Rochelle, a professor in the department of chemical engineering at UT, thinks CCS was ready to be deployed in 2010 and those 12 years have made a difference.
“But now we've emitted all that CO2,” Rochelle said. “And unfortunately, unlike other pollutants, when you emit CO2, it's there. It's not going away.”
Gary Rochelle and Vaibhav Bahadur are both researching technology to address carbon emissions. (UT)
Still, the delay is good in that now researchers like him have had time to learn about and improve the technology, allowing for fewer problems once it's deployed.
In December, UT announced a licensing agreement with advanced technology company Honeywell. The technology from that is targeted at power, steel, cement and other industrial plants to lower emissions.
Rochelle has been working on the technology since 2000 as part of an international collaborative effort. When he talked to Austonia on Thursday, he had just had calls with collaborators in Germany and Norway. Currently, he’s working with some Ph.D. students on addressing a chemical reaction that can happen with the technology known as oxidation that could lead to ammonia emissions and cause problems for a large-scale commercial unit.
Rochelle says he’s driven to this work because he wants to make a contribution.
“We're trying to develop this technology so that we can make a difference,” Rochelle said. “It's a nice problem to work on. The students are motivated and those are the primary things which drive us.”
Meanwhile, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott celebrated the high court’s decision which acted as a blow to President Joe Biden’s plan to reduce emissions.
“Today’s landmark victory against an out-of-control administration is also a big win for Americans who worry about skyrocketing energy costs due to expensive federal regulations that threaten our energy industry,” Abbott said. “President Biden cannot keep attacking the energy industry and the hardworking men and women who power our nation.”
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