For the Denton Record-Chronicle/Spike Johnson
Barnett Shale operators have proposed to use this remote location in Cooke County to manage wastewater. This composite image was created by combining three 35mm photographs.
company, Beck Oilfield Supplies, moved into the building. While plans for a retail mecca on Denton’s west side have languished, city leaders offered tax incentives to lure a local office of Schlumberger Ltd., an international oilfield services conglomerate, away from Gainesville. Before the boom, local economists pointed to western Denton County as the next place in the fast-growing Dallas-Fort Worth area for big housing developments. But to support the rush to drill, Barnett Shale gas operators have bought up, leased or condemned thousands of acres of prime North Texas land to support well sites, production facilities and pipelines. Now, more than 1,200 miles of natural gas pipelines — with thousands of pieces of production equipment — crisscross Denton County, nearly all of it west of Interstate 35. In places where an extraction industry needs lots of land, an area also risks becoming a mono-economy, as happened in Appalachia, says Suzanne Tallichet, a rural sociologist at Morehead State University in Kentucky and an expert on coal mining and communities. The transformation of coal’s all-encompassing reach took a long time, she says. Before the Civil War, many Americans viewed Appalachia as a desirable place to live, and in the decades after the war, they tried to return to farming and the way of life they valued. At the same time, logging and coal companies were buying huge swaths of land — entire mountains. People could no longer afford their agrarian lives. Public officials went along with the change, and people were forced to sell their land, beginning a cycle of dependency, Tallichet says. With a regional annual economy of about $360 billion, even the most generous estimates of the Barnett Shale’s part — $11 billion in gross area product and 111,000 jobs — show little risk to the greater economy of Dallas-Fort Worth, Clower says, at least not the way Midland fell after the oil bust in the 1980s. However, smaller towns and other outlying areas could have a harder time. “Oil and gas still cycle,” Clower says.
Some of the research Clower has done in the U.S. and in Australia shows that small towns with few employers are more exposed to economic risk. But those that can adapt will survive. “You can ride a wave like the Barnett Shale,” Clower says. “You have to use the money to reinvest and be ready to move on.” *** A decade ago, Americans faced the prospect of running out of natural gas. Most natural gas came as a byproduct of oil drilling and production. Other easy-toget reserves were tapped out. Talks had begun over building shipping ports capable of docking tankers filled with compressed natural gas, so the nation could import what it needed. Breakthroughs in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing changed that outlook. And Texas’ energy-producing infrastructure — a skilled workforce, idled drilling equipment, injection wells and, perhaps most important, sympathetic politicians — was primed to get at the mammoth natural resource known as Barnett Shale gas. There was just one hitch. More than 6 million people, and the immeasurable amount of infrastructure that supports their daily lives, reside above the shale’s estimated 27 trillion cubic feet of gas. Legislators and local officials have labored for a decade to make the two infrastructures coexist. Some experts say, historically, the chances for the region to come out ahead aren’t good, even before any down cycle begins. In the early 1990s, researchers studied Third World countries with extraction industries, and then began studying communities in the U.S. Centuries ago, mining spurred the development of other inventions and industry, and local communities benefited from those new economic linkages. Today, mining doesn’t have that robust effect on a local economy, in part because technology helps fewer workers complete tasks that once took many workers, according to the