Posted on 09/29/2011 5:46:02 AM PDT by thackney
Along with oil and gas prosperity, tricky problems come with the Eagle Ford shale boom.
Roads in small communities are taking a beating from oilfield truck traffic. There’s a housing shortage.
And billions of dollars in new pipeline will crisscross the oil and gas play, an eminent domain issue that inevitably will make some private landowners unhappy.
The issues are nothing new in a state with a long history of oil and gas production. But the speed at which drilling activity has ramped up across the Eagle Ford has taken many by surprise.
“Y’all have just been inundated so quickly,” said Kenny Jordan, executive director of the Association of Energy Service Companies, at a meeting Wednesday of the Eagle Ford Task Force, its third. The group met at Cuero’s Chisolm Trail Heritage Museum, where passing trucks sometimes made it difficult to hear, underscoring some of the key complaints in small communities: traffic and road damage.
Brian Schoenemann, area engineer for the Texas Department of Transportation in Yoakum, said the oilfield trucks are traveling on roads that were not designed to handle a significant amount of 18-wheeler traffic. And traffic is up 40 percent to 50 percent.
“What’s going to happen when it starts to rain?” Schoenemann asked. “That deterioration is going to start to quicken and multiply.”
The Eagle Ford shale formation sweeps across 24 counties from the Mexican border to East Texas, and oilfield service companies have poured into the area.
Railroad Commissioner David Porter started the task force in hopes of avoiding the problems that led to a backlash against drilling in the Barnett shale of North Texas. The group meets monthly.
DeWitt County Judge Daryl Fowler said a company is voluntarily paying the county $8,000 per well drilled to go into a fund to help defray road...
(Excerpt) Read more at fuelfix.com ...
The “For Rent” sign on the fence outside the four-bedroom house at 505 Thornton St. captures the new housing dynamic in many of the small communities booming across the Eagle Ford shale.
“Oil Field Guys – Welder – Pipe Liners (Guys Only),” it reads.
And while the old white house with the peeling paint is nothing to look at, its owner hopes it soon will generate over $1,000 a month from transitory workers looking for little more than a place to flop.
“I’m asking $125 a week per man. It can hold up to eight beds, even 10 or 12, and I pay the utilities,” said landlord Gustavo Ayala. In comparison, the longtime tenant who was evicted this summer paid $550 a month.
Renters take hit
And while the oil and gas boom is creating instant millionaires and bringing prosperity to many across two dozen counties, not everyone is cashing in. Among those hurt are renters, older people on fixed incomes and others unable to work in the oilfield.
In July, after living in the house on Thornton Street for nine years, Cotulla City Councilman Joe Flores, his wife Cheryl and their two kids were kicked out. While Ayala claims they paid their rent late and caused other problems, Cheryl Flores said it was simply to make way for high-rent oilfield workers.
And, the family quickly discovered, the era of affordable rent houses in Cotulla is over.
“We looked around for a month, but it was ridiculous. Two bedrooms or little trailers and they wanted $1,200 to $1,400 a month,” said Cheryl Flores, 48, who waited tables at Moe’s Family Restaurant for years.
excerpted due to chron.com content
The “For Rent” sign on the fence outside the four-bedroom house at 505 Thornton St. captures the new housing dynamic in many of the small communities booming across the Eagle Ford shale.
“Oil Field Guys – Welder – Pipe Liners (Guys Only),” it reads.
And while the old white house with the peeling paint is nothing to look at, its owner hopes it soon will generate over $1,000 a month from transitory workers looking for little more than a place to flop.
“I’m asking $125 a week per man. It can hold up to eight beds, even 10 or 12, and I pay the utilities,” said landlord Gustavo Ayala. In comparison, the longtime tenant who was evicted this summer paid $550 a month.
Renters take hit
And while the oil and gas boom is creating instant millionaires and bringing prosperity to many across two dozen counties, not everyone is cashing in. Among those hurt are renters, older people on fixed incomes and others unable to work in the oilfield.
In July, after living in the house on Thornton Street for nine years, Cotulla City Councilman Joe Flores, his wife Cheryl and their two kids were kicked out. While Ayala claims they paid their rent late and caused other problems, Cheryl Flores said it was simply to make way for high-rent oilfield workers.
And, the family quickly discovered, the era of affordable rent houses in Cotulla is over.
“We looked around for a month, but it was ridiculous. Two bedrooms or little trailers and they wanted $1,200 to $1,400 a month,” said Cheryl Flores, 48, who waited tables at Moe’s Family Restaurant for years.
excerpted due to chron.com content
Sand mines boom along with fracking
http://fuelfix.com/blog/2011/09/15/sand-mines-boom-along-with-fracking/
September 15, 2011
Ron Jordan picked up a handful of damp sand as it cascaded off a broad conveyor belt, eventually bound for trucks or railcars that will take it to eager buyers in South Texas and around the country.
“This is the good stuff,” Jordan said as he fingered the golden-colored sand. “This is what everybody wants.” The sand felt more grainy than the sand on your average Texas beach.
It was beach sand, though, that two days earlier had been mined from sandstone formed from an ancient sea that lapped what was shoreline here more than 500 million years ago. Sand mining is booming in Central Texas, as drilling companies are demanding tons of it. Sand aids in getting the best production from wells drilled in the Eagle Ford shale of South Texas and other tight rock formations.
The sand near tiny Voca in south McCulloch County is prized because of its strength and purity. It’s also plentiful and relatively easy to mine.
Jordan was showing off the sand at a mine and processing plant owed by Proppant Specialists LLC, an affiliate company of Frac Tech Services LLC of Fort Worth and Cisco. It’s one of several companies operating in McCulloch County, 140 miles northwest of San Antonio, that are seeing increasing demand for sand by companies for use in hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.
In fracking, a mixture of fluids and “proppants” are pumped at high pressure into a perforated well pipe to create small fractures in tight shale rock. The small fractures allow oil and natural gas to escape and flow out of the well.
Proppants literally prop open the fissures in the rock and may be sand, sand coated with resin, or ceramic pellets. Today Proppant Specialists’ mine, which began operating in fall 2008, is at the center of activity near Brady in southeastern McCulloch County.
The demand for sand has brought hundreds of jobs to the area, McCulloch County Judge Danny Neal said. “We’ve welcomed two new mining operations to our county in the last two or three years,” he said.
As new companies move in, “the pay scale is moving up because they’re in competition for the workforce. These are quality jobs; however, they’re for the physically capable.”
Neal estimates that the industry may employ as many as 1,000 people in the county. That doesn’t count the truckers. “All of these plants will have between 50 and 100 trucks load up every day,” he said.
Other sand mining companies operating in the area include Houston-based Cadre Material Products; Carmeuse Industrial Sands, whose parent is Global Carmeuse Group of France; and Connecticut-based Unimin Corp.
“We produce frack sand almost exclusively at the Voca location,” said Drew Bradley, senior vice president of operations for Unimin, which has had a mine in Voca since the mid-1990s. “Demand for sand has grown significantly,” as companies ramp up fracking in the Eagle Ford shale, he said.
The sand mines are cranking around the clock. Proppant Specialists runs two 12-hour shifts around the clock, seven days a week, its managers said. “That’s not uncommon,” the county judge said.
At the Proppant Specialists’ open-air mine, visitors are surrounded on three sides by red 80-foot sandstone cliffs. On one end, an explosive charge created a crumple of sandstone. The rock is hauled to processing units. As part of a two-day process, the clumps of sandstone go into hoppers to be broken up. The sand is washed — cleansed of red clay — sorted by grain size with sieves, then dried.
“This is a unique deposit of high quality,” Jordan said of the sandstone outcrops at Voca. “If limestone were on top, it wouldn’t be economical to mind the sand.”
Fracking operators are willing to pay for the right kind of sand for their operation. They need sand that’s uniform, round and strong — that is, resistant to being crushed thousands of feet down in dense shale rock, said Texas geologist Jerry McCalip, an officer in the Texas chapter of the Association of Environmental & Engineering Geologists.Users also want sand that won’t dissolve in acids. “It needs to be predominantly quartz or silica,” he said.
The sand in McCulloch County is silica and is prized for its purity and strength. Nicely rounded sand grains of the same size help with a well’s production. Uniformity allows even spacing between the grains, allowing more oil and gas to flow to the top of the well.
Irregular sand inhibits this process. Irregular grains have tiny sections, called fines, that may break off.
“That can hurt well production,” said Jordan, vice president at Proppant Specialists. And angular-shaped grains can pack together, reducing space between the grains. That, too, inhibits the flow of oil and gas.
The sorting of sand is an important step in processing. That’s because the American Petroleum Institute, an industry trade group, sets specifications for fracking sand. That means buyers of sand meeting API specifications know what they’re getting.
Production companies choose different sizes and strengths of sand based on what will work best in a particular formation, Jordan said.
The surge in drilling and hydraulic fracturing in the Eagle Ford is pushing up the price of processed sand. Fracking sand costs an average $110 per ton and has risen in price by about 10 percent since January 2010, said David Vaucher, senior researcher at the consulting firm IHS/CERA, who has examined activity in the Eagle Ford.While there are valuable sands available from mines in the upper Midwest, buying Texas sand cuts shipping costs. “That’s very important when we’re talking these huge quantities of sand,”
Vaucher said. A typical fracking operation in the Eagle Ford shale may use 2,000 tons of sand, he said.
“The good new for Texas producers is that there’s an application for the local materials,” geologist McCalip said. “It’s quite an expense to ship sand 1,000 miles. And the Texas sands work, no doubt about it.”
This is another liberal attack thread on gas drilling.
We see the same arguments here in the Marcellus Shale of Pennsylvania. “Too many trucks....road damage....noise....rent going up...etc, etc, etc”
It proves, once again, that progressives are for anything except real progress.
The questions that should be asked is why aren’t our roads designed properly?
Why are our roads congested? Why haven’t they been expanded?
Fuel taxes are highest on trucks....therefore, revenue is not the problem.
Ahhh...tell me about it! That’s our story here in Bradford County, PA too!
These gas companies move in without knowing a thing about the roads, availability of housing etc... It’s a nightmare at times and especially now since we’ve had a huge flood and many roads and bridges are shut down.
The city councilman Joe Flores lived there for 9 years and paid rent, he probably could have bought that little house for under $20,000 years ago, but not now.
I will just say it wasn’t long ago that you could cross Esplanade Ave in Cuero and not worry about getting run over.
Not anymore!
We monitor GPS on our Techs that work in Cuero and Yoakum and if they idle for too long we have to ask.. why?
My techs say because they can’t cross the highways because of the traffic..lol Traffic in Cuero and Yoakum?! HA!
As for rentals there aint one in Cuero Yoakum or Gonzales to be had. and where they would park 1 Rv the RV parks are squeezing in 2.
Great for the local economy but it doesn’t seem the municipalities are spending it on anything worth while.
Just sayin.
Such a horrible, terrible problem to have. You know, growth outstripping infrastructure and all of that. Must be a terrible burden.
(Extreme sarcasm moment).
The people who own rental property have the right to ask what they can get in rent.
The article also fails to explain how the boom "hurts" older people on fixed incomes and those unable to work in the oil fields. Surely not all of those people are renting too and paying increased rents. More people working in an area is going to increase business for local stores, restaurants, laundromats, etc. That's going to benefit the owners of those businesses, and very likely increase their need for employees as well, which provides jobs for people who may not be able to physically work oil field jobs.
What's more, anyone living in the area with a willingness to work and some incentive can find a way to cash in: providing housecleaning/housekeeping services for the workers and/or the landlords, making and selling breakfast burritos, providing a laundry service, or anything else that the workers might need and are willing to pay for (which is still legal).
I was working a project in the area earlier this year, related to Eagle Ford.
You run into problems like no equipment rentals available, you have to hire from far out of town/state. If you are local family trying to get a backhoe crew to repair/replace a septic time, you will very frustrated both with the prices and delays.
Don't get me wrong. This is a good thing for the area. There will be more jobs for decades to come, the area benefits.
But it can be painful on the front end as prices run up, stores and restaurants are packed.
Lots of opportunity, it will bring in dollars and development for the community in the long run, a good thing.
Small country roads are not designed for lots of heavy haul traffic. Why would you expect every road designed to freeway specification? Why would you want to pay for that?
Why are our roads congested? Why haven’t they been expanded?
Expansion doesn't happen as fast as the boom comes on. And in some cases, this is transitional traffic, it will not stay this heavy in a couple of years.
Fuel taxes are highest on trucks....therefore, revenue is not the problem.
That is fine for the state, but how does that help a county budget that won't see the increases in revenue until property taxes rise after property value rises, a year or two later.
I work in the industry and I don't see this as a hit piece. It is a reality of the situation. Some companies do a better job working with the communities.
I worked on a project earlier this year where my client was going to put quite a bit of truck traffic on the a county dirt road. We also upgraded the dirt road out to the highway. We would have had problems with our own trucks otherwise.
**** Among those hurt are renters, older people on fixed incomes and others unable to work in the oilfield.***
Is this anything new? They should have been in Farmington NM back in 1954-1957!
There were so many gas field workers and families there the schools had to split into two 1/2 day sessions for the kids.
And it was virtually impossible to find a house to rent. Many, including us bought a travel trailer to have a shelter over our heads.
Then there was Roswell NM and Carlsbad NM in the 1959-1962 during their gas boom.
So why is everyone belly aching.
I’m sure belly aching went on then as well.
There is a price for the growth that comes with a boom.
North Dakota, Pennsylvania have experienced it recently for the same reasons. Eastern Ohio is likely to see it soon. They will welcome the jobs and complain just the same.
***I’m sure belly aching went on then as well.
There is a price for the growth that comes with a boom.***
The only bellyaching I saw were those who were not getting any of the money flowing into the area.
Real bellyaching began when the boom finally went bust and there were few jobs, empty houses, and unemployment, kind of like in Carlsbad when the potash mines closed.
So just like today. Somethings never really change.
And the fall back will come for these as well. There will be a net increase, but not like now. Drilling is temporary, production is more lasting.
These are exactly the kind of problems they should want to have.
Better to be too busy rather than too poor.
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