Denton County voters will be going to the polls to decide if they want to stand up to protect private property rights or if they want to restrict peoples’ right to benefit from their ownership of assets they rightfully own.
Those assets may have been passed down to the current owner over generations or may have been purchased just the other day. The sale of them might have been used to put a child through college, or help with the down payment on a first home. The purchase of them is the manifestation of the vibrant market generated by our homegrown energy economy. I am talking about mineral rights and the private ownership of minerals.
Production of minerals, owned by individuals, retirement funds and institutions of higher learning, has filled state and local government coffers through taxes, jobs and good salaries. It’s why the windfall to our Permanent School Fund, to benefit public education to the tune of a whopping $36.4 billion, is now $1.3 billion more than the prestigious Harvard University endowment.
Dorothy, we sure aren’t in Kansas anymore. Where are we? Is this the Texas I know and love? I don’t recognize it. An attack on the energy economy and private property rights all at the same time? What would George Mitchell, the great Texas philanthropist who persevered against odds and opinion to engineer a way to unleash the bounty of natural gas trapped in shale rock right beneath Denton County, think?
You see, a ban on hydraulic fracturing is a ban on drilling. Such a ban will deprive the rightful mineral owner the beneficial use of his or her property and it is perpetrated by irrational fears with no basis in fact or science.
Speaking of facts, over 80 percent of all the wells drilled in America are hydraulically fractured. Hydraulic fracturing is a tool. The industry has used this tool for 60 years to ensure a much more efficient release of the targeted hydrocarbons into the drill pipe. There have been zero instances of groundwater contamination from hydraulic fracturing that takes place tens of thousands of feet below the water table in Texas.
Hydraulic fracturing is nothing new, only “new” to those uninformed of the drilling process. But there is no shame in not knowing more about the drilling process. We all can’t know about everything. Not everybody is a petroleum engineer, or wants to be.
But there is shame in not wanting to accept the truth. There is shame in perpetuating myths. There is danger in it, too. Putting the brakes on the use of hydraulic fracturing makes our country more energy dependent. It emboldens our enemies.
Over the last decade the combination of horizontal drilling and multistage fracturing has unleashed an energy renaissance in America. On a macro level, the new normal is energy security, versus vulnerability. Even better, with advancing technology the drilling footprint gets smaller in relation to amount of production, but not at the expense of safety or the environment. This is what good public policy at the state level and domestic energy companies operating in the field have helped to bring about. It is a great American success story. Who could be against this?
Does this success story mean less oversight is needed? No, it means that concerns need to be properly placed. The casing of wells, cement used during the process, and proper plugging of abandoned wells must be strictly enforced. Water recycling to minimize water use and water disposal trucks on the roads should be the order of the day. The Legislature must continue to give the Texas Railroad Commission the tools it needs to continue to be proactive and to ensure the environment is protected.
Not only do hydraulic fracturing ban proponents deprive the mineral owner of the beneficial use of his private property, they will deprive Texans of the severance tax on production, the local property taxes on proven reserves, the sales taxes on equipment, the good paying jobs of workers from restaurants to roughnecks on the rigs. They would sacrifice all this good and more on the altar of environmental extremism because that will be the result of a prohibition of the decades-old proven tool, hydraulic fracturing. It is simply not Texan and it will not stand when challenged on constitutional grounds. Texans deserve better.
There is simply no rational way to justify the onslaught of misinformation and the attempted property grab of mineral ownership that is inherent in the proposed ballot initiative to ban hydraulic fracturing. Hopefully this is not the manifestation of the vision of that great thinker and comic strip icon, Pogo.
“We have met the enemy and he is us.”
ELIZABETH AMES JONES is the former chairwoman of the Texas Railroad Commission and a sixth-generation Texan. She is a public policy adviser with Squire Patton Boggs and lives in Dallas.
