Having worked for both DS and the Western Co., I can say fracking is both safe and effective. What you will end up with this new bill is higher gas bills, a very bad thing for the poor and elderly. Looks like Dallas is turning into the new Austin.
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Raymond Crawford, Actual Citizen, Fought the City on Fracking -- and Won
When Dallas' drilling rules get tougher, you'll have a professional needlepointer to thank.
"We were like scared little rabbits going head to head with XTO," he says. "We went up there and kind of like just pleaded our case."
The results were more than they could have hoped for. The board sided with them.
"Boom," Crawford says. "They said, 'You know, we don't think we should approve this.' XTO was as surprised as we were."
Patrick Michels
Raymond Crawford, a guy in the ";soft craft" trade, as he puts it, took a hard line with the drilling industry- and won.
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He and his citizen posse kept pushing—emailing city board members, calling them, button-holing them after public meetings, finally weaseling their way in to actually meet with them in their offices. They did exhaustive research, never going to a meeting unprepared. In other words, they did all the same work the high-dollar lobbyists get paid to do on the other side—but for no dollars. When Crawford and his group showed up at last week's council briefing, it was clear that all of the city staff and most of the council knew who they were and had either met with them or at least exchanged calls and emails.
That's not an easy thing to pull off in Dallas. Cherelle Blazer, who has a masters in environmental science from Yale and has worked as an environmental lobbyist in Washington, says volunteering with Crawford on the drilling issue in Dallas has been eye-opening.
She moved to Dallas four years ago, and it was immediately apparent to her that City Hall wasn't eager to be intruded upon by its citizens.
"They make it awfully difficult for any public engagement," she says. "You have the thing where you have to pay for parking, and everything happens in the middle of the day when working people must work...They put up really large hurdles to any public engagement."
But it was equally clear to her, as soon as she started showing up, that great mischief occurs when there are no informed citizens to keep watch. She was taken aback at last week's briefing, for example, when she heard city staff tell council members things that Blazer knew to be patently untrue.
"Much of what they said in their presentation was absolutely false," she said.
For example, a council member asked a city staffer what the existing regulations ("Drill your ass off") were based on, and the city staffer cited several studies and reports. But Blazer, who's familiar with each source the staffer cited, knew that all of them had been published years after the city's existing ordinance was passed.
None of them—not Crawford, not Schermbeck, not Blazer—told me that last week's outcome means they've got the drilling companies on the run. They all counted last week's win as a decent little battle in a long war to come.
But if the council sticks to its word, it will create a commission to study natural gas drilling—especially the method called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which is the source of the biggest environmental worries. Based on that study, which may take a year or more, the commission will recommend improvements to the city laws on drilling—maybe just drill half your ass off or something.
The counter example is Fort Worth, where this kind of drilling has been underway for years, and where drilling companies slipped thousands of wells into the city before officials had any inkling of the dangers. Since then, studies by the EPA and by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality have predicted that air pollution from fracking in Fort Worth will soon outpace all pollution from trucks and automobiles, previously the biggest sources.
Schermbeck has his own theory about why Dallas officials might be more willing to regulate than Fort Worth. He says Fort Worth has way more gas in the ground, which means way more money on the table—both for the city, in terms of royalties and fees, and for private citizens who own the rights to valuable deposits.
Property rights are another piece of it that will have to be hammered out. At the end of last week's hearing, Steve Fort, owner of drilling company Trinity East, made an eloquent appeal for the interests of people who own mineral rights. Owners of these deposits aren't going to want to have that value taken away from them by fiat.
He's right. A lot of college plans and house payments and medical bills are being paid for with gas royalties in Fort Worth these days. If people in Dallas think they've got similar assets under their property, it's hard to imagine they will give them up without a fight. But all these issues will get worked out. And the cool part is there will be citizens at the table—smart, tough, energetic people who will go to City Hall because they think they have a right to go. That's big for Dallas. Even bigger than gas.
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16 comments
PEOPLE! Why so afraid of Natural gas exploration? Everything we do pollutes the air with carcinogens everyday. You drive your big SUVS and cars everyday and dont think twice about about the pollution. Im sure there are several of you on this comment board that use natural gas everyday. How the hell do you think you get it? By drilling and fracking. All hypocrites I say....
It's kind of funny to see things like this - the reaction a citizen has when he finally learns that city hall is not some scary haunted house of horrors, but rather that it's a place where you gather with fellow citizens to better everyone's lives.
It makes me wonder - what kind of sick, twisted home environment produces a citizen who hates and fears his own government?
Good going Dallas! Arlington is stuck in the middle just behind Ft Worth, but the corruption is just as evident. The cover up on the Fulson Site story is so think, Cover Girl makeup would be proud. Just last storm ago two drill sites (Dalworthington Gardens / XTO and the Fulson drill site in SE Arlington at Sublett & HWY 360 / Chesapeake) had an emission event during the night of the storm on April 11 in the early am hours when the power went off. The compressors went down and the pipielines pressure supposedly backed up into the drill sites. The Fulson site's auto shut in didn't work and the secondary safty feature kicked it and spewed benzene into our atmosphere and sickened a woman with her windows oped two blocks away. But we are suppose to be grateful the system "worked" and we avoided a blow out. The reward 40 hours later was that council voted to approve six more wells despite citizen requests to table the vote until TCEQ could finish the investigation. Fireball or benzene take your pick...short death or long, latency cancer one? Read more on Facebook's Barnett Shale Breathers Beware/Discussions page.
The war is not over, but it was astounding to see citizens actually get thrown a bone! Many thanks for Raymond, Cherelle, Mr. Shermbeck and several other UNPAID! citizens working to protect our children's health, our environment, and our city's reputation. Cherelle is right, I've seen some city staff outright manipulate the facts and city council do just about anything (including extend and drag out city proclamations to take up most of the morning, change agenda items around, have a closed session, extend that into a lunch) to keep citizen stakeholders from being able to participate in the process of local government. That day, you needed to be there well before 9 and wait until late in the afternoon to get the final word. Try keeping a job, taking care of your small business, or being able to pick up your kids from school around the Council and Staff's anti-citizen stakeholder maneuvers.When it happens every time I have been one of those stakeholders, regarding various issues, it is hard to shake it off as a one time concern or anti-government paranoia.
The lesson here is that when the cause is right and you are willing to work you can affect policy, even in a dirty business like local government. Write the mayor. Write your councilman. There comes a point when clicking "Like" is not enough.
Raymond Crawford is my neighbor and friend and lately, my hero. He makes me want to be one too.
@Jim Schutze: Who are these everyday people in Fort Worth paying for college and house payments and medical plans with their royalties? That's part of the myth, you know. The only people making any money are the very large landowners. And large landowners are not the majority of people who signed away their minerals.
@Estrada3881: So, you are saying there is nothing new or different about any of this? Is that what you are saying? Because it that is what you are saying..you are sadly mistaken.
Please do some reading up on shale gas drilling and what it is doing to people who are experiencing it. We must begin to move "away" from fossil fuels...that does not mean embracing new technologies that produce fossil fuels and in the case of slick water, horizontal hydraulic fracturing in shale formations...also have issues that can create devastation of our water sources, our health (from all the toxins being released from the processing equipment) and destruction of our communities from all the gas gathering (non-odorized) pipelines that must be built to get the gas out of our communities and to markets far away.
Fear is a good thing when it helps avoid danger. This is a very serious issue...based on what you have written you have an agenda that is not so hard to figure out. So, have a nice evening.
Most of Ft Worth proper are town lots, meaning 1/4 acre on average. You aren't getting rich on that immediately. Gas wells can produce for 30-40 years, if you only get a little $50 check monthly it sounds trivial but put it into an account and forget about it and what do you have at the end? I'm neither pro nor con but do the math and tell me that money can't pay for college or whatever, maybe not you but for your offspring possibly? Just something to think about.
@Steve: When someone on a blog tells me they're not "pro" or "con," I know immediately that the rest of what they are saying is "pro." Shale gas drilling has only been conducted since 2002 in the Barnett as I'm sure you know..telling people that these wells will produce for 30 or 40 years is only a very small and deceptive part of the total story.
Refracking over and over and over to drain a lease requires millions of gallons of water that can never, ever be used again. It's contaminated by the fracking chemicals and the naturally occurring chemicals that come back up from deep in the ground. According to Dr. Ingraffea of Cornell, communities will need to be covered in wells to have any chance of draining the gas out of a lease over time.The storage tanks, the compressor stations, the gas gathering pipelines...all of these necessary parts turn a community into an industrial zone very quickly.
With stuff like that going on in a neighborhood, children will be lucky to get out of childhood alive...much less go to college. So, please don't throw around such ludicrous statements that $50 a month will pay for college...without mentioning the rest of the story.
@Steve: Oh, you're Steve. That's right. I know you. You have no last name. You're Steve. I'm not complaining without a solution. It's doubtful you live anywhere near shale gas drilling operations. Clearly, your replies reveal a shale gas industry bias and a LOVE of fossil fuels. A Love Affair is no excuse. Get a grip. And to correct the usual banter from the industry...most of the United States' crude oil does not come from the Middle East. That's such an outdated, but still so often repeated "notion, " Steve.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil...
Nimby issues? You are a wild and crazy guy, that's one thing for sure. The other thing is (now pay attention) ~ unconventional, slick water, shale gas drilling is deadly to our environment in the cities AND in the country. It's deadly to our planet, Janet, I mean Steve. Not in my back yard...and not on my planet.
Very well stated my anonymous friend. I think you're a little over the top on your conclusions, with all due respect. You can draw equal, if not infinitely worse, consequences from continued coal burning, nuclear, and crude drilling. If someone can give me a solution rather than just complaining then I'm eager to hear. I would agree that urban drilling is not ideal and drilling away from population centers is preferable but we did not build our cities with minerals in mind, sometimes they're right underneath. I hears hat you're saying but I'm watching our results in the middle east and tired of running a huge trade deficit, we can solve those issues if we can get over the nimby issues.
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