As often happens when things are examined up close, my journey through
the Texas lowlands and the nation’s divisive energy debate brought some
surprising twists – and, for me, an unexpected conclusion.
CHAPTER 1: From earth shoes to ‘T. Boone’ Sargent
I became an oil well owner in 1968, at the age of 22.
It was just before Neil Armstrong put his boot print on the moon and college campuses erupted in protest over the Vietnam War.
My
father happened to be running for governor as a Republican and a
liberal environmentalist, perhaps something you could do only in
Massachusetts. He would end up turning the state away from building
highways toward building more public transportation. He would give the
country’s first Earth Day speech at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology in 1970.
But in 1968, when he was seeking
office, he had to divest himself of many holdings, including an oil
well, to avoid conflicts of interest. So he gave my sisters and me part
ownership of the well that he had bought from an old Army buddy in
Houston.
Now that might sound pretty grand, to say
you owned an oil well in Texas. But it was a modest distinction: The
well had been in operation for years and was now only producing a
trickle. It was only pumping enough oil to pay each of us $28 a month.
It
also wasn’t that unusual at the time to own an oil well. Many Americans
did. In fact, one factor driving energy development in the US over the
decades has been the practice of private ownership of mineral rights. In
many other parts of the world – Europe, for instance – the government
owns the rights to oil, gas, and other resources under the ground and
controls development through licensing agreements. Here, oil companies –
big and small – can deal directly with people who own the booty, which
tends to encourage entrepreneurialism and development, for better and
worse.
I also just found my well a wonderfully tangible
investment. I liked thinking of it faithfully bobbing up and down in
East Texas as I went about writing environmental books, some of which
even bashed big oil.
Then, in 1973, I started receiving
letters from Exxon explaining that the company planned to “unitize” our
oil field. This meant that we would be paid a percentage of what the
entire oil field produced rather than what was being pumped out of our
individual well.
But it was a tricky proposition. They
would have to inject pressurized fluids into the ground to draw out the
residual oil. It could result in us earning even less than we had been
making before. Given the risks, the company offered to buy me and my
siblings out for $5,000 each.
My sisters were elated.
One bought a horse with the money; the other put an addition on her
house. I figured that if Exxon wanted our well so badly they had to know
something I didn’t, so I hung on to my share. The royalties plunged to
about $10 a month.
I was beginning to feel less like
J.R. Ewing and more like Cliff Barnes, the dupe who was always getting
outfoxed by the Ewings. But time passed and oil technology progressed
until, a few months ago, I started receiving letters and phone calls
again. This time they were from small wildcatters who wanted to use
newer techniques to siphon the remaining oil out of the field, which
they were now calling the Webster tract. In some cases they were sending
checks offering to buy out my share of the royalties.
Was fracking knocking on my wellhead?
CHAPTER 2: What was this money in my mailbox?
As the oilmen explained it, primary production had drawn 30 to 40 percent of the oil out of the Webster field.
Secondary
production had brought up another 20 percent. But at least 20 percent
more was still lying below the Texas sod, which they believed they could
now recover.
It would have been easy for me to simply
cash one of the $6,000 checks that were showing up in my mailbox. Yet
once again I was curious what the wily Texans knew that this callow
Easterner didn’t.
I had read most of the environmental
literature about the effects of fracking, which included some scary
stuff: how it could contaminate ground water, contribute to air
pollution, create waste-water issues, and, in theory, even cause some
people’s tap water to become flammable.
But I had also
noticed what fracking had done for energy prices: how natural gas prices
had remained low for several years, saving consumers huge amounts on
their heating and electric bills.
I had watched as a city
near us, Salem, Mass., decided to replace its old coal-fired power
plant with a new gas-fired one, thanks to the abundant supplies from
fracking. More broadly, I understood that many people believe natural
gas can be a bridge to get us from an economy based on our dwindling
supplies of oil to one based on wind, solar, and hydrogen energy.
But
did I really think my well was going to help usher in energy
independence by 2016, or just more of the same old environmental
problems?
I needed to do some more sleuthing. First I
clicked on Google Earth to locate the Webster tract. It consisted of
about a dozen wells just north of the town of Webster, an aerospace hub
of 10,500 people 20 miles southeast of Houston.
I
wondered what all those people thought about having oil wells near their
homes – wells that might sully their drinking water but might also be
worth millions of dollars. So I checked online.
I
discovered that Texas has a 100-year history of derricks and drill rigs
coexisting beside homes and farms. Cities like Fort Worth, Dallas, and
Houston boomed because of the black gold often sitting in subterranean
vaults directly below their streets.
As a result, I
expected to find unconditional support for oil and gas extraction, and
people eager to buy into the latest energy boom. Instead I found that
Texas is having many of the same debates as the rest of the country.
A
North Texas family was awarded $3 million in April in a landmark
lawsuit against a natural-gas company whose fracking operations, they
argued, had made them sick and killed some of their ranch animals. In
Denton, just north of Dallas, the city was putting a referendum on its
November ballot that would ban fracking altogether. But most of the
articles were more nuanced, reflecting the state’s long history of
energy exploration and innovation and, yes, its growing use of
renewables (Texas has more wind turbines than any state except
California).
In 1981, Mitchell Energy, a Texas company,
was the first to drill horizontally to reach the Barnett shale formation
beneath Fort Worth. It also used a “slick-water frack” – adding
friction-reducing chemicals to the well water to allow it to flow at a
higher rate. By combining the two technologies, they could dramatically
increase the amount of gas that could be retrieved from shale rock.
When
the price of natural gas rose above the equivalent of $90 a barrel for
oil in the late 1990s, these two technologies, coupled with other
innovations, helped trigger a nationwide fracking boom – one that
extends from the Bakken formation in North Dakota to the Marcellus
formation in Pennsylvania to many other parts of the country.
Today,
the Newark East Field underlying the Barnett formation continues to be
the largest producer in Texas, accounting for 30 percent of all the
natural gas produced in the state. Because it is so big and was the
first field to be exploited, the early frackers made mistakes and
garnered their share of environmental critics.
But I
also found an online forum for land and royalty owners above the
Haynesville shale formation, which covers 9,000 square miles in East
Texas, northwestern Louisiana, and southwestern Arkansas. It is
conservatively estimated to hold 29 trillion cubic feet of natural gas
and to be worth several billion dollars.
The website
demonstrates a new determination to get things right. Its introduction
reads, “What makes this site so great? Well I think it’s the fact that,
quite frankly, we all have a lot at stake in this thing they call
shale.... Our farm has been in our family for over 80 years. As exciting
as this shale is, we know that we have a responsibility to do this
thing correctly.”
But when I started calling around I
found that things were even more interesting. Exxon Mobil had sold the
Webster tract to Denbury Resources in Plano, Texas. I called the head of
owner relations, Jack Collins. I asked him when the company planned to
start fracking my well. He replied, by e-mail, “We have no plans to
frack Webster field, but we do plan to commence a CO2
flood of the field next year.”
He explained that Denbury
owned a source of natural carbon dioxide underneath a salt dome in
Mississippi. The company was extending a pipeline from Mississippi to
Texas, and, when it arrived, it would start pumping natural carbon
dioxide into the oil field.
With fracking, fluids are forced into the wellhead to break up the shale rock and free the trapped gas. With CO2
flooding, carbon dioxide is pumped into the well and adheres to the
droplets of oil in the shale. It’s a little like mixing turpentine with
paint: The oil droplets swell and become thinner so they can be pumped
out.
In 2015, Denbury planned to substitute this natural carbon dioxide with “man-made” CO2
emissions from a new power plant being built in Mississippi. After the
oil is extracted, the company intends to leave the remaining carbon
dioxide underground where it cannot contribute to global warming. The
federal government will provide the power plant with a grant to
participate in the project.
Mr. Collins sent me some
literature that pointed out that the amount of US carbon emissions had
dropped in four out of the past seven years because of power plants
switching from coal to natural gas. It noted that a plant in
Saskatchewan planned to sequester the same amount of carbon dioxide as
would be produced by 500,000 automobiles.
I began to
wonder: Had I serendipitously become an investor in an energy company
that is doing carbon sequestration and oil extraction right?
There had to be a catch. I decided to fly down to Texas, to snoop around a bit more.
CHAPTER 3: A shaker of salt and co2
I found the Webster tract sitting on both sides of the Gulf Freeway, not far from the Johnson Space Center.
It lies in an area of upscale malls and less august malls with pawnshops, gas stations, and bail bondsmen.
The
land Denbury owns is some of the least developed on the highway. There
are large tracts of hardwood forests and the remains of old fruit
orchards. Horses and dairy cows graze beside the capped wells of the oil
field. Across the highway, towering rigs are starting to drill toward a
great dome of salt thousands of feet below, where the CO2
would eventually be pumped in under pressure.
I decided
to ask several neighbors what they thought of the project. On a rainy
morning, as I was having breakfast at a Waffle House, I talked to a
carpenter who said he was concerned about reports of earthquakes in West
Texas, where there is a lot of fracking going on. He was echoing a
common concern about both fracking and CO2
flooding.
“Of course there is no way in heaven you can
say they were caused by fracking, and they really didn’t do much
damage,” said the man, who didn’t want his name used. “But there have
never been any earthquakes there before.”
I asked another
person, Weezie McKay, what she would do if a company wanted to recover
gas under her house. “I would start to look for a new home,” she said
without hesitating.
Eric Miller, a chemical engineer in
the orchard lands of nearby Orange, had a different perspective. He said
he would be thrilled if someone wanted to use carbon dioxide to get
more oil out of his well.
“This kind of thing has been
done safely for years. Natural gas is a seasonal fuel used primarily to
heat homes in the winter. So when they produce it in the summer they
pump it back down into salt domes and store it until the prices rise in
the autumn,” he explained. “The chemical industry also gets credits for
pumping ethylene into salt domes, and, of course, the government stores
strategic supplies of oil in some of the 500 salt domes in this part of
Texas and Louisiana.”
I was discovering that there are
many ways of looking at oil. Easterners tend to look at it as a messy
business of booming gushers that make Texans instantly rich. But the
average well isn’t a gusher but one more like mine that can produce a
moderate amount of oil for several generations if the correct technology
is used.
Scientists see oil as a mineral that built
up when our planet was much warmer and plankton was removing
heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the ocean, then sequestering it under
tons of sediments where it gradually cooked into gas and petroleum. In
essence they see oil as our planet’s way of cooling itself down. The
problem is that now we are putting that heat-trapping gas back into the
atmosphere so fast that the natural system can’t absorb it without
contributing to global warming.
Many thoughtful
environmentalists look at oil and gas differently. They see running out
of oil as one of our biggest environmental problems. Despite its dirty
reputation, oil is one of the cleanest fuels we have – far cleaner than
coal or tar sands. In their view, we should be converting to wind and
solar energy while conserving what oil is left for essential things like
transportation.
Finally, most Texans still see oil as a
pretty good investment that can earn a family a good income for several
generations while helping build our nation’s economy.
I
like to think that using carbon dioxide to extract oil from my well
will take all of these considerations into account. So now I have to
decide: What should I do with the mineral rights?
CHAPTER 4: My smaller carbon footprint
My
well is already owned by a company that is considered a leader in the
field of carbon dioxide sequestration and oil extraction.
Do I think this technology is the silver bullet that will solve all our global warming problems? No.
Do I think there are no problems associated with carbon injection? No.
In
2011, Denbury paid a $662,500 fine when its injection system blew the
cement casing out of a well in Mississippi, and carbon dioxide escaped
and settled in the surrounding hollows, asphyxiating several deer and
other smaller animals. Critics remain concerned about whether companies
do enough to safely cap the wells so they can withstand the pressure
that forces the oil out of dormant fields.
But even wind
turbines have been blamed for killing wildlife such as bald eagles.
Like wind and solar, such carbon sequestering is not the complete
answer, but it does seem to me to be a step in the right direction.
In
theory, my field will continue to make a modest amount of money
extracting oil out of the ground without most of the problems associated
with fracking for natural gas. It will sequester 4 percent more
heat-trapping carbon underground than will be emitted by the pumped-out
oil. This 4 percent represents the equivalent of being able to take
several hundred thousand cars off the road.
So I am
curious to see how all this will play out and have decided to hang onto
my well to see what happens as we pump it full of heat-trapping carbon
dioxide.
I’m hopeful it will help create a world in which CO2
emissions are declining. If so, I may pass on the well to my
grandchildren, as my father did to me, as a petroglyph of sorts to the
Petroleum Age.
William Sargent is a
consultant for the “NOVA” science series on PBS and is the author of 20
books about science and the environment. His latest book, “Islands in
the Storm,” is about how barrier beach communities fared during
superstorm Sandy.
Being at the TIPPING-POINT that these actions are having, it becomes necessary
to access their impacts and once having recognized the negative affects
on the environment, the land that we are farming, our commercial and industrial endeavors, the atmosphere that
we are breathing, it is critical to recognize that WE MUST REVERSE THESE
TRENDS. Then, given the time
and place to implement actions and practices to have a cause-and-effect
impact in a positive
way, will influence implementation, and at least retard further
deterioration of our environment and our climate. On a larger scale,
reversing the trends of deterioration should always be----the ultimate
objective.
Its impact on the economy, pollution, and the focus on Climate; The
Conversation---makes this worthy of continued enthusiasm and
consideration
Lou Marconi (SuiteLou0819)
This Sept. 11, 2013 file photo shows oil pumps the desert oil fields of
Sakhir, Bahrain. Dramatic changes in oil production around the globe,
both higher and lower, are balancing each other out instead of wreaking
havoc. (AP)
