Barnett Shale

More on XTO vs. Chesapeake bidding battle

Here's the latest take from the Mistletoe Heights Neighborhood Association on Chesapeake Energy's new lease offers to the neighborhood. Chesapeake and its agent Four Sevens are competing against XTO and its agent Fort Worth Energy for leases on the South Side. This is an email from Norm Stemple, head of the neighborhood's gas drilling committee, to property owners:

Recently many of us in Mistletoe Heights (including myself) have received an offer from Four Sevens Energy to lease the gas under our property.  In the next week or so you should be receiving a lease from Fort Worth Energy which has been approved by the MH gas lease committee.  As chairman of the MH gas lease committee I urge you to wait and compare the two leases.  It is the opinion of the gas lease committee that the Fort Worth Energy lease provides, in writing, the following key environmental safeguards that are not addressed in the Four Sevens lease.

1) drill site must be over 600 feet from any home in MH

2) no truck traffic associated with drilling on any streets in MH

3) compressor must be over 1000 feet from any home in MH

4) no gas transmission lines through MH

5) noise level is limited to specified decibels above ambient.

Three minor differences include:

a) mineral rights owner makes no warranty of title

b) royalty payments not reduced by "delivery, processing or marketing costs"

c) shut-in royalty is $25./acre instead of $1./acre

In comparing the two leases please consider the safeguards as listed above as very important.

-- Scott

Urban drilling and the Barnett Shale = tension

Check out the S-T's front page Saturday morning. Here's a tease to the story from Mike Lee, one of our Fort Worth City Hall reporters and an author of this blog, that you'll see there:

City Councilman Sal Espino should have been at ease Monday night.

He was leading a community meeting on the North Side, the neighborhood where he grew up, in the parish hall where his parents recently celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary.

He was telling a crowd of about 40 residents that the city was about to spend $4.8 million to fix up Rockwood Park.

But the group wanted to talk about the source of the money: a natural gas well next to the park.

The residents, including Fort Worth school trustee Camille Rodriguez, were concerned about noise, truck traffic, pipelines, the potential for accidents. They felt like they hadn’t gotten enough notice about the drilling site.

“If we can do this right, we can benefit the park and we can protect the neighborhood,” Espino said. “If, for whatever reason it doesn’t work, you can hold me accountable.”

The tension over gas drilling is becoming more common as natural gas drilling pushes into the center of Fort Worth.

• During the summer, residents in the Rolling Hills neighborhood learned they were powerless to stop a rig that was planned for the Glen Garden Country Club because the drilling company had obtained waivers from property owners.
• Negotiations are still going on about saltwater injection wells used to dispose of gas drilling waste.
• Most recently, opponents of a drilling site in a grove of trees next to the Trinity River hike-and-bike trail learned that the ordinance doesn’t consider the trail system a park. More than 1,200 people signed a petition opposing the site.

-- Scott