The private ownership of mineral rights has been essential to the development of the U.S. oil and gas industry. And the continued development and production of the nation's natural gas resources will further strengthen the U.S. economy, because the payments related to those minerals rights provide a significant, but largely unseen, economic stimulus.
Elephant Hunting: Comparing the Barnett Shale and the East Texas Field
Once every few decades, the energy industry is forced to overhaul its thinking. New technologies or new discoveries replace the old ways, and the industry must quickly adapt to the new paradigm. In the 1930s, the East Texas Field turned the U.S. oil sector on its head. In the 2000s, the Barnett Shale did the same for natural gas.
Both fields proved the doubters wrong. Both fields were huge and both were located in northern Texas. And the discoveries of both coincided with a price collapse in their respective commodities and the commencement of worldwide financial calamities. Of course, there's an obvious difference between the Barnett and East Texas Field: The shale is a natural gas play, whereas East Texas was almost exclusively about oil. And yet, even accounting for that difference, the two fields are remarkably similar.
The two fields are geographically close to each other: The East Texas Field was centered around Kilgore, about 125 miles east of Dallas; the Barnett Shale pivots to the north, west, and south of Fort Worth, about 30 miles west of Dallas. Both fields shattered claims that the world was running out of hydrocarbons. In 1914, a U.S. government agency, the Bureau of Mines, predicted that world oil supplies would be depleted within ten years.
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In the 1980s, federal officials and some of the top people in the energy sector believed that the United States was running out of natural gas.
13
Both fields are huge. The East Texas Field dwarfed all of the oil fields that came before it. Historian Lawrence Goodwyn described it as “one vast lake of oil 43 miles long and 3 to 10 miles wide. It was so big it was hard to think about.”
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It contained some 6 billion barrels of oil and was the largest oil field in the world known at that time.
15
By comparison, the sprawling Barnett Shale makes the East Texas Field look almost dainty. The Barnett deposit sprawls across at least seventeen counties and covers some 5,000 square milesâthat's nearly the size of the state of Connecticut.
16
The size of the two fields led to a flurry of drilling activity unlike anything that had come before. In 1930, Columbus Marion “Dad” Joiner, a stubborn, Biblequoting promoter from Alabama, drilled his way into history by bringing in a massive gusher with the Daisy Bradford No. 3. About a year later, in October
1931, one well was being completed in the East Texas Field every hour. In the first half of 1931 alone, 1,100 wells were drilled. In 1932 in Kilgore, one city block contained 44 different oil wells. By the end of 1933, nearly 12,000 wells were sucking oil out of the East Texas Field.
17
The activity in the Barnett Shale has not been quite that intense, but the drilling activity has been remarkable. In 2003, as the outlines of the shale play began to be understood, 47 drilling rigs were working in the Barnett Shale during an average week. By 2008, that number had soared to 182 rigs.
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Put another way, during any given week in 2008, about 10 percent of the wells being drilled in the United States were being drilled in the Barnett Shale.
19
In 2003, the Barnett had about 3,000 producing wells. By the end of 2008, it had more than 12,000.
20
The doubters had insisted that the Barnett Shale would never pay off. The shale was just too dense, too impermeable. Houston oilman George Mitchell's persistence (and sizable wallet) proved them wrong. He kept his drilling crews working on the Barnett Shale for years even though his own personnel were telling him it was a waste of money. Six decades earlier, Dad Joiner had silenced the critics who claimed that East Texas was devoid of hydrocarbons when his rank wildcat yielded a gusher in Rusk County.
21
Both fields resulted in a surge of drilling, which quickly led to a flood of production and a collapse in prices. In 1930, the year that Joiner found oil, crude prices in the United States averaged $1.19 per barrel.
22
By August 1931, oil was selling for 13 cents per barrel, and in parts of East Texas it was selling for as little as 3 cents per barrel.
23
The development of the Barnett Shale and other major shale gas plays in the United States contributed to a similar price collapse. During the summer of 2008, the Barnett was producing about 8 percent of all the gas produced in the country.
24
And that gas was being fed into a booming global economy that was reaching the tail-end of a long bull market. On July 3, 2008, near-month natural-gas futures prices hit a near-record $13.58 per thousand cubic feet.
25
By April 2009, gas futures had fallen to about $3.50,
26
and numerous forecasters were estimating the U.S. natural gas prices would stay under $4 for months, perhaps even years to come.
Just as the East Texas Field changed the American oil business, the Barnett Shale has fundamentally changed the U.S. gas businessâand that change is just getting started.
CHAPTER 24
America's Secret Google
J. PAUL GETTY, one of the world's first billionaires, once declared that “the meek shall inherit the Earth, but not its mineral rights.”
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Gettyâwho made his first million dollars in the Oklahoma oil fieldsâwas on to something.
Although dozens of economists have written about the critical role that private-property rights play in building wealth in developing countries (among the more notable: Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto), few, if any, have considered the importance of private ownership of mineral rights.
2
And fewer still have written about America's anomalous status as the only country on the planet that allows individuals, rather than the state or the crown, to own the minerals beneath their feet.
The private ownership of mineral rights in the United States is a keyâbut perennially overlookedâreason why the nation has become so prosperous, and why the American oil and gas industry continues to lead the world in developing new technologies to extract hydrocarbons.
In the rest of the world, the king or the state decides which resources get drilled and when. The individuals who own or occupy the land where the drilling is occurring have little or no financial interest in the outcome. By contrast, in the United States, mineral owners are motivated to exploit their minerals. That helps to explain why the United Statesâdespite the fact that it is the most-drilled country on the planetâhas the most dynamic and innovative industry. Over the past century, about 1.7 million oil and gas wells have been drilled in
America.
3
No other country comes anywhere close to that level of prospecting. The oceans of natural gas in the Barnett Shale, the Haynesville Shale, and other formations would likely never have been developed if that gas had been owned by the federal or state government. Individuals and entrepreneurs persist in developing new drilling and completion technologies because it's in their interest to do so. The more they produce from the properties on which they lease or own the minerals, the more money they make.
When it comes to getting oil and gas out of the ground, private ownership of mineral rights provides proof positive that greed is good. Without greedâthe greed that springs from individuals owning the minerals beneath their feetâthe vast oil and natural-gas fields in Texas, California, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and other states would likely remain underdeveloped.
Increased domestic gas productionâas well as more domestic oil productionâwill mean more royalty payments to average Americans. In 2007, the total mineral interest payments to individual Americans totaled about $21.5 billion. If the U.S. mineral rights payments to private individuals were a stand-alone company, its revenues would nearly equal those of Google, whose 2008 revenues were $21.8 billion.
4
Despite the enormous value and importance of mineral rights to middle-class Americans, the importance of mineral rights rarely gets mentioned during discussions of energy policy. That may be due to the fact that obtaining royalty information is notoriously difficult. There are no central sources of data for royalty payments on oil and gas production. Therefore, I did my own calculations to come up with that $21.5 billion figure.
5
Whatever the exact amount of U.S. royalty payments from oil and gas, it's not all going to the J. Paul Gettys of the world. The boom in U.S. natural gas production has provided windfall lease and royalty income for ordinary people. About 1 million Americans own mineral interests.
6
And while those mineral royalties help middle-class individuals pay their bills, educate their children, and stimulate local economies, the fuel being produced from privately held mineral deposits will be used for manufacturing, home heating, transportation, and, of course, electricity generation.
In the areas around the Barnett Shale in Texas, one neighborhood group was paid $25,000 per acre for the lease rights.
7
In Louisiana, in the area around the Haynesville Shale gas play, energy companies paid DeSoto Parish $27 million just for the right to drill on parish land.
8
Haynesville
, an insightful documentary about the effect that the new shale play is having on residents of the Bayou State, profiles one of the big winners of the natural gas boom: a middle-class real-estate appraiser named Mike Smith. A resident of DeSoto Parish, Smith owns about 300 acres in the heart of the Haynesville Shale. For the rights to drill on his land, one natural gas driller paid Smith nearly $1.3 million. In addition, Smith will earn a royalty of up to 25 percent on the gas produced from beneath his property.
9
There are many reasons to develop America's abundant natural gas resources. Increasing the amount of royalty paymentsâmoney that will stay near the communities where the gas is being extractedâprovides direct cash payments to a huge number of citizens.
Moreover, the domestic oil and gas business creates jobs, lots of them. In 2007, the Colorado Energy Research Institute released a study on the economic impact that the oil and gas industry has on Colorado. It found that in 2005, nearly 71,000 jobs in the state were directly attributable to the oil and gas industry. That same year, there were about 74 drilling rigs operating continuously in the state; thus, simple arithmetic shows that each rig correlates to about 1,000 jobs.
10
A 2008 study by Oklahoma State University estimated that the oil and gas industry in the Sooner State employs about 76,000 people, and those workers are paid about $8.9 billion per year. When accounting for direct and indirect economic impacts, the oil and gas sector accounts for more than 14 percent of Oklahoma's employment and 18 percent of the state's labor income.
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The Independent Petroleum Association of America estimates that the entire U.S. oil and gas sectorâfrom drilling and refining to transportation and retailingâemploys about 1.8 million people.
12
Are those the type of “green” jobs that are being hyped by various politicians and environmental groups? Probably not. But there is no question that the oil and gas industry is employing lots of people in good-paying jobs. And maintaining a strong domestic oil and gas sector will help assure that those jobs don't go to China or another foreign country.
Although royalties and jobs are critical to the U.S. economy, it's also true that increased drilling activity comes with significant costs. A handful of landowners, like Mike Smith, will get rich off of their mineral rights. But many others will only see the industrial side of the business. Producing natural gas from shale beds and other unconventional sources requires lots of drillingâand drilling rigs are not always welcome.
CHAPTER 25
Gas Pains
T
HE OLD ADAGEâ“There ain't no such thing as a free lunch”âapplies to nearly everything. But it is particularly true with energy. Every form of energy production comes with costs to humans and the environment.
Hydropower requires the flooding of rivers and streams, thereby ruining habitats for aquatic life. Oil and gas production requires significant amounts of land for drilling and pipelines. Oil spills during transportation can harm all types of wildlife. Coal miningâparticularly strip mining and mountain-top removalâresults in huge swaths of denuded land. And, of course, the combustion of hydrocarbons emits enormous quantities of carbon dioxide.
1
Although natural gas production has many favorable attributes, it still comes with significant environmental costs. Producing gas from coal beds, tight sands, and shale deposits requires high well densities. That is, in order to produce large quantities of gas, companies have to drill large numbers of wells in relatively close proximityâand they have to keep drilling. And those wells can pose problems for neighbors in rural and urban areas. During the well drilling and completion process, trafficâfrom both heavy and light trucksâto and from the well site can be heavy.
In addition, there are concerns about water and hydraulic fracturing. Properly fracturing a shale gas well requires the use of 1 to 3 million gallons of water.
2
To obtain optimum results, oil-field service companies add various constituents to the water, including small amounts of surfactants, antibacterial agents, and friction reducers. After the water is used, it must
be disposed of properlyâwhich usually means injecting it into a disposal well. Regulation of the fracturing process is generally left to the statesâand some states that are seeing big increases in gas drilling are under pressure from environmental groups to ramp up regulation of the fracturing process. There is also pressure at the federal level.