West of Fort Worth

The Barnett Shale Boom and What It Did to Tarrant County

By Sam Cottrell

The first commercial well in what came to be called the Barnett Shale play was drilled by Mitchell Energy in 1981 on a Wise County ranch about forty miles northwest of Fort Worth. It took another twenty years for the play to become economically significant, and another five after that for Tarrant County to find itself, almost overnight, in the middle of one of the largest urban natural gas booms in American history. By 2008 there were more than four thousand wells inside the county line. There were drilling pads in church parking lots. There were compressor stations across the street from elementary schools. There were leases signed on the front lawns of Fairmount bungalows whose owners had purchased the houses for the front porches and inherited, with the deed, the mineral rights below.

The Barnett Shale is a layer of organic-rich shale about eight thousand feet below the surface across most of the northern half of the county. The shale had been known to contain gas since the 1950s; the trick that made the gas economically recoverable was the combination of horizontal drilling and high-pressure hydraulic fracturing — fracking — that Mitchell's engineers refined through the late 1990s. Once the technique worked, every major North American oil and gas company wanted a position in the play. Chesapeake Energy was particularly aggressive. By 2009 Chesapeake had leased roughly a third of the surface acreage inside the Fort Worth city limits.

The money was real. The royalty checks went to homeowners who, in many cases, had never received a check from anything resembling a corporation. A modest neighborhood in southwest Fort Worth — west of Hulen, north of Granbury Road — collected, in aggregate, somewhere north of eighty million dollars in lease bonuses and royalties between 2005 and 2012. New roofs went on. New trucks appeared in driveways. School board elections were, briefly, more competitive than they had been in a generation.

The costs were also real, and the costs were not evenly distributed. The drilling pads were almost always located in lower-income parts of the county — the south side, the near east side, parts of Arlington — because that was where the surface rights were cheapest to lease. Air quality in those neighborhoods deteriorated measurably between 2006 and 2012, with elevated readings of benzene and other hydrocarbons traced directly to compressor emissions. The trucks rolling through residential streets cracked pavement that took years to repair. The earthquakes — yes, there were earthquakes, a swarm of small ones centered on Cleburne and Azle and traced eventually to wastewater injection wells — frightened a lot of people who had never imagined Texas as a place that shook.

The boom ended in 2014 when the price of natural gas collapsed. Drilling effectively stopped inside Tarrant County by 2016. Most of the surface pads were either restored or quietly abandoned. The royalty checks shrank to a fraction of what they had been. What the Barnett Shale left Tarrant County, on net, is a complicated ledger: a great deal of money that mostly went to people who already had some; a measurable degradation of air and infrastructure in neighborhoods that were already struggling; a generation of municipal officials who learned, the hard way, how mineral leasing law actually works; and a permanent change in how Texans think about what is under their feet. The play is dormant now. The geology has not gone anywhere. It will come back, in some form, the next time the price of gas allows.

Reining Country: The Horse Culture of Pilot Point and Whitesboro

By Sam Cottrell

The two towns sit forty miles north of Fort Worth on either side of the Cooke and Grayson county line. Pilot Point has perhaps four thousand residents. Whitesboro has perhaps four. Between them they constitute the densest concentration of working reining and cutting horse operations in North America. The National Reining Horse Association's hall of fame is full of trainers who keep their barns within ten miles of the Pilot Point square.

Reining is a discipline in which a rider asks a horse to perform a precise pattern of spins, stops, and rollbacks at speed, judged on accuracy, smoothness, and the willingness of the horse. Cutting is the older companion discipline: a horse and rider separate a single calf from a herd and prevent it from rejoining, with the rider's hands almost entirely off the reins after the cut. Both are descended directly from the working cow horse traditions of nineteenth-century Texas ranching. Both have become, in the last thirty years, sports in which a top stallion can sell for north of a million dollars and a single futurity purse can run to a million and a half.

The economy of Pilot Point and Whitesboro is now structured around this industry. The feed stores stock supplements no quarter horse on a working ranch would ever see. The veterinary clinics specialize in equine reproduction at a level that would not be out of place in central Kentucky. The Mexican grooms and assistant trainers who do most of the actual horse work form a substantial part of the local population, and the elementary schools in both towns have offered dual-language instruction for a decade.

What is striking, walking the back roads between the two towns on a weekday morning, is how much the visible landscape still looks like ranch country. The arenas are tucked behind the tree lines. The barns are painted barn red. The pickups in the driveways are pickups. The money is enormous and almost completely invisible. This is, in part, a North Texas habit. It is also, in part, a deliberate choice by an industry that prefers to conduct its business out of sight of people who do not know what they are looking at.