Unlikely alliance fighting pipeline in Texas Hill Country

FREDERICKSBURG, Texas — One of the longest proposed new natural gas pipelines in the U.S. is set to run through Heath Frantzen’s property in the Texas Hill Country, where more than

600 white-tailed and trophy axis deer graze on a hunting ranch his family has owned for three generations.

Fearing financial ruin and conservation risks, Frantzen and dozens of other landowners in central Texas have banded together with environmental groups and conservative-leaning city governments in opposing the route of pipeline giant Kinder Morgan’s 430-mile, $2 billion natural gas expressway.

“We know a lot more today about the aquifers, we know a lot more today about the endangered species, we know a lot more today about the sensitivity of the environment,” Frantzen said. “And putting a pipeline project through an area such as this, especially when you can compare it to some of the other places where they could put it even less expensively and with much greater ease — this is an idiotic idea.”

But Kinder Morgan has defended its proposal, stating it’s looking to ease a pipeline shortage and help drillers transport gas trapped in West Texas’ thriving

Permian Basin to refineries on the Gulf Coast.

Now, the company is exercising eminent domain as a nasty legal battle over the path of the pipeline threatens to jeopardize future projects passing through central Texas. Opponents of the route are also challenging state regulators at the Texas Railroad Commission who gave Kinder Morgan the green light while accepting millions of dollars from the oil and gas industry.

Unlike the Dakota Access Pipeline project that sparked massive protests in 2016 and 2017 over fears it would hurt the environment and sacred Native American sites, opposition to the Texas pipeline has played out of public view.

Kinder Morgan’s pipeline project comes as a boom in oil and natural gas production in the Permian Basin has catapulted the nation to the forefront of the global shale market. Last year, the U.S. surpassed Russia and Saudi Arabia to become the world’s largest crude oil producer, according to an assessment by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Natural gas is a byproduct of oil drilling, and without the proper infrastructure to move it from the Permian Basin, companies end up burning off excess through a process known as flaring, Kinder Morgan spokesman Allen Fore said.

“That’s the purpose of this project, to capture that natural gas and ship it to market,” Fore said.

If completed, the pipeline will deliver up to 2 billion cubic feet of natural gas — enough to fuel 31,500 homes for one day —as it passes through 16 Texas counties.

Texas already has the most expansive pipeline network in the country with more than 460,000 miles of channels zigzagging through it.

But the project is at the center of a fight that has grounded an unlikely alliance assembled across the state’s central region, where momentum has grown in calling for the company to reroute the pipeline and in urging for further industry regulation in oil-friendly Texas.