‘We aren’t going away’
Driller vows to be good neighbor to residents, but oil wells remain source of tension as critics say cities are powerless to deny permits
LEAGUE CITY — An explosion jolted Jim and Mary Alice Estes awake early one morning last summer as light from a nearby fireball danced on the walls of their home.
The giant flare was from natural gas burning at an oil well being put into production a few hundred feet behind their property.
A drilling rig had been parked behind their Bethel Springs Lane home for months, but nobody warned the couple or their neighbors in the Magnolia Creek subdivision that such startling production work would be taking place. Fearing something had gone wrong, they called 911.
It was a rude awakening, literally, to a reality endured by thousands of city and suburban residents across Texas with oil and natural gas operations in their backyards. It came some five years after the passage of House Bill 40, a law that was supposed to sort out legal issues for drilling within city limits.
Before oil and natural gas wells can be drilled within city limits, they require permits
from both state and local officials. Supporters of House Bill 40 say the law settled what the state regulates and what cities control.
The bill reaffirmed the state’s authority to regulate the technical and underground aspects of an oil well while giving cities the authority to control surface activities such as traffic, noise and light, and requires wells to be a certain distance from homes and businesses. Critics, however, say the debate over distance requirements remains unsettled and that the law makes cities hostages to lawsuits, leaving them powerless to deny drilling permits.
“That bill put profits over people and has made cities afraid to fight back,” Mary Alice Estes said. “None of the people who signed that bill would want to live in our house, on our street and experience what we experienced.”
The vast majority of the state’s 438,000 oil and gas wells are in rural areas, but thousands are in cities such as Fort Worth and Houston, in suburban communities and under entire towns in the Permian Basin, according to the Railroad Commission of Texas, the state agency that regulates the industry.
Over the decades, oil companies have drilled hundreds of wells in areas that have been swallowed up by Houston as the city grew. An area across Loop 610 from NRG Stadium is surrounded by hundreds of wells. Many have been plugged, but other wells were drilled in South Houston, in the Oates Prairie neighborhood in northeast Houston and near the Sam Houston Race Park off Windfern Road near Beltway 8 in northwest Houston.
The Magnolia Creek subdivision in League City, about halfway between Houston and Galveston along I-45, has $350,000 homes, parks, trails and a golf course. It was built over former rice fields that contained decades-old drilling sites. Lynn Watkins and his partners began development in the early 2000s, but he scooped up mineral rights and oil leases because he believed there might be oil and natural gas in the area.
Watkins said he went above city requirements to reduce effects on neighbors. A city permit required Watkins to add earthen walls, plant trees, build fences and install fire hydrants. Listening to neighbors, he said, the businessman moved the flare farther away from homes and stacked cargo containers to muffle sound and block light.
“We’ve done everything we can to accommodate the city and neighbors,” Watkins said.
Constrained by pipelines, lease boundaries and plans to extend the Grand Parkway toll road, Watkins said he chose the site off FM 517 for his oil well years ago. The project, he said, was supposed to be complete before homes were built on Bethel Springs Lane in late 2018 but experienced more than two years of delays in the city permitting process. And then, the work took months longer than expected, dragging out the unpleasant experience for neighbors.
With his well producing 200 barrels of oil and 1.5 million cubic feet of natural gas a day, Watkins proved there are resources in the area.
Plans to drill two more wells at the site make the Esteses and other residents nervous. League City officials said they are aware of those concerns and are in touch with Watkins, who has yet to file for city permits. If approved, Watkins said, the projects will go faster. Stacked cargo containers, he said, will return in brighter colors so they will be less of an eyesore. And with the site connected to a natural gas pipeline, there will not be any flaring.
“We aren’t going away,” Watkins said. “That’s not a option. But we want to be a good neighbor.”
North Texas showdown
In North Texas, most of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex sits atop the Barnett Shale formation, which produces vast amounts of natural gas. Economic growth helped create sprawling subdivisions in Arlington, Mansfield, Azle and Denton that eventually backed up against well sites created as hydraulic fracturing expanded in the early 2000s.
Arlington reemerged last month as a new battleground in decades-old tensions between oil companies and metroplex residents.
In a surprise 6-3 vote on June 9, the Arlington City Council rejected permits for French oil major Total, which sought to drill three natural gas wells next to Mother’s Heart Learning Center, a private school in a predominantly Latino and Black neighborhood on the city’s east side.
Four months earlier, in preliminary action, the council unanimously approved Total’s plans. But before the final vote last month, Mother’s Heart Learning Center owner Wanda Vincent and a dozen others rose to object to the Total permits, voicing environmental, safety and social justice concerns.
“Hopefully, the city of Arlington will continue to think about the people they serve, not the money going into their pockets,” Vincent said.
Politics: Arlington rejects Total’s effort to drill controversial wells inside city limits
Total declined to comment, but during the council meeting, its head of local and government affairs for the region, Kevin Strawser, said the company planned to use an electric-powered drilling rig that would reduce noise and pollution. The company also pledged to drill farther from homes and businesses than the required 600 feet.
After the vote, the company’s options include asking for another hearing, modifying its plans, dropping the project or taking legal action. No action has been taken, but Total is busy in other parts of town.
Crews are restoring productivity of three older wells west of Arlington Municipal Airport. Total also has asked state regulators for permits to drill eight wells within the city. The company has already filed for city permits on seven projects in a neighborhood east of the airport off South Collins Street.
Ranjana Bhandari, an organizer with the environmental group Liveable Arlington, has asked city leaders to suspend drilling during the pandemic, arguing that pollution weakens the respiratory system and that the working-class neighborhoods where Total plans to drill have the highest rates of childhood asthma and COVID-19 infections in the metroplex.
“They promote themselves as a clean energy company, but their branding is not what I experience living here in Arlington with all these drilling sites,” Bhandari said. “It’s the dirtiest type of extraction work, and it’s done poorly.”
Birth of a bill
Tensions between the industry and North Texas cities go back more than a decade.
Launched in 2007, the Barnett Shale Energy Education Council was funded by some of the largest drillers in the region to answer questions from concerned residents and speak for the industry at public meetings that attracted thousands of people.
Council President Ed Ireland spent a year helping to draft a new drilling ordinance in Denton. A group calling itself Frack Free Denton persuaded city leaders to put an ordinance that banned hydraulic fracturing within city limits up for a vote.
The fracking ban garnered 59 percent of the vote in the November 2014 election. Meanwhile, nearby cities were considering ordinances to add stricter rules for cementing and other underground components of oil wells — issues governed by state regulators.
“I think it was necessary for the state to step in,” Ireland said. “I think it was a clarification that would have had to have been made at some point.”
House Bill 40 was the first big fight for Texas Oil & Gas Association President Todd Staples, who joined the industry group ahead of the 2015 legislative session.
Opponents presented a barrage of criticisms and environmental concerns, but Staples and industry allies argued that owners of oil-rich properties, even those within city limits, have the right to develop their property.
“Oil and gas operators drill where there are resources,” Staples said. “Those decisions are driven by geology.”
After an intense lobbying campaign and debate drawing hundreds to the Capitol, the bill passed the House and Senate by 4to-1 margins. Gov. Greg Abbott signed the bill into law on May 18, 2015, and it took effect immediately.
“It was a very consequential piece of legislation that gave great direction for the Lone Star State whether you live in the oil patch or not,” Staples said.
Unsettled debate
Months later, the Obama administration lifted a decades-old ban on the exportation of U.S. oil, setting Texas on a path to become one of the largest oil and gas producers in the world. The industry has since paid $50 billion in taxes and royalties to the state and local communities, according to the Texas Oil & Gas Association.
But Sharon Wilson, a Dallasbased organizer with the Washington, D.C., environmental group Earthworks, said the environment and neighbors pay the price by living next door to noisy equipment and sources of air pollution that sometimes include poisonous and carcinogenic gases.
Sinclair Oil, Endeavor Energy Resources, Diamondback Energy and other companies have drilled hundreds of wells under the Permian Basin towns of Big Spring, Midland and Pecos. Located next to highways, homes, golf courses, parks and airports, the horizontal wells extend under downtown business districts, neighborhoods and shopping centers, Railroad Commission maps show.
Using infrared cameras, Wilson has documented air pollution from many production sites, including some hundreds of feet from homes. The findings have angered neighbors, Wilson said.
“People go to a country club and then go back home. People who fly out of an airport take their flight and go back home. But people who live next door to that type of pollution don’t have that choice,” Wilson said. “When it’s in your backyard, it’s there all the time.”