Friday, January 16, 2009

Fort Worth, Chesapeake reach tentative agreement on TCU gas drilling site

By Steve Smith of West and Clear

Even though some said that a comprehensive approach to gas drilling in Fort Worth was not needed or even possible, it appears that Fort Worth and Chesapeake Energy have taken a first step in that direction.

After months of work on the issue, the City of Fort Worth and Chesapeake Energy have reached a tentative agreement on what District 9 City Council representative Joel Burns called a comprehensive plan proposal for gas drilling in Southwest Fort Worth. The proposed agreement, if presented and approved by the City Council, means that Chesapeake will not drill a well on the TCU campus and the Alton Road pipeline through Westcliff will be unnecessary. TCU’s mineral leases will be developed instead from two well sites off of Granbury Road to the Southeast of the campus, including the Thornton site pictured above.

“I hope this agreement is a helpful example of what we can accomplish in other parts of the city when we take a comprehensive approach to gas drilling,” Burns said.

Evidently, the City asked Chesapeake Energy to develop a plan — and Chesapeake actually came back with something. For the first time, Chesapeake Energy opened their playbook and showed their drilling strategy, including potential pad sites and pipeline routes. As a result, they have agreed to limit their operations to only four additional pad sites.

Those four sites sites would be a new site near the Thornton site, the Merrimac site, a site near the Baptist Seminary site and a site near the former S&H Green Stamps Warehouse off of Seminary Drive. Not only would this reduce most of the impact to the neighborhoods, it would take most of the pipelines out of residential neighborhoods and run them along railroad easements. Chesapeake could bring a proposal to the City Council for a vote by April or May.

Although the plan isn’t perfect and some of the details haven’t been ironed out, this could be a huge step toward a comprehensive plan on urban gas drilling in Fort Worth.

“I worked harder on this than on any other issue since I’ve been on the City Council, including the Eighth Avenue drilling site and the Streetcar initiative,” Burns said. “The Mayor was very supportive of my work, and TCU deserves a lot of credit, too. Victor Boschini and Brian Gutierrez were instrumental in making it happen.”

It appears that TCU left a lot of money on the table for doing so, too. However, the money it would have made by having a surface drilling site on the campus would have been more than offset by the bad will generated by having more than 40 homes that would have been considered high impact, including some as close as 220 feet to the proposed site.

Although Burns had no comment when I asked him about it, another source close to the process confirmed that similar proposals had been shopped to other City Council members about drilling in other districts around Fort Worth.

Regarding the proposed Merrimac site that West and Clear reported on last week, it appears that this site will be moving forward. Also, the proposed initial pad site that was backed up to the Trinity Trail is now moved closer to Old University Drive.

What will be interesting to watch going forward is how Chesapeake Energy and XTO — not the best of friends in the least — can work together on lease swaps and other agreements that could lead to a much less intrusive urban gas drilling process. It will also be interesting to see if this less intrusive and more measured approach can be carried out all over Fort Worth — North, South, East and West.

It’s also interesting that Chesapeake’s Master Plan sounds remarkably like the one that Gas Drilling Task Force member Jim Bradbury had been proposing last summer. When I spoke with Bradbury last night, he had no comment on the issue. “I’m just pleased that a Master Plan approach that would share pad sites, pipelines and infrastructure is getting some momentum,” he said.

And even though I’m not ready to start throwing rose petals in front of Julie Wilson’s chariot, Chesapeake does deserve some credit for coming up with a realistic approach based more on engagement and not confrontation.

But there’s still a long way to go. For instance, Carter Avenue resident and homeowner, Steve Deoung, one of the last holdouts to signing, refuses to be intimidated by Chesapeake into signing an agreement that would threaten the safety of his neighborhood and put the value of homes on the street at risk. His court hearing on Friday morning in Judge Vince Sprinkle’s Tarrant County Court #3 will decide his motion to dismiss the case due to improper filings by Chesapeake.

And I wish that the TCU drilling agreement could have been reached before Chesapeake Energy’s pipeline subsidiary tore down two houses in my neighborhood for no reason. I’m still a little pissed about that.

However, all parties — Chesapeake, TCU, Mayor Moncrief and Councilman Burns deserve credit for taking a step in the right direction. Now let’s see what happens from here.

Pegasus News content partner - West and Clear

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