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Natural gas drilling rigs once dotted the Fort Worth landscape during the height of the Barnett Shale boom. Today, there are only a few actively drilling, including a rig pictured in southeast Arlington on Aug. 23, 2024. (Camilo Diaz | Fort Worth Report)
” data-medium-file=”https://fortworthreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/GasDrill_Aug23_CamiloDiaz0053-scaled.jpg?fit=300%2C200&ssl=1″ data-large-file=”https://fortworthreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/GasDrill_Aug23_CamiloDiaz0053-scaled.jpg?fit=780%2C520&ssl=1″ tabindex=”0″ role=”button”>Barnett Shale: A glance back, a look forward 

Between 2002 and 2009, an unprecedented boom in urban natural gas drilling changed the face of Tarrant County. Fifteen years later, Fort Worth is still profiting from — and wrestling with — its consequences. Over the next month, the Fort Worth Report will publish a series on the Barnett Shale and its impact on the county, the state and the industry.

You’re reading part one, which focuses on the boom of the Barnett. Future stories will explore the backlash against the boom and its impact on Texas’ legislative landscape as well as how the Barnett continues to shape Tarrant County today. Cowtown. Funkytown. The Unexpected City. But who remembers Boomtown? For a time, in the early 2000s, Fort Worth was front and center as a national boomtown for energy production. There are few traces of the early years left now, beyond the inscrutable patches of flat white dirt that dot the Tarrant County landscape. But two decades ago, Fort Worth pioneered a modern energy boom using innovative new technologies that transformed the industry. Along the way, it revived a then-dormant local energy industry.It was a luck of geology, as many energy leaders acknowledge, but Fort Worth sat atop the first major unconventional shale formation to be successfully developed in the United States.Look no farther than west to the Permian Basin today to see similar techniques being applied there. In the Permian, oil production is expected to hit 6.3 million barrels per day in 2024, an increase of nearly 8% from 2023, according to the Energy Information Administration. The Permian Basin now accounts for nearly half of U.S. crude oil production. The Fort Worth boom was primarily tied to natural gas. “It was a miracle, it really was,” said Larry Brogdon, a geologist and partner with Four Sevens Oil Company, one of the key companies involved in the exploration of the Barnett Shale. “It had an impact on Fort Worth, but it impacted the way we get energy now. And that miracle happened here.” A natural gas drilling rig sits near a warehouse district, apartments and stores in southeast Arlington on Aug. 23, 2024. (Camilo Diaz | Fort Worth Report)A moment when ‘the world changed’Aside from some production sites around town, little signs remain of the frenzied activity that began in the early part of the century. According to a report by The Perryman Group, the Barnett Shale drilling activity created 114,994 jobs as of 2013. Drilling permits, a measure of economic activity in the Barnett Shale, peaked in 2008 at 4,065. In 2023, there were 88 drilling permits issued for the Barnett Shale. The Barnett Shale is a large natural gas reserve encompassing more than 5,000 square miles and including portions of at least 18 counties in North Texas. The gas is found encased in dense source rock over 1.5 miles below the earth’s surface. The first indications that successful and economically viable volumes of gas could be extracted from the Barnett Shale didn’t appear until 1997, when the “slickwater” hydraulic fracturing — known colloquially as “fracking — techniques were refined and proved to be effective. An illustration of horizontal drilling into shale deposits. (Courtesy | Energy Information Association) Nearly simultaneously with fracking, horizontal drilling techniques also increased production and decreased drilling costs, said Brogdon. “People didn’t believe what they were seeing,” said Brogdon. Brogdon himself wasn’t sure he believed it. Many in the industry were convinced successful wells in the Barnett had to be surrounded by certain other formations to be viable. Brogdon wasn’t sure either, until he was called out to a well one Sunday morning by engineers who wanted him to see what was happening with a well being drilled horizontally near Boyd, Texas. That well was not surrounded by certain other formations. “It was really a test well, kind of, to see if these other areas might be productive,” he said. Brogdon was still dressed for church when he visited the well that changed his mind. “I’ll never forget it,” he said. “That well was singing and I knew that sound. That meant we had a good, maybe great, well.” Now Brogdon knew wells could be cost-effective and productive throughout the 5,000 square miles of the Barnett Shale. “That was when the world changed as far as I was concerned,” he said. From left to right: TCU’s Jennifer Engel interviews Larry Brogdon, Brad Cunningham and Hunter Enis of Four Sevens OIl Company during the 2024 Global Energy Symposium on March 21, 2024. (Haley Samsel | Fort Worth Report)It also helped that the price of natural gas increased in the early part of the century. In June 2008, the price of natural gas was about $11 per million British thermal units. It is now a little more than $2 per million British thermal units. Even earlier, in 1978, the federal government took steps to encourage new exploration of natural gas as it feared a shortage of domestically produced gas. It began funding research and development programs, providing tax credits and incentive pricing for producing unconventional natural gas. The stage had been set. Brogdon said the Barnett Shale was key to keeping a lot of the energy industry interested in Fort Worth. In the early 2000s, many of them were closing their offices and moving to Dallas or Houston, he said. It didn’t help that a tornado roared through downtown Fort Worth in March 2000. “It was kind of a mess,” Brogdon said. Various local oil companies maintained a library of geological maps in the Mallick Tower, one of the buildings that had been in the path of the tornado. The oil library was in danger of closing because it depended on the support of local companies. To keep it open, the board of directors decided to have a Barnett Shale Symposium to raise money for the library. “The idea was to keep the library open and to keep the oil companies in town. We thought we might get 35, maybe 40 people,” Brogdon said. “We ended up having the fire marshals close it down, we had so many people show up.” Big energy companies, such as ExxonMobil and Chevron, sent representatives seeking information about the Barnett Shale. “It just showed how much interest there was,” he said. While there was plenty of interest in the shale, there wasn’t much interest in drilling in an urban environment from Mitchell Energy and many other players. For one thing, Mitchell and other company executives thought only certain areas of the Barnett Shale would be productive. For another, it was a lot of work — and risk — to drill in an urban environment. Four Sevens wasn’t deterred.Equipment at a natural gas drilling site owned by TEP Barnett in west Fort Worth is visible from a nearby senior living apartment complex in May 2022. (Sandra Sadek | Fort Worth Report)The gridiron connection Dick Lowe and his partner, Hunter Enis, were both former TCU football players who had landed in the energy business and searched all over the world for oil and gas. Enis, a former Horned Frogs quarterback and one of the partners at Four Sevens, said the company’s ties to TCU, and football in particular, were key to securing the leases. The football players and athletes they hired had a good work ethic and knew how to work together, Enis told the 2024 Global Energy Symposium at Texas Christian University’s Ralph Lowe Energy Institute in March. Football, and sports in general, played a big role in Four Sevens’ success, he said. “One month our very top landman was a TCU football player and next was an A&M track scholar, so it seemed to work,” Enis said. “The collateral benefit of us drilling wells was a lot of employment. If you do it right or make a lot of money, you give people a lot of jobs.” The combination of sports, engineering and being unafraid of drilling in an urban environment worked well for Four Sevens. It also worked well for TCU. The school’s Neeley School of Business created an Energy Institute in 2007 in response to the drilling. Now called the Ralph Lowe Energy Institute, it supports the next generation of energy leaders through classes, seminars and training. Students give a campus tour of TCU outside the Mary Counts Burnett Library in February 2024. (Camilo Diaz | Fort Worth Report)Four Sevens saw an opportunity and acquired acreage from Haslet down to Burleson, eventually obtaining 26,000 acres for mineral rights in Tarrant and Johnson counties. Urban drilling was a different animal. Instead of dealing with a few landowners over several 100 acres, it was dealing with separate owners on small parcels of land. It required a lot more effort and lots of landmen, the name for men and women who approached owners to secure their mineral rights. According to a Texas A&M Law School study, before a company received a permit to drill a natural gas well it would need an average of 160 leases from Tarrant County residents.“It wasn’t easy to do,” said Brogdon. In the neighborhood During the early stages of the drilling in the Barnett Shale, leases offered to Tarrant County residents included signing bonuses between $300 and $400 per residential lot and royalty terms between 12.5% and 18.5%. In 2008, at the height of the drilling, lease offers were reaching as high as $18,250 per acre with 27.5% royalties. Fort Worth’s mayor at the time was Mike Moncrief, who had family ties to the industry and knew well the disruptions drilling could present to a neighborhood. “Even once you got the wells completed, you had to get the product to where it needed to go, so you had pipelines through some very sensitive areas, very nice neighborhoods — north, south, east and west, everywhere. So it was a rodeo,” he said. “Fortunately, it wasn’t my first one.” Mike Moncrief, pictured in 2006, served as Fort Worth’s mayor between 2003 and 2011. His tenure saw the arrival of the Barnett Shale boom, presenting new challenges in terms of permitting, regulation and neighborhood impact. (José L. Castillo Collection | UNT Libraries Special Collections)Moncrief’s family name — his grandfather W.A. “Monty” Moncrief was a wildcatter in the 1931 East Texas oil boom — was a big issue, he knew. There was an assumption by some that he was more concerned about the business interests recovering the oil and gas underneath people’s property than he was in the people who lived in those homes, Moncrief said. “That was not the pledge I took when I said my oath of office because I meant to represent the people that elected me and that was my priority,” he said. Don Young was one of Moncrief’s most vocal critics as the founder of Fort Worth Citizens Against Neighborhood Drilling Operations, also known as Fort Worth CAN DO. Young took the lead on many campaigns against the expansion of gas drilling near neighborhoods, schools and churches, arguing that it could have unforeseen consequences for the environment, public health and property values. As a result, Moncrief was in Young’s sights. Young frequently attended the mayor’s speaking appearances as a “citizen journalist” to ask questions about Moncrief’s close relationships with the energy industry. Don Young, pictured in 2023, was one of the most outspoken critics against the expansion of natural gas drilling in Fort Worth, helping to organize opposition campaigns and speaking at City Council meetings. (Cristian ArguetaSoto | Fort Worth Report)“He used to walk around town and say, ‘All boats are going to rise in Fort Worth. We’re all gonna get rich.’ That was the prevailing news from the city, from the Star-Telegram, from all the churches,” Young said. “Everybody had just been brainwashed. This was even before the money was starting to flow.” Moncrief admits it was challenging and difficult to figure out a way to accommodate drilling and production in an urban environment and maintain safe, clean and relatively noise-free neighborhoods.The state Railroad Commission generally governs rules about drilling and production, but local entities have input. The agency has faced criticism over its close ties to the oil and gas industry. One incident in 2006 created a lot of concern for residents. An accident at a well site in Forest Hill, just south of Fort Worth, killed a worker. Citizens and neighborhood leaders began voicing their concerns to the City Council, Moncrief said. The previous ordinance on drilling provided for a 300-foot setback from any home, occupied building, school or park, but Moncrief argued for a 600-foot setback. Others wanted no drilling at all. Young’s group advocated for a 3,000-foot setback, or “safety zone,” which would have effectively prevented companies from drilling within populated areas. Then-state Rep. Lon Burnam, a Democrat who represented Fort Worth between 1997 and 2014, argued for more regulations to protect residents. He introduced bills that would have given municipalities more control over permitting and created more requirements for pipeline safety and pollution control. Burnam could find little support for such measures. “They always resisted regulation, whether it was at the state level or the local level,” Burnam said. “They continue to do outrageous things, like the legislation that prohibits municipal governments from protecting the health and safety of their citizens,” referencing House Bill 40. The law, which prohibits cities from banning fracking, arose from industry backlash against Denton’s effort to ban fracking in 2014. Lon Burnam, who represented Fort Worth in the state Legislature between 1997 and 2014, speaks during an October 2021 Tarrant Regional Water District meeting. (Cristian ArguetaSoto | Fort Worth Report)During Moncrief’s term, the city set up a Gas Drilling Task Force composed of community members, business leaders and industry representatives. Fort Worth added a gas drilling office as part of its planning department, requiring companies to apply for and receive a gas well permit and provide a bond to ensure the operators cleaned up their operations. The city also hired gas well inspectors to keep watch on operations, though activists argued there were too few resources dedicated to regulation.In 2011, Fort Worth paid for a study of the gas wells in the city that found the wells — and their associated air pollution — were within acceptable limits, according to the city. Some residents, including Young, say the air quality study did little to assuage their long-term concerns about the impact of fracking on everything from earthquake activity to open space. “Living in Fort Worth has become intolerable,” Young told a reporter in 2012. “There’s no way to drill safely, in my opinion, especially in the middle of a city.”Moncrief said he is proud of the work that city officials did during the boom period. “There was a chance to come up with a win-win for everyone because there were big challenges, but there were major opportunities and we had to make this work,” he said. “There was a chance for new wealth to be created.” The city received revenue sources from under its parks and airports that were put toward infrastructure improvements and, now, programs like the city’s open space preservation program. “Residents also received income that they could use to pay their mortgage or put their kids through school or use trying to pay off the what they own on their truck or trying to take a family vacation, whatever they wanted,” Moncrief said. “This was an opportunity for new wealth for them and it could be life-changing.” There were plenty of battles over the drilling. When Chesapeake announced plans to set up a 2.3-acre drill site near a heavily used trail on the Trinity River near University Drive, citizens protested. Chesapeake eventually cut a deal with the nearby Union Pacific to use its railyard to store equipment, and the size of the drill site was reduced by nearly half. Many municipalities and government entities also benefited. In Arlington, officials created a foundation with $100 million in natural gas drilling royalties and lease payments. Since 2006, the funds have supported park improvements, economic development projects like Texas Live! and charitable endeavors, including hospitals and art venues. A half mile from AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, natural gas drilling crews are tapping into the Barnett Shale, one of the only shale formations under such a heavily populated area. (Cristian ArguetaSoto | Fort Worth Report)In 2008, when drilling began, Dallas Fort Worth International Airport earned $33.9 million in royalty revenue. In 2013 royalties were $5.3 million. By 2022, revenues from the 70 wells on the airport’s property earned $6.3 million and further fell to $3.7 million in 2023. Those revenues are expected to be $3.5 million this year. The airport has used the funds for terminal improvements. The slowdown Four Sevens and XTO Energy, led by Bob Simpson, were homegrown companies. Four Sevens operated out of the Fort Worth Club building in downtown, a symbol of the city’s business fortunes. But Simpson, a lover of history and antiques, eschewed the traditional building of a shiny new corporate headquarters and instead refurbished old city office buildings and other historic structures to use as offices. He earned several awards, including the High Impact Legacy Award from the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce in 2015 for his extensive renovations and historic preservation of many downtown Fort Worth buildings. Meanwhile, value of his company’s stock soared. With drilling results showing such promise, others began to seek their fortunes here. That included Aubrey McClendon, who ran Chesapeake Energy out of Oklahoma City. McClendon was big, bold and brash, a wildcatter among wildcatters. As his company began to acquire acreage in the Barnett Shale, Chesapeake made an even bigger splash, buying the former Pier 1 tower — now the new Fort Worth City Hall — for $104 million. The company made the 18-story showpiece its local headquarters. The Former Pier 1 Imports’ headquarters is on its way to becoming Fort Worth’s new City Hall. The city of Fort Worth closed on the 20-story glass tower on Jan. 27, 2021 for $69.5 million. (Rodger Mallison | Fort Worth Report)Along with the building investment, McClendon announced plans to grow the company’s Barnett Shale holdings. He also pushed to find new markets for natural gas. He championed and helped fund plans to build and support natural gas fueling stations around the county — Chesapeake showed off a flashy natural-gas powered motorcycle courtesy of then-hot television show “Orange County Choppers.” Chesapeake also produced slick magazines promoting the fuel and hired Texas-born, award-winning actor Tommy Lee Jones as a spokesman for radio and TV ads touting the product. Top area news anchor Tracy Rowlett was plucked from his broadcast job at WFAA for a venture called Shale TV. But as with most booms, the euphoria was not to last. Just before production was set to begin in late 2008, Chesapeake pulled the plug on Shale TV. The price of natural gas was already falling and Chesapeake had borrowed heavily to purchase leases in the Barnett Shale. In 2009, ExxonMobil purchased XTO Energy in a deal valued at $41 million, eventually moving most of that group to the Houston area, leaving many downtown buildings empty. It was the beginning of a rather quick fall for a natural gas boom that had an impact far beyond Fort Worth, said Ray Perryman, president and CEO of The Perryman Group, a Waco-based economist. “History was made in the Barnett Shale with the development of fracking and the vast supplies of natural gas the new methods unlocked,” he said. “The Barnett Shale still has an important role to play in meeting the need for natural gas, and the advances which occurred in the play ensure its enduring place in the industry’s history.” Bob Francis is business editor for the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at bob.francis@fortworthreport.org. At the Fort Worth Report, news decisions are made independently of our board members and financial supporters. Read more about our editorial independence policy here.