The Eagle Ford Shale play: Digging deeper for good news

In south Texas, there is a new shale oil and gas field called the “Eagle Ford Shale Oil and Gas play”. In oil field lingo, an oil or gas reserve is called a “play”.

The Eagle Ford Shale play covers a 24-county area 50 miles wide and 400 miles long stretching from northeast of San Antonio to Maverick and Webb counties on the U.S.-Mexico border.

New high-tech hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling technology has meant energy companies can now reach the oil and gas formations under the Eagle Ford’s dense rock.

In an article titled “Eagle Ford Oil Discovery Has Companies Putting Out ‘Help Wanted’ Sign”, the San Antonio Business Journal reports on a job fair being put on by energy companies and says that, “The Eagle Ford Shale play in South Texas could be one of the largest domestic crude oil and natural gas discoveries in more than 40 years.”

How energy rich are these fields? Rich enough that Korea National Oil just paid Anadarko Petroleum $13,000-$16,000 per acre (a total of $1.55 billion) for a one-third stake in Anadarko’s Eagle Ford Shale properties.

The Eagle Ford Shale play covers mostly privately owned land, and petroleum companies like Anadarko will have to buy leases from private owners to develop and extract the oil and gas reserves under that private land.

Those private landowners are happily poised to become multi-millionaires from oil and gas royalties that will be coming to them for the next twenty years.

Pipelines will move the oil and gas to market over privately-owned land, forcing the energy companies to buy rights-of-way for the pipelines from other private land owners, and that requires a lot more trained right-of-way agents than now currently exist. Training classes are being held for these jobs whose pay range is supposedly $45,000 to $90,000.

The University of Texas at San Antonio issued a February 2011 report, “Economic Impact of the Eagle Ford Shale”, which said: “In less than three years, the shale play is already accounting for roughly six percent of the Gross Regional Product for the 24 county area. Under moderate assumptions, by 2020 (in 2010 dollars), the Eagle Ford Shale is expected to account for close to $11.6 billion in gross state product, $21.6 billion in total economic output (or revenues) impact, and support close to 67,971 full-time jobs in the area.”

Capstone Turbine of Chatworth, California sent out a press release on March 17^th announcing that one of its customers in the Eagle Ford Shale had purchased six more of Capstone’s microturbine energy systems, making a total of 54 of Capstone’s “high-tech” microturbine energy systems being operated by that single producer alone.

Since most of these sites are off the utility grid, they have to create their own power and electricity on-site, but the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Clean Air Act has strict requirements for emissions levels at wellheads and natural gas sites. That is where Capstone Turbine comes in: its “ultra-low emissions” microturbine energy systems create and distribute energy onsite and off-grid.

Essentially, their high-tech innovations make possible all the other jobs which are being done at the Eagle Ford Shale play.

An American company is using American workers to build innovative products to develop American oilfields on land owned by Americans to make America less dependant on foreign oil producers.

That is the type of good news and big economic news that we need to be hearing about more. Just like the oil reserves, the good news is out there, we just need the editors to be asking the reporters to dig a little deeper past the surface to get down to it.