In Fort Worth Neighborhoods, Residents Know the Drill

FORT WORTH -- Gary Hogan bought his Spanish-tile-roofed stucco house on the western edge of the city in 1992 because it offered the perfect combination of city and country living -- only 10 miles from downtown, yet surrounded by pasture land roamed by gentle cows.

But now the pasture is gone. So are the cows. Today Hogan's backyard gate opens onto a huge natural gas well site that, not long ago, kept him up nights as roughnecks drilled 50-foot-long pipes more than a mile underground, aided by industrial spotlights that lighted up the neighborhood. A second well is being drilled 1,500 feet away; 10 more wells are planned in and around his neighborhood.

"I used to open this gate and sit on my patio and look out, and I felt like J.R. Ewing. I had cattle out there and I didn't even have to take care of the critters," Hogan said. "I was used to very quiet countryside. Then it was bing! Bam! Boom!"

Welcome to the newest, largest, most productive and most urban natural gas drilling site in the nation. As a huge billboard ad for drilling services just south of downtown Fort Worth says: "If you want a gas well . . . get one!"

Thousands of residents in this metropolitan area of 1.3 million have done just that. They have signed over the mineral rights in the land under their homes for lease bonus payments and the promise of monthly royalty checks for decades from companies erecting well pad sites and derricks all around town.

And it's not just homeowners who can reap benefits. Any entity that owns mineral rights -- whether or not it owns the land above the minerals -- can.

In less than a year, the City of Fort Worth has earned $9 million from signing bonuses and gas royalties after leasing 2,400 mineral acres to companies drilling near three city parks and the municipal airport. The money will fund park and airport improvements.

Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, just east of Fort Worth, is about to choose the drilling company that will give it the highest royalties for the mineral rights under 17,000 acres of land, as well as the best deal for the right to drill about 30 natural gas wells adjacent to runways.

The American Cancer Society, which retained the mineral rights to land it sold in 1961, recently sold those rights to Chesapeake Energy of Oklahoma City for $5.3 million.

Even the Girl Scouts hope to make money on the drilling frenzy. Fort Worth's Circle T Council has leased more than 400 mineral acres under its two summer camps to an energy company for a substantial bonus and monthly royalty payments. Officials would not disclose the sum, but one Girl Scout employee described it this way: "It's like money falling from heaven."

This gateway to the West, as Texas lore describes Fort Worth, sits atop one of the largest, deepest and richest gas-infused formations of black rock in the United States. Discovered in 1981, the formation, known as the Barnett Shale, was little more than a geological footnote until this past decade, when technological advances made drilling possible through the hard, dense rock.

Companies could finally extract natural gas from the shale, and drilling started in the late 1990s in rural counties north and west of Fort Worth. Newer technology also made horizontal drilling feasible so that the breadth of the rock could be mined efficiently.