God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State(12)

In short order, the state legislature, which is slavishly devoted to the oil-and-gas industry, passed a law prohibiting any such ban. Now cities in Texas have almost no recourse when frackers move in. There are three hundred wells in Denton already, and a third of the landmass of the city has been platted for future wells, now that the legislature has given the green light. “People think there are health consequences,” Ed Soph, who used to teach jazz studies at the university, told me. “Kids were getting asthma. There were nosebleeds and headaches. The silica coated the neighborhood in dust. There was the odor, the noise. The kids couldn’t play outside—they would get sick. It’s that simple.”

In October 2015, unable to stop fracking in the city, the Denton Municipal Electric utility announced its intention to derive 70 percent of its electricity from renewable resources by 2019, making it one of the cleanest energy providers in the state.



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IF YOU HAVE ever flown over West Texas, above the region surrounding Midland and Odessa, you may have noticed something that looks like graph paper stretched across the flatland prairie for hundreds of square miles. This is the Permian Basin, and each intersection on the graph marks an oil or gas well. No region on earth has been more thoroughly drilled. Nearly 30 billion barrels of “sweet” low-sulfur oil known as West Texas Intermediate have come out of this field, roughly the size of South Dakota, and more than that remains. Because of the fracking revolution, it is once again the hottest oil and gas play in the world.

For the first time ever, the United States holds more proved oil reserves than either Saudi Arabia or Russia. More than half of the U.S. total is in shale. New technology has decreased the cost of production to the point that fracking is becoming competitive with traditional means of extraction. Production in the Permian Basin has doubled in the last five years, to 2.4 million barrels a day, and the break-even cost of a fracked well has plummeted to as low as $25 a barrel. This has had dramatic consequences for more expensive means of production, such as coal-tar extraction and ocean drilling.

In September 2016, Apache Corporation, a Houston-based oil and gas exploration company, announced the discovery of an entirely new field in the Permian Basin, called Alpine High, estimated to contain 75 trillion cubic feet of gas and 3 billion barrels of oil. That was followed in November by an announcement from the U.S. Geological Survey that the Wolfcamp formation within the Permian Basin contains an estimated 20 billion barrels of oil—“the largest continuous oil accumulation that USGS has assessed in the United States to date,” according to the agency—plus an additional 16 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Within a decade, the assessment of newly discovered recoverable oil in the Permian Basin alone has increased by more than 800 percent. Moreover, productivity per well has shot up; according to Robert Bryce, the amount of oil produced by a new well in the Permian stayed flat from 2007 to 2013, at about one hundred barrels per day. But from 2013 to 2016—while the rig count was falling dramatically—the productivity of a new well rose to five hundred barrels a day, a fivefold increase in three years. Multiply that rate of productivity by the newly discovered oil, and factor in the declining cost of recovery, and you will have a rough calculation of the future of energy.

The little town of Balmorhea lies within the vast Apache field, as does one of the most glorious spring-fed swimming holes in the state, an oasis more than an acre in size, which attracts tourists from all over the world. Aside from the natural beauty, the pool is home to two endangered species of fish. Locals are concerned that the water table will be contaminated by leakage from a disposal well, or an earthquake (the town happens to sit on a geological fault line). Apache, which maintains that its methods are “safe and proven,” promises not to drill within the town limits or beneath the state park that contains the swimming hole, but it’s hard to imagine that there won’t be considerable environmental consequences from the five thousand wells envisioned to extract all that oil.

Those costs have to be measured by other benefits—the decent jobs that will come to the region, for instance, and the taxable income that will support city services. There are also undeniable geopolitical advantages in reducing American dependence on foreign oil and lowering the cost of energy. Because of fracking, there is an abundance of natural gas, which is killing demand for coal, a trend that the Trump regime is unlikely to be able to stop. Gas burns far cleaner than coal, and as a result, greenhouse gas emissions in the United States are at their lowest point in a quarter century.

Texas is the only state to have its own electrical grid, which was created largely to avoid federal regulations. The state invested $7 billion in high-voltage transmission lines to carry wind power through the shrub-covered plains eastward toward the cities. Because of the intense energy needs of the oil and gas business involving oil refineries and petrochemical plants, Texas uses far more electricity than any other state—67 percent more than second-place California. And yet electricity in Texas is cheaper than the national average, in some places actually free at night. That’s because Texas gets about 17 percent of its electricity from wind power, and wind generally blows more at night, when demand is lower. The plains and caprock mesas of West Texas, as well as the coastal region south of Galveston, are lined with regiments of wind turbines. They are so heavily subsidized by the federal government that the wind-energy producers sometimes pay companies to take the energy off their hands in order to receive their federal tax credits. On some days, wind satisfies half of the state’s electricity demand. In the first quarter of 2017, wind generation accounted for 23 percent of the power generated in the state. In October, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, broke a bottle of Champagne atop a three-hundred-foot turbine to inaugurate a vast new wind farm in Scurry County, in northwest Texas, which will provide another million megawatt hours a year to the grid. Solar energy is also growing, but has been slower to catch on, despite abundant and intense sunshine. Austin gets nearly a fourth of its power from renewable sources and aims to double that in ten years. Georgetown, just north of Austin and one of the most conservative suburbs in the state, already gets all of its electricity from renewable sources.