GONZALES ? To the naked eye, life here, in the heart of a historic, innovative energy boom, appears little different from what it might have been even a half-dozen years ago. But in ways small and large, the influx of money and people mostly men is changing life in Gonzales.
This is the face of a central portion of the Eagle Ford shale play, which stretches roughly 50 miles wide and 400 miles long in a sweep across some of South Texas' historically poorest counties. The last drilling boom-and-bust in these parts ended in the 1980s. Now, with the innovation of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, the natural gas fields are reopened.
The gas boom could not have been better timed, saving many in these rural counties from the harsh drought that choked much of Texas. The land in Gonzales, long the setting for hard lives tending cattle and poultry, has given rise to stories of ranchers getting rich as quickly as it has given rise to the natural gas flares that illuminate a clear Texas night. There's the tale of the elderly woman who made her way to a bank in nearby Shiner to cash her first royalty check from the company drilling beneath her land.
"I'm sorry, ma'am," the teller told her after inspecting the check. "I can't cash that."
"Well, let me see the bank manager then," she said.
"I'm sorry, ma'am, we can't cash that," the bank president then repeated.
"But surely you have the $15,000 on hand," she said.
"I'm sorry, ma'am, but that check's for $1.5 million," he told her.
The central courthouse square, like so many Texas towns, remains sleepy. But a steady stream of landmen pour in and out of the Gonzales County clerk's annex to inspect title records.
Another sign of changed times: The merchandise on sale at Indie's Southern Style, a boutique specializing in women's cosmetics and zebra-striped purses, now includes the $64 fire-retardant Wrangler shirts popular among the roughneck set.
Working for wealth
The first drilling of Eagle Ford wells was in 2008 in La Salle County, and since then, energy companies have poured in resources and manpower to mine the gas, trapped in a layer of shale 250 feet thick and 65 million years old. In fracking, millions of gallons of water, mixed with sand and chemicals, are injected into rock to extract natural gas. The Eagle Ford shale is 4,000 to 12,000 feet below ground.
Like a vortex, the opportunity to make cash has pulled workers from other sectors and other regions.
In DeWitt County, just south of Gonzales County, the county judge reports a dip in jail staffers, and more sheriff's deputies are unwilling to work overtime because of more lucrative employment in the gas fields. A billboard on U.S. 183 South in Luling advertises gas companies seeking drivers with commercial driver's licenses. Starting pay for those jobs has jumped in South Texas from $37,000 a year to $50,000 a year, said Noel Smith, director of the St. Philip's Truck Driving Training School in San Antonio.
RV parks, proliferating like wildflowers on the edges of shale towns, are now home to welders, pipe fitters and drivers from as far away as the Dakotas.
Despite concerns about fracking's potential for groundwater contamination and the pollution of skies above rig operations, hydraulic fracturing in Texas is unlikely to go away even as a booming gas economy could go bust, just as previous booms have rocked this and other parts of the state.
For now, though, the industry and the state are flush with cash. Texas Comptroller Susan Combs reported earlier this month that for fiscal year 2012, which ended Aug. 31, the state collected more than $44 billion in tax revenue, $3.7 billion more than she had projected in December. A big boost came from oil and natural gas production taxes, the result of feverish drilling and fracking activity in West Texas' Permian Basin and the Eagle Ford shale.
Combs' office reported that oil and gas production taxes together came in about $1 billion, or 39 percent, higher than projected, and the industry also contributed heavily to strong sales tax collections, which were up 12.6 percent from the previous year.
In a further signal of the influence of the wealth created by the boom, Texas environmentalists have set only modest goals for the regulation of drilling. In other states, environmentalists have had more success in stymieing natural gas drilling, drawing links between the practice and underground water contamination. New York state has gone so far as to put a drilling moratorium in place.
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