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New source for oil in Texas comes with heavy price
June 1st, 2011
Catholic Online (www.catholic.org)
The Eagle Ford, a 17-mile stretch of land between Catarina and Carrizo Springs is a hotbed for oil production. Giant oil terminals and sprawling RV parks are quickly replacing mesquite fields. More than a dozen companies plan to drill up to 3,000 wells in the next 12 months - however, the cost of acquiring oil here carries a very heavy price.
LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - The oil from the Eagle Ford, along with similar fields of tightly packed rock can be extracted only by using hydraulic fracturing, a method that uses a high-pressure mix of water, sand and hazardous chemicals to blast through the rocks to release the oil inside - in a procedure commonly known as "fracking."
Fracking has been commonly used in the last decade to unlock vast new fields of natural gas. As evidence mounts that fracking poses risks to water supplies, the federal government and regulators in various states are considering tighter regulations on it.
The opportunities posed by the Eagle Ford are tremendous. The field is just one of about 20 new onshore oil fields that advocates say could collectively increase the nation's oil output by 25 percent within a decade. The opportunity sidesteps the hazards of drilling in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico or the coastal areas off Alaska.
The oil industry says any environmental concerns are far outweighed by the economic benefits of pumping previously inaccessible oil from fields that could collectively hold two or three times as much oil as Prudhoe Bay, the Alaskan field that was the last great onshore discovery.
The boom will also theoretically create more than two million new jobs and bring tens of billions of dollars to the states where the fields are located, which include traditional oil sites like Texas and Oklahoma, industrial stalwarts like Ohio and Michigan and even farm states like Kansas.
"It's the one thing we have seen in our adult lives that could take us away from imported oil," Aubrey McClendon, chief executive of Chesapeake Energy says. "What if we have found three of the world's biggest oil fields in the last three years right here in the U.S.? How transformative could that be for the U.S. economy?"
Based on the industry's plans, shale and other "tight rock" fields that now produce about half a million barrels of oil a day will produce up to three million barrels daily by 2020, according to IHS CERA, an energy research firm. Oil companies are investing an estimated $25 billion this year to drill 5,000 new oil wells in tight rock fields.