T. Boone Pickens and the Barnett Shale

Well dog my cat. There he was: T. Boone Pickens, legendary oil man robber baron, right there on the television, telling us the current gasoline crisis is not something we can drill our way out of. Not only was he saying something that might seem contrary to his personal interest, he reportedly was spending $10 million on the advertisements encouraging U.S. policymakers and general folks to invest in wind and solar.

Can an old cur really learn such new, forward-thinking and selfless tricks? Polyanna that I am, I was ready to believe it. Now I knew Pickens had been building some of the biggest wind farms on the planet in West Texas and that some arm of the Texas government had just agreed to wire that farm into the ERCOT, Texas' independent energy grid. That can only be a good thing, right? I mean, how can a green hearted, left slanted person such as myself dis a broad advance in renewable energy?

Mind you, I've been just vaguely watching this, letting it creep into my consciousness as I spend professional time examining school funding and tax rollback elections, the city of Sherman's dismantling its day care program and privately working on shoring up North Texas Youth Connections push toward providing transitional living programs for youth aging out of CPS. But somewhere last week, I saw a headline questioning T. Boone's motives, with a subhead about water. I mentally filed that brief. Then I saw another Pickens' ad showing solar panels, more good news; broader approach to renewables. That matches my thinking pretty well. And then I saw another on the use of natural gas in vehicles, an early 1990s solution championed by then Texas Land Commissioner Garry Mauro. The trend died down.

Saturday, I caught part of a rerun of Pickens' testimony Tuesday before the U.S. Senate's Energy Committee. He was fleshing out his proposal on renewable energy. Replace 22 percent of the nation's natural gas-fired electricity with power produced from solar and wind. (Note to check Pickens' investments in solar tech). Then, accelerate the production of natural gas powered heavy duty trucks and other vehicles.

Wouldn't that raise the price of natural gas, queried Sen. Pete Dominici. Why yes of course, Pickens replied. The market is the market. But, we reached the half-way mark in the planets two trillion barrel supply of oil a couple of years ago, no matter how you go about separating it from the earth. Now natural gas is a different story altogether. It's a domestic product and, because of new natural gas extraction methods, we can cheaply produce as much of that product as we need, here in the United States. There are fields all over the place, a huge one called Barnett Shale.

Comes the dawn! That's Pickens' angle. Given, in my Polyanna way, that I believe he could still have some positive motives in turning the nation's attention toward renewables, I nonetheless see great danger in his proposal. I haven't done the research yet, but I'd bet my bottom dollar that T. Boone owns a hefty chunk of Barnett and the other East Texas shale fields. Not only that, but I bet his fingerprints are all over the legislation and regulatory paper that is forcing groundwater rules and regulation, because that's what he meant by the technology to extract gas from shale. You fracture shale with water; unthinkably massive amounts of water.

In Texas, for the past at least 40 years, we've talked about water being the next "gold". Some areas, like the Hill Country, already highly regulate groundwater, both that in aquifers and that in other sub-surface structures. The Legislature is forcing counties into groundwater districts. Grayson, Fannin and Cooke counties are fighting now to keep from being lumped in with larger counties to the south, in groundwater districts. Guess where Barnett Shale is? You got it: Tarrant, Parker, Denton, Wise and about seven other counties to the south and west of us. And, it also lines up neatly with the Woodbine and Trinity aquifers, subject of said groundwater districts. We've been building surface water sources to keep from draining the groundwater sources, but most small towns in this area and most rural areas rely on wells for drinking water and irrigation for agriculture.

Here's where my pinko background comes into the picture. Do you remember Barry Commoner? He's 90 something now and can rightly be called the founding father or the environmental movement. A cellular biologist, he gets his reasoning from the bottom up. Commoner ran for president in 1980 on the Citizen's Party ticket. He's written several books "The Poverty of Power" being the one that originally caught my attention. I would like to apply several of Commoner's key concepts to this discussion.

"The first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else." "No action is without its side effects." and "Nothing ever goes away."

Take, for example, the beating plowshares into gasoline philosophy of ethanol, brought to you by Big Corn, also known as Archer-Daniels-Midland and other agri-giants. Grand idea, use a renewable product to
replace oil and boost the humble farmers income at the same time. After giving ADM and other giant, global corporations billions in subsidies, we've learned that it takes more energy to produce it than it delivers; it corrodes auto parts; and poor people in Central and South America no longer can afford to eat tortillas, their dietary staple. Right wing governments with whom we have "free trade agreements" are pushing poor people off land to grow more corn and are creating ever more poor people who cannot sustain their own lives because of the monoculture. The need to produce huge amounts of corn is bringing about ever more genetically engineered corn, which has infected domestic food crops and makes growing traditional, nutritional corn more challenging if not impossible. And, genetically engineered crops are one of the suspects in the disappearance of bees, a trend that endangers the entire world food supply.

Commoner's basic tenet is that the only way to control technology is at its source, to control the way it is produced. His credo is that the lowest technology is the best technology. The poverty of power comes from the nation's policy of investing in giving private corporations the opportunity to produce ever more profit from every unit of energy. The solution lies not in finding the best two or three big technologies that a handful of companies can replicate in scattered giant sites that make power and transmit it over huge distances to a multitude of customers. The answers lie in creating individual and small group generators that use a wide variety of sources. This would mean investing in tax credits or grants for neighborhoods to put arrays of solar panels or shingles on their rooftops and a windmill or two, to generate power for themselves, and the ability to feed the excess on the big grid to share with other neighborhoods. It means helping small communities in West Texas harness the power of cow manure. It means co-generatios among closely situated industries. It means communities getting together to use the methane their landfills and water treatment plans produce.

So T. Boone Pickens, thanks for the push toward renewables. It's certainly a direction we need to be looking. But Congress, recognize the self interest that lies behind that testimony and look for the lower technology, the greater good of common interest because "everything is related to everything else."