Oil!--From Landowners' Viewpoints

choi

Rick Jervis, Oil! Texans gushing over new riches; but boom poses risks to health and safety. USA Today, Jan 16, 2014.
www.usatoday.com/story/news/nati ... m-fracking/4481977/

Excerpt in the window of print: Black gold is back in Texas. New drilling technology has doubled the state's output in the past two years.


Quote:

As "royalties earned by leasing his property to oil companies and co-owning wells * * * checks appear in his [Richard Dockery's] box each month that, added up, equal roughly the annual salary of a midlevel NBA player. 'It's crazy,' Dockery says. 'And I'm small fry. There are literally thousands of people out here who are millionaires, and some who are going to be billionaires. It's the wild, wild West.' Dockery and this small city [Three Rivers], 75 miles south of San Antonio, are at the epicenter of one of the biggest oil booms ever to hit Texas * * * 'fracking' and horizontal drilling are unlocking huge reservoirs of oil previously deemed impossible to reach, doubling the state's crude oil production the past two years. This year, Texas is projected to produce more than 3 million barrels a day — moving it ahead of Kuwait, Mexico and Iraq to become the eighth-largest oil producer in the world.

"Dockery, the real estate broker, says he sniffed out the rush in 2009 when out-of-town researchers began showing up in the local courthouse, looking up property titles. He quickly started buying land he thought would be useful to oil companies. Developers built two man-camps on one of his lots and an oil company drilled a water well for a fracking pond on another of his properties, for which he gets monthly royalties. Dockery used money from those ventures to buy a stake in four wells.


Note:
(a) Three Rivers, Texas
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Rivers,_Texas
(a city of 1,878 at the 2000 census; The city is named for its proximity to three rivers, the Atascosa River, the Frio River, and the Nueces River (the Atascosa joins the Frio north of the city, while the Frio joins the Nueces south of the city))
(b) "It's not just oil companies and counties profiting. Ranch owners who previously had only scrub bush and white-tailed deer on their property are leasing their land for millions of dollars a month."

scrub bush
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrub_brush
(may refer to shrubland, an environmental habitat characterized by vegetation dominated by shrubs)

(c) "This is the latest in a string of Texas oil booms — and perhaps one of the biggest — since Anthony Lucas punched a hole in Spindletop Hill near Beaumont in 1901, thrusting the country into the modern petroleum era, says Eric Potter of the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas at Austin. The Spindletop discovery and another one in East Texas in the 1930s at the time made Texas the largest producer of oil in the world, he says. This one is far bigger."
(i) Anthony Lucas
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Lucas
(born Antun Lučić in Croatia; 1855-1921)

section 4 Legacy: With the Lucas Gusher, "[t]he city of Houston become the national center of the oil industry, with the United States surpassing Russia as the world's leading producer. Anthony Francis Lucas is considered to be the founder of modern petroleum reservoir engineering

(ii) Beaumont, Texas
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaumont,_Texas
(a city; section 1 History: In 1824 Noah and Nancy Tevis settled, in 1835 Henry Millard and partners bought land from the Tevises, named it after his brother in law Jefferson Beaumont; "Oil was discovered at nearby Spindletop on 10 January 1901. Spindletop became the first major oil field and one of the largest in American history")

Beaumont is 78 miles (air distance) east of Houston. Beaumont is not atop Eagle Ford Shale, which is in south Texas.

(d) "roads banged up by oil trucks"

bang up (vt; from bang "to strike sharply;" First Known Use 1886):
"to cause extensive damage to"
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bang%20up
(e) "The first Eagle Ford wells were drilled in 2008 in and around LaSalle County — previously considered brush country and not viable oil territory. The rush was on. Today, more than 7,000 oil and gas wells have been drilled or are scheduled to be drilled along the Eagle Ford Shale, a crescent-shaped formation 4,000 feet underground that stretches 400 miles along the Texas-Mexico border, according to the Texas Railroad Commission, which oversees the state's oil and gas industry. * * * Just how much crude is down there? That's been a point of hot debate in the industry, says [Scott] Tinker," director of the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas-Austin.

La Salle County, Texas
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Salle_County,_Texas
(Founded 1856; Named for  René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle (French explorer])
(f) "David Martin Phillip, a former mining executive and cattle rancher in Karnes City"

Karnes City, Texas
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karnes_City,_Texas
(seat of Karnes County; was named after [military man] Henry Karnes of the Texas Revolution [1835-1836]; about 60 miles (97 km) southeast of San Antonio)

(g) In print but not online, there was a ranking table:

"World's Top Oil Producers
If Texas were a country, it would be ranked eighth.
(million barrels per day)

Saudi Arabia  11.7
United States  11.1
Russia 10.4
China 4.4
Canada  3.9
Iran 3.6
United Arab Emirates  3.2
TEXAS  3.0
Iraq  3.0

Source: Energy Information Agency"