PONDER - From atop a 40-foot-high walkway on a towering natural gas rig, Doug Hampton scans the grassy scrubland that has served ranchers since the 19th century.
He doesn't see much evidence of that history now, though. No cattle, horses or cowboys. Instead, out on the horizon, he sees the future of this vast expanse north of Fort Worth.
"Just look out there. See?" he says, pointing to another solitary steel structure. "There's a rig over there, another out there and another way out there."
Hampton is a project manager for Oklahoma City-based Devon Energy Corp., one of several companies tapping into the nation's fastest-growing natural gas field-the Barnett Shale.
The reservoir is vital to a tight U.S. supply market, has become a template for other fields nationwide and is turning oil and gas into this region's most important industry.
The changing landscape is making wells on high school campuses and private property a familiar sight. Even Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport is reviewing its options with 12 companies to lease land for drilling.
"It's going great guns," said John Wood, director of reserves and production for the U.S. Department of Energy's information administration, which ranks the shale as the fourth-most-productive onshore field in the nation.
Barnett Shale produces about 1.2 billion cubic feet of natural gas daily, enough to power about 10,500 homes a year. Forecasts say that will eventually reach 1.7 billion cubic feet, or 2 percent of the annual domestic production.
That growth is crucial because most gas drilling operations-which make up the vast majority of the U.S. supply-are declining or stagnating. The United States produces 85 percent of its gas supply.
"If we did not have shale gas, then there would be less gas available, and natural gas prices would be higher," said Kent Bowker, a private Houston-based consultant who once worked for an energy company at the forefront of the Barnett Shale work. "I didn't think it would be nearly as big as it is right now."
Named after pioneer settler John Barnett, the 5,000-square-mile reservoir covers 15 North Texas counties. It consists of a dense, jet black rock found thousands of feet below the surface.
Gas was first discovered there in 1981, but geologists were frustrated for years because tight geographic formations made it tough to unlock gas from the heavy rock.
The Barnett Shale wasn't even among the nation's top 100 natural gas fields until the last few years, when two technological advances helped drive growth: horizontal drilling and a hydraulic fracturing technique to break through the thick rock surrounding the gas.
That means Barnett Shale has gone from 25 rigs drilling wells in 2001 to more than 130 by the end of last year. In production, the gas field trails only the San Juan Basin Gas Area, which covers New Mexico and Colorado; Prudhoe Bay in Alaska; and Pinedale in Wyoming.
Industry analysts and executives credit George Mitchell, who sold his Houston-based Mitchell Energy to Devon in 2002 for $3.5 billion, for not giving up on the North Texas field.
"It's taken a lot of effort to unlock the heat," said George Jackson, a former Mitchell employee and now an operations supervisor with Devon. "He had to drag most of us with our heels fixed to the dirt, but he understood what its value was and that it would work."
George Mitchell said he believed Barnett Shale could be profitable despite the geologic barriers. He said engineers and geologists repeatedly told him to cut his losses and forget about the field and move on.
"If we hadn't persisted, we never would have made it work," Mitchell said. "I had to kick their butts to get it done, and now it's a tremendous asset to the entire country."
The technology working in Texas is being applied to other areas where shale is found, including Arkansas, Oklahoma, Michigan and several Canadian provinces.
Analysts say such drilling could be instrumental to the nation's natural gas supply as other areas dry up.
"That is the only segment that is going to give us a chance to continue growing," said Bob Esser, a senior consultant with Cambridge Energy Research Associates.
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