Eagle Ford Hotel – Housing Shortage and Media Hype

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By Eaglefordshaleblog.com author Nolan Hart, July, 31, 2010

The Eagle Ford Shale Housing and Motel Room Shortage Grows

From Karnes County to Cotulla there is hardly a motel room to be found these days.  Oil company workers, landmen and others have snatched up reservations for  months into the future. As a recent story in the San Antonio Express noted, motels are full across the Eagle Ford shale oil and gas play.  Restaurants are full and even starting to raise  prices on their menus as the Eagle Ford shale “gold rush” grows.   The home and commercial property market is heating up as well.  A man I spoke to in  Tilden, Texas, said that he has had no less than ten offers in the past two months on his rental home which has frontage on highway 281.

In the Pleasanton – Jourdanton Texas area, Eagle Ford shale activity has caused a flurry of home leasing activity. No longer are properties sitting on the market for weeks. Rental rates for homes and commercial property are increasing across the board. Atascosa county’s jobless rate, as well as that of many counties in the Eagle Ford shale, is dropping.

Right now the hotbed of activity is in the “oil window”, which is in the northern part of the Eagle Ford shale play from DeWitt all the way to Maverick County. Farther south there are still gas wells being drilled but the real local impact is happening in the north.

The Eagle Ford shale has been called the “sixth largest U.S. oil discovery in history” by geologists working for EOG Resources, one of the major players. It’s only beginning to kick off.   I wrote an article titled “Economic Impact Of The Eagle Ford Shale” on my other website, energyindustryphotos.com over a year ago and predicted almost all of what is happening right now. It took twelve months for them to wake up, but the major newspapers have finally realized that something major is happening in South Texas.

Media Hype

While there are concerns that need to be addressed, such as use of valuable surface water and wells drilled into the Carrizo aquifer, the media is full of  over-hyped reports warning impending air and water pollution.  It’s no wonder that oil companies have a bad rap, just after the largest oil spill in U.S. history, but the fact is there has yet to be a confirmed report of groundwater damage in Texas due to hydraulic fracturing. It’s one of the most regulated procedures in the industry and there are literally thousands of feet of solid rock separating aquifers like the Carrizo and the Eagle Ford shale.  What many fail to appreciate is that hydraulic fracturing has been used successfully in Texas for decades. Also, oilfields tend to be smelly.  That’s just a fact.

Residents right next to a producing well who are not getting any royalties tend to file a lot of complaints, even if the odor is minor, and attribute everything from asthma to ulcers to the well next door.  We’ve seen these kind of lawsuits in the Barnett shale near Fort Worth and Dallas, where hundreds of them have been filed. Of all of those, I would venture that most were filed by folks who didn’t think the whiff of petroleum smell they got every now and then “smelled like money” since they weren’t getting anything from the well.

There are major oil and gas fields across the state of Texas and you don’t find people dropping like flies from pollution like the newspapers might suggest.  What we need to see is an objective approach to reporting the development of the Eagle Ford shale, not biased hype based on a reporter’s opinion of the industry as influenced by matters that happen elsewhere in the world . Here, in our backyard, sits billions of barrels of easily obtainable oil. There is no danger to marine creatures, no despotic foreign dictators to deal with and billions in dollars of economic benefit to United States citizens.  We’re not going to be powering our cars on solar rays anytime soon and we desperately need to keep our dollars at home rather than sending them overseas to people who often hate us.

I’m not saying to drop your guard and trust everything that oil companies do, but let’s have some objective reporting that weighs the benefits and risks of the largest domestic oil discovery in forty years.