Eagle Ford production causing traffic problems

Houston Chronicle:

Along with prosperity, tricky problems come with the Eagle Ford shale boom.

Roads in small communities are taking a beating from oil field truck traffic. There's a housing shortage. And billions of dollars in new pipelines will crisscross the oil and gas play, an eminent domain issue that inevitably will make some private landowners unhappy.

The issues are nothing new in a state with a long history of oil and natural gas production. But the speed at which drilling activity has ramped up across the Eagle Ford has taken many by surprise.

"Y'all have just been inundated so quickly," Kenny Jordan, executive director of the Association of Energy Service Companies, said at a meeting this week of the Eagle Ford Task Force, its third.

Brian Schoenemann, area engineer for the Texas Department of Transportation in Yoakum, said the oil field trucks are traveling on roads not designed to handle a significant amount of 18-wheeler traffic. And traffic is up 40 percent to 50 percent.

The Eagle Ford shale formation sweeps across 24 counties from the border to East Texas, and oil field service companies have poured into the area.

Railroad Commissioner David Porter started the task force in hopes of avoiding the problems that led to a backlash against drilling in the Barnett shale of North Texas. The group meets monthly.

DeWitt County Judge Daryl Fowler said that a company is voluntarily paying the county $8,000 per well drilled to go into a fund to help defray road repair costs. "It comes nowhere close to what the damages are," Fowler said. But it should add $2.4 million to county coffers to address road damage.

Another looming issue across the region is pipeline construction.

James Mann, an attorney with Austin's Duggins, Wren, Mann and Romero, said billions of dollars in new pipeline and infrastructure is needed to be able to move oil and gas out of the area. He estimated that 95 percent of pipeline easements are negotiated, while 5 percent are acquired through the condemnation process.

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These are good problems to have.  Local governments should be getting substantially increased sales tax revenue and while RV parks have been added to meet temporary housing demands, eventually there will be a home building boom that will also add assets to property tax rolls.