Bryan Burgess, like Jed Clampett, wears bluejean coveralls, drives an old truck and voices mistrust of big-city interlopers. But that’s where similarities to the patriarch of the Beverly Hillbillies’ clan end.
Well, there is something else shared by the retired Burgess and the fictional Clampett: The land under their farms is marbled with enough fossil fuel to make a man very, very rich.
Cross Creek Ranch, Burgess’ gentleman farm 110 miles west of Atlanta, lies atop what is potentially one of the largest natural gas finds in U.S. history.
It’s part of the massive Conasauga Shale Field that extends into Georgia’s Chattooga and Floyd counties, 70 miles away, where prospectors have leased mineral rights on 20,000 acres.
Getting the gas out of the ground remains technologically difficult and commercially questionable. Still, gas fever spreads across northeast Alabama and into northwest Georgia.
Energy company executives, professional landmen, roustabouts, engineers and lawyers have descended upon Ashville (pop. 2,260) in droves, hoping to secure drilling rights and comfy retirements. They’ve introduced a new vocabulary, including “fracturization,” “blockbusters,” “unitization,” that now flows expertly off locals’ tongues.
But the gas companies have also brought rumor, frustration and mistrust to the town known for its courthouse square and active Sons of Confederate Veterans’ chapter.
“We here in the community are playing another man’s game, but we haven’t lost,” says Charles Robinson Jr., an attorney who owns land under contract to a gas exploration company. “We can’t lose because we don’t have any exposure. And if the company wins, we’re going to win big, too.”
St. Clair County is an unlikely gas “play,” a rural community succumbing to Birmingham’s sprawl up Interstate Highway 59. An oil patch it ain’t.
No Clampetts are likely to become instant millionaires; much of the land on either side of U.S. 411, a two-lane blacktop that runs through the middle of the gas field, is owned by doctors, Realtors, lawyers, contractors and scientists like Burgess.
“We’re at the heart, the epicenter, of where it all got started,” he says. “Most people have a dream to get rich. But I’ll be 70 in October, so it better come pretty soon.”
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Prospectors have long assumed that the tectonic forces that shaped the Appalachian Mountains hundreds of millions of years ago and later molded many fossil-fuel fortunes in Pennsylvania, Kentucky and West Virginia must surely be at play in Alabama.
The above-ground idyll of blue-green hills, meandering rivers, and cow-filled valleys belies a folded and faulted underbelly rich in shale and natural gas.
In the mid-1980s, Amoco Oil drilled nearly two miles into the Conasauga formation right across from Burgess’ farm.
“They had some real good gas shows, but, at the time, natural gas prices were plummeting,” says Phillip Meadows, an Alabama geologist who surveyed St. Clair County. “The whole industry was going down the tubes, so they abandoned this play.”
Natural gas sold for $1.73 per thousand cubic feet at the wellhead in 1987. In March 2007 it went for $6.56. Amoco’s seismic mapping showed a deep (more than 10,000 feet in spots) and wide (40 square miles) skein of gas-trapped shale. Technology, though, kept folks from profitably sucking the fuel from the ground.
Interest heightened in the late 1990s as the Barnett Shale Field in Texas came online. Engineers were now able to steer their drill bits in and around rocks to find the gas and send it skyward. Fifteen-hundred-foot seams of shale course through the Barnett Field, considerably smaller than the Conasauga.
“Right now the buzzword in the industry is the Barnett Shale. It’s blowing and going,” says Meadows, who started cobbling together mineral leases in 2002 for an energy company owned by the Choctaw Indians. “It’s referred to as the 17-year overnight success, because it literally took Mitchell Energy 17 years to figure out how to get gas out of that tight shale.”
Dominion Exploration & Production bought out the Choctaws in early 2005 and concentrated prospecting along both sides of U.S. 411 and Big Canoe Creek. In May 2005, Dominion apparently hit a gusher just north of Ashville.
“The well encountered a significant gas flow at roughly 3,500 feet,” a company executive testified at an Alabama Oil and Gas Board hearing earlier this year.
Meadows says the so-called Big Canoe Creek Field may contain more gas than any onshore field ever discovered in this country.
Tim Parker, a Dominion executive, told the Richmond Times-Dispatch last March that “there is a substantial amount of gas in place. That’s very clear. The question is whether the gas is economically recoverable.”
Meanwhile, other gas companies have joined the hunt for the bubbling crude, er, gas.
Chesapeake Energy paid $75 million last year for half of Energen Resource’s 200,000-acre claim and is drilling a 12,000-foot well near Gadsden’s airport. Chesapeake vows to spend at least $30 million exploring in Etowah and Cherokee counties. Dominion is rumored to have spent $50 million so far.
“In six, seven, eight years down the road you’re going to see a different Ashville sitting here,” says Mayor Robert McKay. “I don’t see how we can go wrong. There’ll be some millionaires in our area.”