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State Representative Sid Miller
addressed the board of directors at the most recent meeting of
the Middle Trinity Groundwater Conservation District board of
directors, Thursday, July 3, 2008, in Dublin.
Present and participating were board
members Rodney Stephens, Fred Parker, Jerry Fronterhouse, George
Bingham and Ed Dittfurth, MTGCD general manager Joe Cooper, and
Wes Burris, field tech. Not present was board member Jerry
Hinshaw, and Sharon Mainord, administrative assistant.
“Basically, I hadn’t had a chance to
drop by during a meeting,” Sid Miller said, “and I just wanted
to stop in. It’s the interim state of the legislature, we’ll be
meeting again in January, so I’m trying to get my legislative
package together. And I wanted to bump some ideas off of you. I
know we’ve had some ongoing problems with disposal wells,
permitting and what-not and I was going to let y’all know what
I’m thinking about doing, and get your input.”
Miller then discussed his efforts to
“shore up the notification process” for oil and gas injection
wells.
“Right now when they apply for a permit, they have to do a
public notice,” Miller said. “But basically, they can just
publish in any newspaper they want to. First problem we had was
with a well down in Hico, right near the city limits, and they
published the notice in the Hamilton paper, but not in the Hico
paper. Then we had one recently that published in the Fort Worth
Star Telegram instead of in the Dublin paper.”
Miller’s planned changes include
requirements that would call for notices to be printed in the
paper in the closest proximity to the well-site.
“And they’d have to publish the
notice in the largest circulation newspaper in the county too,”
Miller said. “Also, it would require them to give notice to any
adjoining land owner, or tenant. I’m going to try and go with
that. It would also require notice to all county commissioners,
county judges, and elected officials, including water district
board members -- so that everyone could know what was going on.”
Miller then asked for any comments
from the directors.
“I support the oil and gas initiative
on the waste injection wells,” Cooper said. “The fear that
people have...the concerns are, that we’re going to get the oil
and gas waste injection that produce salt water from all those
places adjacent to us, in the Barnett Shale, that are
incorporated, that can pass rules disallowing it. So...people
feel like we’re going to get a lot of stuff brought into our
counties. And really, the over-riding concern, and the catalyst
for some activists, is that they don’t feel like, whether it’s
true or not, that the Railroad Commission is doing due diligence
with oversight on construction of the wells.”
Cooper added that he believed that
agency to be understaffed. “Those kind of concerns are what
bother people,” he said, adding that “Anything that could be
done would be good.”
“I think a lot of the time the
Railroad Commission is doing what it’s supposed to, but it’s
just maybe losing track of it,” Cooper said. “When people ask
for documentation of things that are required by law and they
can’t get it, then their first assumption is, ‘that’s because it
doesn’t exist, it wasn’t done’ and it may have been done.”
Cooper said that there was a solution
to all the problems.
“What we really need..to stop all
these problems, is if we could just require the oil and gas
waste injection wells be placed outside the boundaries of our
state’s mapped aquifers,” Cooper said. “There’s lots of
territory that doesn’t have any groundwater. We wouldn’t have to
worry about whether they’re constructed right to start with. The
problem is, the oil and gas industry is certainly going to buck
up, because it’s going to cost them a little more, to haul it a
little further. And till the law makes them do it, they’re not
going to do it of their own free will.”
Cooper then spoke briefly regarding a
problem encountered by the Rolling Plains Groundwater District.
“Just recently, the Rolling Plains Groundwater District lost in
appeals court, a case against the City of Aspermont,” Cooper
said. “As you know, when our district was founded, people here
were concerned about water marketing -- keeping their water here
and not letting people come in and buy it and sell it. So we
adopted rules that tried to dissuade that practice. One of them,
is an export fee. Well, Rolling Plains had an export fee, and
Aspermont came into their groundwater district...(to export
water) and for the first several months they paid the prescribed
export fees, and then they decided to just stop paying it, and
it went to court. The courts have ruled that the City of
Aspermont is immune to the rules of the groundwater conservation
district.”
Cooper then mentioned concerns about
similar potential problems with MTGCD.
“Our biggest user is the City of
Stephenville,” Cooper said. “If this district couldn’t regulate
its biggest user, for the benefit of the aquifer and everybody
else that uses water in that aquifer, we might as well go home.
So we need to get that fixed -- to make sure we’re able to treat
everybody the same. When you’re talking about water, we need to
treat everybody the same.”
Miller made notes throughout Cooper’s
comments, and at the conclusion noted that the problems with
Rolling Plains and Aspermont was probably had nothing to do with
the water code, and everything to do with the government code,
and might be difficult to change.
“But one of the promising things on
this waste water disposal, is the potential for not injecting
any of it period,” Miller said.
“There’s been a lot of research, and
there are some new innovations,” Miller said. “Over in east
Texas, there’s a machine, I don’t know exactly how to describe
it...but they can take that truck load of salt water and
actually recover four or five barrels of oil out of it -- and
purify about 80 percent of the water, and then you only have
about 15 or 20 percent of it that has to be hauled off.”
Miller said it was sort of “a reverse
osmosis process.” He added that he believes the oil and gas
industry as a whole, because of the pressures from the water
districts and the public, would begin to move towards such
innovations. He then noted that the rising cost of fuel should
also make such alternative disposal methods appealing to the
industry.
During the Manager’s Report, Cooper
updated the directors on recent discussions with Coryell County
representatives regarding possible consolidation with MTGCD,
including potential difficulties with their election or petition
process.
Cooper also noted that there were
“now 14,686 wells in the database.”
“We’re making great progress on
that,” Cooper said. “The lady who’s working for us is just doing
a super job, and I expect we’ll be through with this process by
the end of August.”
Cooper also provided directors with
an update on progress with the new building site (in
Stephenville) for MTGCD headquarters. “He (the realtor)
indicated he was in the process of working with the landowner
and the Stephenville Planning and Zoning committee to re-plat
that piece of property,” Cooper said, “so that we could move
towards closing on it.”
In other business, board members:
• Approved and ratified the payment
of bills.
• Reviewed the income/expense
comparison.
• Reviewed the quarterly report on
investments.
During the Quarterly Drought
Assessment, Cooper noted that the Palmer Drought Severity Index
indicated that the area had entered a dry spell.
“The prior three quarters have been
normal, very wet, and very wet, respectively,” Cooper said. “And
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration indicates
that those conditions will persist or worsen through the end of
September. That’s not the best outlook we’d like to have, but
that’s the best that science has got for us.” |
