Oil and gas companies rushing to drill in the Eagle Ford Shale since 2009 have burned and wasted billions of cubic feet of natural gas - enough to meet the heating and cooking needs of 335,000 Texas homes for a year.

The only practical way to transport the natural gas that bubbles to the surface with more profitable crude oil in the Eagle Ford is through pipelines to processing plants. But that critical infrastructure is lacking in some remote areas.

The solution? Oilfield workers raise tall metal spires known as flare stacks to burn off natural gas and release it into the Texas sky - sometimes for months.

Flares light the countryside at night like ghostly beacons. The glow of flames and lights of 24-hour drilling and fracking operations are so widespread, the region south of San Antonio looks like a sprawling city in satellite photos.

While flaring is supposed to incinerate impurities in raw natural gas and produce carbon dioxide, some of the wasted fossil fuel is instead just being vented - unburned - directly into the atmosphere. Faced with a pipeline shortage in rural South Texas, companies bleed off the gas into flares that release air pollutants and greenhouse gases in amounts that collectively rival the output of a half-dozen oil refineries.

Back to Gallery Thirsty for oil, energy companies wasting less valuable... 3 1 of 3 Photo: Kin Man Hui, Staff 2 of 3 Photo: Kin Man Hui, Staff 3 of 3 Photo: Kin Man Hui, Staff





Not even the state's top regulators at the Railroad Commission of Texas, who oversee the oil and gas industry, know how much gas is going to waste and polluting the air in the Eagle Ford Shale.

"Nobody wants to flare," said Barry Smitherman, chairman of the Railroad Commission's three-member elected board. "When you do that, you're burning up money."

But a yearlong San Antonio Express-News investigation used the state's own data to show how often a resource used to cook, heat homes, produce electricity and fuel vehicles is being squandered.

Analyzing millions of records, the news­paper found that the volume of wasted gas in Texas has reached levels not seen in decades - and the South Texas shale field is largely to blame.

Among the findings:

1 No region in Texas flared as much gas as the Eagle Ford Shale. Since the early days of the energy boom in 2009, statewide flaring and venting in Texas surged by 400 percent to 33 billion cubic feet in 2012. Nearly two-thirds of the gas lost that year - 21 billion cubic feet - came from the Eagle Ford.

1 The rate of Eagle Ford flaring was 10 times higher than the combined rate of the state's other oil fields.

1 The total volume of wasted gas in the shale from 2009 to 2012 was almost 39 billion cubic feet - enough to meet the annual heating and cooking needs for all 335,700 residential customers who relied on gas last year in CPS Energy's service area, which includes San Antonio.

Flaring with no permits

Despite assurances by the Railroad Commission that gas flares are safely regulated, the Express-News found seven Eagle Ford operations with some of the highest amounts of flaring had failed to obtain the necessary permits from the agency.

Eagle Ford flares pumped more than 15,000 tons of volatile organic compounds and other contaminants into the air in 2012, state pollution estimates obtained by the Express-News state. That's more pollution than the amount emitted by the six oil refineries in Corpus Christi. And it doesn't include all the other sources of pollution in the oil patch.

It's the downside of an energy boom that seemed unthinkable not long ago.

The discovery that hydraulic fracturing could tap the Eagle Ford's rich oil and gas reserves has sparked a flurry of drilling that has pumped billions of dollars into the region and has helped propel a surge in domestic oil production.

Advances in horizontal drilling have made "fracking" widespread in the United States. Drillers inject high-pressure fluids down wells to unlock fossil fuels trapped in layers of shale rock buried deep beneath the surface.

Texas oil production is on track to surpass every OPEC country except Saudi Arabia because of the fracking boom in oil fields, with the Eagle Ford and Permian Basin leading the way.

Texas regulators blame the cheap price of natural gas for the spike in flaring. They said the plummeting cost of the fossil fuel in recent years hampered pipeline construction.

Problem getting worse

While Smitherman and other officials at the Railroad Commission tout the low rates of flaring in Texas oil and gas fields, they said they didn't know how much gas has been lost in the Eagle Ford, where they acknowledge flaring is a concern.

Ultimately, the Railroad Commission, which critics say is too cozy with the industry it regulates, is leaving it up to the industry to solve the problem.

The surge in flaring came at a time when Smitherman criticized "global warming alarmists" and boasted about his clashes with the Environmental Protection Agency during a failed electoral bid for Texas attorney general.

Meanwhile, preliminary data for 2013 indicates flaring and venting in South Texas is getting worse.

Energy firms operating Eagle Ford wells lost more than 35 billion cubic feet of gas that year - a 65 percent increase from 2012, when flaring and venting totaled more than 21 billion cubic feet.

"That amount of gas is horrible," said Sister Elizabeth Riebschlaeger, a nun with the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word who lives in South Texas and speaks out for residents who believe they've been harmed by rising levels of pollution in the Eagle Ford. "I would use the word 'disastrous.' "

Riebschlaeger, who works out of her Honda Civic as she drives the back roads of the shale, said she's seen flares burning "day and night" and emitting plumes of black smoke that indicate the flames are burning inefficiently and releasing air pollutants.

"It's an environmental tragedy," Riebschlaeger said. "There are lots of people who bought nice, quiet country places who now find that same quiet environment destroyed."

Smitherman said the waste of any natural resource is a serious problem. But he emphasized most Eagle Ford gas still is being collected. He predicted energy producers will have a bigger incentive to build pipelines as gas prices rise.

When an oil company drilled new wells next to their rural home last year, Adrian and Loretta Niestroy quickly learned that oil isn't the only thing that flows from the ground.

The Niestroys live in Karnes County, in the heart of the boom. No other spot in Texas produces more oil. Last year, the county yielded 56 million barrels - enough to fill 30 tanker ships.

But in Karnes and other oil-rich areas of the region, thousands of wells that dot the landscape also produce natural gas. Drillers call it casinghead gas, a reference to the heavy metal casings that are fitted on top of a well.

Over the past few years, oil prices climbed while gas prices dipped. Producers followed the money and hunted oil. That's why flaring often occurs in counties such as Karnes that lie in the oil-rich northern swath of the shale region, a formation the size of Costa Rica that stretches for 400 miles like a lopsided grin from the Mexican border near Laredo to Madison County.

Ryan Salmon of Ceres, a Boston-based coalition of investors and environmentalists, said the Eagle Ford and Bakken share key attributes: A pipeline shortage and companies that hunt oil, not gas.

"Development is happening in areas that lack the legacy infrastructure, and companies are primarily interested in the oil," Salmon said.

The Eagle Ford dips toward the Texas coastline, and along that southern swoosh, the deepest part of the rock produces pure natural gas, known as dry gas. There isn't much oil.

Rates of flaring are much lower at those wells, which makes sense - drillers in that region actually want the natural gas, and much of the infrastructure to collect it already was in place.

Pipelines don't come cheap, even assuming that a company can obtain the regulatory approvals quickly. James Mann, an Austin attorney who handles pipeline cases, said it can take a year to secure the right-of-way for a pipeline. He recently worked on a short segment of pipe in the Eagle Ford that took six months from start to finish - an exceptionally fast pace.

Pipelines too costly

The low price of gas in recent years hasn't been enough to cover pipeline expenses.

On Oct. 30, 2013, the Houston-based oil producer EF Energy LLC told the Railroad Commission it would be too costly to build a new pipeline from its oil lease at Sheffield Ranch in Wilson County.

The company said it would cost $1.5 million to build a 5.7-mile pipeline to hook into the nearest available pipeline. With the gas worth an estimated $670,000, the company would lose more than $800,000. EF Energy sought permission to flare the casinghead gas instead.

"Due to the explosive, rapid rate of drilling by operators in the area, there is a severe shortage of equipment, supplies, manpower and services available to construct and complete gas gathering pipelines," state officials wrote in their decision regarding the company's request.

Noting that EF Energy already was flaring casinghead gas without permission, officials went ahead and approved the request.

Bureaucratic nightmare

A clash between Texas officials and the EPA also delayed pipeline projects.

In 2011, new federal rules required polluters to obtain greenhouse gas permits in an effort to tackle climate change. The rules didn't apply to pipelines. But they did apply to the infrastructure that connects to pipelines - things like compressor stations and processing plants.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Attorney General Greg Abbott, who's now running for governor, said the new requirements would be disastrous for the industry and sued the EPA.

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality could have taken responsibility for issuing greenhouse gas permits but refused.

What seemed like a business-friendly move instead created a bureaucratic nightmare.

The approval of greenhouse gas permits was left to the EPA - something industry and environmental advocates say delayed construction of midstream infrastructure, the part of the oil and gas industry that moves products from point A to point B.

"The TCEQ is really falling down on the job in every way," said Elena Craft of the Environmental Defense Fund, a group that has partnered with the industry. "We're going on three years where we've had businesses losing money and a deterioration in environmental quality. We have this abundance of natural resources and we're just wasting them. That's not smart. And for what? Some partisan personal political statement?"

Now it takes anywhere from eight months to more than a year and a half to get a greenhouse gas permit through the EPA, said Celina Romero, an Austin attorney who works with the Texas Pipeline Association.

Romero said it would take the TCEQ less time to issue the same permit because it has more staff than the EPA.

Oil where the money is

In the meantime, 50 such projects for things such as compressor stations were delayed in the Eagle Ford and Barnett Shale, the massive gas field in the Fort Worth area.

The Texas Pipeline Association estimates the delays placed more than 48,000 jobs at risk - an estimate based on pending applications for air permits or company news releases that included jobs numbers.

The Texas Legislature passed a law in 2013 authorizing the TCEQ to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. But it probably will take months for the agency to craft its rule-making process and have the EPA sign off on it, Romero said.

Despite the missing revenue from flared gas, oil is where the money is. For many residents of the Eagle Ford Shale who spent their lives trying to make a living off the parched land, the energy boom is a financial miracle.

Nolan Jonas, a retired police chief of Karnes City, is witnessing the town bustling with traffic and workers from the oil patch. It wasn't always that way.

"When things go bad, there are no jobs, no employment," Jonas said as he and his son tended a herd of cattle at their ranch outside Karnes City.

Jonas, who owns the mineral rights on his ranch, is spending his retirement years watching his investment in the land pay off. Landowners who suddenly find themselves awash in royalty checks call it "mailbox money."

But next to the ranch sits a sprawling gas processing plant. As cattle munched on feed and looked lazily around, flames from the plant's flare stack burned off natural gas.

Like many residents, Jonas doesn't like seeing a natural resource going to waste. He tries to be philosophical about it.

"You can find good and bad, but you have to look at the whole picture," the rancher said.

Still, when it comes to knowing how much pollution is spewing out of flare stacks that have spread across the shale region, it's difficult to see the whole picture.

In many cases, no one is tracking the kind of toxins being released from specific flare sites - including the state regulators who are supposed to protect residents from air pollution.

Express-News Database Editors Joseph Kokenge and Joe Yerardi contributed to this report