SAN ANTONIO — The Eagle Ford Shale oil field had an $87 billion effect across South Texas last year — nearly equal to the San Antonio area's entire gross domestic product, according to the University of Texas at San Antonio.

The university's latest report on the oil boom, released Tuesday, shows that South Texas' traditional ranching, farming and hunting economy is increasingly eclipsed by the region's sudden reinvention as an oil field.

The study calculated the direct economic effects of oil and gas exploration, as well as the so-called indirect and “induced” economic activity created from things such as suppliers building warehouses or workers spending their paychecks.

The report found:

The direct effect alone is enormous: The study counted 51,652 people directly employed in the oil industry in 2013. That's about 5,600 more jobs than in 2012.

The overall economic effect of the field increased by 43 percent in one year, up from $61 billion in 2012.

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UTSA report|http://iedtexas.org/images/documents/2014_EFS_Release_Oct.pdf

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The Eagle Ford paid an estimated $6.8 billion in royalties in 2013, assuming that mineral owners get a 20 percent slice of the oil and gas that comes out of the ground.

A huge infrastructure build-out continues. Around 427 miles of pipeline, much of it for crude oil, were laid in 2013 at a cost of $504 million.

By 2023, UTSA projects a $137 billion effect from the field. But there would be fewer jobs directly involved in the oil patch as there are now, as companies get more efficient and the field shifts from drilling to production mode. Around 38,767 people would be working directly for oil and gas companies.

Eagle Ford crude oil production started from basically nothing — 352 barrels per day in 2008 — but is expected to cross the 1-million-barrel mark this year.

The report was paid for by America's Natural Gas Alliance, the South Texas Energy & Economic Roundtable and Shale Oil & Gas Business Magazine. This is the fourth time UTSA has updated its Eagle Ford study, and each time the numbers get larger.

“The Eagle Ford Shale in general continues to surprise us to the upside,” said Thomas Tunstall, principal investigator for the report.

UTSA looked at 15 of the busiest counties in the Eagle Ford region: Atascosa, Bee, DeWitt, Dimmit, Frio, Gonzales, Karnes, La Salle, Lavaca, Live Oak, Maverick, McMullen, Webb, Wilson and Zavala. Six neighboring counties with significant oil and gas business activity — but not drilling — were included: Bexar, Jim Wells, Nueces, San Patricio, Uvalde and Victoria. Those communities have become staging and office areas for the Eagle Ford.

The San Antonio area has been among the biggest beneficiaries. The study pegs full-time jobs in Bexar County attributable to the Eagle Ford at 13,919 in 2013, which could grow to 19,332 in a decade.

Port cities Corpus Christi and Victoria are shipping crude oil and other goods such as sand for hydraulic fracturing.

State revenue from the boom, including severance taxes paid when oil and gas are “severed” from the Earth, was more than $2.2 billion in 2013.

The study takes the first stab at trying to count the number of RV parks and worker camps, known more commonly as “man camps,” that have appeared in South Texas.

UTSA counted 320 RV parks and worker camps with 7,600 units. There were an estimated 50 RV parks just in the city of Three Rivers.

Man camps and RV parks to house workers sprouted virtually overnight a few years ago when the sudden drilling activity filled up all the hotel rooms in the region. They're everywhere, but hard to count. The report says there are “no accurate means” to determine the number of RV parks and no centralized data source on the number of things such as septic tank permits. Some enterprising South Texas residents have cleared a patch of brush and added six to 10 RV slots as a way to capitalize on the boom.

But it isn't all good news and easy money in the region. Rents have increased 300 percent in Cotulla, the report says, and local officials have noted that increasing air pollution is an issue. Longtime residents and those who don't or can't work in the oil field are struggling to pay rent and elevated prices.

Those who can leave their current jobs for the oil field often do. An estimated 30 percent of the city employees in Pleasanton have quit to take oil and gas jobs.

Employment in Atascosa County rose from 9,760 workers in 2011 to 13,012 in 2013, according to the report. In McMullen County, per capita income was $64,826 last year.

Workforce training is still an issue, even as colleges and universities have scrambled to add or enlarge programs for the oil and gas industry. “Now hiring” signs, especially for those with a commercial driver's license, are common across the region. Signs stapled on the sides of buildings and on telephone poles in Cotulla recently offered drivers a $1,500 signing bonus.

“Even now, there is so much activity that the existing South Texas workforce simply cannot supply all of the industry's needs,” the report says.

At a recent breakfast event, Leodoro Martinez, head of the Eagle Ford Consortium, showed aerials images of Cotulla. It's humming with activity, but was once known mainly as the poor community where a young Lyndon Baines Johnson first taught school.

“We used to have two little hotels in Cotulla,” Martinez said. “Now we have 24.”

People have stopped asking whether the Eagle Ford was really going to happen. Martinez said the question is now, “How long is this going to last?”

To that end, Tuesday's report notes that by some accounts, Texas already has more than 1,000 ghost towns and that “it is clear that the state does not need any more.”

UTSA recommends everything from geothermal energy exploration to olive growing to bird watching to history tourism as a way to diversify beyond oil. El Camino Real de los Tejas, the route the Spanish used to move between Mexico City and what's now northern Louisiana, runs across much of the Eagle Ford. Gonzales, with its “Come and Take It” motto, is among the communities positioned to do well beyond the oil boom, the study said.

But even with branching out beyond drilling, it's clear that the continued economic activity at anything approaching the current level depends on hydrocarbons — in the Mexican side of the Eagle Ford Shale that has yet to be extensively explored or in the export of what the shale in Texas is already producing.

Eagle Ford operators are pushing for the export of crude oil (currently banned), light oil condensate (which is beginning to be allowed) and liquefied natural gas (in the federal permitting stage).

jhiller@express-news.net