As a vegetable farmer and landscaper in NWLa with 11 acres "in the play" of new drilling occurring in the Haynesville Shale, you're absolutely right that this is unsustainable. We've spent the last week researching the geology, aquifers (we have well water) and mineral rights of our property. Thread
2. The land in this area was underwater, but the Shale is a bowl encompassing east TX and NWLa from Shreveport to Natchitoches Parish. Our soil is pure sand, we've found rocks with sea shell impressions. Most of the northern portion of the shale has been extracted, they're moving prospecting south.
3. Most of the land around us is timber. They are moving fast to secure over 150,000 acres of land for drilling rights in this area. The pipelines were built over the last 2 years to move the gas to refineries in Southern LA. The timber land is mostly owned by out of state corps, hundreds of acres.
4. We spoke to a lawyer last week to find out if our property was "in the play". This means they plan on exploring your acreage. LA allows land owners to hold mineral rights and Corps have to negotiate with you to do under your land and pay you royalties for anything produced minus transportation.
5. Our well is 200ft, they shoot trillions of gallons of water (not sure where that's coming from) 15,000ft down in lines as far as 3 miles. Then they have to truck out all of the very salty water and store it in underground tanks. They fill the earth with sand and capture the gas release.
6. Our small 11 acres makes up a tiny portion of each square mile of speculation. We brought up the Ruston AI facility and the amount of energy they are "telling us" it will take. He hadn't even heard about it and asked how we knew... wild. There's alot of folk here that don't even know.
7. Final fact. As landscapers we do lots of business in Forest Hill. Small town south of Alexandria with hundreds of family owned nurseries. It exists because it sits on a massive aquifer and that's how they water the hundreds of thousands of plants and trees that ship all over the country.
8. We spoke with a nursery owner that told us they'd received letters from the state regarding meters to track water usage/ auto shutoff because they were going to be redirecting that H20 to Ruston for the cooling process. This is going to be catastrophic for LA and no one is paying attention.