Drilling is Bad for Business

Via the Fish Creek Monitor out of Arlington comes word of a Chesapeake 5-acre drilling well pad that's seemingly condemned a piece of adjacent property at a potentially lucrative intersection in that city. The entity doing the loudest complaining? The developer whose land Chesapeake is allegedly ruining.

The property is now covered with gas pipelines. It's illegal to build anything on top of gas pipelines for safety reasons. It's not illegal to use your Eminent Domain power as a gas pipeline company to take valuable real estate and make it useless for the purpose the owner intended.

We've seen this before. There's a similar gas pipeline no-man's land in DISH in Denton County that was slated to be an entire sub-division.

This is one of those little known, but hugely consequential results of not thinking through what it means to allow gas drilling in your town. You'd think that a practice that ruins perfectly good real estate from becoming the next 7-11 or Taco Bell would be anathema to the usual Powers-That-Be. It tells you something about how much things have changed in the past decade that not even developers outrank gas companies in DFW.