How Dallas became frack free: hydrocarbon governance under neoliberalism

Abstract

Local-scale government ordinances that attempt to delay or displace oil and gas drilling in their territories are common in regions with hydrocarbon extraction activities. Drawing on literature from policy mobilities and resource and energy governance, this paper analyzes policymaking processes that resulted in a December 2013 ordinance in Dallas, Texas, which established a 1500 foot (457.2 meter) setback between gas wells and residences, making drilling (with hydraulic fracturing) nearly impossible. Dallas was not the first city in the region to adopt an oil and gas drilling ordinance; indeed, many regulatory provisions were copied from other regional cities. This paper explains policy mobility in the Dallas policymaking process in terms of anti-political practices and hydrocarbon institutions that, overall, determine neoliberal hydrocarbon governance. City governments cede some of the political process to gas drilling task forces that work to render setbacks technical. Legal classification of subsurface hydrocarbons as the mineral estate creates a legal gray area that confounds municipal regulatory authority and gives discursive power to mineral owners to threaten municipal officials with lawsuits. Both of these anti-political strategies encouraged selective copying and morphing of other policy provisions by the Dallas city government. Adopting longer municipal setback distance regulations represents a type of contestation of neoliberalism situated between complete deregulation and overt opposition.

Resource-making controversies: Knowledge, anticipatory politics and economization of unconventional fossil fuels

“…But even more significantly, the proliferation of protest campaigns around prospective extraction sites illuminates how 'fracking has the capacity both to fracture formerly cohesive communities and to bring formerly disparate communities together' (Willow and Wylie, 2014: 227). Similarly to widespread contestation of bituminous sands in Canada, the 'anti-fracking' fronts on both sides of the Atlantic reshape the social fabric by giving rise to divided and often irreconcilable public concerns, which cannot be occluded by narrowly designed calculations of environmental safety and techno-economic feasibility, but reveal, more fundamentally, historically wedged social inequalities, distrust of political regimes and desired modes of future collective life (Espig and de Rijke, 2016;Fry et al, 2015;Lis and Stankiewicz, 2016;Sica, 2015;Steger and Milosevic, 2014;Thomas et al, 2017;Williams et al, 2017). Despite being loosely defined, such 'political situations' (Barry, 2012) show tremendous potential to mobilize resistance across all segments of society, from the usual suspects of NGOs and green parties, to the farming and indigenous communities affected by exploration, to local health practitioners and 'Lancashire Nanas' representing the rights of future generations (e.g.…”

“…Christopherson and Rightor, 2014;Willow and Wylie, 2014;Zalik, 2015b), as well as political economy accounts of its implications for global energy markets (Bradshaw et al, 2015a(Bradshaw et al, , 2015bNeville et al, 2017). The allocation of swathes of land for fracking, in particular, is often seen as an extension of neoliberal appropriation of nature, which engulfs local communities while sustaining the order of the carbon-fuelled capitalist economy (Fry et al, 2015;Hudgins and Poole, 2014;Mercer et al, 2014). Geographers are now also joining other social scientists to address the dynamics of extractive politics across scale, noting how such struggles are played out around competing imaginations of territory and property, progress and modernization, social justice and future communities (e.g.…”

Environmental justice and natural resource extraction: intersections of power, equity and access

“…While social disruptions in boomtowns included increasing demands on services and infrastructure, increased cost of living and social tensions, and increased criminal activity (Kohrs 1974;England and Albrecht 1984;Cortese and Jones 1977;Brown and Swanson 2003), communities can be resilient to negative outcomes over time (Smith, Krannich, and Hunter 2001). Recent booms in unconventional oil and gas production have led researchers to examine the utility of the boomtown model when extraction takes place in peri-urban areas (Fry 2013;Fry, Brannstrom, and Murphy 2015) and when extraction may not be as likely to happen in volatile spurts (Jacquet and Kay 2014). Nevertheless, boom and bust cycles remain important and powerful considerations for communities whose economies depend upon natural resource-based extractive activity .…”

Fracking Fortunes: Economic Well‐being and Oil and Gas Development along the Urban‐Rural Continuum

“…New technologies and deregulation have brought drilling into suburban or other populated areas-and communities experiencing oil and gas booms may not be any more remote than nonboom communities (Jacquet and Kay 2014;Weber 2012Weber , 2013. Quintessential examples are the urban areas of Dallas2Fort Worth in central Texas, where prior to local activism thousands of active oil and gas wells were within city limits, including densely populated neighborhoods (Fry 2013;Fry, Brannstrom, and Murphy 2015); and the Front Range area of Colorado, north and south of Denver, which possibly has the highest concentration of UOGE wells in the nation (Mayer 2017). Hence, it is important to consider rural, suburban, and urban locales when studying the impact of UOGE-or the rural-urban continuum, on which we focus here.…”