East Flournoy Lucas in Shreveport next location for Haynesville Shale rigs

• BY LIZ SWAINE | Staff writer  shreveportbossieradvocate.com

Work has begun in the area of the newest urban natural gas drilling site in Shreveport-Bossier. Trees are being cut on 17.5 acres on the south side of East Flournoy Lucas Road across from Gullo’s Fresh Produce and Cypress Baptist Church. Residential homesites at The Oaks of Louisiana, Southwood Terrace and Twelve Oaks are close by.

Maps indicate the main entrance to the large drilling site will be off of East Flournoy Lucas.

The site will be owned and operated by APEX Natural Gas LLC, the same company that is actively drilling on East 70^th Street near the Jimmie Davis Bridge and has recently purchased a site at the former Shreveport Country Club near Greenwood Road.

No drilling permit has yet been issued for the Flournoy Lucas location.

Shreveport-based mineral consultant Skip Peel says there is a several-step process that must be followed before the Louisiana Department of Conservation gives its approval.  

Once that happens, he says serious activity will begin and it will be seen in the number of heavy trucks coming into and leaving the site.

“If you've seen these trucks on the highway with these two square boxes on it, that's sand that they use in the fracking,” says Jeff Wellborn, a 40-year oil and gas consultant.  “You're going to have saltwater disposal trucks. You're going to have just the various trucks associated with the drilling itself.”

“Understand it's an industrial site. Understand each well pad is about five acres. Understand that typically they start at the north or south end of a section line and drill underneath. They're using the horizontal drilling to create multiple wells, right?”

Peel warns that during the completion of the frack job, there may be 50 vehicles on the pad, and all the sounds that come with the work. 

“The noise, I don't think you can completely mitigate that with sound walls or whatever else. And so drilling is a 24 hour a day process, and then when the completion starts, that's also a 24 hour a day process.”

“And since they tend to drill multiple wells together, yeah, it can go on for many weeks if you drill four wells and then have to frack those. It could be constant, you know, two weeks’ worth of stuff going on 24 hours a day on that site. It's always, to me, a question of how close do people live?”

Peel said the rigs, which are the largest used domestically, could be as tall as ten-story buildings, and will be visible from Esplanade, Twelve Oaks and Flournoy Lucas.  

Who will have oversight?

“Once a permit’s issued, yeah, it's almost to the level of not even God can stop the well from being drilled,” says Wellborn. He says after that, it will generally be up to the city or parish to handle any complaints such as noise or road damage.

Shreveport Chief Administrative Officer Tom Dark confirmed to The Shreveport Bossier City Advocate that the city has a Public Works ordinance that specifically relates to street damage caused by oil or natural gas activity.

The city’s Code of Ordinances also contains operational standards for drilling sites that relate to dust, noise, disruptive vibrations, signage, site maintenance, fences and screens and more.

Wellborn says he has heard municipal leaders in other areas state that they don’t want to make the regulations too strict “because we don’t want them to go somewhere else. It's really kind of stupid, because I don't know what you're thinking. Here's where the gas is.”

“Just like with Walmart or anybody else, you're putting these ordinances in place, you're not going to run them off or keep them from doing it- it is a cost of doing business. They do it all over the place. They will react to whatever ordinance environment they have to work in. So the concern or fear of being disruptive or onerous to the oil and gas companies doesn't carry much water.”

“Three of the last four applications to the state have been from APEX,” said Peel. “They’re real serious about this inner city drilling.”