Cowtown Gas Deals a Model for the Nation

While some local bloggers portray Cowtownites as fools for buying the gas companies' bill of goods Time Magazine sees things differently:

Today's energy company landmen must deal with Texas soccer moms with their own websites and Pennsylvania dairy farmers/bloggers, all armed with Google maps and Excel spreadsheets. The domestic gas-exploration business has undergone a revolutionary face-lift.

Yep, according to Time, local homeowners are driving the hard bargains and taking the gas companies to the cleaners, not the other way around. And people in other parts of the country are taking notice:

[Ron] Stamets says what he and his Pennsylvania dairy-farmer neighbors are doing is based on the experiences of Fort Worth neighborhoods. The Barnett Shale site has long been known to Texas oilmen, but extracting what is estimated to be some 2.5 trillion cu. ft. of natural gas from the 350-million-year-old rocks beneath the Dallas-Fort Worth area only became feasible in the last decade with the advent of horizontal drilling techniques.

So the next time somebody whines about local citizens "selling out" just remember, we're not selling out, we're cashing in.