"It's very early, and almost no 3-D seismic imaging
has been shot in Dallas County," Harding said. "So
we're going to be careful."
The Harding-Exxon partnership plans to keep one
drilling rig busy this year, a credible enough
performance but far short of the 20 to 30 rigs the
Barnett behemoths such as Devon Energy, XTO and
Chesapeake Energy will run in the North Texas field
this year.
As Harding explains it, the partnership has evolved
around the use of an old Mobil Corp. 8-inch pipeline
running from Keller to Corsicana. Harding has leases
along the pipeline, from Keller through Hurst, North
Richland Hills, Arlington and Grand
Prairie, western Dallas County and southeast into
Ellis County at Midlothian.
"They had the pipeline and we had the Barnett
Shale expertise, so it made a good partnership,"
Harding said.
Harding-Exxon will be a pioneer of sorts, pushing
into Dallas County, which in contrast to Tarrant
County has seen virtually no Barnett Shale drilling.
The partnership has a lease in west Dallas near
Kiest Boulevard and Texas 408 near Dallas Baptist
University. Harding says he is looking at other
leasing sites in Dallas County.
So far, the Barnett Shale boom has stopped at the
western Dallas County line because of an underground
barrier called the Ouachita Overthrust, a break in
geological formation patterns that occurred roughly
280 million years ago when the earth's tectonic
plates pulled apart, then came back together.
The result was the Ouachita Mountains, whose
remnants can be seen today in parts of Arkansas and
Missouri. In Texas, the Ouachita Overthrust runs
under the western half of Dallas County.
"The Ouachita Overthrust is considered to be the
eastern boundary to the Barnett Shale, and
everything behind it is pretty much a no-man's
land," said geologist Jimmy Thomas of Weatherford, a
longtime student of the Barnett Shale.
Harding agrees with the conventional wisdom about
the Ouachita Overthrust and says that the city of
Dallas is unlikely to see the kind of
industrial-strength drilling that Fort Worth and
Tarrant County have experienced.
He says, however, that the old Mobil pipeline
through Dallas, Ellis and Navarro counties courses
through a path on the safe side of the Ouachita
Overthrust, with the added bonus of giving the
partners the capacity to take the gas away.
"I don't want to produce stranded gas with no
pipeline access," said Harding, whose company will
produce about 1 billion cubic feet of Barnett Shale
gas from its own leases -- independent of the Exxon
Mobil partnership -- in eastern Parker County this
year.
Exxon Mobil, as is its custom, declined to talk
about its partnership with Harding. While other big
integrateds such as Shell, ConocoPhillips and
Marathon Oil have moved into the Barnett Shale in
the past two years, Exxon Mobil has generally
stayed aloof, concentrating its new U.S. natural-gas
production in the Piceance Basin of western
Colorado.
The partnership with Harding has been something
of a surprise among independents because Harding
Co., while a well-regarded producer over its 54-year
life, has studiously kept a low profile ever since
Rick Harding's father, Charles, sold a Dallas
furniture store in 1953 and went into the oil
business.
"We are a family operation and we want to be
low-key," Harding said.
The elder Harding, now 87, was in partnership
with his brother Roy in a Preston Road furniture
store in 1953 when they were offered pieces of an
oil-drilling deal in Brown County. When the
first seven wells came in, Charles and Roy Harding
decided to get out of the furniture business and
become full-time oilmen.
The Brown County wells, and another set of wells
Harding drilled in Callahan County, benefited from a
Railroad Commission rule at the time that exempted
more shallow wells such as Harding's from mandatory
shutdowns that the commission used at the time to
control overproduction of oil.
The Hardings kept their overhead low and their
options wide by gradually divesting most of their
assets through the '60s, '70s and '80s. That enabled
the company to ride out the downturn in the oil
business in the 1980s and '90s.
Like most energy producers, Charles Harding was
always aware of the Barnett Shale but like his
fellows, Harding knew the conventional wisdom that
the Barnett could never be drilled because of its
impermeability.
"We always thought the idea of drilling the
Barnett Shale was crazy," said the elder Harding,
who still comes to Harding's offices on West
Northwest Highway regularly.
As the son and nephew of oilmen (Roy Harding died
in the early 1990s), Rick Harding grew up in the oil
fields. Father Charles tells a story of how his son
learned the habits of the field. A young Rick
imitated his elders at a rig one day as they
licked rock fragments that came out of the test
well, seeking the telltale taste if petroleum. Rick,
however, took the process a step further and
swallowed the rock.
"I survived it, and I guess that told me I was
going to be an oilman," the younger Harding said.
In the early part of this decade Harding noticed
the success Mitchell Energy was having with its
first Barnett Shale wells in Wise and Denton
counties north of Fort Worth.
Eager to try the new field, Harding took a lease
in Rhome and sunk its first well.
"The well was not a success," Rick Harding said.
"We didn't have good 3-D seismic on it."
But Harding tried again, this time in eastern
Parker County along White Settlement Road. That well
paid off, and was the beginning of a 5,000-acre
lease position in eastern Parker County. Harding's
production jumped from 150.5 million cubic
feet in 2004 to almost 1 billion cubic feet of gas
in the first 10 months of 2006, according to Texas
Railroad Commission figures.
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