Natural gas leaders reflect on success, obstacles to future growth during TCU

“The way you made yourself competitive is you went in and got the drill sites, and the pipeline right away. Once you had that, you controlled the gas, so you really knocked the competition out of the game,” said Brad Cunningham, also at Four Sevens and the son of the late Dick Lowe, one of the company’s partners. “That’s what we did. We went and carpet bombed this place with drill sites.” 

Four Sevens acquired acreage from Haslet down to Burleson, eventually obtaining 26,000 acres for mineral rights in Tarrant and Johnson counties. They sold the acreage to Fort Worth’s XTO Energy for leases for $155 million, then acquired more land and sold it to Chesapeake Energy for $845 million in 2007. 

Hunter Enis, a former Horned Frogs quarterback and one of the partners at Four Sevens, said the company’s ties to TCU, and football in particular, were key to securing the leases. Along with Enis, Lowe also played football for the Horned Frogs. 

The football players and athletes they hired had a good work ethic and knew how to work together, Enis said. 

“One month our very top land man was a TCU football player and next was an A&M track scholar, so it seemed to work,” Enis said. “The collateral benefit of us drilling wells was a lot of employment. If you do it right or make a lot of money, you give people a lot of jobs,” Enis said.

The first thing the company talked about in the morning was not energy prices or the business, but TCU football, he added. Those ties created the foundation for the Barnett Shale boom, Brogdon said. 

“You can’t tell it by looking around the town, but in the Barnett Shale, there’s been 19,000 wells drilled. It covers 19 counties,” he said. “It’s amazing. It’s a ubiquitous zone where you can’t drill a well without hitting it.” 

The height of the boom has been in Fort Worth’s rearview mirror for a decade, but natural gas remains a major player in the global economy.