At nearly 80 years old Dallas natural gas
wildcatter frank pitts is like a kid in a candy
store. And he has those dirty coal-burning
electric plants up in Ohio and across the
upper Midwest to thank. The mountains of coal
those plants burn pump hundreds of tons of
sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide into the
atmosphere every day, the two main components
of acid rain.
And natural gas is the answer. It's the
cleanest-burning fossil fuel available in the world.
Pitts has been preaching that solution to acid
rain for years.
Now, thanks to the Economic Summit Agreement,
it is so close he can already hear the drilling
rigs headed back out to the Texas oil patch.
It's a huge market that we're talking about for
natural gas.
Pitts predicts conversion of those old smoke
belching plants to a combination of coal and
natural gas,
along with construction of new totally
gas-fired electric plants,
will be the source of a new economic boom in Texas.
Each trillion cubic feet of new natural gas
that we produce in our state means
50,000-100,000 new jobs.
And Pitts predicts newly drilled Texas wells
will produce an additional 3 trillion cubic
feet of natural gas for Midwestern electric
plants by the end of this century.
And that translates into thousands upon
thousands of new jobs.
It really means something to Texas, quite frankly.