Natural gas industry leaders met to discuss the future of the industry at the 2024 Global Energy Symposium hosted by Texas Christian University.
Last week’s event featured various panels with many speakers covering topics such as finance, markets, policy, leadership, and entrepreneurship.
The last panel discussion was on innovation and entrepreneurship, specifically the story of Fort Worth’s Four Sevens Oil Company. Following the conversation, local energy leaders, including a team from Four Sevens Oil Company, were inducted into TCU Legends in Energy.
Those recognized among the Four Sevens Oil Company were energy leaders Larry Brogdon, Brad Cunningham, and Hunter Enis.
The company pioneered the drilling of gas wells in Tarrant County, which was thought of as a risky decision back then. The risk was enough to scare off George Mitchell, the “Father of the Barnett Shale,” who did not want to come that far south and drill in the urban environment, said Brogdon, the company’s geologist at the time, as reported by Fort Worth Report.
Despite hesitancy, the company proceeded to drill, unaware of the legacy that it would create.
“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 Cunningham, son of the late Dick Lowe, one of the company’s partners, per FWR. “That’s what we did. We went and carpet-bombed this place with drill sites.”
The team members talked about their ties to TCU football and its connection to helping them secure leases. Both Enis and Lowe 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, per FWR. “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.”
According to Brogdon, those ties created the foundation for the Barnett Shale boom.
The symposium comes amid conversation surrounding a recent bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives that looks to strip control over liquified natural gas export licensing from the Department of Energy, as previously reported by The Dallas Express.
The bill, authored by Rep. August Pfluger (R-TX), would reverse President Joe Biden’s efforts to curtail the production and export of liquified natural gas.
