Fort Worth, TX Air Quality Index (AQI) Today

The Barnett Shale lies directly beneath Fort Worth. A December 2009 count already put more than a thousand producing gas wells inside the city limits, permitted under ordinances that allow them in every zoning category, residential included, with compressors, tank batteries and pipeline equipment alongside them. Very few large American cities have their housing stock interleaved with active hydrocarbon production at anything like that density.

That matters for the reading because production emissions keep no schedule. A tank hatch, a compressor start or a well blowdown vents when the equipment or the operator determines, not on the twice-daily curve an urban model built around traffic expects. A metro figure can be entirely accurate for the metro and still describe nothing about one block for one hour.

The regional picture puts this city on the producing side of it. Of the ten counties in the Dallas-Fort Worth ozone nonattainment area, the four carrying core Barnett production, Tarrant and Wise and Denton and Johnson, all sit in its western half, while the plume TCEQ’s conceptual modeling tracks moves northwest across the metro on slow southeasterly flow. Fort Worth is not cleanly upwind of that plume and not cleanly downwind of it. It is inside the source area.