Better Air, Rail Infrastructure Aids Rural Areas
Published Sep 15, 2008
It’s a familiar sight across The High Ground’s territory: A Burlington Northern Santa Fe freight train passes in front of a grain elevator – in this case in the Panhandle.
At Moore County Airport near Dumas, general aviation pilots prize the affordable self-service fuel and the courtesy vehicles that cart them two miles down U.S. 87 to K-BOB’s Steakhouse.
Imagine, then, how vital the airport becomes if you work for a $90-billion-a-year oil company and frequently fly into the Texas Panhandle to monitor the progress of nearly 500 people processing 170,000 barrels of crude oil a day.
That’s a snapshot of management for San Antonio-based Valero Energy Corp., which now flies Gulfstream jets to Amarillo, then drives an hour to the company’s McKee refinery north of Dumas. Though smaller Gulfstreams can land in Dumas, larger Gulfstream 550 and 650 aircraft like Valero’s need a bit longer take-off distance than the airport’s 5,466-foot main runway provides.
By 2010, Brandon Cox looks forward to welcoming Valero executives on the tarmac at Moore County Airport, already a permanent base for 15 planes.
“We’re going to widen and extend the main runway up to 6,000 feet or possibly longer,” says Cox, the general manager. “Valero’s a big reason why we’re doing it: They even pitched in a half-million dollars themselves for this project. It’s a good economic development tool.”
With construction scheduled to start by the end of 2008, the $6 million project will elevate the Dumas airport’s status.
“When we put a group together from the headquarters, we’ll fly out on the corporate plane (to the McKee refinery),” Valero spokesman Bill Day says. “This runway expansion will give us more flexibility to do that and could really increase the number of visits.”
The airport also provides a vital link to the land, with a pair of crop dusters serving corn, cotton and grain farms from March to the first fall freeze.
KEEPING TABS ON CATTLE, CHEESE
The same agricultural link animates Dalhart Municipal Airport, Texas’ northernmost aviation center about 40 miles northwest of Dumas.
While corporate aircraft from Colorado visit the JBS Swift meatpacking plant north of Dumas, officials from Minneapolis-based Cargill Inc. fly to Dalhart to monitor cattle feedlots.
Two agricultural spray companies fly from Dalhart, which is home to three dozen planes, and the rise of regional dairy farms parallels a $190 million investment by California-based Hilmar Cheese. With its 2007 opening, Hilmar’s Dalhart plant began churning out more than 2 million pounds of cheese weekly.
During the plant’s development, “we had planes that brought employees in on Monday and took them home on Friday,” says Dalhart City Manager Greg Duggan, who has overseen $13 million worth of airport improvements in the past several years. “We get quite a bit of jet traffic and cross-country traffic that stops here. We’re almost exactly in the center of the United States – and for fueling, that works out good.”
In recent years, landowners from as far as Florida, Arizona and Maryland have avoided capital gains tax liability by accumulating hundreds of thousands of Panhandle ranch acres, Duggan adds. They, too, frequent Dalhart Municipal Airport.
COMMERCIAL AIRPORTS, RAILWAYS
As for commercial airline service, airports in Amarillo, Lubbock and Midland offer dozens of flights daily with direct service to such hubs as Dallas, Denver, Houston and Las Vegas for 1.5 million outbound passengers a year.
Rounding out off-road assets in The High Ground, Permian Basin Railways completed a $4 million track upgrade from Lubbock to Levelland in 2008 to allow freight shipments to a new ethanol plant in Levelland. Permian Basin owns the wedge-shaped, 107-mile West Texas & Lubbock Railway that fans out from Lubbock to New Mexico on upper and lower legs. It also operates the 104-mile Texas-New Mexico Railroad from Monahans west of Odessa to Lovington, N.M.
The short-line railroads connect to Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway and Union Pacific Railroad, giving them access and the potential in today’s energy boom to double their business regionally by 2010, says Ed Ellis, president of parent company Iowa Pacific Holdings.
Story by Gary Perilloux
Photo by Jesse Knish
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