This should surprise absolutely no one:
After Scott Ely and his father talked with salesmen from an energy company about signing the lease allowing gas drilling on their land in northeastern Pennsylvania, he said he felt certain it required the company to leave the property as good as new.
So Mr. Ely said he was surprised several years later when the drilling company, Cabot Oil and Gas, informed them that rather than draining and hauling away the toxic drilling sludge stored in large waste ponds on the property, it would leave the waste, cover it with dirt and seed the area with grass. He knew that waste pond liners can leak, seeping contaminated waste.
“I guess our terms should have been clearer” about requiring the company to remove the waste pits after drilling, said Mr. Ely, of Dimock, Pa., who sued Cabot after his drinking water from a separate property was contaminated. “We learned that the hard way.”
***In Pennsylvania, Colorado and West Virginia, some landowners have had to spend hundreds of dollars a month to buy bottled water or maintain large tanks, known as water buffaloes, for drinking water in their front yards. They said they learned only after the fact that the leases did not require gas companies to pay for replacement drinking water if their wells were contaminated, and despite state regulations, not all costs were covered.
Thousands of landowners in Virginia, Pennsylvania and Texas have joined class action lawsuits claiming that they were paid less than they expected because gas companies deducted costs like hauling chemicals to the well site or transporting the gas to market.
Some industry officials say the criticism of their business practices is misguided. Asked about the waste pits on Mr. Ely’s land in Pennsylvania, for example, George Stark, a Cabot spokesman, said the company’s cleanup measures met or exceeded state requirements. And the door-to-door salesmen, commonly known as landmen, who pitch the leases on behalf of the drilling companies also dismiss similar complaints from landowners, and say they do not mislead anyone.
I just love that response- “We meet or exceed state requirements.” Given what Corbett is doing to regulations in PA (gutting them in some cases, simply waiving them in others, and then putting energy executives in charge of environmental permitting), in a couple of months drillers in PA will exceed state requirements if they hold you down and shoot the waste water down your throat like the UC Davis cops and pepper spray.
This is particularly vexing that this is happening to folks in WV and the rest of Appalachia. For christ sakes, how many centuries of predatory companies and resource extraction do we have to live through before people get a fucking clue? Stop signing your rights away for a few dollars because a gas and oil conglomerate in Kansas doesn’t give a shit what you use for drinking water for the next 40 years anymore than Massey energy gives a shit if your kids are swimming in coal sludge. Just makes me want to scream.
The Bearded Blogger
If you see a rich white guy in a suit, run like hell, don’t TRUST him!
Comrade Dread
If you see a rich white guy in a suit,
run like hellgo fetch the shotgun and rock salt, don’t TRUST him!Mudge
A friend of mine has worked with oil, gas and coal companies for most of his career. He says the companies involved in the Marcellus shale natural gas business are the slimiest bunch he has ever seen.
MikeBoyScout
I think you may be mistaken John.
– John D. Rockefeller was known for his fair dealing and transparent contracts.
– Nobody ever went wrong trusting British Petroleum.
– The CEO of Halliburton Company became one of the greatest Vice Presidents evah!
– George W. Bush, teh Decider, got his start acquiring oil & gas leases.
One can never go wrong trusting an oil & gas man bearing gifts.
Sophist
Maybe they wouldn’t be so willing to sign that piece of paper if they weren’t all fucking broke. You can’t eat rights.
kindness
Yea, and stop voting for Republicans. That one may take longer for them to figure out though. I don’t know why. Must be somethin’ in the water or somethin’.
@Comrade Dread: Buck shot is better.
Zifnab
But I’m poor now, John. You want me to turn down a giant bag of up-front free money because of consequences 20 years down the road? Nuts to that! This is America. We take things one grossly distorted fiscal quarter at a time. Planning ahead is for damn dirty hippies.
Sasha
And somehow, it’s Obama’s fault.
Jeff Boatright
When you spend all of your time, and I don’t mean your time while sitting on the can or staring at the boob tube, but ALL of your time worrying about how you’ll pay for food, clothing, and medicine for your kids, it is very, very easy to say “yes” when ANY amount of money is dangled in front of you.
Crashman
@Zifnab: As Elvis would say, this pleases me greatly.
RobertB
Evidently one more, at least.
My in-laws live in Morgantown, and every other billboard and TV ad that I see there is telling me how great the energy companies are. So you know they’re fscking you in some way, shape, or form.
scav
What kind of low-down socia1ist kenyan freeloaders expect water for FREE to come out of the ground? ! Bottled water consumption increases the GDP and creates jobs!
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
“It won’t happen to me.” It’s not that they are consciously thinking that, it’s just that the opposite never crosses their minds, whether its drilling, medical care, losing their job.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@RobertB: The commercials here in the DFW area are just as bad, and they have Tommy Lee Jones to boot.
Chris
One does not simply walk into Mordor! One invites a gas driller in, and one’s land becomes Mordor.
Calouste
@Zifnab:
Who do you think came up with Five-Year Plans?
Rome Again
All of them. They will STILL never get it.
khead
Rockefeller ran against strip mining in ’72 and lost. He learned his lesson.
Odie Hugh Manatee
While I sympathize with the landowners and agree that they are getting screwed over, I have to ask myself how many of those landowners are pro-Republican, pro-business and anti-anything DFH (such as business/environmental/land regulation) types. I’ll bet that more than a few of them are, and I bet they will still be after their horrible experiences.
I’m tired of hearing stupid people complain that they got screwed by the same people that told them to not trust anyone but them. Oh, and to vote for them too. I wish they would draw the simple conclusion that they are being screwed over by the very people who say “Trust me!”, especially after being screwed over and sold out repeatedly.
Instead, once again, they will vote for the R in the next election and afterward, as usual, scream and howl about how the Democrats are screwing them over.
Cluttered Mind
@Odie Hugh Manatee: But the Republican candidate is the one they’d rather have a beer with!
The Moar You Know
Not to be a dick, but anyone who is signing property over to an energy company cannot possibly think that they’re going to get it back in any sort of environmentally usable condition.
Deepwater Horizon ring a bell with anyone? Exxon Valdez? Love Canal? You can’t tell me these Ely folks were literally living under a rock for the last 40 years.
Smells like an effort by the landowners to deflect lawsuits more than anything else.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Odie Hugh Manatee: And, if us liberals sigh about all of this, we’re condescending.
Rome Again
@Chris:
Scary when you consider it that way. The entire world will one day look like Mordor.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Cluttered Mind:
Me too, but only to break the full bottle of beer over their head.
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
Yup. Problem is that it’s not condescension, it’s exasperation. Exasperation at seeing shit happen the way you thought or said it would, yet nobody wants to listen because it’s inconvenient. That it might cost something that would come out of any potential profit, reducing that profit. So shit goes wrong and we stand back, say “I told you so!”, and get shit in return.
As if we’re the ones who wronged them.
Makewi
I guess it helps you sleep better at night to just assign this sort of behavior to one particular political party. You don’t so much as have an ideology in that as you are constant members of some sort of sick cheer camp.
Benjamin Franklin
@The Moar You Know:
Aquifers do not respect property boundaries.
Rome Again
@The Moar You Know:
With Jesus you shall never thirst!
Cluttered Mind
@Odie Hugh Manatee: Oh my, look at the horrible violence inherent in the left! Where’s my fainting couch?
Being serious for a moment though, I think by now it’s been thoroughly proven that being right doesn’t give you any political points, and being wrong doesn’t take any away. It’s all about telling low information voters what they want to hear.
Nylund
What I don’t understand is how you have all these people who buy into the whole “gov’t regulations are killing American businesses” crap who then get their lives destroyed and scream, “why does the government let companies do this? Aren’t they supposed to protect us?!”
It’s like me and my pets. They’ll do annoying things when they want my attention, and it works. I give them attention! My wife hates me reinforcing their bad behavior. As she says, “you get the behavior that you reward.”
Same goes for politicians, corporations, and regulations. Vote for someone who wants to gut the government, and guess what? The government won’t help you. You get the politicians you reward.
Benjamin Franklin
@Makewi:
Only sociopaths sleep like babies because conscience is ‘no problem’
I’m sorry, but corruption is not limited to one Party. however, this particular situation is right up the ‘free marketer’s’ alley. It’s their stock in trade; their avocation; their hobby….Ask Cheney how he sleeps at nght.
The Moar You Know
@Benjamin Franklin: Don’t I know it. My grandfather had a nice piece of property in Alabama. With a well. It was awesome water, but then it got contaminated by all the PCBs that the local manufacturers dumped, and within a few years it got so bad that not only could you not drink it, but he couldn’t even use it on the lawn anymore.
@Rome Again: Can you send Jesus down to my grandpa’s house? He’s dead these days, but it would be nice to have non-lethal water coming out of the ground.
carpeduum
keep yer big gubmit hands offof mah land rights.
John Cole
@Makewi:
WTF are you talking about? No one even has mentioned Republican v. Democrat in this thread, nor in the main post.
Cluttered Mind
@The Moar You Know: Maybe if it had what plants crave, electrolytes!
Benjamin Franklin
Presumptive guilt…
SteveinSC
“America Needs Energy From All Sources!” Says Ms. Clack, Clack, Clack on MSNBC. Fracking is an Environmentally safe way to solve America’s energy dependence. “Clean Coal.” Eight percent of Japan under a Cesium 137 blanket, PCB’s in your well. Now that’s what I call Energy Independence.
Makewi
@John Cole:
I agree with your post, this is predatory behavior on the part of the company and should be punished. You’re wrong that your commenters haven’t turned this into a left vs right issue. That’s where my comment was directed.
Zifnab
@Nylund:
Kinda like that time marijuana legalization advocates came around behind Obama for his defense of state medical marijuana laws, and then he just kinda shrugged and let the DEA have its way? :-p
El Cid
Well, as long as we make sure that no one assumes that this sort of outcome is the result of malice instead of incompetence.
Jack the Second
It’s already the theme of half the comments, but anyway this quote from the article:
hits the nail on the head.
If your choice is “lose the farm” or “lease it to Big Oil”, well, it’s not like Big Oil isn’t going to be drilling there next year after the bank auction.
bemused
Claiming they don’t mislead landowners (& the public) is just lying by omission.
Villago Delenda Est
@Benjamin Franklin:
I believe George W. Bush said he slept like a baby after he ordered the utterly illegal and immoral invasion of Iraq.
Gex
This is the real benefit for the haves of the growing inequality. The more desperate people get to make a living, the better terms they get for taking everything valuable and leaving the rest of us with toxic waste/toxic investments/toxic food etc.
Greyjoy
Well, you know, if all these oil and energy companies didn’t have to spend so much money lobbying to fight regulations, they WOULD clean up the messes they made and make everything perfect again. Because energy companies are, deep down, really nice people and only acting in their own defense. They would never stick you with the mess if only you voted for the people who would get rid of all those nasty rules and gave them more money.
Mino
I get the impression that we’re in the middle of a plutocratic feeding frenzy. And we may have devolved too far to stop it.
DarkSyde
Oh, consider that linked and inked.
BD of MN
perhaps when the fracking starts messing with the beer supply, people will start to notice…
“Ommegang – Fracking may force us to leave Cooperstown”
El Cid
@BD of MN: Turn that frown upside down, Ommegang! Just tell America that your beer is Frackalicious!
Gex
@BD of MN: Our chances of dealing with these frakking companies is if other industries that will be negatively impacted put up a fight. Lord knows citizens aren’t people.
Lev
No kidding: I wish more states followed 2006-vintage Sarah Palin’s lead on resource extraction. Socialize the benefits!
Roger Moore
How many centuries of predatory lending and usury do we have to live through before people get a fucking clue? The big thing that’s going on here is that there’s a vast disparity in knowledge and experience between the big companies and the people they deal with. Most people who sign a gas drilling lease do it only once in their life, and most people only get a mortgage a few times, while their counterparties are arranging these things every single day. The hucksters who sell these things know how to allay people’s fears while fucking them over seven ways from Sunday. The only prayer the poor suckers have is to find a lawyer who’s as experience as the big companies have and hope they can afford to pay him what he’s asking to make the deal for them. That’s what happens when you treat the contents of a contract as more important than human life and dignity.
JR
I live in an old oil patch in Southwest W. Va., 1910-1920, and used to have free wellhead gas on our farm. They plugged all the wells on occupied farms, to eliminate all the free gas those folks (like me) was using.
Then they drilled new gas wells on farms that weren’t occupied, hence saving thousands of MCF a year.
While drilling a plain old well not too long ago, they used liquid nitrogen to frack it, and every well in the field made nitrogen instead of natural gas/methane. They shut off utility customers as fast as they could, to keep folks from being asphyxiated in their sleep.
It took several days for them to get the nitrogen wells off-line and all their customers back running combustible methane again. If it had happened at night during the heating season, lots of us would have died in our sleep.
Our well water is OK so far, even though we can feel the blasting at the nearby Hobet mountain removal strip mine, and there have been oil and gas wells on the farm since 1919. We had it tested by the USGS in a program they had to identify bad water wells and attempt to ID a cause.
If it goes bad we have a connection (which I built at my own cost) to the local Public Service District water system, which draws their water from Coal River, downstream of thousands of active and abandoned coal mines and oil and gas wells.
Sweet, right?
The mineral rights on our property were severed from the surface rights around a century ago, and we knew that when we bought the farms. But we didn’t expect that this meant we would live (or die) at the convenience of the extractive corps with a lease on those mineral rights.
Don’t trust anyone with paperwork until you have had a lawyer familiar with the rights covered look at it to be sure your interests are covered, because I can tell you they won’t be addressed in the first draft of paperwork. If they are mentioned at all it will be to tell you your rights are negated by the agreement.
Good luck!
JR
Ruckus
@Roger Moore:
Nicely stated.
Too bad it has to be repeated every 15 minutes
A Ghost To Most
@Chris:
Ding Ding Ding! We have a winner.
Between fracking fouling the ground water, and mountaintop removal fouling the rivers, where then will you turn?
/christopher lee
bystander
Quick buck my ass.
If you’re gonna mention Colorado look up forced pooling, dammit. Some of those so-called choices are NO choice at all.
Rome Again
@The Moar You Know:
Sorry, I don’t have a phone line to “The Man”. It was a fantasy scenario I was referring to, the kind that makes people believe it could never happen to them.
Jesus doesn’t take my calls and I don’t take his.
Rome Again
@A Ghost To Most:
We’ll turn to Dasani, of course!
Buffalo Rude
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
Lots of them are. At least in PA. I know a few that are having a crisis of conscience right now. That being said, lots – more, even – are smart people (righties and lefties, mostly righties) that have been caught completely flat-footed by the boom.
@bemused:
Sometimes also known as smart negotiating. Which is what a landman, like myself, gets paid to do part of the time.
When I knock on a mineral owner’s door to lease his/her/it’s minerals, I’m not there because I want to do something good for them or because I particularly care about their individual situations. I’m paid to negotiate a lease on behalf of an energy company. It’s not my job to look out for the interests and well-being of the land owners and/or mineral owners. That sounds heartless and cruel because it is. Because mineral extraction is a for-profit concern, quite a ruthless one at that. When the land/mineral owners pay my salary, I’ll negotiate from their position.
That being said. . .
I’m not a total asshole. Yeah, there are some shady motherfuckers in my trade who are trying to rob people blind. They’re a small minority, however. And they also have a habit of scamming/robbing other landmen, too. Regardless, the biggest problem, IMHO – from personal and anecdotal accounts, is way too many land/mineral owners easily forget that this is purely a business arrangement. Too quickly, people meet me and know I’m there to “sell them some money” – as we say in the biz – and assume, since I’m essentially giving them phat loot they have to do no real work for, that I’m on their side. Except I’m not on their side.
I remember attending a county-wide Marcellus Shale boom task force meeting in a sparsely populated county in the Laurel Highlands of PA. One gentleman at the meeting was an ardent and vocal supporter of the gas boom. So much so, that I figured he was a company man* masquerading as an out-of-town mineral owner. Turned out that he was a local guy, nice fella, who really believed in his position. He cited every industry-fed trope I’ve ever heard when making his argument both to the task force and to myself when I talked to him at a local watering hole after the meeting. The gist of the conversation went something like this:
Local Guy: I think the gas boom is great for the region. Jobs. Private sector based economic stimulus for the local communities. Lets not rely on the aye-rabs for energy.
Buffalo Rude: Somewhat true. The “jobs” argument is kinda thin. I get paid to eat at local joints and I run up some pretty impressive bar-tabs. As for the Arabs. . . you don’t know how the energy industry operates.
Local Guy: I was talking to my landman from [insert the name of a small energy broker I’ve long since forgotten here] and he says fracking is completely safe. Nothing to worry about.
Buffalo Rude: Really?
Local Guy: Yes. My check cleared
Buffalo Rude: Do you believe everything someone with a specific financial interest that is not yours says with respect to you own financial interests?
Local Guy: Huh? He’s a nice guy. He won’t try to screw me.
Buffalo Rude: [groans]
——
*Never mind the landmen; the company men – guys that are employed directly by energy companies, the rest of us are “at-will” contractors – are the aspiring sociopaths we should be concerned about.
Rome Again
@JR:
Disturbing story. How likely are we to hear of such occurrences as the winter settles in?
Bill Murray
@Buffalo Rude:
you’re there to rob them into wearing thick glasses? and of course “not a total” asshole, still makes you an asshole.
Rome Again
@Buffalo Rude:
So you know that people are being screwed over and yet you continue to work in the field because it pays. Where I come from, we consider that prostitution. And, your telling yourself you’re not the one to be concerned about doesn’t actually let you off the hook, it just sells nice when you look in the mirror and close your eyes at night. Congratulations on your depravity!
bcw
@MikeBoyScout: But BP has such a beautiful green logo.
chattacal
Amen, brother. Been waiting for that clue to be gotten for, oh, 30 years.
A Conservative Teacher
This is a failure to properly address private property rights concerns, and is the kind of situation that happens when private property rights are eroded by a tyrannical government.
Our Founding Fathers talked about the need for clear, strong private property rights, and we need to go back to emphasizing that so that situations like this don’t happen in the future by fighting back against bigger, stronger, more powerful government and communist, socialist, and collectivist impulses.
It is clear that the more left a nation goes, the more it destroys its environment (see Russia, China, etc for evidence), so the solution is to go more to the right- more conservative- where property rights are clearly defined and respected and situations like this won’t result as much.
DKF
@kindness: You beat me to that one, friend. It’ll be the liberals who come to their rescue and they’ll scarcely notice.
Buffalo Rude
@Bill Murray:
Rob them? I leave them with a large check for real money. I’m there to lease their minerals and enter into a legal contract with them. Mineral/land owners feel screwed because they enter into these agreements without knowing much about what is actually contained in them – which are boilerplate leases to begin with – and having no idea what to negotiate for. In fact, if I find myself having to explain every little detail – not disclose, mind you, explain as in teach terms and clauses to them – I tell them to get a lawyer to explain and negotiate because I don’t work for them.
Uh huh. Your point?
Buffalo Rude
@Rome Again:
Lulz?
Um. . . Yeah. By your logic most of the economy would grind to a halt because people would stop showing up to their jobs, for money, because not everyone is getting a fair deal. It’s worth pointing out that there are different levels of getting screwed and only one of them is actually actionable in a court of law – when the energy company violates the letter of the agreement. Everything else is a negotiation. That’s not a cop-out, that’s what it is. Most of the people who are screwed, and they are, are people who negotiated a bad lease because they had no clue what they were doing and probably had a less than helpful landman. They exist, I knows. Just like in every other fucking profession that involves haggling over the terms and conditions of an agreement of some sort.
Where you come from must be an interesting place.
Where did I tell myself I’m not the one to be concerned about? What hook? Eh?
Also, every time you avail yourself the use of any petroleum based products (essentially every moment your alive and afterwards), don’t forget to thanks us Ho’s who helped make it possible. Heh. (We hookers don’t need to be thanked, actually.)
I’m not defending the business. It’s a horrible, brutal, ruthless and greedy business. And that’s what people need to realize. It’s not a public-benefit concern or a charity. It’s a highly industrialized, global, for-profit business. It doesn’t give a shit about your water (except to use it for drilling), your land or anything else. It’s not designed to and it won’t unless it’s negotiated into a lease or it’s told to do so by some type of authority or something. And even then, like the horseshit John Cole highlighted and rightfully pointed-and-laughed at, they met the letter of the regulation and that’s all they are compelled to do. So perhaps maybe the rules need to be tighter or more efficiently enforced.
But what do I know, I’m just whoring around.