This is nice:
Natural gas producers in West Virginia no longer can drill on one person’s property to reach gas reserves under adjoining or neighboring tracts, the state Supreme Court said Wednesday in a much-anticipated ruling that gives additional leverage to residents struggling with the effects from the booming industry.
In a 5-0 ruling, the justices upheld a lower court ruling and jury verdict against EQT Corp., siding with two Doddridge County residents who had sued the state’s second-largest gas company.
Justice John Hutchison wrote that gas and other mineral companies must obtain permission from surface owners to use their land to reach reserves under other properties.
“The court will not imply a right to use a surface estate to conduct drilling or mining operations under neighboring lands,” Hutchison wrote. “The right must be expressly obtained, addressed, or reserved in the parties’ deeds, leases, or other writings.”
In the case, two people who live on a 300-acre farm in Doddridge County said EQT came onto their land to extract gas from underneath adjacent properties. The two people, Beth Crowder and David Wentz, warned EQT that the company would be trespassing. EQT entered the property anyway. Crowder and Wentz sued, and a local circuit judge ruled in their favor, and a jury two years ago awarded them nearly $200,000 in damages.
It’s insane that a company would be so brazen as to even take this to court, but, you know, West Virginia.
Doug R
No more milkshake drinking in West Virginia, at least.
Aleta
Can’t believe this isn’t the law already. I think even in Texas, or at least in some parts, they have to get express permission from the lease holder or landowner.
ThresherK
Doesn’t Stand Your Ground apply here?
(Not sure if I’m being sarcastic.)
mrmoshpotato
@Doug R: No more drinking it up!
Ladyraxterinok
What’s going on with the Catholic diocese in Wheeling WV (?)? Bishop using $300,000+ of church money for self, sexually molesting young priests? Sounds like big mess.
trollhattan
@Doug R:
Damn, beat me to it by a country mile.
Good news in any case.
Omnes Omnibus
@Doug R: Milkshakes are for throwing these days anyway.
Ladyraxterinok
@Ladyraxterinok: And WV church has millions of $$ in oil in TX that it was willed by immensely wealthy heiress 100 or so years ago.
Some wild stories there!
Barbara
Through various family holdings I have learned quite a bit about things like implied rights of access and constructive easements, but if the extraction company was trying to use a given plot only because it was the most convenient way in, it is just unthinkable that they could proceed over the owner’s objections.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
What the fuck? These businesses think they can just go onto somebody’s land and begin drilling without asking and for free? Who are these people? What are they on?
Kdaug
@Aleta: Yup. Not only that, you can shoot ’em for tresspassing.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Ladyraxterinok:
Tokyokie
@Aleta: In Texas, the owner of mineral rights for the surface area can extract the gas underneath. A few years ago, gas companies were buying up mineral rights of homeowners around Fort Worth because when the areas were developed, nobody thought the mineral rights to a quarter-acre lot were worth anything. Producers would have to buy up most of a neighborhood before drilling, telling the holdouts that they would drill around their property. Because shale formations don’t heed property lines, drilling around a lot here and there was impractical, but it wasn’t economically feasible for a homeowner to prove that the producer had stolen his or her minerals.
But drilling around a 300-acre plot? In Texas, the producer would have to acquire the mineral rights, because that’s way too much land to claim it was drained of natural gas accidentally. Texas law generally protects the interests of the wealthy over those of the poor, but Texas protects property rights above all else.
Kdaug
To clarify: the companies are buying rights to tiny neighboring plots, then horizontal drilling into your land, stealing your gas. They’ll buy a half-acre to set up their pad, and snake their lines into your thousand acres.
Kdaug
@Tokyokie: Exactly.
Jay
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2:25 PM · Jun 5, 2019 · Twitter for iPhone
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Jay
BTDubs,
To go with thick cut, naturally smoked bacon and scrabled eggs, SWMBO, made what we are now calling “Mexican Perogi’s”.
Basically cream cheese mashed potatoe, sharp chedder, quesadillas.
Quite amazing, quick and simple, and would work with all your favorite perogi fillings.
rikyrah
Good ruling
Lumpy
A fine of “almost $200,00” is lunch money for an energy company. It’s considered part of the cost of doing business. That’s a slap on the wrist.
Obviously it’s good that these private citizens prevailed, but that’s a weak penalty.
Aleta
(T warnings for boring, tedious and for Texas)
@Kdaug: @Tokyokie: Here’s a different example of Texas land rights I’m a little familiar with, that’s not uncommon. (Prob. some mistakes in this too.)
In (say) 1911, leases to drill wells on the surface of (say) 20- or 40-acre plots are sold in shares to (say) 10 people for each plot. A few wells are sunk and money from their production is paid out to the leaseholders year after year. (By now probably the wells barely produce, or their operation has been halted off and on.) The leaseholders never had ownership of the plot or of the mineral rights below; they just received a portion of any production from any wells on their plot. BUT to this day they still control the right to drill on their plot.
Ownership of the land might change hands as bigger companies buy up plots, but the leaseholders for each 20-acre plot still own the surface rights. Over 100 years, each share has been divided even more, among heirs, etc.
In 2019 it’s not economical for a company to search for oil or gas by sinking trial wells here and there; instead they hire a geologist or someone to locate a likely area to put pipe under and across (at a depth) to take test samples. They need to begin by drilling down in the adjoining areas before they go horizontally into the area they’re interested in sampling.
But back in 1911, that bunch of people back east or somewhere each bought a few shares of the lease to the drilling rights on that plot of adjoining land, and on that one and that one. So by law, no matter who owns a plot or its mineral rights, the agent for the drilling company has to track down every one of the current heirs or share owners from the original sale of leased surface drilling rights to each 20-acre plot. To get legal written permission to drill down. If even one share owner on a plot won’t sign, there’s no right to drill there. If everyone signs, and if oil or gas is found and extracted, then each person receives some money.
Alex
@Tokyokie: Eastern states usually tie mineral rights to surface ownership. But West Virginia isn’t unusual in allowing drilling on your neighbors’ land to suck the oil/gas out from under your land. Michigan allows it, for instance. It’s a major way landsmen convince landowners to contract with drillers— if you don’t beat your neighbors to it you get nothing.
J R in WV
The worst land ownership mineral rights scandal in WV is still in business and still infuriates me,
because even though the Supreme Court (of WV) made a final order, someone wanted it reopened (which is not legal) and overturned.
Here is the scoop. A group of mostly low income farm owners receiving royalties for gas and oil produced from their land discovered that the production companies were taking the production costs off the top before computing the royalties due the property owners. [For the record, although we own a couple of hundred acres of unimproved forested hillside, we own NO mineral rights whatsoever!]
This method of computing royalties meant that the relatively poor farmers were paying the costs to operate these gas and oil production companies directly out of their share of the money being made from their oil and gas, rather than the production companies share of that money.
This was in direct opposition to the royalty computation method spelled out in their leases and contracts with these production companies. In other words, the big Oil and Gas Production companies were stealing the total cost of running their expensive to operate outfits from the landowner farmers. In plain daylight, once an accountant got to view the financial records.
So a group of landowners formed a mineral rights owners association and hired a property rights lawyer and took the oil and gas producers to court. After years of litigation and much denial and obfuscation by the big O&G companies, the landowners and farmers won. They also won in the state Supreme Court, and received a large cash settlement from the O&G industry.
Now much later on, all this settled law is being raised again, among the dust from the majority of the Supreme Court having to resign in disgrace, be prosecuted after resignation, or be impeached (there’s that word again!) by the legislature and then be prosecuted. Ironically, most of the impeachments were for petty cash theft type crimes like misuse of a state credit card for personal use or using a state car to go visit family out of state, rather than being owned body and soul by the big mineral interests who operate West Virginia as a Third World Colony like The Congo.
Someone (I don’t know who myself) wants very much for farmers to pay the costs of running expensive O&G resource extraction operations, rather than paying for that out of their profits. Imagine that? They will do anything to steal money from the little guys. They also want to make it illegal for a bunch of farmers to combine to bring an expensive suit against the rich mineral extraction businesses. These people have no ethics, no morality past if these money out there, IT IS MINE! This is Mr Trump’s morality also. Of course.
Aleta
@Alex: In Maine a seller sometimes specifies they are retaining the mineral rights when they sell a piece of land. It’s done to either prevent destructive graveling (say on an esker), or to make sure the 1st owner would also profit if the gravel is ever sold down the line. (Doesn’t apply if the owner digs a little pit for their own use.) As you say, the mineral rights are the owner’s otherwise.
Aleta
@J R in WV: wow. unbelievable.
Adam Geffen
@Alex:
Michigan has a combination Costs-Only/Risk-Penalty compulsory pooling law. (Mich. Comp. Laws Ann. § 324.61513).
This article explains how compulsory pooling functions, it also have nifty diagrams to help illustrate how the property right work out:
“Compulsory pooling, also known as forced, statutory or mandatory pooling, forces landowners—who do not wish the mineral resources underneath their land to be extracted—to become part of a drilling unit. Although this process does not allow extraction companies surface access to the non-consenting landowner’s property, it does allow drilling to occur underneath their land, while compensating the owner for the extracted resource.”
http://www.ncsl.org/research/energy/compulsory-pooling-laws-protecting-the-conflicting-rights-of-neighboring-landowners.aspx