PA District Court Rules in Favor of Driller in NEPA Lease Dispute
A decision by the Middle District Court of Pennsylvania is worth noting–for both drillers AND landowners. A landowner in Susquehanna County, PA sold some land already under lease to a new landowner/rights owner. Neither the new landowner nor the previous landowner informed the driller of the change in ownership. The time came to renew the lease and under the terms of the contract the driller sent payment–but didn’t know about the change in ownership–so the driller sent the payment to the previous owner. The new landowner used that faux pas as a legal excuse to sue the driller to break the contract. The new landowner claimed the paperwork filed (not the full lease but an abstract) didn’t contain mention of informing the driller. In other words, the landowner used the “we didn’t know” excuse. The judge disagreed and said, a) the lease itself clearly outlines the responsibilities of the old/new landowners to inform the driller, b) there is a reasonable expectation for the new landowner to perform due diligence in seeking out a copy of the original lease to know that. Therefore the new landowner is still under lease. Here’s an outline of the case, with names…
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In last Thursday’s episode of “As the (Midstream) World Turns” (ATMWT) MDN told you that Williams still wants to marry Energy Transfer Equity (ETE), even though both companies are suing each other over the proposed merger (see 
Last December Pennsylvania’s felony-indicted Attorney General, Kathleen Kane, brought a lawsuit against Chesapeake Energy, Anadarko and Williams accusing them of, among other things, royalty fraud (see 
Last week the Ohio Manufacturers’ Association (OMA), along with several other trade associations, filed a “friend of the court” brief (called an amicus brief, full copy below) in a case pending before the Ohio Seventh District Court of Appeals (in Youngstown). The OMA wants the Court of Appeals to uphold the ruling of a Harrison County trial court in the eminent domain case of Sunoco Pipeline v. Carol A. Teter, Trustee. OMA says eminent domain should be used in rare circumstances, but when no other choices remain, its use is legitimate and necessary. In particular, OMA is supporting Sunoco’s right to use eminent domain for the Mariner East 2 project–a project that will employ a lot of OMA businesses and their employees…
MDN previously reported on the injustice happening in Bulter County where a handful of anti-drilling parents from the Mars School District, backed by money from Philadelphia from Big Green groups Delaware Riverkeeper and Clean Air Council, filed frivolous lawsuit after frivolous lawsuit–denying landowners in Middlesex Township revenue from legally permitted drilling. The actions by these radicalized parents have cost the taxpayers of Middlesex Township over $80,000 in legal fees. So the landowners got together and sued them, to stop this miscarriage of justice (see 
In January 2015 MDN highlighted an ongoing squabble near Cleveland, in Cuyahoga County, OH, between the Ohio Dept. of Natural Resources (ODNR) and the Ohio Oil and Gas Commission (OOGC) (see 
We’ve written plenty about President Obama’s draconian, so-called “Clean Power Plan” (
In March MDN brought you news of an environmental Nazi confab in New York City, headlined by New York Attorney Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and Al Gore (see 
Some great news to share. A landowner in Wayne County, PA–in the Delaware River Basin–has filed a lawsuit against the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC) asking a judge to declare the DRBC does not have jurisdiction to prevent construction of a natural gas well. MDN has chronicled, for years, the lawless actions of the DRBC in seizing power it does not have to block shale drilling in essentially two PA counties where there is measurable quantities of shale gas that could be extracted: Wayne County and Pike County. DRBC’s former director, Carol Collier, is a hardened anti-driller who colluded with Josh Fox in making his infamous propaganda film Gasland. Collier is gone and it was thought her replacement, Steve Tambini would bring some order and sense to the organization (see 
Energy Transfer Equity (ETE) pushed and prodded and poked and cajoled and insisted, and finally with the help of an inside corporate raider, forced Williams to agree to a buyout/merger (see 
This is the tale of landowners who negotiated a lease without consulting a qualified oil and gas attorney, and later regretted the decision. In 2008 the owners of a small hunting and fishing camp in Tioga County, PA negotiated and signed a lease with East Resources, which was later sold to SWEPI (i.e. the shale drilling arm of Shell). The lease, so the landowners thought, guaranteed that 11 wells would be drilled on the 240-acre property, and that a pipeline would be used to flow gas only from those wells. The landowners got a nice signing bonus–$287,000. They also got $164,000 for a pipeline right-of-way. But only one well was ever drilled–and it’s capped. And there is a pipeline–flowing other people’s gas through it. The landowners sued and a district court judge ruled last week that the landowners don’t have a case for their “shattered dreams” as they thought they did. It all comes down to a poorly worded lease and signing a lease without running it by a lawyer first…
A group of radical/leftist environmental groups have just launched their latest “sue and settle” case against the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). For a description of the despicable practice of sue and settle, where our own government colludes with these groups in a faux lawsuit which “forces” an agency to do what it wanted to do but couldn’t otherwise under existing laws, see this MDN story: