OH Court Says Internet Search to Find Mineral Owners Not Required
How much “due diligence” must a landowner engage in when it comes to locating a long lost mineral rights owner in Ohio? According to Ohio’s Dormant Mineral Act (ODMA), the landowner who wants to reclaim mineral rights that were severed must (a) send a certified letter to the last known address of the rights owner, and (b) if that doesn’t work, publish a notice in local newspapers to try and find the long lost rights owner. After that, the landowner can reclaim the mineral rights (an oversimplification, but you get the idea).
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The actions of one man seeking access to confidential risk assessments and plans for the Mariner East pipelines in the Philadelphia area will, if successful, put information into the public domain that terrorists can potentially use. Note we don’t believe it is the intent of this man to grant access to sensitive information to terrorists. But that is the consequence, the outcome, the result of his actions–if a court now reviewing the case grants his request.
Columbia Gas of Massachusetts (NiSource) continues to recover (physically and reputationally) from a series of explosions last September in its local delivery pipelines north of Boston (see 
The same U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals judges who quoted from Dr. Seuss’ book “The Lorax” in a previous decision against Dominion Energy’s Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP) have, once again, delivered another blow to ACP. In a very poor decision issued on Friday, the clown judges overturned reissued permits from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) for the project, claiming the permits don’t do enough to protect bumble bees and bats.
A landowner in Pike County, PA called King Arthur Estates LP, challenged Kinder Morgan’s Tennessee Gas Pipeline (TGP) over the amount of money they should receive to have a pipeline cross its land–and has won the right to use PA’s more generous laws on compensation rather than the federal government’s more stingy laws on “just” compensation. The decision sets a precedent for all PA landowners.
Mainstream media, via a single Associated Press story, is reporting a decision by Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court yesterday is largely a “win” for the PA Dept. of Environmental Protection with respect to Chapter 78a regulations. The AP story de-emphasizes what we consider the larger story–that the drilling industry already won most of the case last year (see 
In February, EQT filed lawsuits in both Pennsylvania and federal courts against two former employees it had fired, claiming the employees, before they were fired, had systematically copied confidential information from company computers and took it with them when they left (see 
A radical anti-fossil fuel group (rich snobs) from Cooperstown, NY, in Otsego County (calling themselves Otsego 2000), sued the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) in federal court a year ago to try and stop a project to build a couple of compressor stations in upstate New York, using the argument global warming wasn’t factored into the decision-making process (see 
In May 2016, a landowner in Wayne County, PA filed a lawsuit against the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC) asking a judge to declare that the DRBC does not have jurisdiction to prevent construction of a natural gas well (see 
Last July a group of 100+ southwestern Pennsylvania landowners sued EQT for failure to pay them rental fees for storing natural gas under their properties (see 
In March 2016, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) approved Tennessee Gas Pipeline’s (TGP) Connecticut Expansion project (see 
In another MDN exclusive, last Friday LOLA Energy filed a lawsuit in Greene County, PA against EQT for allegedly drilling shale wells under property EQT formerly leased, property for which the leases had lapsed and were subsequently scooped up by LOLA Energy (see 
It seems the door *does* swing both ways when it comes to Pennsylvania municipalities and the Act 13 lawsuit decision that allows municipalities to have a say in zoning in, or zoning out, shale drilling. In 2013 seven selfish PA towns won the right, from the PA Supreme Court, to impose their own zoning rules on oil and gas drilling (see