Williams Reveals Eminent Domain Strategy for Atlantic Sunrise
One of the interesting breakout sessions MDN editor Jim Willis attended at last week’s Shale Insight event in Pittsburgh was a panel of lawyers discussing recent rulings in the Marcellus/Utica related to eminent domain and royalties. Sitting with the lawyers was a non-lawyer panelist from Williams. Aaron Blair is right-of-way manager for Williams in the northeast. He managed securing easements for the Atlantic Sunrise Pipeline project, Williams’ $3 billion, 198-mile pipeline project running through 10 Pennsylvania counties to connect Marcellus Shale natural gas from northeastern PA with the Williams’ Transco pipeline in southern Lancaster County. The lawyers on the panel peppered Blair with questions about his strategy for securing rights. Blair’s strategy boils down to this: if/when you need to file for eminent domain, do so in federal, NOT Pennsylvania state court (and certainly not with appointed commissions). Blair finds federal judges know the law and stick to the law–and the case law with regard to eminent domain, whether you like it or not, is quite clear when it comes to pipelines. Atlantic Sunrise began with needing leases from about 950 landowners. In the end, just under 50 of them had to be settled with eminent domain proceedings in court. Here’s an overview of what Blair said on the panel…
Read More “Williams Reveals Eminent Domain Strategy for Atlantic Sunrise”
Landowners in Wayne (and Pike) counties in northeastern Pennsylvania are not going to stand by and allow their property rights to be stripped away from them. Two weeks ago the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC), which has had an ongoing, “temporary” ban on fracking within the Delaware River Basin since 2010, voted to begin the process of implementing a permanent ban (see 
Lone Pine Resources, a U.S.-based driller, has a huge amount of Canadian Utica Shale acreage in the province of Quebec. As we reported in 2012, they own 398,850 gross (240,320 net) acres of leases (see 
A group of Catholic nuns in Lancaster County called Adorers of the Blood of Christ have tried several strategies to derail the Williams Atlantic Sunrise Pipeline (ASP) project. One of stunts they have pulled, in league with a radical Big Green group, is to stick a few wooden park benches in the middle of a corn field that they own (leased to a local farmer), and call it a “chapel” (see 
Back in March MDN told you about an Ohio landowner with an old oil and gas lease where a conventional (vertical only) well was drilled–and still producing–suing the energy company, telling the company to either explore the shale layer, or severe the lease rights to shale so the landowner can lease it to someone who will go after the shale (see 
In early September, a Broome County, NY judge ruled that the Town of Fenton (Binghamton area) Planning Board did not take a hard enough look at environmental and traffic issues related to their approval of NG Advantage’s plan to construct a facility in the town to compress and load natural gas onto tractor trailers for delivery to regional customers who desperately need the gas–what is called a “virtual pipeline” (see 
Some big news that both Cabot Oil & Gas and the two families suing them seem to want to keep quiet: they’ve settled out of court. Brief background for those new to MDN and to the “Dimock” story: There were 14 families along the Carter Road area of Dimock Township, PA (Susquehanna County) that reportedly experienced turbidity in their water from methane migrating, supposedly from Cabot’s drilling operations nearby. The state Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) investigated in 2010 and declared Cabot guilty and imposed stiff fines and requirements, including a requirement to install permanent water treatment systems at each home and even an offer to each of the families to pay twice what their property was worth at the time (see 
Two serial, paid protesters, along with a landowner and her daughter have sued Sunoco Logistics and parent company Energy Transfer for breaching their constitutional rights. You may recall our story about the daughter of a Huntingdon County, PA landowner, radicalized by Big Green groups (as evidenced by her association with well known protesters previously arrested), who took to a tree on her mom’s property in March 2016 in order to illegally stop crews working on tree clearing for the Mariner East 2 pipeline (see 
NEXUS Pipeline, a $2 billion, 255-mile interstate pipeline that will run from Ohio through Michigan and eventually to the Dawn Hub in Ontario, Canada, is about ready to begin construction–any time. NEXUS got final approval for the project from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) in August, the first major pipeline to get approved following a newly restored quorum at FERC (see 
Rich, snobbish homeowners in an “upscale” Philadelphia suburb development are asking an appeals court to stop Sunoco Logistics from building the Mariner East 2 pipeline through the edge of their high-priced development because, they claim, the digging is disturbing the dirt (which is what digging does) and disturbing the dirt is causing lead and arsenic to become dislodged. The lead and arsenic are supposedly in the dirt as a result of pesticides used when the land was an apple orchard. The claim is flat out BS–Barbara Streisand. The Andover Homeowners Association in Thornbury Township (Delaware County) is the same group that a few weeks ago acted like five year-olds by intentionally stepping over a painted line put there to protect them from a ME2 construction zone (see 
In August, the D.C. Court of Appeals ruled in a case that may have long-term, very negative consequences for the oil and gas industry related to pipeline development (see 
Last week MDN told you that New York’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, had just ruled that the New York State Attorney General, Eric Schneiderman, has the right to demand documents in a court case that accuses Exxon of hiding internal research that shows burning oil and gas leads to catastrophic, man-made global warming (see 
According to expert analysis by the legal beagles at the Blank Rome law firm, a recent decision by the Superior Court of Pennsylvania disregards established precedent law and has created a new law in PA, possibly “leaving lessees [drillers] in limbo, possibly giving unscrupulous lessors [landowners] a unilateral tool to terminate oil and gas leases, and ultimately harming both lessors and lessees in the process.” In Montgomery v. R. Oil & Gas Enterprises, two (out of three) judges ruled that oil and gas leases could be severed (terminated) both “vertically” and “horizontally” by unilateral actions of the landowner. In this case “vertical” means shale or other rock layers under the ground, and “horizontal” means surface ownership. As with most things legal, this is a complicated case with a lot of history we won’t attempt to recount it chapter and verse. If we can boil it all down, the judges found that a landowner who had purchased a piece of property with an old lease that contained terms for shallow rock layers and deeper rock layers, could, unilaterally, terminate one aspect of that lease (in this case the shallow layer portion of the lease) while keeping the other aspect of the lease intact (the deeper layers, already drilled and producing). The Blank Rome analysis below does a deep dive into the case, frankly ripping the decision to shreds, and postulates the theory that it may lead to cases in which a landowner with a decades-old lease in which the shallow layers are held by production can separate and convey the deeper layers to a family member or family trust, and then terminate the deeper layer lease, re-releasing it to a different driller…
Four years after then-Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane decided to turn an accident into a criminal prosecution against XTO Energy, the final chapter has been written. Anti-drilling Kane attempted to criminalize the accidental spill of a small amount of recycled wastewater by XTO that happened years before she took office (see 