PA Town Delays Accepting Apex Offer of $1,500/Ac + 16% Royalty
Yesterday, MDN told you about a very small lease deal on offer for North Huntingdon Township in Westmoreland County, PA (see Apex Energy Offers $1,500/Ac + 16% Royalty in Westmoreland Co.). Apex Energy wants to lease 4.5 acres of town land for a signing bonus of $6,760. The deal on the table from Apex is “only good” through June 30. Sign now before this offer expires! Town commissioners were not impressed with the high-pressure sales tactic and voted to table a decision on the offer until after June 30.
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We’re always interested in lease signing bonuses and royalty rates. We don’t see as many references today as we did five and ten years ago. Typically, we learn about lease rates when municipal-owned land is leased, as is the case for a small parcel in North Huntingdon, PA (Westmoreland County). Apex Energy is offering North Huntingdon $1,500 per acre in a signing bonus to lease 4.5 acres of town land for a grand total of $6,760. It ain’t much, but it’s better than a sharp stick in the eye, right?
In a clear case of sour grapes for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit (4th Circus clowns) who tried to block the 303-mile Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) by rendering arbitrary decisions that caused years of delays for the pipeline, the court flipped the bird to MVP one last time in a decision issued Tuesday of this week (June 11). Three judges from the 4th Circus re-inflated a jury award against MVP for an eminent domain “taking” case in the Bent Mountain, Virginia, area back in May (see 
In February, the Ohio Oil & Gas Land Management Commission (OGLMC) met to award contracts to drill under (not on) several Ohio state parks, including 5,700 acres of the 20,000-acre Salt Fork State Park in Guernsey County (see 
Back in the summer of 2020, MDN told you about a lawsuit brought by an Ohio rights owner called TERA, an organization that owns the royalty rights for a number of leases with wells in Belmont County, OH, drilled by different producers, suing the producers for drilling into the Point Pleasant shale layer when the lease only mentions the Utica layer (see 
A group of landowners in Belmont County, OH, filed a lawsuit against Rice Drilling (now EQT Corporation) in July 2021, alleging the company had shorted them on royalty payments by (a) selling the gas extracted to an affiliated (instead of unaffiliated) third party, and (b) deducting post-production costs specifically disallowed under the signed contract. Several landowners who are part of what was originally known as the Smith-Goshen Landowners Group have requested a federal court in Ohio to elevate the lawsuit to class-action status.
A royalty case that took nearly four years and hundreds of filings by both sides was finally decided by an Ohio jury in March (see 
Here’s a strange one we don’t quite understand. Yet. Two weeks ago we brought you the news that a jury in a federal court had decided a group of Utica shale drillers, including Rice Drilling (now EQT), Ascent Resources, XTO, and Gulfport Energy, were not guilty of “unjust enrichment” by drilling into the Point Pleasant shale layer that sits immediately below the Utica (see 
In February, MDN brought readers the news that Tenaska, one of the largest privately operated companies in the U.S., is building a carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) hub spanning tens of thousands of acres in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia (see 
Yesterday, the Ohio Oil & Gas Land Management Commission (OGLMC) met to award contracts to drill under (not on) several Ohio state parks, including the 20,000-acre Salt Fork State Park in Guernsey County. Anti-fossil fuel nutters didn’t disappoint. They showed up and dressed up in burlap bags and silly hats, standing along a wall to protest against the proceeding. Fortunately, the protesters didn’t disrupt or stop the proceeding (they had been threatened with arrest if they did). The big news (for us) is that Encino Energy, which has long coveted the Salt Fork State Park property, did NOT win the contract for it! At some point, Encino pulled its proposal for Salt Fork and instead concentrated on several other parcels. The contract for Salt Fork was awarded to Infinity Natural Resources. We have the complete list of who won which contracts and how much they are paying in signing bonuses and royalties.
Earlier this week, MDN reported on a bill making its way through West Virginia’s legislative sausage-making process (see