PA Game Commission Cuts $15.5M in Deals to Lease State Land for Drilling
This is something you don’t see often these days: The Pennsylvania Game Commission is getting $15.5 million of revenue from new Marcellus leases with Chief Oil & Gas and EQT. The bulk of the money will come from a deal with Chief to lease 5,870 acres in Bradford and Sullivan counties. Terms of the lease? Chief is paying $2,500 per acre as a signing bonus and 20.55% in royalties when/if they drill and the gas and oil begin to flow. It just about floored us to see this deal! We though all deals were done until the price of gas goes up again. We’d not heard of any new deals being cut. As for EQT, they are paying the Game Commission $917,000 for the right to drill under a 306-acre parcel in Washington County, PA. Details on the per acre bonus and royalty for the EQT deal below…
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Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane, who has been indicted on numerous felony charges and likely to be forced from office any day now, filed a lawsuit yesterday against Chesapeake Energy in Bradford County Court over the issue of shorting landowners out of royalties. What every story we’ve seen (thus far) misses is this: The lawsuit also names Williams as participating in the scheme to defraud landowners out of royalty payments. So this is not just a Chesapeake story, it’s a Williams story too. Landowner groups are “hailing” the decision, jumping up and down with glee. Let us throw a little cold water on your face. Note to landowners and the groups that represent them: When you (metaphorically) crawl into bed with Kathleen Kane, you’re crawling into bed with a rattlesnake. Sooner or later she’s going to turn on you too. Mark it down. It’s in her nature. With that disclaimer in place, we’ll break down the news for you, and show you a copy of the lawsuit Kane’s office filed yesterday…
A complicated court case just decided by Pennsylvania Superior Court has implications for all land and mineral rights owners in PA. The case is called Wright v. Misty Mountain Farm LLC. This is how we understand it. In 1950 Fred and Jeanetta Buck sold some property in Bradford County, PA to Robert and Marjorie Wright. However, the Bucks kept the oil/gas/mineral rights for themselves, having already leased the mineral rights for the property. The mineral rights lease eventually expired in 1971. At that time, Robert and Marjorie Wright, the surface owners, figured with the expiration of the lease, the mineral rights reverted to them–so they signed a lease to allow oil and gas drilling. In 1988 the Wrights signed over the property and the lease to David and Patricia Wright (we’re assuming son and daughter-in-law). David and Patricia signed new leases on the property in both 2001 and again in 2005. Eventually Jeanetta Buck died and in 2010 while reviewing her estate and its assets, Shirley Matthews, administratrix of the estate, discovered/claimed the mineral rights still belonged to the Bucks. So Matthews conveyed the subsurface mineral rights to Misty Mountain Farm LLC. Patricia Wright argued that the when the original lease made by the Bucks in 1950 expired, ownership of the mineral rights also expired–in 1971. A lower court and then the Superior Court disagreed and ruled that unless there is specific language saying that when a lease expires so too do the mineral rights, then the mineral rights still belong to the original rights owner. Whew. Get all that? Bottom line: Just because a lease expires it doesn’t mean the party who owns the mineral rights loses their claim on those rights…
Pennsylvania landowners Andrew and Sally Dewing signed a 10-year lease for 493 acres of land in Bradford County, PA with Central Appalachian Petroleum in April 2001. The lease was later sold to a consortium including Abarta Oil & Gas Co., Talisman Energy USA and Range Resources. The terms of the lease require rent payments of $5 per acre per year ($2,465) for each year when their property has not be drilled on or under. After not receiving payments on time in 2010, the Dewings served the drillers notice of nonpayment. Eventually the three partners figured out who was supposed to pay and made the payment–but because the payment was late (more than 60 days late), the Dewings claimed the lease was terminated under the original terms of the lease. To make a long story short, Pennsylvania Superior Court ruled last Friday that no, the terms of the lease do not allow the Dewings to get out of the lease because the payment was late…
Yesterday the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection announced an agreement/settlement with three Marcellus drillers operating in the northeastern portion of the state. The three–Chesapeake Energy, XTO Energy and SWEPI (i.e. Shell) were fined a collective $374,481 for methane migration related to their drilling activities at three locations (three different counties) in 2011 and 2012. The bad news is that 13 private water wells between the three incidents were negatively affected, along with several local creeks. The good news is that the problems are all fixed. Methane migration is an eminently fixable condition. Here are the details for each fine, including what happened and where it happened…
A new research study appearing in an online “journal” with very low standards, PLOS ONE, claims that hydraulic fracturing leads to an increase in hospitalization rates in the Marcellus Shale region. The research study, titled “Unconventional Gas and Oil Drilling Is Associated with Increased Hospital Utilization Rates” (full copy embedded below) on the surface appears to contain damning evidence. Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University looked at hospitalization records for three northeastern Pennsylvania counties from 2007-2011–Bradford, Susquehanna and Wayne. Both Bradford and Susquehanna counties have seen a huge amount of shale drilling over that period. Wayne County, on the other hand, has seen no shale drilling because of the intransigence of the Delaware River Basin Commission and their ongoing frack ban. The researchers say that people in Bradford and Susquehanna counties go to the hospital for serious heart conditions at a rate 27% higher than those in Wayne County. Ergo, there is a connection between fracking and health issues. We are fully in favor of rigorous academic research into issues like this one. But a few things bother us about this latest “fracking kills” study…
The mask has been ripped off fractivist liars peddling what they pretend is science–and it’s been ripped off by mainstream media outlets including the Associated Press, USA Today, the International Business Times and (yes) The New York Times. Let us explain. Last week MDN brought you a story about a new research study that was ostensibly authored by Penn State researchers which found, using “non-traditional” methods of research, that wastewater leaking from an above-ground impoundment had migrated up to a mile and a half away and had contaminated three private water wells in PA–five years ago (see 
We’re passing along a bit of gossip–we call it gossip because we haven’t (yet) been able to verify it, but we believe it to be true. A long-time MDN reader wrote to tell us that he services most of the rigs operating in the Appalachian basin (Marcellus/Utica), and that Southwestern either has or is about to idle two rigs owned and operated by Precision Drilling in northeast PA: Rigs #538 and #539 in Bradford and Susquehanna counties. According to our source, the Bradford County rig was idled last week and the Susquehanna County rig will be idled this week. We don’t know if Southwestern has any remaining active rigs in northeastern PA owned by other companies.