Officials OK rule to force fracking on NC landowners

[marions ghost]

http://www.newsobserver.com/2013/08/28/3145187/officials-ok-rule-to-force-fracking.html

Officials OK rule to force fracking on NC landowners

Aug 28, 2013
RALEIGH — North Carolina landowners would be forced to sell the natural gas under their homes and farms – whether they want to or not – under a fracking recommendation approved Wednesday that’s expected to be enacted by the state legislature this fall.

The proposal by a state study group endorses a rarely used 1945 law that’s never been tried here on the kind of scale that would be required for shale gas exploration, or fracking. Thousands of property owners could potentially be affected in the state’s gas-rich midsection in Lee, Moore and Chatham counties.

The recommendation, dealing with one of the most emotional fracking issues, bypasses the N.C. Mining and Energy Commission, which holds regular public hearings on protecting the public and safeguarding the environment, and goes to the legislature.

“We are talking about a for-profit industry taking away personal freedoms with the blessing of the government,” Therese Vick, a community activist with the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League, told the Compulsory Pooling Study Group. “Personal freedoms are seldom on the radar when the gas companies come to town.”

The panel does include four members of the Mining and Energy Commission, some of whom were deeply conflicted.

“I find it abhorrent personally that a simple majority of landowners could dictate what I can do with my land,” said James Womack, chairman of the Mining and Energy Commission and a member of the Lee County Board of Commissioners. But Womack voted for the practice, called forced or compulsory pooling, saying there are compelling reasons to justify it. Forced pooling protects local residents from inadvertently having their gas sucked out without compensation and keeps neighbors from profiting from resources under someone else’s land.

(more at link)

Even PA and WV don't do this...but NC is virgin territory and they are just going to ride roughshod over non-participants.

[atreides1]

1. Got to wonder

How does the Tea Bagger party feel now...the dictatorial powers that they accused the Democrats of wanting to use, now being used by those that they voted for.

[marions ghost]

6. Some buyers remorse

going on in NC right now...confusion and cognitive dissonance.

The area of the piedmont they want to frack is full of productive farms and clean water. I hope some of the landowners are gearing up for a fight. They are going to be exploited.

[dixiegrrrrl]

2. Insurance companies are reportedly refusing to cover homes in fracking areas.

I doubt these affected homeowners know it yet, but insurance coverage is becoming an issue.

and if homes with mortgages cannot get insurance, that is a major problem if fracking is allowed.

[Champion Jack]

4. Not only that, but, mortgage companies won't make loans on properties

With a well or close to a well.
So you can't even sell your property ( I'm sure the gas companies will offer you a lowball price tho)

[Champion Jack]

3. Forced pooling is really fucked up

So much for personal property rights..

[marions ghost]

5. This story from PA ought to shake people up also:

Report: Frackers cheating Pa. landowners and gov't out of billions

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1014578303

--excerpt:

From Pennsylvania to North Dakota, a powerful argument for allowing extensive new drilling has been that royalty payments would enrich local landowners, lifting the economies of heartland and rural America. The boom was also supposed to fill the government’s coffers, since roughly 30 percent of the nation’s drilling takes place on federal land.

Over the last decade, an untold number of leases were signed, and hundreds of thousands of wells have been sunk into new energy deposits across the country. But manipulation of costs and other data by oil companies is keeping billions of dollars in royalties out of the hands of private and government landholders, an investigation by ProPublica has found.

An analysis of lease agreements, government documents and thousands of pages of court records shows that such underpayments are widespread. Thousands of landowners like Feusner are receiving far less than they expected based on the sales value of gas or oil produced on their property. In some cases, they are being paid virtually nothing at all.

In many cases, lawyers and auditors who specialize in production accounting tell ProPublica energy companies are using complex accounting and business arrangements to skim profits off the sale of resources and increase the expenses charged to landowners.

Read more at http://www.philly.com/philly/business/Frackers_.html#QjuyYXEYuy12cobV.99

[marions ghost]

8. North Carolina's shale gas is so insignificant

it isn't even included on this map. And yet the exploiters want to forcibly frack central NC....

[marions ghost]

9. Really good background story re. the push for fracking NC:

http://www.indyweek.com/indyweek/despite-the-dangers-of-fracking-north-carolina-lawmakers-want-to-legalize-it/Content?oid=2454484



Excerpt:

In North Carolina, fracking hasn't occurred because, in part, horizontal drilling is illegal. The state's underground injection program prohibits injecting wastewater or pollutants that could contaminate drinking water into an aquifer. These rules apply to fracking because the flowback—chemicals, salts, sands and other wastewater that is belched with the gas (think of it as acid reflux in a well)—is often reinjected into aquifers deep within the ground.

But that could soon change. With Republicans in charge of the General Assembly, the state's energy focus is shifting from renewables and energy efficiency back to fossil fuels, including offshore drilling and fracking for natural gas.

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North Carolina doesn't regulate large water withdrawals, leaving the state's waterways vulnerable especially during droughts. The 2007 drought drained many of the state's waterways—that summer the bed of Falls Lake was dry—and also depleted shallow groundwater.

In southern Chatham and Lee counties, fracking could harm the Deep River and its watershed. "It's already a dry basin with almost no groundwater," said Pearsall of the Environmental Defense Fund. "And the surface streams don't carry a lot of water. It's hard to say if there is enough water to frack."

About a third of the amount of water that is initially injected into the well returns as flowback, or discharge. It is often dozens of times saltier than the original fluid and contains fracking chemicals. That means it should not be dumped into lakes and rivers or pumped into shallow groundwater aquifers.
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Excess discharge presents another problem for drilling companies: disposing of it. In North Carolina, it is illegal to put those materials back in the ground, although in Texas wells are designated for just that purpose—and they can fail. (See this story about how a faulty disposal well in East Texas polluted a neighborhood's drinking water supply.)

In Pennsylvania, some operators have shipped the discharge to wastewater treatment plants. But these plants can't handle or even detect many of the types of chemicals and salts and, in some cases, naturally occurring radioactivity. In Pittsburgh, radioactive material from discharge passed through a city treatment plant and wound up in the drinking water supply.