Governor Corbett signed a controversial bill into law today, giving drillers the power to combine or “pool” leases for horizontal oil and gas drilling.



The legislation was originally promoted as an effort to bring more transparency to the deductions companies take out of royalty payments. Complaints over those deductions lead to a recent Senate hearing on the issue.



An organization representing Pennsylvania’s mineral owners was angered over language added later on, which…

          An extremely hot issue at the present time involves post-production costs or “deductions” that landowners are seeing subtracted from their gas royalty checks.  Typically, boilerplate Oil and Gas Leases offered to landowners clearly permit the gas company to deduct post-production costs for the cost of producing, gathering, storing, separating, treating, dehydrating, processing, transporting and marketing the oil and gas. 

          In the 2010 Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s…