Of course - landowners need to be fairly compensated for the natural gas, oils, and other minerals they own part and parcel of with their purchase of their land as an investment in real estate - we all totally agree.

Also landowners deserve a fair marketplace, free of hoodwinking shenanigans we find very prevalent these days.

For instance, the ruse we find both annoying and insulting is the (perhaps) lucrative sounding leasehold offer that never pays the lessor. There are many flavors of that one; sign now or get passed over; sign here for five or ten years and if we sell the lease to a driller / developer / G & O E & P we'll pay you your signing bonus and when the well is developed a high percentage royalty (in this case it appears many have signed their mineral rights into a purgatory waiting for development); then there's the one similar but with landowner royalty deductions (such as real estate tax increases / severance taxes / production costs / post production costs / market enhancement costs / etc.) some (even perhaps all) of which are assigned to be paid by the landowner lessor thereby consuming a great portion or even all of the landowner's / lessor's return.

What good does it do us to sign into such ? It does no good at all if you ask me.

We as landowners have read about it all on these pages. And we've read about how many have had to go to court to clean up the messes these shenanigans / ruses have delivered. Court is an expensive ($ and time) process. In those situations I'm hoping the legal fees are paid by the offending lessees and not by the landowner lessors and that the landowner lessors are awarded meaningful compensation for going through those processes.

Also, in my opinion, it's no good for 65% of a proposed forced unitization action signed up in a deficient lease always to point their fingers at the dissenting landowners unwilling to be forced into a losing proposition. They need to realize that they might have been the ones that tripped up the process.

Also there needs to be a fair way to settle situations like that - far short of courts and penalizing dissenting landowners.

Also, we need - together - all of us - to be wise and thoughtful - and also to show everyone involved that they have greatly under estimated our wisdom.

Also, exercise extreme care in seeking assistance in these matters.  Good help has always been and still is very hard to find.

Good luck to all of us - it is truly a hostile marketplace as I see it. 

What is law now to me represents a great legalized trespass and is not fair to landowners - any and all landowners - and needs to change -all of course only in my most humble opinion as a layman landowner / prospective lessor.