Forced Pooling or "Lease Integration"

It's come to my attention recently that West Virginia legislation will be reviewing a "Lease integration" bill this session. It seems to be directed at "non-participating minority mineral owners".

 I'm personally against any type of forced pooling especially in WV, the two types of people they cite as being an issue are lost and unaccounted for heirs and owners who won't participate.  I'm pretty sure there is a WV statute that allows for someone to represent these lost and unaccounted for heirs so those people are out of the equation.  

As for people that do not want to participate, I feel that is up to them.  They bought the minerals they should be able to do what they want with them.

I know during the Marcellus bill in 2011 there was talk of force pooling and I joined a group, West Virginia Royalty Owners Association, they seemed to be pretty actively opposing this.  

Is any one else concerned about this or am I just paranoid?

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Permalink Reply by Clinton44 on January 28, 2013 at 10:23am

Hi Christine,

We are in PA where to my knowledge there is no forced pooling.

Your are correct people should be able to do as they please with there mineral rights.

However, there was a situation in one of the units that we are included in where one landowner absolutley refused to sign a lease, which was their right, only problem then the gas company reconfigured the unit delaying fracing on one of the wells in that unit and cutting some neighbors that were originally in the unit completely out of the drilling unit....

We do not live in the area where the unit is but I am sure the neighbors that were cut out were not very happy... Guess they do not have warm and fuzzy neighborhood cook outs any longer...

So in this case one persons refusal to go along with the drilling had a negative impact on other peoples rights to receive royalties on their gas and thats not fair either...

Also the delay on fracing the sixth well in the unit has delayed quite a large chuck of royalty money to the other neighboring landowners. The well was eventually drilled and fraced this october so the royalties will come...

Just wanted to bring another point of view to your discussion  

Permalink Reply by Christine Davis on January 29, 2013 at 2:55am

In WV we have a statute allowing for co-owners to petition the courts to sell the refusing parties mineral interest. There have been NUMEROUS filing to have that taken care of in WV.  Of course it has it's limitations, obviously if there is only one owner then the petition can't be filed.  However in WV it's rare to find a tract that is owned by a single individual.  

Permalink Reply by Clinton44 on January 29, 2013 at 2:57am

Very interesting approach, how did they make out with their court filings? Have any decisions been rendered by the courts??

Permalink Reply by Christine Davis on January 30, 2013 at 8:05am

It's been used a bunch by both mineral owners and large gas companies with great success.  There is also a statute that allows them to assign a special commissioner in the place of a person that "can't be found" which has also been successful in the state and has been filed by Chesapeake, Antero and numerous other companies.

Permalink Reply by Clinton44 on January 30, 2013 at 8:59am

Ah ok thanks for the interesting information!

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