(Source: Charleston Daily Mail)
By Ry Rivard, Charleston Daily Mail, W.Va.
May 24--The expansion of West Virginia's natural gas industry could open up new
battlefronts in the courtroom over the protection of property rights, health
and the environment.
Some of the legal uncertainty may result from the failure so far of state
lawmakers to settle questions about how to regulate drilling in the Marcellus
shale. The shale contains a massive underground cache of gas that could help
create thousands of jobs and generate billions of dollars.
But there are also new environmental concerns, including whether the
water-intensive method called hydraulic fracturing threatens to suck too much
water from streams. There is similar concern that the chemical serum that
companies use in the same process threatens water supplies.
Joe Lovett, an environmental lawyer who directs the Appalachian Center
for the Economy and the Environment, has been among those leading his side's
charge against mountaintop removal coal mining.
Now he's begun looking at the environmental effects of gas drilling.
State environmental regulators say they are already looking into some of the
issues.
There are also air quality issues.
"People really complain about air emissions from the pads at certain
times," Lovett said.
Lovett also is looking at whether gas companies have too much leeway to
use surface owners' land without compensating them.
"The whole operation, could it be less invasive?" Lovett said.
"Basically, the gas companies just take over your property when they do this."
One issue lawyers hope to press would help steer money toward surface
owners who don't own the mineral rights beneath their land.
These landowners are in danger of being left out of the shale boom.
Currently companies can come on surface owners' property and develop the gas
beneath without paying the surface owners anything in return.
David McMahon of the West Virginia Surface Owners' Rights Organization
wants to change that.
He argues that in the case of mineral rights deeds sold off decades ago,
the landowners never imagined gas companies would use such large well pads to
get gas from the Marcellus shale.
Then, McMahon said, drillers were just using traditional gas wells with a
relatively small footprint.
Now drillers are building pads several acres wide with holes that extend
thousands of feet underground in multiple directions. The company also visits
these wells more often than they do normal wells.
That's more than landowners bargained for, Lovett said.