Worth noting that no farmer will ever have solar panels or wind turbines on his land that he or she does not want, and negotiate good compensation for.
The complaints we hear are not from farmers, who generally support property rights and understand the benefits that come from clean energy. It’s neighboring NIMBYs who, too often, are conditioned by right wing media to associate Clean energy with a Barack Obama, AOC, globalist elite cabals, pedophile pizza parlors, the secret Lizard People, and other horribles.
The record U.S. oil and gas boom may lie on a bedrock of aggressive sales and legal “compulsion,” a new study has found.
Many Ohio landowners who ended up with fracked wells on their properties were forced by state law to accept them, according to findings published Monday in Nature Energy.
Others gave in only after repeated and aggressive sales attempts, researchers at New York’s Binghamton University found.
The study highlights an underdiscussed topic in the public debate surrounding fracking, a practice which has drawn renewed scrutiny amid the dueling Vice President Harris and former President Trump presidential campaigns in Pennsylvania.
That debate often hinges on “big-picture consequences for the climate and the economy,” lead author Benjamin Farrer said in a statement.
But Farrer emphasized that this leaves out a key part of the story — the experience of private landowners whose properties oil and gas companies must access if the vast majority of U.S. oil and gas production is to go forward.
Fracking uses explosives and a highly pressurized blend of water, sand and caustic chemicals to force open layers of rock deep underground to extract oil and gas — a suite of technologies that has enabled U.S. oil and gas production to reach record levels under President Biden. In 2023, fracking accounted for about two-third of U.S. oil production and more than three-quarters of U.S. gas.
Fracking is different from traditional oil and gas development in a few key ways. Its combination of high pressure and proprietary blends of caustic chemicals raises the risk of localized pollution to land and water, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. And because it relies on horizontal drilling through broad swaths of geological strata — as opposed to vertical wells into traditional reservoirs — it tends to require far more wells spread across a far larger area.
The work of gaining access to properties for that drilling falls to one of the most important, and least well-known, jobs in the oil patch: the “landman,” whose role is to convince landowners to sign leases for oil and gas extraction.
The structure of these deals — and how the landmen secure them — is often shrouded in secrecy.
But the Binghamton team got access to detailed records of landmen’s dealings with 31 landowners who companies ultimately sought to force to lease their land. They found a distinct reluctance on the companies’ part to take no for an answer.
“Overall, we find widespread use of personalized tactics like phone calls and visits, as well as evidence that these tactics are used persistently,” the researchers wrote in Nature Energy.
Landmen, they found, spent many months making repeated attempts to contact reluctant landowners. In one instance, an Ohio man faced repeated visits from a drilling company representative while in the hospital for cancer treatment.
And when persuasion fails, the researchers wrote, “we also find that many negotiations end in compulsion rather than in consent.”
In many states, when the hard sell doesn’t work, oil and gas drilling companies can seek to get the state to force landowners to accept wells they don’t want.
This practice is called “compulsory unitization” or “pooling,” and it provides landmen with a powerful trump card against wavering landowners.
To extract natural gas through hydraulic fracturing, energy companies often need to obtain consent from many different private landowners, whose properties lie atop the gas reservoir. Negotiations with these landowners have important economic, environmental and social implications. In this paper we present a dataset on negotiations in Ohio and use these data to investigate how landowners may be advantaged or disadvantaged in these lease negotiations. We find that they are disadvantaged in two ways. First, because energy companies can use persistent and personal strategies to overcome landowner reluctance. Second, because of the institutional context: specifically the widespread use of compulsory unitization. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for equity in energy policy and by drawing out the other potential uses of these data.