Marcellus Life: One Greene County Man’s Encounter With a Landman
Leigh Shields refused to allow seismic testing for natural gas on his 88 acres in Spraggs, Greene County. He thought if he said no to the company asking, that would be the end of it.
Marcellus Life is a
PublicSource project that tells the stories of people living and working in
Pennsylvania’s shale gas boom.
By Natasha Khan | PublicSource | Oct. 8, 2014
Leigh Shields refused to allow seismic testing for natural gas
on his 88 acres in Spraggs, Greene County. He thought if he said no to the
company asking, that would be the end of it.
Along with his wife, Lillian, and adult 27-year-old son, Alex,
the family runs Shields Nursery and Shields Demesne Winery, just south of
Waynesburg off Route 218. They grow juicy grapes in their vineyard, which get
crushed and stored in old Kentucky bourbon barrels to create Hungarian-style
wine called Melomel. To pay homage to their nursery business, their wines have
plant names: Bloodroot, Irish Moss, Rosa Rugosa.
They live and run businesses in the heart of Southwestern
Pennsylvania that’s part of the
Marcellus Shale gas boom. But Shields, who opened his nursery in 1982,
said he tries to stay away from the industry.
“See, I'm in longwall
mining country,” he said. “These giant corporations come in and do
these things to you. So, if you've gone through it before, you have to be a
little bit leary about everything that's happening around you. It's better not
to be involved. Money is something; it's not everything.”
 |
| Shields, of Spraggs, Greene County, said he recently caught employees of a seismic testing company on his property after he refused to let them test on his land. |
He’s turned away those who came knocking over the past year
looking to test for gas beneath his land.
Seismic testing is like doing an underground ultrasound to look
for natural gas. The data is used by oil and gas companies to find the best
places to drill.
It involves setting off explosives about 20 to 30 feet
underground to record sound waves, which bounce off rocks and are used to map
where the gas is. Some landowners in shale regions, including Shields, have
concerns that setting off explosives could affect the environment or crack
foundations in houses and infrastructure.
Shields said employees of Cougar Land Services, a Texas-based
company that acquires seismic testing permits for the oil and gas industry,
came to his house three or four times in 2013. He said the company was signing
permits for Houston-based Geokinetics, a company that operates in 29 countries
acquiring seismic data for oil and gas operators, according to its website.
Shields is just one example of the people affected by landmen
in the area. Geokinetics recently contracted with oil and gas operators to
perform seismic surveys across more than 200,000 acres in Greene County,
according to legal documents. They’ve signed up nearly 4,000 property owners
for the project.
Neither Geokinetics nor Cougar Land Services responded to
requests for comment for this story.
“He came to me, a gentleman from Kansas. He had maps. He said
they were going to do seismic testing on my property, almost like ‘We're going
to do this.’ It was almost like a foregone conclusion,” Shields said.
Shields was offered $5 an acre, or $440 total.
“I wouldn't have signed for $1,000 an acre,” he said.
Shields always sent the landman away with a stern “no” to
signing a permit. The man eventually stopped showing up.
‘Full of blinking
lights’
He didn’t think about it again until a year later, in June.
While Shields was out in the nursery with customers, his son called and said
there was a helicopter hovering over their family’s property.
“So I got in my tractor and I went driving up the hill and
there it was, this big orange bag.”
“I opened it up a little bit and it was full of blinking
lights,” he said. He assumed the blinking lights were sensors for seismic
testing.
He dragged the bag out of the woods and hauled it back to his
house. When he returned to the woods, he found a large red X spraypainted on his property and pink ribbons tied
to trees.
“So, I pulled all the ribbons down,” he said. “I had the bush
hogger on my tractor. I bushhogged the thing [the red X] so you couldn't see
it.”
A few days later he caught several men behind his house. They
were digging holes in the ground. He presumed it was to bury explosives for
seismic testing.
He told them to get lost and they eventually left. Later that
day, he encountered a man working for Cougar Land Services.
“Do you have our bag?” the man said.
“'Yeah, I do,” Shields said.
“Well, we want it back,” the man said.
“Well, you’re not getting it back,” Shields said.
Shields decided to keep the bag in defiance of the companies he
saw as trespassing on his property.
Shields’ lawyer received a letter from Geokinetics asking him
to return the bag. Shields refused, saying anything dropped on his property was
his.
Then, in
mid-July, Shields said Brian Siege, a state trooper, knocked on his door.
Shields said
Siege told him that he’d be arrested if he didn’t return the bag.
“I said: ‘Go
ahead, arrest me. I don't care,’” he said, fed up with the whole mess.
He told the
trooper he was surprised to see him there in defense of the company, instead of
arresting the men who trespassed on his land.
Trooper Matt
Jardine, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania State Police, said it’s against the
law to keep someone's property if you know who it belongs to. (Shields knew the
bag belonged to Geokinetics, therefore Siege was within his rights to tell him
to return it.) By law, it’s called a “theft of lost or mislaid property,”
Jardine explained.
Whether a
company can enter a person’s property without warning them, that’s usually a
civil matter, he said. If the property owner can prove the company trespassed,
then it's a possible criminal matter, Jardine said.
Siege ended
up leaving that day, without arresting Shields. He did not return phone calls
from PublicSource.
Fearful that
the police would arrest him, affecting his businesses, Shields gave the bag to
his lawyer, who returned it to Geokinetics. He hasn’t heard from the company
since.
Jardine said
such situations happen frequently in Greene County, with helicopters dropping
equipment on people’s land. Then, the landowner gets angry and calls police.
Who owns the gas?
Shields does not own the oil and gas rights to his land. In
fact, he’s not sure who owns them.
In Pennsylvania, if a seismic testing company has permission
from the person or company who owns the oil and gas rights or a driller leasing
those rights, they have a reasonable right to access the land, according to
Paul Yagelski, a Pittsburgh-based oil and gas attorney at Rothman Gordon.
If the company does not have that permission, landowners don’t
have to allow testing, he said. If they show up, it could mean they’re
trespassing.
After being told about Shields’ story, Yagelski said it’s a
“bad scenario” when a company just shows up on someone’s land without informing
them, even if the company represents the owner of the oil and gas rights.
Even then, if the landowner doesn’t want testing, “the proper
way to do it would be for the seismic testing company to send a letter saying,
‘If you don’t allow this [seismic testing] to happen, we are going to go to
court to force it,’” Yagelski said.
Shields said he never received such a letter from Geokinetics
or any of the companies working for them.
Yagelski suggests that people approached by a seismic testing
company demand proof the company represents the owner of the oil and gas
rights.
A history of problems
Geokinetics has a history of causing problems in Greene County
townships.
“We frequently hear about them trespassing and being
disrespectful,” said Veronica Coptis, a community organizer at the Center for
Coalfield Justice, an environmental advocacy group in Southwestern
Pennsylvania.
Robert Keller, a supervisor in Morris Township, said
Geokinetics was in his township three years ago.
“I dread the thought of them coming back,” Keller said.
Back in 2011, he said there were several instances of
trespassing and significant damage to township roads (seismic testing companies
use trucks to thump the ground, which sends vibrations into the subsurface that
are used to map gas.)
“It was always a struggle to get what was owed to the township
from [road] damage. We were only able to get some of that back,” Keller said.
Geokinetics filed a lawsuit in July against Center Township
after the township passed an ordinance restricting its activities.
The ordinance requires companies like Geokinetics to file for a
permit with the township, pay an application fee and post a bond for damage to township roads. It also requires
that testing with charges be done at least 500 feet from buildings and water
wells.
Geokinetics said the ordinance prevented it from performing
testing in the area, according to court documents.
In affidavits, township officials said Geokinetics threatened
landowners who wouldn’t sign permits, harassed them to enter their land and
entered from other points when they were denied.
Equipment was air-dropped onto property and wires; debris and
other equipment were left behind, causing damage to residents’ farm equipment.
Complaints of trespassing were as recent as July.
“Past experience has shown that seismic testing has not been
easy to deal with as a township,” Supervisor Seann McCollum said in an
affidavit.
The lawsuit was settled in August in federal court in
Pittsburgh. Geokinetics agreed to abide by the township’s ordinance, McCollum
said in a phone interview.
As for Shields, he said he wants these companies to end its trespassing and bullying people.
“It’s got to stop,” he said.
Reach Natasha Khan at
412-315-0261 or nkhan@publicsource.org. Follow her on twitter @khantasha.
Reprinted with permission. View original article here: http://publicsource.org/node/4182
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