Our cattle, our dreams and our
ranching lives are now a thing of the past. My husband and I felt
obligated to sell everything we had worked for over nine years in
Silt, in western Colorado, to escape the impacts of gas drilling.
As one who has lived through the experience, I can say
that the drilling that rapidly expanded around our 200-acre ranch
took away everything that we came to expect of country living.
Traffic increased, and so did the dust; in addition to the well
pads we saw everyday, there were pipelines and roads. Irrigation
ditches were severed, weeds encroached on the disturbed grounds,
fences got cut.
Our land represented our retirement.
Before we put our ranch on the market, my husband and I tried to
determine how much we could afford to lose on our investment, as
studies have shown the obvious: No one wants to live near drilling.
We were among the lucky — we owned our mineral rights. The
man who bought our ranch wanted those rights; he cared nothing for
the land.
It’s good the new owner doesn’t live in the
area fulltime, because gas drilling makes a place unlivable. A
nearby creek, Divide Creek, was literally bubbling with methane
from a leaking casing on a well. Yet a company’s failure to abide
by the laws governing drilling rarely brings a significant fine.
Fines are levied by the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation
Commission, which is dominated by industry representatives.
Until you experience it, you cannot fathom the noise of
these operations, the explosions that rattle your home, the humming
of the generators and the rumble of increased traffic. Sitting on
our porch at night was like watching a scene from hell as the
clouds reflected red from flaring gas.
The painful thing
is that we thought we were protected. When we purchased our ranch
in 1995, we went to the courthouse and read about the leasing of
our mineral rights by the former owner. According to this document,
the lease would expire in 1998, so we figured, since drilling
wasn’t evident in the area at the time, we’d take a chance, and
deemed ourselves safe when that deadline passed.
In 2003,
we received notice that the company wanted to drill several wells
on our ranch, with a schematic of where the wells, roads and
pipelines were to be located. This preliminary work was performed
on a desk in a high-rise building in Denver, with no chance for us
to be involved. There was no mention of compressor stations, waste
pits or roads. To our shock, one of the proposed wells was in the
middle of our best-producing alfalfa field.
When we
protested that the lease had expired, we were informed that our
ranch had been “unitized,” a federal designation that pools large
tracts of land into a “unit” for the convenience of the drilling
company. Unitization essentially changes two significant aspects of
the lease: Any well spacings that have been previously negotiated
are negated (the location and density of the wells is now
controlled by the Bureau of Land Management), and, the lease
becomes, essentially, a lease in perpetuity. No one should be
fooled into thinking that owning the mineral rights will protect
landowners.
Faced with, and finally accepting the
inevitable, and hoping that drilling could be done responsibly, we
were interested in finding alternative places for the wells. We
also worried about accident prevention and mitigation. This last
fear was driven by the calamities, such as leaks of mine waste,
that we had seen our neighbors endure.
We met with
industry representatives to negotiate a surface use agreement. We
were given assurances, specifically regarding the monitoring
equipment in case of a spill or leak, but we were not convinced the
devices would be in place. We had no power and felt it. We dared
not call the landmen on their assurances, which never seemed
believable, because we also knew that all of the cards were in
their hands. By law, if a landowner is deemed to be recalcitrant,
demanding or obstreperous, the drilling company has the right to
post a laughable bond amount and drill on the property without a
surface use agreement. As a landowner, you walk a fine line in
these mock negotiations. You have to approach industry as a
supplicant, not as an equal.
Let landowners elsewhere be
warned: By the time the industry representatives come knocking on
your door, it’s too late.
Rosemary Bilchak is a
contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High
Country News (hcn.org). She and her husband live in
Hotchkiss, Colorado.
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