Lawyers Getting In On Shale Boom, Too

Scott Detrow

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Scott Detrow is a congressional correspondent for NPR. He also co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.

Detrow joined NPR in 2015 to cover the presidential election. He focused on the Republican side of the 2016 race, spending time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, and also reported on the election's technology and data angles.

Detrow worked as a statehouse reporter for member stations WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KQED in San Francisco, California. He has also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

October 31, 2011 | 4:17 PM

The latest group to see a spike in business, due to Pennsylvania’s natural gas boom: lawyers.
The Wall Street Journal has more:

Historically, litigation over mineral rights often follows a boom in oil and gas production; such cases continue to crop up in states like Texas and Louisiana. Laws governing ownership of mineral rights vary from state to state, but it is common in many to sell separate rights to minerals, coal, oil and gas.

That is the case in Pennsylvania, where new legal questions are coming up on some fundamental issues. These include whether ownership of shale gas, which is tightly bound to the rock in which it is found and usually extracted using horizontal-drilling techniques, should be treated differently from conventional gas extracted through traditional vertical wells.
In September, in a tangled case involving an 1881 land sale, a state appellate court found some merit in the argument of a Susquehanna County couple’s claim that shale gas should belong to those who own the rock that contains it, and not to those who own rights to conventional natural gas on the property.
The court sent the case back to a lower court for expert testimony, raising questions about the validity of some leases and sending tremors of uncertainty through the industry.