Landowners Angry With Ohio's Forced Pooling Laws

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.

April 25, 2012 | 3:00 PM

Remember forced pooling? Governor Corbett’s Marcellus Shale Advisory Commission wanted to allow natural gas drillers to, under certain circumstances, extract Marcellus Shale gas from under unwilling landowners’ property. The panel’s justification: That scenario is legal – with full compensation for the landowner – in nearly every other geological formation.
But Governor Corbett said he was dead-set against pooling, and the language never made it into the impact fee legislators passed in February.
Forced pooling is legal in Ohio, which is entering its own natural gas drilling rush. As more drilling begins to take place there, landowners are learning about the pooling law. And as the AP reports, many of them are ticked off:

Natural gas drillers are swarming eastern Ohio — where Hashbarger lives — as new horizontal drilling technology has allowed access to previously unavailable oil and gas deposits in the shale. Ohio is among states that have been revisiting their drilling laws in order to capitalize on the investment and job creation potential.
Laws on mandatory pooling were intended to assure that profits from drilling were shared among both willing and unwilling property owners, said John Keller, a Columbus lawyer who represents Ohio drillers in their pooling requests.
The arrangement prevents neighbors from allowing drillers to suck resources from under another’s land without compensation, while allowing interested landowners to exercise their mineral rights.
He said they were dubbed “conservation statutes” that would discourage several neighbors from each drilling wells extending down into the same deposit “like several straws going into the same Coke bottle.” That was seen as both blighting the landscape and shrinking profits for everyone involved by reducing the underground pressure that dictates how much oil or gas is produced.