Drilling Generates $160 Million In Bradford County Royalties

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.

September 25, 2012 | 12:52 PM

Scott Detrow/ StateImpact Pennsylvania

A Bradford County drilling rig

Analysis from a Penn State researcher shows natural gas drilling has generated more than $160 million in royalties for landowners in Bradford County alone.
More from the Daily Review:

And the number of royalty recipients will continue to grow, since there have been 1,856 gas wells drilled in the county, but only 512 of those wells are producing gas commercially, said agronomy educator Mark Madden of Penn State Extension.
In addition to the wells that have been built, many additional permits have been issued for wells that have yet to be constructed or are in the process of being developed, he said.
Land owners, including farmers, need to make sure they are not the victims of unscrupulous people who want to separate them from their money, and they may also need to plan financially for how to pass royalty revenue to their descendants, he said.

Of course, the royalties slow down when drilling slows down, and Bradford’s extraction rate have dipped as natural gas prices have plummeted. Bloomberg reports on how Chesapeake, the dominant driller in Bradford County, has begun reducing royalty payments:

As gas prices were heading toward a 10-year low in April, Chesapeake began reinterpreting in its favor thousands of contracts with landowners from Pennsylvania to Texas that own the 1 trillion cubic feet of gas the company produced last year, according to interviews and documents reviewed by Bloomberg. Chesapeake, arguing that other contract language allows for cost deductions, is fighting more than a dozen lawsuits.
“I don’t want to sound like I’m a bitter, disgruntled royalty owner, but this isn’t fair,” Thornton said. “Don’t do sneaky tricks. If it belongs to the royalty owners, it belongs to the royalty owners.”