How A Drilling Lease Complicates Wills And Trusts

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.

November 27, 2012 | 2:08 PM

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The Pennsylvania Judicial Center

The latest industry to get a second-hand boost from natural gas drilling: trust and estate-planning.
The Legal Intelligencer examines how royalty payments and lease agreements can complicate wills:

Trusts and estates lawyers in Central and Western Pennsylvania said they’ve seen an uptick in inquiries from landowners with oil and gas interests who are interested in beginning the process of estate planning.
But, those lawyers added, there are several schools of thought regarding when — and even if — it’s advisable for a landowner to consider gifting those interests.
R. Douglas DeNardo — a shareholder at Rothman Gordon in Pittsburgh and chairman of the firm’s estates, trusts and taxation department — said inquiries have been “way up” recently, mostly from people who own land in the Utica Shale regions of Western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio, where there are high concentrations of so-called “wet” gas.