Don’t know how to put it more simply. New Yorkers are waking up to the fact, that, as practiced by the DEC, New York has the worst compulsory integration practices in the country. Or the world, if you exclude Kazakistan, Somalia and Burma.
Since Chesapeake wrote New York’s law, the DEC has done more compulsory integrations than Texas. Where thousands more wells are drilled every year. The DEC is the world’s champ on pushing people into wells against their will. Because that’s what the frackers paid for.
VanSlyke got a letter last year from XTO Energy, a unit ofExxon Mobil Corp. (XOM), informing her that portions of her property are within range of a horizontal hydraulic-fracturing well the company wants to build if New York approves drilling. Under a 2005 law, the company doesn’t need VanSlyke’s permission to buy the natural gas under her farm once 60 percent of the land around the well is leased or owned.
New York’s compulsory integration law was written entirely by Chesapeake’s lobbyist.
“We don’t want any part of it,” VanSlyke, 58, said in a telephone interview. “I don’t want it on my land, under my land, and really don’t care to have it on my neighbor’s land, because unfortunately water pollution and air pollution don’t recognize borders.”
Since the law took effect in August 2005, the Environmental Conservation Department has issued 208 integration orders, according to Emily DeSantis, a spokeswoman. The orders are used for all types of drilling, she said in an e-mail.
That’s about 30 a year on conventional wells, which is approximately 15 times the rate of CIs in Texas. Meaning New York compels more landowners into wells than Texas does, on a fraction of the number of total wells. NY DEC is the world’s worst on CI.
VanSlyke said she and her husband aren’t going to sign a lease. If a future well on their neighbor’s land makes money and they receive royalties, it will get deposited in an escrow account, she said. The potential for fracking under the land has delayed their plans of creating an organic beef farm. “That was going to be my retirement to keep me busy,” the former computer-applications teaching assistant said. “Now, we’re afraid to buy animals because we keep reading when fracking operations come in, the animals get sick.”
James Bacon has written the definitive legal paper on how compulsory integration does not apply to a horizontal shale gas lateral – even conceptually. But that won’t stop those bratty frackers from trying:
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