The Texas Supreme Court heard arguments yesterday in the fight between the City of Lubbock and Coyote Lake Ranch over whether the accommodation doctrine applies to severed water rights. Here is a good article from the Texas Tribune summarizing the arguments. The oral arguments can be viewed on the Texas Supreme Court website, here. My earlier discussion of the case can be found here.
I have written before about landowners’ efforts to collect damages for personal injury and property damage caused by nearby oil and gas exploration operations on the theory that such activities cause a nuisance. Nuisance is a recognized tort claim. To recover, a person must prove that (1) the person has an interest in land (2) the defendant interfered with or invaded the person’s interest in the land by conduct that was negligent, intentional, or abnormal and out of place in its surroundings, (3) the defendant’s conduct resulted in a condition that substantially interfered with the person’s use and enjoyment of his land, and (4) the nuisance caused injury to the plaintiff.
In the case decided by the court of appeals in San Antonio, Cerny v. Marathon Oil, the Cernys bought an acre of land with a residence on it in 2002. In 2012, Marathon began drilling wells in the area. Plains Exploration and Production also constructed production facilities in the area. Eventually, there were 22 well sites within 1 1/2 mile of the Cernys’ home. The Cernys hired experts, who measured chemicals in the air around their home and near oil and gas production sites in the area. The experts included an air quality expert, a forensic meteorologist, and a toxicologist.
The Cernys sued Marathon and Plains, alleging that the fumes, odors and dust from their facilities caused physical health symptoms and made their home uninhabitable. Marathon asked the trial court to dismiss the case, on the ground that the Cernys had no evidence that their facilities were the “proximate cause” of the Cernys’ alleged damages.
During my vacation I read The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789, by Joseph J. Ellis. Ellis tells the story of the writing and passage of the US Constitution, orchestrated, he asserts, by George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison (the quartet).
Before the adoption of the Constitution, the thirteen states were essentially independent countries who had won their independence but failed to found a new country. The “United States” were always referred to in the plural. The genius of the quartet, says Ellis, was the compromise they crafted in the Constitution in the debate over federal vs. state power. States were understandably reluctant to relinquish their sovereignty, but the quartet knew that the new nation, to survive, had to have federal power – to levy taxes, provide for common defense, and regulate commerce among the states. The Constitution enumerates the powers of the federal government. The Bill of Rights – the first ten amendments to the Constitution, passed simultaneously — enumerates the rights retained by the states and the people, limitations on federal power. The tenth amendment provides: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” The contours of this compromise are still being debated in courts across the land. “States rights” were fighting words in the civil war, and today are the battle cry of states seeking to curb the federal government’s regulation of health care, water quality, voting rights, and abortion.
The Texas Supreme Court yesterday granted Coyote Lake Ranch’s petition to review the Amarillo Court of Appeals’ opinion holding that the accommodation doctrine does not apply to severed groundwater. View my previous post on the case here.
In January, the El Paso Court of Appeals decided the appeal of Lazy R. Ranch, LP, et al. vs. ExxonMobil Corporation. The court reversed a summary judgment in favor of Exxon and remanded the case to the trial court for a trial on the merits. Exxon has asked the Texas Supreme Court to review the El Paso Court’s decision. Exxon argues that it has conclusively proven that Lazy R’s claims are barred by limitations.
The Lazy R Ranch is 20,000 acres in Ector, Crane, Ward and Winkler Counties. Exxon had operations on the ranch for many years. In 2009, the Ranch hired an environmental firm to investigate several sites on the property for oil-related contamination. The environmental firm found substantial hydrocarbon contamination at five sites, and found that at one of the sites the contamination had percolated down into the groundwater and that contamination at the other sites also posed a risk of leaching down into the groundwater. Lazy R sued Exxon for an injunction to require Exxon to take sufficient steps to prevent further spread of the contamination into the subsurface and groundwater.
The trial court ruled that the Ranch had waited too long to sue and dismissed its claims. The El Paso Court of Appeals reversed, holding that the statute of limitations does not apply because the Ranch is only suing for an injunction to require Exxon to abate a continuing nuisance, the spread of hydrocarbon contamination into the subsurface.
Chesapeake is spending a lot of money on lawyers.
Dan McDonald, a Fort Worth attorney, has filed some 250 cases against Chesapeake contending that it is underpaying its royalty owners. Companies affiliated with former House of Representatives Speaker Tom Craddick have now been added to McDonald’s client list. So many cases have been filed against it in Texas that Chesapeake asked the cases to be granted multidistrict litigation status, so that one judge could control pretrial discovery and motions and settings. Two judges have been appointed for that purpose, one for McDonald’s cases and another for cases brought by other attorneys. Chesapeake is settling cases as fast as it can.
Most of the claims against Chesapeake arise from its structure for selling gas. Chesapeake sells its gas at the wellhead to its wholly owned subsidiary Chesapeake Energy Marketing. Chesapeake Energy Marketing arranges for the gathering of the gas and delivery to central sales points, and pays Chesapeake for the gas based on a weighted average price of all sales at those central gathering points, less costs of compression, gathering, treating and transportation, and less a “marketing fee” charged by Chesapeake Energy Marketing. The costs incurred between the wellhead and the point of delivery to the purchaser were formerly incurred by another Chesapeake affiliate, Access Midstream. Chesapeake spun off its gathering systems into a separate company a few years ago, and as part of that deal it guaranteed a minimum rate of return on those gathering systems to the new spin-off company, thereby receiving a premium price in the market for the new company’s shares. Chesapeake pays royalties based on the new price it receives from Chesapeake Energy Marketing, after deduction of post-production costs and marketing fees. McDonald says that these “costs” are “sham sales” and “fraudulent transactions.”
Residents of DISH, Texas were awarded a victory by the Amarillo Court of Appeals in their long-running fight with pipeline companies. Sciscoe et al. v. Enbridge Gathering (North Texas), L.P., et al., No. 07-13-00391-CV. In an opinion issued on June 1, the court held that the plaintiffs are entitled to a trial on their claims that the pipelines’ gathering and compression facilities caused damages to their properties from noise and emissions that constituted trespass and nuisance.
DISH residents have fought the pipeline companies for years. The companies constructed several compressors and a metering station just outside the town between 2005 and 2009. Residents began to complain of excessive noise and offensive odors and said they suffered adverse health effects. In 2008, the residents complained to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, which conducted monitoring in 2009 and 2010 and concluded that emissions from the compressors “would not be expected to cause short-term adverse health effects, adverse vegetative effects, or odors.” The Texas Department of State Health Services performed medical tests on 28 DISH residents for exposure to chemicals, and tested tap water; it found no evidence of exposure to chemicals. Those findings were contradicted by tests conducted by Plaintiffs’ expert, Wolf Eagle Environmental, which found that Plaintiffs were exposed to harmful emissions of benzene, xylene, ethyl benzene, toluene and other harmful chemicals.
Finally, 18 DISH residents sued the pipelines in 2001 for damages, alleging nuisance and trespass. The town of DISH also filed suit, seeking damages for the loss of tax revenue resulting from reduced property values caused by the compressor station.
The Texas Supreme Court has ruled 5 to 4 that Chesapeake cannot deduct post-production costs from the Hyder family’s gas royalties.
The case in the Supreme Court actually addresses only the Hyders’ overriding royalty. As part of the Hyders’ oil and gas lease, the Hyders agreed that Chesapeake could use their land to drill horizontal wells producing from their neighbors’ land — the surface location on the Hyders’ land, but all of the productive lateral of the well under the neighbor’s property. In exchange, Chesapeake agreed to pay the Hyders a 5% royalty on production from such wells. Because the Hyders have no mineral interest in the lands from which these wells produce, the parties referred to this royalty as an overriding royalty.
The Hyders’ lease contains very specific provisions prohibiting Chesapeake from deducting post-production costs from the Hyders’ royalty on production from their lands. But the lease provision granting the overriding royalty on production from wells bottomed under their neighbors’ property is not so clear. Although Chesapeake originally fought to deduct post-production costs from both the royalties and the overriding royalties, the trial court and court of appeals ruled for the Hyders on all claims, and Chesapeake elected to appeal to the Texas Supreme Court only on the issue of deductibility of post-production costs from the Hyders’ overriding royalty.
Last November, the Texas General Land Office lost its appeal in Commissioner v. SandRidge Energy, Inc., in the El Paso Court of Appeals. For the first time, a court has ruled that a lessee can deduct post-production costs under the Texas General Land Office’s Relinquishment Act lease form, citing Heritage Resources v. NationsBank, 939 S.W.2d 118 (Tex. 1996).
The case actually involves several oil and gas leases owned by SandRidge in Pecos County, some covering lands owned by private parties, some covering Relinquishment Act lands. (The State owns the minerals under Relinquishment Act land; the surface owner is agent for the state in granting oil and gas leases, for which the surface owner receives ½ of bonuses and royalties. The lease must be approved by the GLO and be on the approved GLO lease form.) The most interesting part of the case is the court’s interpretation of the GLO’s Relinquishment Act lease form. There are somewhere between 6.4 million and 7.4 million acres of Relinquishment Act lands in Texas, principally in West Texas, in and around the Permian Basin.
SandRidge’s wells on the leases in dispute produce mostly carbon dioxide, mixed with some natural gas. Originally, SandRidge paid the GLO royalties on its sales of natural gas and carbon dioxide. More recently, SandRidge made an agreement with Oxy USA; SandRidge built a plant, the Century Plant, to extract the CO2 from SandRidge’s gas. Oxy owns and operates the plant and gets the CO2 extracted; SandRidge gets the natural gas. Oxy doesn’t charge SandRidge for separating the gas from the CO2. Oxy uses the CO2 in secondary recovery projects. The plant reportedly cost a billion dollars.
Betty Lou Bradshaw’s parents owned 1773 acres in Hood County. In 1960, they sold the land and reserved 1/2 of the royalty on oil, gas and other minerals. Betty Lou inherited her parents’ royalty interest.
In 2005, Steadfast Financial (subsequently renamed KCM Financial) acquired the right to purchase the land. In 2006, KCM made a deal with Range Resources by which it simultaneously (1) exercised its right to purchase the land, (2) sold the land to Range, reserving all minerals, and (3) leased the mineral estate to Range. The lease provided for 1/8th royalty, and the bonus was $7,505 per acre.
Betty Lou sued KCM and Range. She alleged that they conspired to limit her royalty on production from the lease to 1/16 (1/2 of 1/8), whereas it should have been 1/8 (1/2 of 1/4), since the going rate for lease royalties in Hood County at the time was 1/4. She alleged that Steadfast had agreed to a lower royalty in order to receive an above-market bonus.
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