February 14, 2008

Let's Not Change Rules During Game

Now, with the oil and gas industry ramped up in West Virginia, we are seeing citizens energized to change the rules after companies have made substantial investments.

Most people engaged in any activity want to know what the rules are. They also don't want the rules to change in the middle of the game.

Lo and behold, some West Virginia citizens have begun a movement that essentially seeks to alter the rules that govern the way developers of oil and gas wells gain access to the energy below the earth. Unhappy citizens have come up with a Surface Owner's Bill of Rights that requires developers to give surface owners more advance notification before they start drilling and also stipulates that those developers pay more for any damages they cause.

This movement flies in the face of established laws that spell out who owns the oil and gas and how the owners can recover it.

For decades, West Virginia law has respected "split estates," i.e., separate surface and mineral ownership of property, and those laws explain each party's rights and requirements. During the administration of Gov. Gaston Caperton, the state developed even more laws to protect surface owners. Energy companies generally play by all of those rules.

Now, with the oil and gas industry ramped up in West Virginia, we are seeing citizens energized to change the rules after companies have made substantial investments. The citizens' new bundle of laws appears to serve the interests of organizers and lawyers more than the interests of the public that benefits from oil and gas development.

That sort of conduct hardly helps those energy companies that are hiring more and more West Virginians and paying an increasing amount of tax dollars to local and state government. Oil and gas businesses make up a well-established industry that is important to the state's future, and they deserve fair, balanced and consistent oversight.

Some West Virginia lawmakers have a bad habit of listening to a handful of citizens who cast corporations as villains. More often than not, those citizens are apt to identify a successful business sector and stake it out as if it were game on the hoof. It appears this so-called Bill of Rights is intended to create legal conflict by changing the rules of oil and gas recovery in the middle of the game.

No business wants to face instability. Such an exercise is bad business for the oil and gas industry and the rest of us.