Bluestone Pipeline Now Pays More Than 6% of Property Taxes in Rustic Sanford, NY

Plucked from the web: Tax Assessor for the New York Town of Sanford (and adjoining Windsor) Becky Ottens.

Many people assume the shale gas technological revolution has so far had zero impact in New York State — except as the acknowledged source for much, much political turmoil.

But that's not all true everywhere. 

Leaving aside the consumption side, where there has actually been quite a bit of rarely acknowledged economic and environmental benefit, mostly for urban New Yorkers, here's a story about a very local property tax impact involving just the New York end of the small, shale-gas-triggered Bluestone Gathering Pipeline, coming out of Pennsylvania.

Let me just try to break all this down without boring you to even further tears.

This morning, I figured out how to look up the 2013 final assessment roll for the easternmost Town of Sanford in Broome County, NY.  This is a computer-generated sheaf of paper that's typically spit out in the summer of each year, then used as the basis for fall school tax bills, and then used again as the basis for town and county tax bills, which are generally due in January of the next calendar year.

The reason I did this is because something actually happened in Sanford between 2012 and 2013.  The Bluestone pipeline — originally proposed July 2011, then green-lighted for its NY end Sept. 2012 — was built in time to start flowing natural gas through to that NY end in the Town of Sanford as of May 2013. 

At 20 inches in diameter for much of its length, Bluestone now runs a total of 44 miles from the Marcellus Shale drilling hot zone in northeastern PA, northerly into NY.  But only about 9 miles of it are in NY, all in Sanford.  There in NY, Bluestone tees into an inter-connect with the larger Millennium Pipeline, which moves natural gas much further in the direction of greater NYC and other well-developed points beyond.  It's true that the molecules of natural gas in a transmission pipeline are generally all mixed together from multiple sources, but I think it's fair to say that virtually all of Bluestone's product is fully fracked shale gas coming out of PA — where that kind of drilling has always been kept legal, and has even been welcomed by many.  None of Bluestone's natgas originates out of NY.  Instead, we New Yorkers — even die-hard anti-frackers — simply play the role of helping pay the ultimate tab for this whole enterprise, by buying the stuff directly or indirectly as consumers and burning it, without protest or controversy.

People down in the Greater Binghamton area may not have taken much notice of Bluestone, but the town tax assessor in Sanford, Becky Ottens, certainly did.  This past fall, payers of school taxes in Sanford should have also noticed for the first time that something was up.  Come January, when the town and county tax bill comes due, these folks should also be in for another pleasant surprise.

Here's why:

Bluestone is now the assessed taxpayer for two newly created accounts related to their new pipeline.  There are two accounts because the lay of the pipeline in Sanford means its taxes have to be split across two school districts — some for the Lumberjacks at Deposit Central, and some for the Black Knights at Windsor Central.

(Note that, in New York, we pretty much tax every kind of real estate, including natural gas wells, and natural gas pipelines situate within purchased rights of way, both of which are on land that's usually technically owned by somebody else.  We tax everything, that is, so long as the real estate isn't owned by government or a not-for-profit, or so long as the development doesn't involve a tax-break program for which the politicians get to take credit for progress.)

Becky Ottens' total assessed value for Bluestone in Sanford is $10,578,120.  All of this value is taxable for county, town, and school taxes, and none of it has been made exempt by any kind of economic development handout from state or local authorities.  Converted to "full market value" — using Sanford's 60% equalization rate, which means assessments are by local practice running at 60% of actual full value — this shows the town assessor is calculating the in-the-ground infrastructure as worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $17.6 million.  (Getting sleepy yet?)

Now, then, for the context: 

What is the total taxable value (not the total assessed value, due to the various exemptions) of the Town of Sanford?  For county taxes, total taxable is $157,635,235, town taxable is $161,522,490, and school taxable is $163,179,811.  So that means the pipeline — again, $10,578,120, totally taxable — is now covering between about 6.5% and 6.7% of the money Sanfordians hand over annually in county, town, and school property taxes.

It also means that everybody else in Sanford — even any anti-frackers that might be holding out down there — should, from now on, be paying significantly less than they would be without the pipeline. 

(This is assuming the local budgets didn't jump up in lockstep in order to eat all of the now-enlarged tax base, which is always possible, but I just don't know how to check this just yet.  Somebody else will have to do the work of ascertaining just how much Deposit Central and Windsor Central school tax bills have already dropped this past fall for the average taxpayer, and just how much the average Town of Sanford town and county property tax bill will drop when it comes due in January 2014.  As I said, a lot of that depends on the school and town budgets, and the consequent levies, and I just don't have my hands on that stuff.  Maybe Becky Ottens or Town Supervisor Dewey Decker knows.)

Note lastly that there are also two vacant parcels on Pazzelli Road in Sanford, said to be worth $150K at full market value, that are assessed to Bluestone as owner outright.  But I'm not counting these because, for these, Bluestone is simply picking up more or less the same tax bill as was paid by whichever Sanfordian owned that land previously.

The pipeline is different, though.  It didn't exist, previously, to generate taxes.

It's true that Bluestone represents just the tip of the overall shale gas iceberg, even just the tip of just the Marcellus shale gas iceberg.  But it's one of the few small portions that have already managed to encroach themselves into New York — a state where there really should be license plates offered that read "Frackless Since 2008."

Whether you're freaked out, open minded, or gung ho on the fracking question, it's already a fact that Bluestone has delivered a net positive shale gas impact in Sanford.  There's more where that came from, but, to get it, New York's governor is going to have to bite the political bullet, coming from his left, and finally issue regulations covering the drilling of these new kinds of wells.

DMP/Williams Files with NYS PSC for 2nd Parallel Natgas Pipeline Into Windsor, NY

Some more unnoticed "public notice," that I noticed this morning.

Here's a link to this particular NYS PSC file's overall table of contents, which should keep delivering updates to you, as this application inevitably builds and builds, voluminously.

What this is is — in a nutshell, because I don't have much free, unpaid time right now — is this:  This is a flood of paperwork — 89 documents in just the first salvo, filed Dec. 2, 2013 — put forth with the New York State Public Service Commission by DMP New York, Inc. and Williams Field Services Company, LLC. 

To my knowledge, these entities are the current owners of a now-already-installed 16" PA-to-Windsor, NY natural gas pipeline which originally went by the tagline "Laser," but is now apparently called the "New York Mainline."

The new, proposed work they're calling the "New York Mainline Loop."

The paperwork shows the pipeline developers have contracted with Northeast PA drillers that have so much shale gas they want to get to the Northeastern U.S. market, there's a plan to put in a second, parallel, 16" pipeline — right into still-frackless NY, presumably allowing them to feed twice as much product into the west-east Millennium Pipeline.

Should be of interest to taxpayers in the Township of Windsor, NY, and taxpayers in whatever school district soaks that particular area with tax bills, including tax bills to pipeline owners (I'm assuming that would be the Black Knights at Windsor Central).

Should also be of interest to landowners along the route.

Should also be of interest to readers of the Binghamton, NY newspaper, always on the lookout for more unsubsidized private-sector investment in Gov. Cuomo's "Open for Business" Southern Tier.  (But it doesn't look like the newspaper people are on top of it yet, which doesn't surprise me.)

And it should also be of interest to NY and PA pipeline specialists, folks with the know-how, the where-with-all, and the crying economic need to line up some more work for themselves, down the road.

Some additional context: 

Sometime around Oct. 2012, there was some rare reporting, I believe originating out of the Binghamton newspaper, which showed that what was then known as the Laser pipeline (and compressor station) gave a nearly $30 million boost to the Town of Windsor's taxable value.  But even that's not a fair number, as Windsor assesses property at 68% of full value, according to the latest state-issued equalization rate, so it's really more like a $44 million development.

I just double-checked the math, and the Jan. 2013 data for Windsor shows $446K paid in town and county taxes by the Laser/Williams pipeline people.  In the context of a township with a total annual collection of $4,226K, that's more than 10% of the tax base that's being carried by that part of this pipeline development that's already in the ground.  The first year the tax impact materialized, the pipeline was credited with lowering town and county tax bills for Windsorians by 8% on average — which stands to reason if the town's budget went up slightly over the same time period.  I haven't also double-checked the math on the school tax side, but Windsor Central school taxes were last reported to be lowered by 5.8% due to the pipeline.

Needless to say, if the developers succeed in putting in a second twin pipeline and whatever additional infrastructure it takes to run it, the Windsor assessor is going to get a chance to re-run these numbers all over again.

Meanwhile, here's a question:  Over in the neighboring Town of Sanford, which employs the same assessor, when will local people see the impact of installation of the similar Bluestone Pipeline, green-lighted by the State of New York in Sept. 2012, and reported to be flowing gas into the NYS end as of May 2013?  I got to the bottom of the answer to that question here.

New Plan: Export PA NatGas to Canada Via Dreaded Pipelines in Frackless NY

Does Canada make a Good Bogeyman for Red-Necked Xenophobes in Upstate New York?

Or, rather, does Canada make a good bogeyman for those who seek to push their political agenda by needling the emotions of red-necked xenophobes in Upstate New York?

I realize that Canadians have a reputation for being so polite, and so nice, but this... this could mean war!

Persuasive strategists within New York's over-sized army of anti-fossil fuels and anti-fracking activists are undoubtedly considering the Canadian Question this morning.

Here's why:

These activists have been building up a growing list of various natural gas infrastructure battles being waged in still-frackless New York.  Close to the top on this list, they've been trying to kill a PA-NY natural gas pipeline proposed to run across their backyard upstate counties of Broome, Delaware, Chenango, Otsego, and Schoharie — the Constitution Pipeline. 

And here suddenly is a chance to gain some political traction with the otherwise skeptical local worthies in Upstate New York:  Iroquois — a different pipeline, which is already in place, slicing elsewhere across upstate — is testing the North American market for long-term interest in reversing its pipeline's originally intended, circa-1992 flow of natural gas from Canada toward the New York City metropolitan area — and exporting much of the shale gas instead to Canada!

It turns out there's so much natural gas being fracked out of the Appalachian Basin states of PA, WV, and OH — and so much natural gas that's soon expected to be made available to Iroquois at the planned Schoharie County, NY, junction with the Constitution Pipeline — that Iroquois is thinking about switching things up and sending nearly half of that new capacity to Canada.

Yeah, Canada — send it right across the St. Lawrence River through the customs curtain at Waddington, NY.

Here's a link to a specialized news service's coverage of this otherwise beneath-the-radar development.

Does that make an anti-fracker's blood boil?

Why should we New Yorkers have to tear up upstate to help out those Canadian bastards?

This could be like Keystone XL in reverse!

Norse Energy Bankruptcy Trustee to Sue Cuomo on Indefinite Frack Ban

A couple public documents quietly popped Wednesday, Nov. 20, 2013 in a highly obscure location — Item Number 637, deep in the congested bowels of a federal bankruptcy court case — revealing a new strategy aimed at breaking the now-kindergarten-aged Shale Gas Stalemate in New York.

On Friday, I tried to get a much, much more widely read Marcellus shale news platform to run with this, but it didn't work out.  I'm instead killing some of my Saturday, at least temporarily cracking back open my moribund blog.  (Yeah, sorry about that; I've been a busy, dispirited New Yorker, making a living working on shale gas projects in West Virginia.)  I've combined the four relevant bankruptcy court pages to a single PDF and posted it to Scribd for all to see, interpret, mull over — and to celebrate or freak out about, depending:

   Norse Bankruptcy Trustee Proposes Legal Challenge to NYS on Indefinite Frack Ban

The scoop on this, incidentally, belongs to "SONY," a Natural Gas Forum for Landowners participant, and to Binghamton, NY real estate lawyer Gary B. Kline, a Twitterer who goes by the handle @houseattorney.  For all I know, these may be two electronic incarnations of the same dude, as both on Nov. 20 made cryptic references to the Norse trustee's plan to mount a legal challenge to New York State, such as here:

Norse Energy suing Cuomo, Shah and Martens to compel release of SGEIS.... Can anyone day happy dance!
— Gary B. Kline, Esq. (@houseattorney) November 20, 2013

Just for the record, the documents are from U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Western District of New York (Buffalo), Bankruptcy Petition #: 1-12-13685-CLB.  Norse's first filing for bankruptcy is already nearly a year old, dating from Dec. 6, 2012.  Then the case was converted from the original reorganization attempt to a strip-and-unload situation as of Oct. 10, 2013.

So here's a layman's interpretation of this latest plan:  On behalf of a tiny, Norwegian oil and gas player, that's in the process of going bankrupt, and whose profile stands as a martyr to the unholy business climate in the Empire State, file an Article 78 proceeding, seeking to have a court force New York State government to do its job already — that is, to declare finally finished the environmental impact statement covering high-volume hydraulic fracturing (and then, presumably, to start issuing drilling permits).

Over the years, prior to going out of business, Norse Energy applied for a bunch of such permits, targeting both Marcellus and Utica shales, with drillsite locations spread atop its rural checkerboard of a leasehold in selected portions of Madison, Chenango, and Broome counties.  But all these applications have been collecting dust on an Albany shelf someplace, on account of New York's political inability to get its regulatory act together on fracking.

In New York, an "Article 78" proceeding is essentially The Last Bastion for Those Dispossessed by Government's Refusal to Act.  To prevail, you basically need a lot of money, and to find a judge who's similarly disgusted by the gridlock.

Technically, however, here's all that's happened so far:  The appointed lawyer-trustee in Norse Energy's Chapter 7 case (a wind-down bankruptcy) has asked the judge for permission to employ a specialist lawyer for a suit against New York State's Primary Foot-Draggers in the Shale Gas Quagmire — Governor Andrew Cuomo, DEC head Joe Martens, and DOH head Nirav Shah (both appointed by Cuomo, and therefore mere arms of his administration).

Word on the street is that something's supposed to break after the Thanksgiving holiday, when the courts happen to reopen for business on Monday, Dec. 2.

There wouldn't seem to be anybody in the bankruptcy courtroom with an interest in saying "No" to such a scheme.  The federal rep has already blessed the idea by saying "no objection" on Nov. 21.  And Norse's Stiffed Creditors are entitled to seek as many cents on the dollar as they can possibly scavenge from the would-be driller's carcass.  In the most optimistic strategic forecast, getting New York's shale gas blockade judicially lifted would overnight raise the market value of Norse's portfolio of inactive, aging oil and gas development leases — all of which have been granted over many prior years at low signing bonuses, delay rentals, and royalty rates by ever-hopeful upstate landowners.  Under New York's current, joke-worthy, "Open for Business" policy, the market value of this leasehold currently stands at basically zero.

The specialist lawyer the bankruptcy trustee wants to hire is Thomas S. West of Albany's West Law Firm, the top dog in a very small, native pool of gas industry representatives who are ready, willing, and able to go to work, should there ever be much such business to litigate over in New York.  West is already the gas industry's rep in one of the handful of local drill ban challenges that are still hanging fire — in Norse Energy (it was originally Anschutz) versus Ithaca's exurban Town of Dryden, Tompkins County.  The Dryden case is supposedly due to be heard and decided at the appellate level sometime in 2014 — along with an essentially equivalent companion case featuring the slight difference of a landowner, a dairy farmer, being the one to challenge a local drill ban in Cooperstown's exurban Town of Middlefield, Otsego County.

Elsewhere upstream in the bankruptcy court's river of paper, the file shows the bankruptcy trustee had previously, in October 2013, formally rehired West to keep on keeping on with Norse's Dryden appeal.  And it further shows that West has been and is "handling that case based upon contributions from other industry sources."

That same sort of thickening plot also features in the Norse trustee's proposed Article 78 challenge, as there's word within the documents that West is prepared to go to work for free or "pro bono" — at least in so far as Norse, Norse's creditors, the trustee, or the court are concerned.  Instead, West proposes to get paid by "independent third parties ('The Funding Parties')" that have already agreed to finance such a case.  Needless to say, these funders aren't named, but it's a sure bet they ain't the Park Foundation.

The bottom line is that Norse's death is important enough to somebody, somewhere, that there's quite a bit of money being spent on the funeral, but not for flowers.  Instead, the file shows Norse's bankrupt Viking ghost is being propped up alongside West at the plaintiff's table for test cases at both the local and now statewide levels.  Whether New York State continues to sit out the whole production side of the shale gas revolution may well hang in the balance.  If Norse is, in the end, able to reach out from its grave, and make a difference for we survivors — yes, that would be something.

Let me just close with a long, bitter digression on the issue of behind-the-scenes funding in New York's ongoing, and pretty tiresome, frack battle.  Most media consumers hereabouts — dependent on an unbalanced diet of what passes for mainstream coverage in this state — are probably of the mistaken impression that this dispute exclusively involves the nefarious, profit-seeking Big Oil and Gas Industry, with lots of money to burn, going up against the not-for-profit, public-interest-oriented Environmental Groups, with just a sorry frayed shoestring to hold their colorful grassroots together.

It makes a compelling media narrative, partly because it's so familiar, and it seems to make sense to most innocent people.  At this point, everybody's already seen the undoubtedly expensive Clean Shale Gas Revolution television ads, featuring the straight-up blond woman, attempting to put out a cheerful wholesome counterpoint to a myriad of also undoubtedly expensive wild-eyed diatribes put forth in a variety of media from the anti side.

The only trouble is that actual facts conflict with this narrative.  Leaving aside the well-established fact that the anti side is remarkably well-endowed in New York, and also self-interested, my main case in point is the forgotten "other party" in this dispute — the pro-drilling, resource-owning landowners themselves, together with like-minded, Chamber of Commerce types with a legitimate interest in re-legalizing opportunity in upstate New York.

The land-owning stakeholders' primary representative is the Joint Landowners Coalition of New York.  Since February 2013, the JLCNY has been passing the hat for a similar legal challenge to New York State — on novel grounds that the state's interminable fracking delay amounts to an unjustly uncompensated "taking" of private property, which is illegal under both the state and federal constitutions.  (In America, all this started with the Bill of Rights, the 5th Amendment, which — among other colonial-era beefs — rules out the taking of private property for public use, without just compensation.)

JLCNY has already lined up a sampling of model plaintiffs, most or all of whom were chosen for owning only mineral rights (no surface ownership), and who can therefore make the legally important argument that they've been stripped of all, or virtually all, their property.  JLCNY has also already announced its legal team has put in 300-plus hours organizing the complaint.

So why don't they file already?  It turns out, nine months later, the landowners group still does not have enough money!  In fact, at last word, in-the-know landowners were reporting that only $67,000 had been raised out of a funding goal of $100,000.  $100K may not even be enough to see the case through to either triumph, or whatever legal dead end it may be doomed to be funneled into.  But, regardless, they're not filing until they have the full $100K to get it rolling, and they just don't have it yet.

So what gives?  If it were up to the leftward-ho Box Cake Mix Heirs at the Park Foundation, or the similarly situated Ketchup Heirs at Heinz, $100K for any kind of anti-side legal challenge would not be a problem.  And everybody knows that a Chesapeake Energy or an ExxonMobil — both of which can effortlessly prove they've also had leased property rights that were made worthless by the situation in New York — could, in a heartbeat, figure out a way to write checks for the rest of what the JLCNY needs.

But here's the rub:  Because this sort of David v. Goliath Showdown is set to occur in as much a political arena as a legal one, the JLCNY Elders — for reasons of keeping the group's motives pure — refuse to accept industry money to fund their case!

Is that notably noble, or just plain stupid, or what is it? 

But let me just further ask — has anybody ever read such a key fact in any of the Gannett chain dailies, which claim to serve the Southern Tier epicenter for this conflict?  Have any comfort-the-afflicted scribes statewide given equal time to these downtrodden citizens, with their sorry frayed shoestring?  Has public radio's Susan Arbetter — or the laughably misnamed "Innovation Trail" (where the coverage inexorably skews toward provincial well-off activist resistance to the now-global innovation of shale gas technology) — noted that upstate landowners are now so beaten down, so dispirited, and so impoverished as to struggle for the resources to simply demand their day in court?

Yeah, I didn't think so.

A Modest Proposal: Drill-Ban Towns Could Just Ask Folks to Vote with Their Square Feet

I realize this idea will never fly.  But it would be much fairer than the current confiscatory state of affairs regarding shale gas in New York, where the winners don't even bother seeking to meet the losers half-way.

Rather than put in a temporary moratorium or permanent ban on drilling, New York townships could simply rent the underlying mineral rights — and then decline to use them.  It's not a solution that relies on blunt regulation, or fiat, but on compromise and horse-trading.

It's very similar to a public agency, or an environmentally minded group, buying development rights, sometimes also known as conservation easements.  These involve willing sellers, willing buyers, and prices they meet at someplace in the middle.

In New York, towns wouldn't have to lease everything.  Just a tad above 40%, on average, crazy-quilted across the landscape, would prevent any serious operator from qualifying for a state permit for anything other than an old-school vertical well.

Town leaders could just sit down with the grassroots landowner coalitions and negotiate the price on a 5- or 10-year model lease:  Joe and Josephine Landowner, Lessor, to Town of Freakout, Lessee.  And then the town would have to pay up, of course.  And, yes, you'd have to do it all over again in five or ten years, if the townspeople haven't come around to any kind of New Religion in the meanwhile.

To motivate the marketplace, a town could run it as a first-come, first-serve, limited-time-offer kind of thing — at least until its quota is reached, at which point they could close up the lease-buying shop, and the latecomers lose their chances.

Put the word out what the standing offer is, buy some lunch for a few otherwise idle notaries public, and schedule a couple signings en masse.  Possibly sync these events up with a chicken barbecue or something, and put on some heartfelt presentations in the school auditorium themed "Peace in Our Time."

People with a lot of land effectively get a discount, or possibly even a rebate, on their land taxes.  Villagers and small lot holders make up the difference.  It's an end to the bully's free lunch of getting away with just pushing people around.

Ever-mistrustful anti's would be free to boycott the proceedings by either relying instead upon their tallies of acreage that's already pledged to never (again) be put under lease.  Or by leasing all their land, for a nominal price, and for the same no-drill purpose, to an organization they feel confident will never do anything with those rights.

Vote with your square feet.

Either way, you add it all up, and you could put a rough pricetag on the preliminary costs of a community's decision to decline the opportunity shale gas poses — at least within the current climate of nagging skepticism that New York will ever be able to get its act together on this score.

The point is these bans cost something.  For those landowners willing to turn down such an opportunity, and to eat those costs on principle, I see it as a matter of private rights and choice, and I cannot object. 

But for those who demand to be compensated for something owned — something that's essentially being confiscated from them by popular will — show them the money.  To me, it's just another side to the coin of "environmental justice."

Then put the whole lease plan to a referendum, including the final costs.  If the townsfolk start back-peddling when the final bill comes due, well, then, that should tell you something about the depth of their current mania.

All this is the same kind of tough choice anybody faces in any kind of legitimate marketplace:  If there's no cost to the proponent, demand is unlimited, but, if there's skin in the game — well, then, not so much.

Millennium Pipeline Floats Upstate North-South Natural Gas Connector

Yet another chance for New York's anti-development forces to say "not in my backyard," even while thousands of Upstate residents, businesses, and institutions — including Whitney Point, NY, my hometown — continue to have no competitive consumer-level energy options other than electricity, trucked-in fuel oil/propane, or the joys of firewood.

   Proposed Millennium Phase 1 Pipeline

The developer — a consortium known as Millennium, which includes National Grid as a member, and which already controls the main west-east pipeline through New York's Southern Tier — floated trial balloons on this 60-mile south-north natural gas pipeline plan on May 9-10, 2013.  Unsurprisingly, no mainstream or web-based outlets have so far gone to the trouble of posting the map, which to me is the most interesting thing.  So I dug it out myself.

Right now, and for the rest of the month of May, Millennium is just shopping for enough transmission customers to justify building at least a 24-inch diameter line.  If there's more than enough interest, the pipe could go bigger.  On the other hand, if there's not enough need — measured exclusively by the private sector, according to future flow commitments — then this thing could easily die an early death, and we in New York can go back to our regularly scheduled programming.

The project is going to go by either the dull name Phase 1, or the somewhat more descriptive North-South Upstate Pipeline Connector.  The concept — the same as several other already built, building, or proposed plans — is to get around the Northeast U.S. west-east bottleneck by sliding burgeoning WV-OH-PA shale gas production to open west-east pipeline capacity to the north.  Big city markets in New York and New England would be very quietly using up most of it, although I suppose the politically testy natural gas exports angle could be a factor in the long run (no such proposals have been put forth yet in the Northeast).

From a very provincial perspective, but one that happens to be very important to me, this pipeline could put an end to that sorry lack of energy choices in small towns in the Tioughnioga River valley.  But I'm already certain that this pipeline plan is going to turn into another branch of the larger political fight over shale gas, regardless of what New York State ever winds up deciding (or failing to decide) on this issue, so far as its own citizens' undeveloped resources are concerned.

I know there are always winners and losers in politics, but this kind of reflexive conflict in New York State is getting ridiculous.

At this point, I think I would welcome an activism-imbued township, somewhere along this route, seeking to naively try enforcing a ban on not only all localized drilling, but also through-transport of fossil fuels by pipeline.  Such a "Home Rule"-inspired ban should eventually be crushed under the principles of federally protected interstate commerce.

(But, then again, maybe not.  Maybe the balkanization of New York continues and prevails, no matter what the long-term up-shot of all this might be.)

We've already seen in New York, at least for the time-being, that "Home Rule" is capable of both politically and legally trumping long-standing private property rights, much to the dismay of local landowners who mistakenly thought they still held onto something constitutionally protected against popularly inflamed confiscation.  My hope would be that pushing "Home Rule" to the next level should expose the fact that it's really just "States Rights" for green reactionaries, where provincial interests go too far by getting in the hair of the larger public interest.

Reading further between the lines of Millennium's announcement (which you can peruse for yourself here):

"Millennium has executed a Memorandum of Understanding with the owner of an existing pipeline and the related right of way associated with that pipeline.  Millennium has completed a preliminary constructability assessment of the right of way and has conducted a review of the property records underlying that right of way and has determined that the right of way for the proposed extension is usable from both a constructability and land rights perspective."

Translation:  To minimize the impact, the pipeline planners want to "co-locate" this natural gas pipeline alongside an already built, refined and liquid fossil fuels pipeline (which should be familiar to locals on the ground with its orange or yellow markers).  To my knowledge, this should be the Sunoco Corporation's 8-inch line, which moves refined product from Philadelphia, PA, to an end point in Brewerton, NY.  This is historically known as the "Sun Pipe Line," and probably dates from, like, the 1930's.

Question:  Does the developer actually propose it won't have to pay host landowners to expand the use of these old easements — because it's going in as a sub-tenant under open-ended boilerplate language in these old documents?  That's not a good start, and I sure hope not.  They're going to have a big enough fight on their hands, as it is.

ExxonMobil's XTO Now Camped Out With 5 Wells In NY's Stalled Shale Gas Queue

[Original post Feb. 27, 2013.  Updated May 1, 2013 upon receipt from DEC Albany of the two Delaware County unit maps proposed by XTO.]

Three more full-on Marcellus shale drilling applications from ExxonMobil subsidiary XTO Energy popped within New York State's electronic records during Feb. 2013. 

Adding these three to two previous XTO filings — previously reported here and here alone in Oct. 2012, but now re-cast with this fresh update — I've mapped all five projects with pins marking top and bottom holes below, and summarized all five at the end of this post (together with links to detailed maps of the proposed units, when I get my hands on the new ones).

View XTO Energy (ExxonMobil subsidiary) — Five Marcellus shale gas applications in NYS in a larger map

Significant?

These are the first of any sort of application statewide for XTO, never before an active driller in New York State by that name.

But they're also the first horizontal shale gas requests from a well-known, well-funded developer — at least since New York State started informally refusing such applications sometime during the early months of its now fully 5-year-old bureaucratic blockade against this new enterprise.  A number of pre- and early-moratorium applications still technically sit idle within the DEC's electronic records, but so many of the underlying leases have lapsed in the meantime — or fallen under the legal cloudiness of the force majeure issue — all of these old applications are likely to be scrapped, or to be total do-overs.

XTO's projects are all within Broome County's easternmost Sanford or the adjoining Township of Deposit in Delaware County.  Both townships sit just north of the politically significant NY-PA state line (though the shale has been sitting for many years under both jurisdictions without knowing the difference).  While Deposit looks as though it sits wholly within the Delaware River drainage, Sanford straddles the watershed divide between the incapacitated Delaware Basin, and the much more accommodating Susquehanna River drainage area.  (Yes, they're both free-flowing rivers; but, again, it's just that the bureaucracies are different.)

Nonetheless, the surface pads for all of these XTO wells — including the Dew Dec A 1H, which I'm told is named for landowner Dewey Decker, Sanford Town Supervisor, and an early advocate for upstate's budding lease opportunities — are proposed for hilltop wooded terrain draining ultimately to the Delaware, not the Susquehanna.

What this all means is that XTO — for reasons that probably only an optimist could explain — is now ready and eager to get into a line that's been long blocked, not by one, but by two, shale gas moratoriums.

For the first moratorium, New York environmental officials have been flat-footed since Feb. 15, 2008 (the date of the first such stalled application anywhere statewide from industry).  Then — since July 23, 2008, the birth date for the tortured and still-unresolved SGEIS process — these officials were busy coping with studious delay, and unprecedented public commentary, on this question.

For the second moratorium, the federal-state compact Delaware River Basin Commission has been stymied from reaching a consensus (or even just taking a vote) on its own version of over-lapping regulations governing such activity.  Unlike the similar, adjoining federal-state compact Susquehanna River Basin Commission, the DRBC decided early on it had to do much more than simply regulate water withdrawals in its zone of influence.  But then the DRBC's proposed, over-the-top regulatory scheme got bogged down in politics, same as in New York — a pool of quicksand from which the path of least (short-term) resistance always seems to mean... don't sink; don't swim; don't even struggle; just delay, delay, delay.

These XTO applications also represent a challenge to anti-leaning observers (most mainstream reporters, and a handful of pseudo-journalistic bloggers), as well as to basically-burned-out well-wishers for progress (such as myself, at least on certain days) — all of whom have become increasingly hopeful/fearful that indigenous shale gas will never be produced from under gridlocked New York.  (At least not within the foreseeable future.)

It's true that financially troubled Norwegian penny stock Norse Energy has made similar filings — camping out in the DEC's stalled shale gas queue since July 2011 with 29 new, mostly horizontal, Marcellus and Utica shale applications.  But it's been easy for many to ignore Norse's efforts as a persuasive stunt, or as a prop to the hopefulness of its investors, or as a sweetening to its underlying assets for an eventual sale.

But now well-heeled XTO joins bedraggled Norse to "occupy" New York's line.

Hmmm...

API Well Number:  31007300060000 (proposed unit map obtained and uploaded off-site here)

Well Name:  Dew Dec A 1H

Company Name:  XTO Energy

Well Type:  Not Listed

Well Status:  App to Drill/Plug/Convert

Objective Formation:  Marcellus

County:  Broome

Town:  Sanford

Status Date:  10/11/2012

Permit Application Date:  10/3/2012

Well Orientation:  Horizontal

Surface Longitude:  -75.519335

Surface Latitude:  42.064837

Bottom Hole Longitude:  -75.506605

Bottom Hole Latitude:  42.054007

True Vertical Depth:  6050

Bottom Hole Total Measured Depth:  11000

Drilled Depth:  11000

Proposed Well Type:  Gas Wildcat

Spacing: 

Spacing Acres:  619.1

Integration: 

Last Modified Date:  10/11/2012

API Well Number:  31007300070000 (proposed unit map obtained and uploaded off-site here)

Well Name:  Cempa Unit A 1H

Company Name:  XTO Energy

Well Type:  Not Listed

Well Status:  App to Drill/Plug/Convert

Objective Formation:  Marcellus

County:  Broome

Town:  Sanford

Status Date:  10/11/2012

Permit Application Date:  10/3/2012

Well Orientation:  Horizontal

Surface Longitude:  -75.503886

Surface Latitude:  42.079922

Bottom Hole Longitude:  -75.514772

Bottom Hole Latitude:  42.091136

True Vertical Depth:  6077

Bottom Hole Total Measured Depth:  10795

Drilled Depth:  10795

Proposed Well Type:  Gas Wildcat

Spacing: 

Spacing Acres:  635.2

Integration: 

Last Modified Date:  10/11/2012

API Well Number:  31025300000000 (proposed unit map obtained and uploaded off-site here — after waiting out a nearly 2-month Freedom of Information Law delay engineered within DEC Albany)
Well Name:  Begeal 1H
Company Name:  XTO Energy
Well Type:  Not Listed
Well Status:  App to Drill/Plug/Convert
Objective Formation:  Marcellus
County:  Delaware
Town:  Deposit
Status Date:  2/20/2013
Permit Application Date:  1/18/2013
Well Orientation:  Horizontal
Surface Longitude:  -75.35141
Surface Latitude:  42.017858
Bottom Hole Longitude:  -75.355152
Bottom Hole Latitude:  42.033241
True Vertical Depth:  5870
Bottom Hole Total Measured Depth:  11170
Drilled Depth:  11170
Proposed Well Type:  Gas Development
Spacing: Conforms to statewide spacing under Title 5
Spacing Acres:  633.23
Integration: Integration order pending
Last Modified Date:  2/20/2013

API Well Number:  31025300010000 (proposed unit map obtained and uploaded off-site here — after waiting out a nearly 2-month Freedom of Information Law delay engineered within DEC Albany)
Well Name:  Shaefer Unit 1H
Company Name:  XTO Energy
Well Type:  Not Listed
Well Status:  App to Drill/Plug/Convert
Objective Formation:  Marcellus
County:  Delaware
Town:  Deposit
Status Date:  2/21/2013
Permit Application Date:  1/18/2013
Well Orientation:  Horizontal
Surface Longitude:  -75.365989
Surface Latitude:  42.121412
Bottom Hole Longitude:  -75.372014
Bottom Hole Latitude:  42.128093
True Vertical Depth:  5995
Bottom Hole Total Measured Depth:  10732
Drilled Depth:  10732
Proposed Well Type:  Gas Development
Spacing: Non-statutory unit under Title 5; conforms to policy objectives
Spacing Acres:  579.95
Integration: Integration order pending
Last Modified Date:  2/21/2013

API Well Number:  31007300080000 (proposed unit map uploaded off-site here)
Well Name:  Kelly Unit 1H
Company Name:  XTO Energy
Well Type:  Not Listed
Well Status:  App to Drill/Plug/Convert
Objective Formation:  Marcellus
County:  Broome
Town:  Sanford
Status Date:  2/21/2013
Permit Application Date:  1/29/2013
Well Orientation:  Horizontal
Surface Longitude:  -75.4611045
Surface Latitude:  42.098447
Bottom Hole Longitude:  -75.468786
Bottom Hole Latitude:  42.108737
True Vertical Depth:  5873
Bottom Hole Total Measured Depth:  10088
Drilled Depth:  10088
Proposed Well Type:  Gas Wildcat
Spacing: Non-statutory unit under Title 5; review in progress
Spacing Acres:  555.49
Integration:
Last Modified Date:  2/21/2013