Natural gas land grab
Imagine you are living a peaceful, rural life in beautiful Bedford County and a large Texas natural gas company arrives one day. They tell you to get off your land, and oh, here's a check. Would you be upset?
That's the situation faced by several land owners near Clearville, Pa., which is about 20 miles east of Bedford, Pa. Spectra Energy of Houston and its partner, New Jersey Resources, wants to seize land via eminent domain to create an underground storage facility for 17.7 billion cubic feet of gas. Among the customers would be the growing number of gas-fired power plants in the Northeast. This is known as the Steckman Ridge project, and work to build pipelines to the site is already underway. Spectra, the former Duke Energy Gas Transmission, plans to open the facility on April 1, 2009.
You, as a homeowner, might be upset both about the land grab--even with court-determined compensation, which may or may not be what you think the land is worth--and because you might be blocked from a royalty windfall if new natural gas deposits are discovered in the Marcellus Shale layer that is the subject of increasingly frenzied energy exploration in Pennsylvania.
This story was first reported last month by the Altoona Mirror, which has also provided links to key court and regulatory documents in the case. The Johnstown Tribune-Democrat also wrote a good story, as did the Bedford Gazette. The Gazette doesn't provide its stories online. I happened to pick up a copy when I stopped with my family at Ed's Steakhouse in Bedford on Saturday night returning from vacation in Michigan, which was how I first learned this was going on. This story hasn't gone statewide, in part because the state's larger newspapers are increasingly retreating into their core territories in the misguided belief that "readers" aren't interested in news outside their home municipalities.
Small town newspapers can report the heck out of stories like this, but as I learned covering the Centralia mine fire for the Shamokin News-Item from 1976-86, you remain a voice crying in the wilderness unless the big city newspapers, TV stations, and Associated Press pick up on your work and do their own reporting.
The affected land owners, who include a York couple, are fighting back. Some of them have retained a Pittsburgh lawyer, and they have succeeded in persuading the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to at least consider a rehearing of its original approval of the project. Eminent domain papers have already been filed against them by Spectra Energy's local lawyer, Charles Rubendall of Harrisburg. There is an unseemly rush to all this that seems driven by Spectra Energy's self-imposed deadline of opening the facility next spring.
No one argues that the Northeast needs more natural gas, although it needs a massive effort to improve the energy efficiency of homes and commercial buildings even more. The question here is fairness to the landowners involved. Spectra Energy has the right under the Natural Gas Act to take their property, but the sad history of energy development in this country is that little people will get trampled by large corporations if someone isn't sticking up for their rights.