W.Va. Supreme Court says landowners can keep drillers from using their land to frack on other properties

David Wentz looks at an EQT gas well site on his property. (ProPublica photo by Raymond Thompson Jr.)

Last Wednesday, the West Virginia Supreme Court ruled unanimously that oil and gas companies are trespassing if they enter private land to use it for something the owners have not agreed to.

"Companies must obtain permission from surface owners in order to use their land to reach reserves under other properties, Justice John Hutchison wrote for the court," report Kate Mishkin and Ken Ward Jr. of the Charleston Gazette-Mail and ProPublica's Local Reporting Network.

The problem that led to the lawsuit began more than seven years ago. EQT Corp. owned the mineral rights on Beth Crowder and David Wentz's farm, and was allowed to use a 20-acre well pad on their property to drill for natural gas under their property. But EQT also owned drilling rights to about 3,000 acres nearby, and wanted to use the Wentz well pad to drill horizontal hydraulic fracturing wells to reach those tracts. Crowder and Wentz told EQT it could not do that, but EQT ignored them and drilled nine wells, causing considerable noise and traffic on the farm, Mishkin and Ward report.

The ruling "represents a rare victory for residents in a state where economics and politics are increasingly controlled by the natural gas business after decades of domination by the coal industry. Making it more gratifying for Crowder and Wentz, the court that ruled in their favor has been under the microscope because of connections to the gas industry," Mishkin and Ward report.

Industry officials say fracking limits environmental harm by drilling multiple wells from one pad, but that practice has increased the nuisance for nearby residents, many of whom didn't own their surface tracts when the mineral rights under them were sold. The sellers could not have anticipated the advent of fracking, which critics say is sometimes more of a nuisance than traditional drilling. "Though bills have been introduced year after year that are designed to mitigate the impacts on residents, West Virginia lawmakers have repeatedly refused to act," Mishkin and Ward report.