Oilandlandowner update
Thank you for visiting this site. If you are here for the first time, welcome. If you are here for more than the first time, thank you for returning.
Many of you may have an active oil/gas lease on your property as I have had. You are therefore an asset to the oil company. Sometime in the future, maybe a few months or a few years, your well will become a non-viable business for the oil company. This may be when you find out the truth about the contract you signed. I am at that stage of an oil/gas lease.
I was led to believe that when the well site was reclaimed my land would be returned to its natural state or as close as humanly possible. What a line I was fed. Mature trees were removed to accommodate the well site. Now that their site is being abandoned, Murphy Oil has no intention of replacing the trees. I am being left with a visual and environmental scar on my property.
In my particular instance the well site construction consisted of removing mature 60-80 foot trees. Now I know that to replace 60-80 foot trees would be a bit overboard. My request is for 6-8 foot spruce trees at a 4 metre spacing. I believe this to be environmentally friendly and well within the range of being humanly possible. Murphy Oil totally refuses to replace the trees.
Is it possible that the land is no longer able to support mature trees because of the buried sumps at the well site? This wouldn’t surprise me. Maybe that is what the oil company is afraid of, the truth. These sumps contain the finings from the well bore as well as the drilling mud and all other chemicals and materials used in the drilling process.
If you have an oil/gas well on your property, were you told that when the well site is reclaimed there still exists a permanent restricted area around the well head? I wasn’t.
When we are approached by a landman to put a pipeline across our property, we are told how the topsoil is rolled back and how minimal their disturbance to our land will be. When the pipeline is no longer in service or abandoned and you would like to have it removed, you are told that to dig up the pipeline would cause a lot of environmental damage to the top soil.
I have since found out that many pipelines can be removed by digging a few holes to access the pipe and then hooking onto the pipe and pulling it out with very little surface disturbance and much less cost than trenching to remove the pipe.
I believe that the recycling of the conceivably thousands of tons of high quality steel that has been or is being abandoned is an issue that needs to be addressed. As pipelines are being installed at an unprecedented rate today, this will only lead to increase this concern tomorrow.
If you are an asset to the oil company there seems to be one set of rules. If you become a liability as when the well is no longer viable, then a different set of rules seems to apply.
We all have to work together in the production of fossil fuels and the sustainability of our earth for future generations. Please don’t let the monetary greed of the oil companies dictate our future. Thanks.
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