# Pipelines And Farmers.



## Vol

AgWeb.

Regards, Mike

https://www.agweb.com/article/pipelines-and-farmers-battle-over-lifetime-loss-naa-chris-bennett/


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## Teslan

Interesting article. Starting to read this article I thought that these were a bunch of whiney farmers. Because here while it's annoying when the oil and gas companies do any work. Either pipelines or wells you can recover the soils and production fairly easily. Especially in row crops. But in these areas soils seem to be much more complex. Just due to the moisture. But in general I've found the representatives for these companies don't know a lot about farming. They fight over rather small payments to farmers to rework their fields after they've been in there. But yet they waste an unbelievable amount of money on things they could control a lot better. For example. They are removing two gas wells from one field. Did they schedule it one right after another? No. So the crew removing one well will come back after two months. Just moving around equipment wastes time and money. Pipelines are another beast. There hasn't been one around as large as 48 inches like the DAPL pipeline. But I've seen 36 inch. I have no idea how much they pay for any of the pipelines. You hear rumors. But nothing concrete. The problem here is they don't pack the soil around the well when they put it back and then it settles so you have a 6 inch trench or more. By then that company is gone and doesn't care about more damages.


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## swmnhay

Teslan said:


> But in general I've found the representatives for these companies don't know a lot about farming.


After they built the windmills they deep ripped the compacted areas going threw standing water.Probably did more harm then good.I stopped the guy and said don't you think you should wait until it dries up.He said just doing what I was told to do.


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## Teslan

swmnhay said:


> After they built the windmills they deep ripped the compacted areas going threw standing water.Probably did more harm then good.I stopped the guy and said don't you think you should wait until it dries up.He said just doing what I was told to do.


That's what they always say. Its true though. They don't know enough or want to argue with their superiors who don't know anything. Last year I yelled at a guy driving out to one of the gas wells they were taking out in a 3/4 ton pickup when it was wet. He was putting some marker flags in. Which was fine, but the part that made me mad is I saw him walk back to the road to put flags at the road. Then walk back to his truck at the well. Made two nice 4 inch tracks. He didn't need to drive out there at all since he walked it anyways. He said he was just doing what they told him too. Then stepped on the gas and drove away. I felt like throwing a rock through his back window.

I'm planning to deep rip where they took and are taking out two gas wells. They are being charged $1000 each for me to rework and replant the two sites. They are taking out another well in a field that I'm ripping anyways to plant in alfalfa and I told them if you get in there before April I won't charge you anything. If you go in there after I plant I'm going to charge about $5000. Especially because it's flood irrigated ground. But we don't have the water issues a lot of folks on this site do.


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## swmnhay

They have roads built to the windmills and right before harvest they graded them and made a berm along the edge with gravel and rip rap rocks they used in wetter spots so combining beans or cutting hay along the drives you had to be extra careful to not get a rock in the combine or hit with cutter.

They clean snow off the roads in winter and the rip rap rocks 3-4" get pushed or blown out it to the field also.I have enough of my own rocks with out adding to them!


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## Teslan

swmnhay said:


> They have roads built to the windmills and right before harvest they graded them and made a berm along the edge with gravel and rip rap rocks they used in wetter spots so combining beans or cutting hay along the drives you had to be extra careful to not get a rock in the combine or hit with cutter.
> 
> They clean snow off the roads in winter and the rip rap rocks 3-4" get pushed or blown out it to the field also.I have enough of my own rocks with out adding to them!


Sounds like the windmill workers come from the same place as oil and gas workers.


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## endrow

We live in the land of pipelines one went threw our township 2years ago .Last year one went across 2 farms 100 acres each that we own and this year one goes across our township again . The one on our farm thye did not care a bit about land and soil restoration they put the top soil around the pipe and the rocky soil on the top and the erosion fence and tubes still lay all over the farm . .......I complained to a consumer advocate and she put a little blurb about it in the local paper and she was a Democrat so the locals attacked her . A lady her and her husband own 2 farms the first pipe line crossed also said they thought I was foolish to complain about the pipe line company. The pipeline that crossed there farm the soil restoration was excellent and she forgot to mention they got for the easement for over $400k for the one farm and over 500k. ... We had a mile and a quarter 60 ft wide of farmland and lost over an acre of good wood land. It is a UGI project and the say we will be paid for our loss but .. UGI says that we need to negotiate with a third party company they use to secure there easements . This 3rd party company wanted us to sign off for One thousand dollars . . It is just like anything else there are good people in the process and some not so good .


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## Teslan

endrow said:


> We live in the land of pipelines one went threw our township 2years ago .Last year one went across 2 farms 100 acres each that we own and this year one goes across our township again . The one on our farm thye did not care a bit about land and soil restoration they put the top soil around the pipe and the rocky soil on the top and the erosion fence and tubes still lay all over the farm . .......I complained to a consumer advocate and she put a little blurb about it in the local paper and she was a Democrat so the locals attacked her . A lady her and her husband own 2 farms the first pipe line crossed also said they thought I was foolish to complain about the pipe line company. The pipeline that crossed there farm the soil restoration was excellent and she forgot to mention they got for the easement for over $400k for the one farm and over 500k. ... We had a mile and a quarter 60 ft wide of farmland and lost over an acre of good wood land. It is a UGI project and the say we will be paid for our loss but .. UGI says that we need to negotiate with a third party company they use to secure there easements . This 3rd party company wanted us to sign off for One thousand dollars . . It is just like anything else there are good people in the process and some not so good .


Yes a few hundred thousand can make a lot of hassle disappear. Our neighbor claims he got $75,000 for a pipeline crossing his farm. But we've learned to divide any number he says by 2 to arrive at the real number. When you get third parties negotiating payments or restoration in never works out. Or what's worse is when the oil/gas companies hire bad subcontractors and heck that's all the oil companies do. Hire subcontractors for everything.


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## endrow

What baffles me is several representatives from Ugi said Ugi pays all the damages and they would not hesitate to compensate me for all the loss. So they hire a third-party right away negotiating company whose mission in life is to make sure I get nothing for damages and this third party company had a rep there most of the time to make sure the contractor could get away with doing everything in a half-ass manner.


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## Teslan

endrow said:


> What baffles me is several representatives from Ugi said Ugi pays all the damages and they would not hesitate to compensate me for all the loss. So they hire a third-party right away negotiating company whose mission in life is to make sure I get nothing for damages and this third party company had a rep there most of the time to make sure the contractor could get away with doing everything in a half-ass manner.


That 3rd party was probably getting what you should have gotten.


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## endrow

Teslan said:


> That 3rd party was probably getting what you should have gotten.


We are afraid of that


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## BWfarms

I hear Keystone leaked 210k gallons in South Dakota. The same pipeline they said would not leak.


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## Teslan

BWfarms said:


> I hear Keystone leaked 210k gallons in South Dakota. The same pipeline they said would not leak.


That's a lot of oil. I wonder how long it was before they noticed it. Or if it was noticed immediately, but that's how much leaked before they could stop it to fix it.


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## somedevildawg

Teslan said:


> That's a lot of oil. I wonder how long it was before they noticed it. Or if it was noticed immediately, but that's how much leaked before they could stop it to fix it.


I don't think it was long after the pressure dropped, seems like 30 min or less? That's a lot of oil in a short amount of time, which is why pipelines are so efficient.....I don't think it was the Keystone Pipeline


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## Teslan

somedevildawg said:


> I don't think it was long after the pressure dropped, seems like 30 min or less? That's a lot of oil in a short amount of time, which is why pipelines are so efficient.....I don't think it was the Keystone Pipeline


If you say the leak in barrels of oil at 5000 barrels it sounds better then 210,000 gallons also.


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## swmnhay

Teslan said:


> If you say the leak in barrels of oil at 5000 barrels it sounds better then 210,000 gallons also.


Thats like when the school board was pushing for a new bond issue.It was so much per acre per week.


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## Teslan

swmnhay said:


> Thats like when the school board was pushing for a new bond issue.It was so much per acre per week.


They spilled 3,360,000 cups of oil! That's outrageous!


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## somedevildawg

Ya, life is full of them......why the hell do they price gas with 9/10's of a gallon.....seems strange that that practice is still envougue. But, it's all about making it sound better......plus Americans can be a dumb lot, I wonder if it's like that in other countries? Just seems we're gettin' hosed a bit, of course when it comes to oil, we're at their mercy...


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## BWfarms

somedevildawg said:


> I don't think it was long after the pressure dropped, seems like 30 min or less? That's a lot of oil in a short amount of time, which is why pipelines are so efficient.....I don't think it was the Keystone Pipeline


http://www.keloland.com/news/article/news/keystone-pipeline-leaks-210-000-gallons-of-oil


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## luke strawwalker

somedevildawg said:


> Ya, life is full of them......why the hell do they price gas with 9/10's of a gallon.....seems strange that that practice is still envougue. But, it's all about making it sound better......plus Americans can be a dumb lot, I wonder if it's like that in other countries? Just seems we're gettin' hosed a bit, of course when it comes to oil, we're at their mercy...


Ya know Texas tried to do away with the 9/10 cent on the end of gasoline prices a few years ago... seems a lot of stations started just pricing it to the nearest cent...

Don't know why but there was SOME BIG brou-ha-ha and the gubmint came in like a bull in heat and FORCED ALL the stations to continue (or go back to) charging the price of gas with the additional 9/10th's cent added on...

Stupid is as stupid does, and nothing is STUPIDER than big gubmint...

Later! OL J R


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## luke strawwalker

Better hold out for enough payment for the easement that basically they "bought" the land from you... consider any future productivity and retaining limited surface rights and "ownership" as something of a bonus, at best.

They drilled four gas wells on this farm in the 80's... back then they bulldozed up slush pits half the size of a football field to hold the drilling mud and cuttings from the drilling bore. Course we made enough in gas royalties over the years that it more than paid for the fact that we lost a couple acres or so to surface installations (wellheads, equipment, and distillate tanks) and had probably 5 acres or so of ground that either became much wetter or wouldn't grow anything at all (drilling mud/salt contamination. Has taken 30 years for those areas to really "naturally heal" themselves so they grow grass now (haven't row cropped since the early 2000's).

We've had pipelines cross BOTH our farms (here at Needville near Houston and at Shiner) and I'm not sure what Dad got out of it... must've been pretty decent because he really kept mum about it (figured my brother and I would pressure him to make some investments in the farms-- go figure!) Anyway, we got EXTREMELY lucky both times... the pipeline here at Needville was going to parallel the south end of the farm about 150 feet in from the borderline along the county road, which would have REALLY screwed things up. Our family has been on this farm for 120 years, but I have NO illusions that we'll be the last generation of farmers here... this entire area is getting SO developed and expensive and farming/ranching just gets more and more difficult every year, and all the new "citiot" neighbor's DEFINITELY don't help... this USED to be a nice place to live but now it's just a sh!thole, and frankly when it's in my name I want to do a land swap for a lot more RURAL (ie NOBODY AROUND) ground and let the developers have this place, and they can throw up another cheap subdivision... make the gubmint happy because of all the extra tax revenue off those fancy suburbanite houses... At any rate, a pipeline right along the road would have screwed up the development possibilities for the future. As it is we have a county drainage canal/ dry creek that crosses the farm from the mid point of the western side where it exits the farm under the state highway at a 45 degree angle across the place, curving around to about the 3/4 line up to the northern edge of the place... so the southern edge was the best "developable" land anyway. Luckily for us a neighbor across the road and up a bit moved in an old house right smack dab in the middle of their proposed right of way and so they moved the pipeline about 1/4 mile north of their proposed route, which put it crossing basically directly across the farm from west to east and under the drainage canal/dry creek, minimizing the impacts of the ROW on development possibility in the future. Dad's cousins fought the eminent domain claims and lost (OF COURSE) and STILL ended up with the pipeline cutting across their ground at basically a 30 degree angle, as it angles gradually from our place up the road about 3/4 of a mile and crosses under the county road, to a 10-acre or so pipeline valve yard and crap that's lit up 24/7 like a [email protected] prison yard and surrounded with razor wire fence and occasionally has a huge gas flare erected on it burning like a rocket engine pointed straight up when they're doing work on the pipeline... Worst thing for us is that they dug up land that had never been farmed (pasture/hay meadow) and created a low spot that's sorta turned into something of a frog pond in the wet season... Their attempts at leveling and reseeding grass (it was all native before with some Dallis grass that had grown in on its own) was pathetic-- those "reclamation" guys are just cheap subcontractors-- they're all doing it on a sub-contract basis with the company for a fixed rate, so they don't give a rip-- they'll do it rain, shine, snow, mud, whatever-- they're getting paid so much per mile of pipeline for whatever it is they're doing, and the faster they get it done and can move on to other ground the more money they make... they dragged a disk across it a few times and spun a little bermuda grass mix on it and called it good... grew a few sprigs of bermuda here and there but mostly dewberry vines for a couple years until the native grass and Dallis grass reasserted itself...

We got lucky at Shiner because when they did the pipeline there, they installed it 25 feet in from the western border fence between our place and the neighbors behind us (our farms back onto each other). They bought a 50 foot easement (Dad never would reveal what he got paid, but from what I gathered it was substantial) and basically the last 50 feet to the fence we can't build anything on (not a problem) but we can fence over it and farm it or grow hay or crops or graze it whatever else-- just no digging or buildings, which we never planned on doing anyway. Basically it's the least obtrusive way the pipeline could have POSSIBLY turned out. The neighbor across the southern fence had a valve installed on the surface in his pasture about 100 feet from the road, so they put up a razor-wire topped storm fence around that with a man-gate in it. They installed 15 foot gates on all the cross-fences between farms on both the north and south side, and I demanded that they lock those gates with their padlocks-- I DO NOT want neighbors having "easy access" via the pipeline gates. (The pipeline company cuts the ROW's once or twice a year and comes through the gates with their tractors/shredders and equipment-- I used to work for United Gas Pipeline doing ROW mowing when I was just out of high school back in about 90-91... We mostly ran through old rice fields around Katy, TX that had been turned into subdivisions right up to the pipeline ROW boundaries... stories I could tell LOL) They did a better reclamation job at Shiner when they were done IMHO than the idgits they had doing it here at Needville.

Shiner is also right on the eastern edge of the big new "Eagle Ford Shale" gas drilling region... they've done a TON of drilling and Dad rented the farm, for pretty good money so he told us (but never would disclose the amount to my brother and I) and Mom's getting royalties (it's all pooled anyway-- again she won't say how much). Drilling has come a LONG way since the 80's... but it's a mixed bag for the landowners, because of how they do things now. Gone are the days of bulldozing a level site for the drilling rig and then bulldozing up a slush pit to hold the drilling mud and tailings... Gubmint environmental regulations mean they now use steel tanks on wheels for holding their water for making drilling mud, mixing up drilling mud, and to hold the tailings and recirculated drilling mud from the drilling rig and bore hole (which is good because once they hit a certain depth they hit salt water which does more damage IMHO than the bentonite drilling mud (and the acids or alkalies used in the drilling mud). Now they do "directional drilling" and bore up to a dozen wells through the same surface bore hole-- they get down a few thousand feet and start cutting out gradually sideways and by the time the well is 10-14,000 feet deep, the bottom of the bore hole is actually up to a mile away from the surface drilling site... so they only have to put drill sites about 2 miles away from each other at the closest points, because drilling towards each other from either site puts the bottoms of the holes practically side-by-side down in the formation. They'll drill out in all directions from the single surface site bore hole, like an upside down tree as it forks and branches going up from a single trunk... which is GOOD. What's BAD is, they level an area about the size of 3-4 football fields (like between 10-20 acres in some places, depending on the lay of the land) and literally will cut away the hills and push them into the valleys to get the site level, and then put down a few feet of caliche gravel on top of it for their equipment to sit on. The well site remains after they're done, so essentially that land is "lost forever" as they have not only the wellhead remaining long after the rig, toolpusher's shacks and equipment trailers, frakking equipment and other stuff is long gone (but they usually will have a small tank farm there for distillate-- usually at least 4 big steel tanks). A lot of them have flares and separator equipment to burn off "sour gas" (hydrogen sulfide gas) that comes up from the formation with the natural gas, that goes into the pipeline (distillate and salt water is also separated out and pumped into the tanks). Those flares burn pretty much 24/7, usually about like a burn barrel if it were up on a pole 20 feet in the air, but sometimes a lot brighter if a pocket of sour gas comes into the well bore...) It's definitely a change to the scenery, seeing all those flare flames up on top of the stacks across the countryside for miles... probably a half-dozen visible just to the north/west of Mom and Dad's house at Shiner... nevermind the one right across the road to the east of the farm about a half-mile up the road on the next place over... It's usually fairly dim but sometimes brightens up considerably-- depends what kind of gas is coming into the bore hole.

Of course the area is having earthquake swarms-- nothing big enough to be "felt on the surface" but certainly register on earthquake sensing equipment... it's a by-product of the frakking they do on the shale formation down there... they pump acid and sand and water down the bore hole at a couple hundred thousand PSI, which literally shatters the rock like glass-- then the sand wedges into the cracks to hold them open, and the acid etches into the rock so the gas can escape from the surface of the cracks into the sand, which it then moves easily through to the bore hole... Now I'm not a geologist, but it's easy enough to figure out that if you take a block of solid rock the size of your house, for instance, and drill a hole into it, then pump a few hundred gallons of water and sand and acid into it at a couple hundred thousand PSI until the rock cracks and shatters, and the sand wedges itself into the cracks so they don't "close up again" when you remove the pressure, that suddenly that block of rock is now BIGGER than it was before... after all that space has to come from SOMEWHERE, which means that the rock is going to be pushed OUTWARDS and take up MORE SPACE than it did before... and all that creates geologic stress in the surrounding rock, and compresses it like a spring, and eventually that energy is going to go SOMEWHERE as the rock shifts to alleviate the stress and release that pent-up energy, resulting in mini-earthquakes...

Course, in Texas anyway, "mineral rights" supersede "surface rights"... "Mineral rights" are defined as mining, drilling, or otherwise "producing" ANYTHING from an inch or two below the surface all the way to the center of the Earth. "Surface rights" are basically anything you can do on the surface of the land-- build a house or building, farm it, graze it, whatever... so if an oil company WANTS TO, they CAN demolish your house to put a well *right there* where your house is-- but they have to "compensate you" for it... course that's not much of an issue any more, except if you lose 10-20 acres to a well site... end up with a 10 foot cliff tapered back slightly on one side, and a 10 foot drop-off where they pushed the dirt from the hill down the slope to make a level drill site on the other side...

The price of progress... And one thing I CAN tell you about it all-- YOU CAN'T STOP "PROGRESS"... Bout as much luck fighting the wind, or Don Quixote jousting with windmills...

Later! OL J R


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## Teslan

luke strawwalker said:


> Later! OL J R


I guess they aren't doing the horizontal drilling there yet? There is one going under our farm that we own mineral rights on. So they are taking out old gas wells. So for the first time I'm going to be operating in some fields without wells in them. And dad should get a spike in payments. Have you seen a horizontal drill pad yet? Those take up to 5 acres. I've heard the payments to the landowner is about $100k. Which actually is roughly what a 5 acre lot goes for around here. They do have to level that 5 acres. Just because the rigs are so huge for those wells. They are slowly taking out the wells on another farm we own, but don't own any of the mineral rights. So it will be nice to not have to deal with oil companies on it going forward. 2 of the wells in the 80s caused my dad lots of issues as like you said they just buried the drillings. It's kind of funny, but when you don't own the mineral rights on land it makes dealing with the oil/gas companies much more difficult. They don't treat you the same for some reason. When really they should treat you better because after the initial payment for the well site you don't get any more benefit just the headaches. At least when own the mineral rights you will get some sort of payments. Unless you are on a railroad section. Then you get very little. Union Pacific gets the rest.


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