Fracking wells forced on many US landowners, study finds

The record U.S. oil and gas boom may lie on a bedrock of aggressive sales and legal “compulsion,” a new study has found.

Many Ohio landowners who ended up with fracked wells on their properties were forced by state law to accept them, according to findings published Monday in Nature Energy.

Others gave in only after repeated and aggressive sales attempts, researchers at New York’s Binghamton University found.

The study highlights an underdiscussed topic in the public debate surrounding fracking, a practice which has drawn renewed scrutiny amid the dueling Vice President Harris and former President Trump presidential campaigns in Pennsylvania.

That debate often hinges on “big-picture consequences for the climate and the economy,” lead author Benjamin Farrer said in a statement. 

But Farrer emphasized that this leaves out a key part of the story — the experience of private landowners whose properties oil and gas companies must access if the vast majority of U.S. oil and gas production is to go forward.

Fracking uses explosives and a highly pressurized blend of water, sand and caustic chemicals to force open layers of rock deep underground to extract oil and gas — a suite of technologies that has enabled U.S. oil and gas production to reach record levels under President Biden. In 2023, fracking accounted for about two-third of U.S. oil production and more than three-quarters of U.S. gas.

Fracking is different from traditional oil and gas development in a few key ways. Its combination of high pressure and proprietary blends of caustic chemicals raises the risk of localized pollution to land and water, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. And because it relies on horizontal drilling through broad swaths of geological strata — as opposed to vertical wells into traditional reservoirs — it tends to require far more wells spread across a far larger area.

The work of gaining access to properties for that drilling falls to one of the most important, and least well-known, jobs in the oil patch: the “landman,” whose role is to convince landowners to sign leases for oil and gas extraction.

The structure of these deals — and how the landmen secure them — is often shrouded in secrecy. 

But the Binghamton team got access to detailed records of landmen’s dealings with 31 landowners who companies ultimately sought to force to lease their land. They found a distinct reluctance on the companies’ part to take no for an answer.

“Overall, we find widespread use of personalized tactics like phone calls and visits, as well as evidence that these tactics are used persistently,” the researchers wrote in Nature Energy.

Landmen, they found, spent many months making repeated attempts to contact reluctant landowners. In one instance, an Ohio man faced repeated visits from a drilling company representative while in the hospital for cancer treatment.

Another property owner who was opposed to signing a lease to allow fracking on her land received repeated calls and letters after she refused to do so — and then had company agents seek to persuade her through in-person pitches to her neighbors and family.

And when persuasion fails, the researchers wrote, “we also find that many negotiations end in compulsion rather than in consent.”

In many states, when the hard sell doesn’t work, oil and gas drilling companies can seek to get the state to force landowners to accept wells they don’t want. 

This practice is called “compulsory unitization” or “pooling,” and it provides landmen with a powerful trump card against wavering landowners.

In many oil and gas states, if a majority of landowners atop an oil and gas reservoir consent to drilling, then the state can force the rest to accept drilling as well.

In the past, when companies were using conventional oil and gas drilling — a practice that poses equivalent risk of localized pollution to land or water supplies to fracking but uses much less land — this was “a net positive” for landowners, Binghamton political science professor and study coauthor Robert Holahan said in a statement.

The practice kept a few holdouts from scuttling a lucrative oil deal for everyone else — or allowed those landowners who wanted in on a big deal to force oil companies to admit them, Holahan said.

But fracking is different, because drilling happens horizontally under so many more properties over a far wider area than traditional drilling, he said — a situation where compulsory unitization allows companies to “force mineral owners who otherwise don’t want to lease their property to do so.”

By looking at dozens of randomly-chosen properties that had been the subject of compulsory unitization applications in Ohio, the researchers found that the tactic was being used in early-stage negotiations with landowners — not just holdouts to largely-secured leases or those who refused to respond. 

Holahan argues that oil- and gas-producing states should reform their laws to better reflect the new reality of oil and gas drilling.

“Legal instruments, like compulsory unitization or pooling, are often designed to solve one type of problem (ensuring all mineral owners get a fair share of revenues from an oil or gas well), but eventually can be used for other purposes (forcing mineral owners to lease their rights),” said Holahan. 

“Effective resource policy requires a continuous updating of the law as technologies change,” he added.