NEW BERLIN – More than 400 local citizens filled the Unadilla Valley High School auditorium Thursday night to listen to a presentation put on by the Central New York Land Owners Coalition.
The coalition represents the interests of over 84,000 acres over five different counties – 48,997 of those acres are in Chenango.
The group was organized and operated by volunteers, many land owners themselves, such as the president of the Coalition, Richard Lasky.
Lasky is critical of the companies attempting to obtain gas leases, citing his own poor experience which originally motivated him to help form the group.
“As long as they can take advantage, they will. It’s business. American business. It’s all just numbers to them, but to us it’s people’s lives. They will threaten and they will lie,” said Lasky.
The coalition has grown so quickly, explained Lasky, that he had to create two steering committees to help operate the group. “It’s much bigger than I ever assumed it could get,” he said.
Lasky told the crowd that he receives ten phone calls a day from farmers in central New York wanting to get out of their leases. “Once you’ve signed it, you can’t get out,” he said.
“Now a coalition has the power to bargain with the company. Imagine you are a landlord and a person comes to you interested in renting your apartment but brings their own lease, one they wrote, and then tells you to sign it. That’s crazy, and that is exactly what the companies do. As a coalition we, as the landlords, write our own lease and then tell them to sign it, making sure our concerns are addressed. That’s the power of our coalition,” said Lasky to an applauding crowd.
Petroleum geologist Don Zaengle put on a powerpoint presentation at the meeting. Zaengle worked for Shell for 20 years as a consulting geologist and was hired by Christopher Denton, an Elmira lawyer with the coalition.
“We need to go to the table with an understanding of how things work. We’ll bring the science,” he said.
Zaengle explained that gas companies pursue multiple targets in the earth for potential gas harvest. The drillers, he said, target different layers in the bedrock; some layers have greater potential than others. Zaengle said Black Shale was one of the most-sought sedimentary rocks. The shale’s organic nature traps natural gas inside of it while also acting as a liner, sealing any that might be trapped below it in other formations. One of the largest shelves extends from the Mohawk Valley, across southern New York, into Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania and parts of Canada and beneath Lake Erie.
“This has world class potential,” he said.
Zaengle said companies really don’t know what they will find in any given location until they drill. “They can speculate, but until they drill there is no way to know,” he said.
Zaengle explained the aspects of involved in drilling, raising a few key concerns. Companies expand over a million gallons of water in ‘cracking’ a site and will often crack several different layers of rock. Drillers use a method that involves high pressure water mixed with sand and other chemicals to achieve this.
“We don’t know what chemicals they use and right now they don’t have to tell us. It’s proprietary information. In our leases, we’ll demand to know what it is they are using even if we have to sign a confidentiality agreement,” he said.
The attorney, Denton, finished the three-hour meeting talking about the several scams that private contractors and gas companies use to get people to sign a lease.
“These guys are professional, they are slick. It’s not money, it’s psychology and they do this every day. You are new to this,” said Denton.
Denton explained the drilling laws in New York and gave examples from other areas where drilling become popular.
Denton’s firm will complete a lease for the coalition members and anyone who chooses to sign or use that lease pays about $20 an acre to the firm, which has paid for several experts, said Lasky.
“If people think they could do better, then they don’t have to sign it,” he said. Profit distribution in the coalition will be based on the acreage of its members. Members with more land get a higher percentage.