The pools of natural gas lying beneath the farm fields of Southwestern Ontario are being converted into something potentially more lucrative.
Storage space.
As gas reservoirs run dry, demand has grown to store natural gas in some of them, a move that has caught some farmers napping.
Gas exploration firms have shifted to an emphasis on storage, pursuing lucrative contracts without sharing the wealth with landowners.
So says Harry Lawson, a Chatham-Kent farmer whose advice is often relied upon by the Ontario Federation of Agriculture.
Unbeknownst to landowners, the long-term value of storage can exceed the value of gas extracted under gas-rights agreements, he said.
“People don’t realize the actual value when they sign a storage agreement,” Lawson said.
“And landowners, most of them, will not pay for any legal advice.
“They get what I call ‘Jed Clampett fever’ when the leasing agent comes around waving a cheque under their nose,” he said, referring to the fictional poor mountain man of the television series The Beverly Hillbillies, whose rifle shot aimed at food produced an oil find instead.
“This happens in the spring or fall, typically, when they’re busy and they say: ‘Where do I sign?,’ ” Lawson said.
[More]
The guys who are installing windmills in the Maritimes are doing much the same thing. They wave a piece of paper under the farmer’s nose, talk about how the farmers get paid whether the company makes a dime or not… how the farmer doesn’t need to do a thing… how the windmill can be placed on fallow land or the edge of the field so it doesn’t interfere whatsoever…
Supposedly, if the farmer asks to take the contract to a lawyer, the company folds up and goes to the next farm… and, from what I hear, the contract doesn’t include anything about how the windmill site will be “cleaned up” after it’s no longer viable which means the farmer ends up owning the mess leftover.
Ah, isnt capitalism great?
Ah, isn’t it great to be able to toss out a cliched remark?
There are central planners and there are capitalists. The difference is nicely described today in the WSJ.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124693370103803869.html#mod=rss_opinion_main
A quote:
“But all that happened only after the Planners gave way to what development economist William Easterly has called the “Searchers.” As Mr. Easterly writes in his book “The White Man’s Burden,” “a Planner thinks he already knows the answers; he thinks of poverty as a technical engineering problem that his answers will solve. A Searcher admits he doesn’t know the answers in advance; he believes that poverty is a complicated tangle of political, social, historical, institutional, and technological factors. A Searcher hopes to find answers to individual problems only by trial and error experimentation. A Planner believes outsiders know enough to impose solutions.”
Interesting article! Thanks for linking!!