Attorney general asked to investigate gas lease tactics.

[Youngstownshrimp]

Eighteen hits, should I respond?  No insignificant!

[irishbobcat]

Be wary of the shady, shrimpy, gas land man bearing fruits of silver and gold!  Say NO to fracking on your property!

Attorney general asked to investigate gas lease tactics.

   
COLUMBUS — Three state legislators have asked Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine to investigate the possibility that energy companies are using deceptive tactics as they persuade property owners to sign oil and gas leases.

Cited as evidence is a five-page document that supposedly was found in a Yellow Springs yard after the homeowner was visited by someone trying to get her to sell her oil and gas rights.

The document has come to be known as the "the lost landman's handbook" on anti-drilling websites. It lists discussion points and suggests ways to persuade residents to sell their oil and gas rights. Since last year, more than 1,950 Stark County property owners have signed oil and gas leases with energy companies.

Representatives with the Center for Health, Environment & Justice received the document and began distributing it to anti-drilling activists.

At last week's Plain Township trustees meeting, trustee Louis P. Giavasis had the document introduced into the official meeting record.

"If any resident of Plain Township wants a copy of this they can have it," Giavasis said, explaining why he wanted it on the record. "It's unbelievable."

The document also went to the Ohio House Agriculture Committee, and Rep. Teresa Fedor, D-Toledo, asked DeWine for the investigation. Rep. Dennis Murray, D-Sandusky, who is on the agriculture committee, and Rep. Mark Okey, D-Carrollton, who stepped away from the committee because he's considering a lease agreement with Chesapeake Energy, also signed the letter to DeWine.

"This document causes us great concern and apprehension over the possibility of a pattern of corrupt activity and actual fraud in the leasing of landowner oil and gas rights in Ohio," Fedor wrote to DeWine. "The document highlights practices that are questionable at best and outright misleading on material issues of fact and law."

Fedor admitted that the document hasn't been authenticated. She hopes the attorney general's staff can determine if the document is legitimate.

Fedor said that she wants DeWine's staff to determine if fraud has been used to get Ohio residents to sign oil and gas leases.

The oil and gas industry has increased activity in Ohio over the past year, looking for opportunities to drill into the Marcellus and Utica shale rock formations. Energy companies hope to extract natural gas trapped in the rock.

Drilling opponents question the safety of hydraulic fracturing, a process used to break up the rock and release natural gas. Opponents cite cases where natural gas and other chemicals have migrated into groundwater after drilling and hydraulic fracturing. There is a push for a moratorium on using hydraulic fracturing with horizontal drilling until after a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency review is completed in 2012.