Why accepting a natural gas easement is a bad deal

Here are a few things you get with a pipeline easement: no right to grow trees on it, limited right to put up fences, and if you do, you have to have gates in them that the pipeline company can put their own lock on. 300x162 Right-of-Way diagram, in Kinder Morgan Right-of-, by Kinder Morgan, 2 June 2008 But you do get to continue to pay taxes on land you can no longer fully use; land that now contains a potentially corrosive, leaky, explosive hazard that you can’t tap for your own use. And you do get pipeline company contractors coming through at their convenience to mow or otherwise clear the right of way. Contractors who may be somewhat unclear on where the right of way ends and your trees, for example, start. Without ever having to notify you then or tell you later what happened. And it’s even worse than that: you may get another pipeline, and meanwhile the pipeline company will claim rights over local governments and developments. All while the world has changed and the sun has risen on a better way.

All bets are off if there’s a pipeline break

300x225 Berrien County Sheriff, GDOT, city of Nashville, Kinder Morgan trucks, in Berrien break, by John S. Quarterman, 6 November 2014 If there actually is a pipeline break, even a minor one like the 6 November 2014 break in Berrien County, Georgia, you also get evacuated while law enforcement, local government, state government, medical emergency vehicles, and of course pipeline company vehicles and personnel use your property without your permission. And not just on the pipeline easement, either. You can see a white pipeline company truck parked on private land in this picture, while the landowner was evacuated. Everybody else also used his land for turning around, parking, and TV interviews.

You paid once; they profit indefinitely

For all this you get: paid a pittance once while the pipeline company continues to profit indefinitely. As Tom Hochschild asked the Lowndes County Commission,

Considering the vast profits Florida Power and Light and Sabal Trail stand to make from the use of our land, I know they can do a lot better than hotel stays, Big Macs, and temporary jobs….

I want to propose a profit-sharing venture between Florida Power and Light, Sabal Trail, and Lowndes County, where a percentage of their corporate profits are given to the neediest families in Lowndes County. This profit-sharing venture would fit nicely into Florida Power and Light and Sabal Trail’s core values of ethical behavior and community enhancement.

Thank you for considering this.

The answer from Sabal Trail or FPL? Crickets.

Which pipeline company?

Southern Natural Gas (SONAT), the owner of that particular 1950s pipeline, is owned by El Paso Pipeline Partners (EPB), which is owned by Kinder Morgan, Inc. (KMI). When each of these corporate mergers occured is unclear even to the landowners with which the latest megacorp purchaser obtained the easement as part of the package, because the new owners are under no obligation to inform the landowners.

Your land (excuse me: formally the easement on your land) is just a tiny minor asset to these megacorps, to be bought and sold like anything else, without your approval or even knowledge. That doesn’t fit too well with family-owned land passed down for generations.

It doesn’t even sit too well with a developer’s ability to put up a subdivision. My neighbors and I successfully fought off a subdivision partly because a pipeline ran through it.

Which easement contract?

If you the landowner want to put up a fence, you may be subject to the new corporate overlord’s latest easement contract. For example:

In general, Kinder Morgan’s right-of-way agreements prohibit the following:
  • Buildings, structures or foundations, overhanging roofs and balconies, garden sheds, patios, concrete slabs or swimming pools
  • Trees, tree canopy and bushes or shrubs tall enough to restrict line of sight
    (Note: Trees should be planted far enough from the right-of-way so that no part of the tree covers or shades the right-of-way area. Bushes or shrubs should typically be shorter than four feet to avoid restricting line of sight.)
  • Wells or other boreholes
  • Pile-driving
  • Blasting
  • Adding or removing soil
  • Storage of flammable materials, equipment, bulk goods and vehicles
  • Parallel or tapering encroachment by roads or other utilities
  • Dumping or burning materials such as waste, scrap lumber and slash

In general, Kinder Morgan’s right-of-way agreements allow the following:

  • Raising certain crops
  • Livestock grazing
  • Hiking and horseback trails
  • Sports and game fields, parks and golf courses (subject to limits regarding re-grading, landscaping or paving and on installation of structures such as exercise equipment, goal posts and backstops)

Did you catch these parts: “no part of the tree covers or shades the right-of-way area” and “Parallel or tapering encroachment by roads or other utilities”. That’s right: KMI controls uses of your property that are not even on their easement. They can come on your property at any time through their right of way, they can trespass on your property to trim your trees, but you can’t even build a road paralleling their right of way.

Plus don’t bet on them staying on the right of way while they’re gouging their pipe into your ground. Nashoba Conservation Trust in If Your Property is Affected/Impact to Homeowners quotes INGAA’s Siting and Right of Way for Interstate Pipelines:

‘In addition to the permanent easement required to operate and maintain a pipeline after it is constructed, the company also will require a temporary easement during construction. A permanent easement typically is about 50 feet wide and a temporary easement typically will range between 50 to 75 additional feet depending on the size of pipeline; larger pipelines require the use of bigger equipment and more room to operate. The amount of workspace required is also dependent on the type of terrain that will be crossed and any special construction requirements.”

Now Kinder Morgan’s right of way writeup says:

Kinder Morgan’s right-of-way agreements are negotiated individually with each landowner; therefore, right-of-way widths and terms of agreement may vary with each individual property. A change in property ownership does not alter the right-of-way agreement. Landowners may obtain a copy of their easement agreement from their local county courthouse.

Maybe that’s true, so maybe if you already have an old-time easement from sixty years ago it might not have all the current restrictions. But if you fall for a pipeline easement now, you’re going to get all the most modern terms and conditions conducive to pipeline profit.

Pipeline company over local government and developers

It’s not even just you, the landowner, the pipeline company will want to control. Developer Handbook, Kinder Morgan, Inc., 11 June 2014,

This booklet is also designed for city planners, building inspectors, surveyors, landscape and building architects, and other interested parties who may be working near or approving work adjacent to our easement….

  • Send us your plans so we can review and approve them.

That’s right, pipeline companies claim right of review and approval over local governments and developers. You not only get to continue to pay taxes on land you no longer really control, they get to determine how those taxes are used.

Then they’ll want more pipelines

Speaking of “roads or other utilities”, once you’ve a pipeline has encroached on your property, its current owner may want an offshoot pipeline. One of the earliest stories about Sabal Trail in the Valdosta Daily Times, Massive pipeline project may cross Lowndes, by Jason Schaefer 30 June 2013, said:

To multiply his concern, the caller explained to Cameron that when the project is complete, Sabal Trail may elect to build branch pipelines from the main artery that would cross his property as well.

“You mean to tell me that you can go somewhere else on my land?” Cameron asked the caller, he said. “How many ditches are they going to dig before they get through with all their stuff?”

And pipeline companies will go for eminent domain to get offshoots if they don’t get an agreement for them to start with.

Hidden Pipelines

Including pipelines that aren’t even on PHMSA’s National Pipeline Mapper, because they may go to, for example military bases. Do local emergency responders even have appropriate information about such pipelines? How would you know?

Speaking of how would you know, why am I using Kinder Morgan in most of these examples? Because KMI is more transparent than Sabal Trail. After all, Sabal Trail has no history: it’s a shell company (Sabal Trail Transmission, LLC, co-owned by Spectra Energy) managed by a shell company (Sabal Trail Management, LLC), owned by the same Spectra Energy that’s famously “not familiar” with their own (lack of) safety record.

Other companies’ pipelines

300x299 Mitchell County, Georgia, Tax Assessors, in Pipeline protesters, Leesburg, GA, by John S. Quarterman, 10 July 2014 And if your property was in a path some pipeline company considered convenient, some other pipeline company may think the same thing later, as is happening right now with Sabal Trail wanting to parallel SONAT. For example the property in Leesburg, Georgia that already has both the SONAT pipeline and a power line easement: Sabal Trail wants to gouge another hundred-foot right of way through between the two. That’s what resulted in the famous court case in Leesburg, GA last July.

More pipelines in the same easement

You don’t even know the same pipeline company might not end up putting another pipeline on the same easement, like Spectra Energy, co-owner of Sabal Trail, is proposing right now in British Columbia, Canada for their pipeline to an LNG terminal.

Pipeline companies pretend it’s still the 1950s

Fifty years ago, ten, even five, accepting a natural gas pipeline on your property might have been a way of supporting your neighbors, your state, your country’s national security. Pipeline companies and FERC keep using all those arguments.

Kinder Morgan’s Developer Handbook starts with these quaint antique words:

Kinder Morgan transports natural gas from the well to your Local Distribution Company (LDC). Your LDC brings natural gas to your home.

But that’s not what a lot of these pipelines are for. Kinder Morgan’s Southern Natural Gas page says:

SNG is the principal natural gas transporter to southeastern markets in Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina, which are part of one of the fastest growing natural gas demand regions in the United States. The SNG system is also connected to Southern LNG’s Elba Island LNG terminal near Savannah, Ga.

That’s the Elba Island LNG that’s already in formal FERC filing for LNG export as docket CP14-103.

Plus right at the end of the Transco -> Sabal Trail -> FSC path in Florida are three already-authorized LNG export operations plus a fourth applying and still more getting ready.

The big money in natural gas is exporting fracked methane for big profit from much higher overseas prices.

The fast rise and impending bust of the LNG export craze

The LNG export craze is new in the last five years because of the “shale gas revolution”, which is a euphemism for fracking. The direct connection between a glut of fracked gas seeking an export market and new pipelines has been spelled out by for example by Paula Gant, head of the Office of Fossil Energy that permitted those three LNG export operations in Florida, and by FERC Commissioner Tony Clark, both in testimony before Congress.

Yet those prices aren’t as much higher as they seem when the costs of pipelines, liquification, and shipping are factored in, and China’s recent deals with Russia for Siberian methane push prices down, with that downward pressure increased by the recent U.S.-China agreement on moving to energy sources with no emissions.

The whole carbon bubble is going to pop, along with the fracked gas LNG export boondoggle, because the sun also rises.

Natural gas is the fuel of the past

The world was different fifty, ten, or even five years ago, before solar photovoltaic panels became the least expensive source of energy in the U.S. Yes, it’s happened that fast. Remember the “shale gas revolution” took off in about a decade, and solar power is moving way faster than that.

Five years from now solar power will be so obviously a better deal for everyone that there will be only one term for people who accepted a gas pipeline easement this year. Ten years from now solar power will produce more energy than any other source in the U.S., as former FERC Chair Jon Wellinghoff predicted more than a year ago and as actual energy production deployment figures continue to bear out. Natural gas industry analysts brag about a projected 56% increas in shale gas from 2012 to 2014, while actual solar deployments already increased 200% from 2012 to 2014.

Solar power is going to win like the Internet did, because the price goes down year after year and the deployments go up like compound interest. It’s going to happen so fast it will “make your jaw drop with astonishment”. Unless, of course, you’re looking past the pipeline company and FERC flim-flam to the actual energy price and deployment figures.

Don’t be a mark

Speaking of flim-flam, there is a technical term from circus sideshows for landowners or local governments who agree to easements for LNG export pipelines:

Suckers!

Don’t be a sucker, a chump, a mark, a rube.

Help stop the pipeline boondoggles.

Help the sun rise

Help the sun rise. U.S. electric demand continues to go down, while solar goes up like a rocket. We know how to shift every U.S. state to sun, wind, and water power. We have plenty of natural gas pipelines already in place to pick up the slack while we’re doing that. We don’t need more.

No Pipeline.

Yes Solar, Wind, Conservation, and Efficiency.

-jsq

22 thoughts on “Why accepting a natural gas easement is a bad deal

  1. We have a gas line approx. 1 mile ling running through our property which already has an easement in place. the gas company is looking to widen the easement for about a 2 year period only. we are trying to calculate a fee for that. What would you suggest we ask?

  2. I tend to disagree with many of the points you are trying to make, but understand your concern. Starting from the bottom, the upfront cost of having solar powered – anything- is astonishingly high, as cited by the following website of almost $100,000 up front cost. Sure you save the same amount of money over 25 years, but it puts people in the same dilemma as renting versus owning a home. http://www.hgtv.com/remodel/mechanical-systems/the-true-cost-of-solar-power
    Next, natural gas is still the cleanest burning fossil fuel, (reducing fuel costs and burning cleaner than traditional gasoline). Please refer to this website http://www.bankrate.com/finance/auto/natural-gas-vehicles.aspx citing the US’s opportunity to use natural gas to break away from dependence on foreign oil.
    Your picture of one government car partially on some grass on a roadway (which could also be the public easement area anyway) is a joke. You have no context for why that person is there, if they had permission or not, and if the 3 square feet that his/her tire is own is even a private citizens. As you show yourself, each easement negotiation is between the company and the land owner. Personally, I have seen land owners grovel at the chance to get the tiniest bit of money, and i have see people hold out for eternity and go to court trying to get more. Each person has different motivations in accepting or combating the acquisition of their land. I will agree that people should stand up for their rights more as property owners and read the fine print, but to completely shun the natural gas pipeline industry is a little ludicrous based on the information you convey. Statistics, propaganda, and messages can be conveyed all sorts of ways to make anything look good or bad. As far as fees go, theses people each have the chance to get paid something for that land. And most of the time that is all they deserve, a payment for a piece of their land. Land transactions occur everyday. Please stop framing situations with poorly supported arguments, when indeed they are important issues that need to be addressed. The more people you convince to believe this poorly supported crap, the less people will actually use real information and well grounded arguments to create change. Get people to think about the situation and what can actually be done to improve it rather than citing one quote, showing one picture, and making a half cocked claim at the future of renewable energy to convince people that pipelines are bad.

    1. If your solar installer is quoting you $100,000, you should find another solar installer.

      Solar prices continue to drop even farther below any other source of energy:

      http://www.l-a-k-e.org/blog/2015/09/solar-prices-will-drop-much-further-below-fossil-fuels.html

      For energy independence and national security, the U.S. Department of Defense is actively deploying solar power in Georgia and Florida:

      http://www.l-a-k-e.org/blog/2015/08/solar-power-for-military-bases-in-florida-gulf-power-a-southern-company.html

      Solar power needs no fuel, so is far cleaner and safer than any fossil fuel, especially a land-taking, river drilling, explosion-risking invading pipeline from Texas!

      Local people, that comment from “jake” from Texas is typical of what you’ll hear from any supporters of Sabal Trail at the FERC meetings this week: they’ll tell you what you “deserve” for your own land!

      I don’t know about you, but I think we know more about our own land, rivers, health, safety, and people than Spectra Energy from Houston, Texas.

      Tonight in Albany is a good time to tell Spectra and FERC that:

      http://spectrabusters.org/2015/09/28/citizens-oppose-sabal-trail-in-albany-moultrie-and-valdosta-this-week-wtoc-albany-ga/

      Your neighbors will be watching.

      We have a chance to stop this boondoggle, and the whole world will watch that!

      -jsq

  3. Our property has a one-mile pipeline that was negotiated in the early 1950’s by a previous landowner. Now, KMI is trying to execute rights that are inclusive in their new-style contract, not those per the original contract. We have caught their personnel wandering around on our property, off their easement. Their pipeline is only buried 22″ – 24″ under the surface of the ground, which it should be buried at lease 36″ under the surface of the ground. Now, what remedies do we have as small-time landowners against these big-time money-pockets?

  4. My property does NOT have a pipeline easement, however, a pipeline was built on it before I owned it. Their easement was with another property about half a mile away. They have laid waste to my property and say they can do anything they like for 70′ around it.

  5. +If a pipeline company invokes eminent domain could the land owner receive less per rod than originally offered?

    1. Big time. The company is only obligated to pay you appraised value per acre of ROW. Keep in mind, once you’re being condemned by eminent domain, YOUR LOCAL JUDGE is the ruling party. He/she determines what you’ll be paid. In other words, he’s not going to give you any more than he gives your neighbor. And to be fair, the only way to figure that is by appraised value.

  6. I have a gas line easement through my property. Kinder Morgan/ Southern Natural Gas. They refuse to secure the opening from the road that they created and now I have a massive dumping problem. They are supposed to keep the right of way clear but refuse to remove the items dumped there or prevent recurring dumping by securing the opening.

  7. It’s apparent the author is not a property owner. Or if he is, he doesn’t own much property. What an awful article.

  8. my husbands grandmother recently passed. She left him land that has a pipeline running through it and some equipment on the property. lots of gauges and knobs a concrete slab about 6 x6 with tanks regulators on it with the company stamp and other phone numbers and what not. it appears to be maintained often. We have no documentation to what the agreement was with his granny and them but at this time we wonder are we owed any monies from them having the eqiupment there? a rental fee? thanks.

  9. I was contacted about allowing company surveyor exploring the best way to route the pipeline thru Choctaw county , alabama. since I own 80 acres of forestry land and hunting lease on it( it lies at the end of the road a mile off the paved county. at first I said I wasn’t interested as would remove tree production and interferer with my leasing for hunting but my hunter/lease said I should negotiate with them as they might pay more for the easement than the land withtimber would sell for.If invested could provide college education money for grandchildren. Question : if they cut across the corner and say take out 10% or 8 acres . then I could have food plots for wildlife but NOT GROw Timber any more on that property. So I will pay taxes on entire acerage,be limited as to uses of land, have loss of privacy as workers can enter propoperty as they need, my needs are of little concern any more as far as that acerage. a fair price should be 3x the value of a fully stocked mature timber tract(say $3000 per acre x 3= $9,000 x 8 acres=$72,000 plus have written into contract only 1 pipeline allowed ,additional pipelines will be allow at a renegotiated fee but not to exceed the current price paid plus increase annually for inflation, pipeline company will only use access to the easement 8 acress and will maintain roads controlling any erosions caused by constrcrticon and maintaince. surface damage to land outside the deeded easement acreage will be paid on a sqare foot basis and a charge for timber damaged and /or replacing, esthetics and environmental damages, plus whatever else I think of to protect my interests.If they class timber adjacent to easement as danger timber a fee of $100 per stump of trees cut will be paid unless I am notified in writing that said danger trees have been marked and I am notified by certified letter and given 30 days to contact areas= manager to meet witih his representative and I be allow to remove trees myself. how does this sound for starters?

  10. i HAVE A TECO GAS LINE RUNNING THROUGH MY PROPERTY DOES THAT CHANGE MY ZONING TO COMMERICAL REAL ESTATE . THANK YOU ROBERT F .

  11. I’m trying to find information on how often the Pipeline companies are supposed to cut grass on the property that they own in our subdivision. They informed our HOA that they are only obligated to cut it once every 3 years, which sound absurd since the grass literally grows 5 feet high every month! I’m looking for the ordinance but can’t find anything about it. Where can I go to look? I’m in Georgia.

  12. I NEED TO BUILD NEW FENCE TO KEEP CATTLE IN .I STARTED DOZING THE OLD FENCE A D BRUSH BUT THE GAS LINE AND PHONE COMPANY TOLD ME I CANNOT CLEAN THE OLDGENCE OUT AND PIT IN NEW MY GRA DAD LEFT ME THE LAND WHAT AM I TO DO

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