American Oil and Gas Reporter - April 2019 - 29

Deep-Well Bills
Less successful, Burd acknowledges,
were attempts to update West Virginia's
deep-well spacing regulations and to provide for expedited deep-well permitting.
He explains that while state statute
defines wells drilled to the Marcellus
Shale as shallow, those drilled to the
Utica Shale are classified as deep wells.
Under state statute, deep wells must be
separated by 3,000 feet on the surface.
HB 2834 would have eliminated that
surface spacing requirement in two instances, Burd says:
· When the wells being drilled were
owned by the same operator; or
· There was a formal agreement by
two operators to utilize the same pad.
HB 2834 also specified 500-foot offsets
and 1,000-foot subsurface spacing for
the perforated lateral portions of wells
owned by different operators.
HB 2834 passed the West Virginia
House of Delegates 100-0, but "sort of
got tied at the hip" in the Senate Energy
Industry and Mining Committee to HB
2802, the Uniform Partition of Heirs
Property Act, which Burd says was intended to keep ownership of farms and
minerals in families.
But he says HB 2802 would have
changed the way oil and gas companies
dealt with multiple mineral owners in a
manner IOGAWV was uncomfortable
with. "We informed the committee chairs
of our disagreement with HB 2802 from
the beginning," he recounts. "The two
bills seemed to get tied together-they
both came from the House and Senate
energy chairmen-and in the end, HB
2802 died in committee sitting right
beside HB 2834 on the agenda."
Meanwhile, SB 665, which would
have enabled producers to expedite drilling
permits for deep wells, fell to an unfortunate misunderstanding, Burd says.
He explains that applications for permits to drill horizontal wells in West Virginia are first posted for 30 day public
comment. It then takes the Department
of Environmental Protection about 60
days to process the APD, resulting an
average 90-100 days for an operator to
receive his permit.
SB 665 would have enabled an operator
to speed the permitting process by paying
an additional fee. Burd says at present,
the fee for the first horizontal well on a
pad is $10,000, and subsequent wells on
the pad are charged $5,000. SB 665 called
for doubling both fees, with the additional
money to be split between the orphan
well plugging fund and going to the DEP
to augment staffing.
The problem, Burd says, was industry

representatives' understanding that SB
665 called for a doubling of fees to
$20,000 and $10,000, while the chairman
of the Senate Energy Industry and Minerals
Committee held steadfast that the agreement was to add the doubling onto the
original fee, in essence tripling the cost
of expedited permits to $30,000 and
$15,000.
SB 665 passed the Senate with the
treble fee amounts, Burd reports. The
House amended it to a doubling of fees
and the Senate then refused to concur.
Burd says he believes this legislation
likely will be back in the future.

Surface Owner Bills
Two other bills of interest that ultimately failed, Burd mentions, were HB
2779 and SB 541, which were combined
in the Senate Judiciary Committee.
He says HB 2779 was intended to enable surface owners to petition to have
severed mineral rights that went unclaimed
for seven years reattached to the surface.
But the bill specified that any royalty
payments escrowed for unidentified mineral
owners would go into the plugging fund,
whereas they now are paid to the surface
owner after seven years, Burd details.
SB 541, meanwhile, would have pro-

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American Oil and Gas Reporter - April 2019

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