Drill, baby, drill may be what’s on the minds of gas companies, but if you’re a landowner of a potential gas site, you probably have a lot of questions.
Thanks to a new software application that’s being test marketed by MIT, landowners may now extract data to see if the gas companies’ proposals to drill are fair and safe. The software tool, called the Landman Report Card (LRC), will help landowners in any state navigate the government and corporate databases, as well as get feedback from other landowners who’ve been in similar situations. And they can do all this before agreeing to a drilling contract.
The term “land man” refers to an oil company representative who often times shows up on the doorstep of unsuspecting property owners who’ve been targeted as having prospective drill sites.
“People often will sign the day the land man shows up at the door,” says MIT professor Chris Csikszentmihalyi. “There are lots of negotiations that people can do, that they often don’t know they can.”
Csikszentmihalyi , co-director of MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media, and Sara Wylie, a grad student in the Science , Technology and Society Program, are the directors of the Landman Report Card project, which is coming to fruition as natural gas exploration in America gains traction as an energy source that doesn’t rely on foreign oil — affecting land and homeowners from New York to Texas to the Rocky Mountains states.
Wylie says that the feedback from the first tests in Ohio were “pretty positive…We will make some tweaks, but for the most part the software tool technically went great.”
Environmental consultant Lisa Sumi, who has worked with Earthwork’s Oil and Gas Accountability Project (OGAP), says the Landman Report Card is needed “because there is a huge power imbalance between the oil and gas industry and the people affected by it. When the oil company comes in, they already have the technology information and legal background. But the landowner, who may never had to deal with them before, is at disadvantage.” OGAP, founded in 1999, works with communities to prevent and reduce environmental degradation caused by oil and gas development.
“The report card,” she says, “provides landowners with a place they can go to make sure they are not being taken for a ride.” The LRC provides leasing rates and comparable deals.
Mark Scoville is one of the affected landowners who participated in the recent test marketing of the LRC. Scoville, an electrical engineer, lives with his young family in northeastern Ohio, the site of much drilling 
due to its location in the relatively newly discovered Marcellus Shale region. Most of Ohio’s oil and gas is located in this eastern third of the state. Scoville believes the LRC is a wonderful tool. (See Scoville’s photo, left, of an oil well near a playground.)
“I’m interested in the tactics that landmen are using. The reviews by people who have dealt with them are like a Consumer Reports for the landowner. The oil and gas industry seems to be exempt from just about everything. Drilling is going bonkers here in the northeastern Ohio suburbs. Residents moved here because it’s zoned for residential use, yet the state has taken over responsibility for all oil drilling, thanks to House Bill 278,” he said.
House Bill 278, which went into effect in 2004, states if a gas company is looking for a tract of contiguous land, and a homeowner doesn’t want to be involved, the state of Ohio can force the homeowner to accept the deal.
In the official wording by Ohio’s Division of Mineral Resources Management in the Department of Natural Resources, the state “has exclusive authority to regulate the permitting, location, and spacing of oil and gas wells in the state, and to revise the laws governing the drilling of oil and gas.”