The Barnett Shale rig report

The Star-Telegram posted a report on Christmas Eve in the Business section about the new drilling rigs in the Barnett Shale for the period that ended on Friday, December 21, 2007. If interested, you can go here to read it.

Barnett Shale 2007 roundup bulletpoints

TradingMarkets.com has an end of year piece in which they report four statistics pertinent to the Barnett Shale operations in North Texas.

• 100,000-plus:  Number of mineral rights leases filed in Tarrant County in 2007.
• 23,511:  Highest per-acre bonus reported on a commercial or municipal mineral rights lease.
• 15,850:  Highest per-acre bonus reported on a residential mineral rights lease.
• 2,078,512,000:  Average daily natural gas production in cubic feet in the Barnett Shale field in the year’s first eight months.

We’ve got our eyes on stat #3.

It’s gonna be a Happy New Year

I hope everyone is having a great holiday season and that if you traveled for the Christmas festivities that you had a safe return home. Bob sent out a note yesterday thanking everyone for their patience and steadfastness in keeping our group on one accord and I concur with him. We’ve had a couple of issues with duplicate or missing forms but that issue is nearly resolved.

To summarize Bob’s email, we are getting close to concluding the business of getting an agreement with one of the gas companies. The lease proposal will be completed shortly after which we will have the attorney (whose services have been kindly donated) look it over to ensure its legal integrity.

After that, the gas company representatives and our lease negotiation committee will sit down to do some hagglin’ and horse tradin’. Once we reach an acceptable agreement, a signing day and place will be set. At that point, our group members who stuck with us will be able take a very pleasant stroll down to their respective banks to make a well earned deposit.

We want everyone who is within our boundaries (click here to see map) to benefit from our group’s negotiation. Talk to or call your neighbors. If they have not yet joined our group and they are still unsigned.  Let them know that the deadline is fast approaching when we will have to cut off membership to our group.   To get on board with us just have them download our new member information form (see link below) and follow the written instructions on it. They will need to act fast to turn in their form and be counted in our group.

Again, we want to thank all of our members for sticking with us and staying the course. Your dedication is about to reap rewards.

I wish you all a very safe and Happy New Year and a very prosperous one as well.

NEIGHBORHOOD GROUP New Member Information form

It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog

As the familiar saying goes. I ran across a good story in the Dallas Morning News from last month about one Grand Prairie resident, 63-year-old Doranna Corley, who began getting involved in helping people in her neighborhood and ones nearby to understand what is at stake for them with the Barnett Shale gas drilling and mineral rights leasing and how not to get taken advantage of in the process. The article says:

Mrs. Corley is the leader of a grassroots movement to assemble Grand Prairie’s underrepresented neighborhoods – some of which haven’t organized in decades – to inform residents about gas well drilling. Spurred by a bad experience with a drilling company, she launched her door-to-door campaign, issuing fliers and planting yard signs. The first meeting drew more than 400 people.

As I noted a few weeks ago, none of the neighborhoods in our alliance, Neighborhod Group, had an established formal neighborhood association when we began this gas lease endeavor. Nevertheless, this does not mean that we can’t engage the big boys of the energy world and come out with an advantageous contract. It will take tenacity, patience, ingenuity and most of all the commitment, especially from the homeowners we represent to see this process throught to the end. Mrs. Corley is a great example of all of those traits.

Mrs. Corley, consider yourself saluted!

3000th pageview milestone

Just a quick note to let you know that today the NEIGHBORHOOD GROUP Gas Lease Blog surpassed 3000 pageviews since I first clicked “publish” last month. Not bad, for a li’l ol’ blog that began as a way to keep neighbors on a dozen or so streets (Coronet Estates) updated on efforts to organize a group to negotiate a gas lease with the energy companies.

Once we began incorporating other subdivisions and neighborhoods our group began to grow faster and it was then I decided to change the name of the blog to its current name to encompass all of the neighborhoods we represent.

Thank you for taking the time to stop by and read what’s going on. If you want to see something on the blog that relates to gas leases or gas drilling drop me a line at arlingtongasdrilling (at) gmail.com and tell me about it. I’ll see what I can do.

Be the Tortoise, not the Hare

The moral of the Tortoise and the Hare story was that “slow and steady often wins the race”. In essence, that is what we are trying to accomplish with Neighborhood Group. We want our our neighbors to join us in the worthy common cause which is negotiating the best gas lease deal possible for all of our members. But we’re not identifying with the tortoise just for the purpose of being slow. Our goal is to put together a lease with generous financial terms for you, our members, but to also include stipulations and fair conditions that the energy company will abide by. Above all, the Negotiation Committee wants to “get it right the first time” when it comes to this gas lease issue. We feel that we would be doing you a disservice if we were to haphazardly slap together a contract proposal that had more holes than your grandmother’s doily.

We understand that some folks were hoping a deal could be negotiated prior to Christmas in order to have a little extra “holiday cash”. However, rushing to meet a deadline like that would be counterproductive to our group. The Negotiation Committee is carefully looking at the best way to reward your commitment to our group with this lease, not only in the short term but in the years to come as well.

You all have been models of patience and steadfastness and we humbly thank you. Now we ask for your continued patience and support in the next few critical weeks as we craft the details of this contract with your best interests as our guide. Let’s win together!

Don’t take the bait!

In the coming days expect to see a flurry of offers from land brokers trying to get you to sign a gas lease for your mineral rights….as an individual.  You’ll find big envelopes in your mailbox, flyers on your door with offers and even phone calls and voicemails trying to sway you into signing away your mineral rights.

Don’t do it!  The offer will likely be below what other nearby neighborhood alliances have received recently.  Those other neighborhood groups were able to negotiate much higher amounts and better lease terms because the residents were committed to sticking together and negotiating as a group.  There is strength in numbers.

We are asking our group members to hold steady and not sign the lease papers that they receive in the mail.  By signing now, the gas companies are dictating the terms and amounts.  We have a great negotiating team in place that is knowledgeable and highly committed to bargaining for the best possible lease for all of our great group of members. Additionally, we are also homeowners and have a vested interest in seeing all of our neighbors succeed with a great gas lease.

Don’t just settle for the arbitrary amount that the gas companies feel they can get away with.  After all, when they started making offers they thought our mineral rights were worth much less than they seem to think they are worth now.  Now that they know we have a strong group, they would like nothing better than to get our members to sign for less than what they know they’ll have to offer in the end.  By standing firm with us, our group members are reinforcing the signal to the land brokers and energy companies that they will have to come to the negotiating table ready with offers that are equal to or better that what we are seeing around our vicinity.

Negotiation Committee meets and begins to craft contract

A broadcast email went out from Bob Haelle yesterday advising all of our members about the Negotiation Committee’s first meeting held on Thursday, December 13, 2007. The email read as follows:

The negotiation committee held their first meeting yesterday, Thursday. We met to discuss the lease we intend to submit during negotiations. We put our general terms in place and are working toward further details. Once we have it all put together, we will present the lease to our attorneys for their review.

Please keep in mind, it took other neighborhood groups more than 4 months to get this far. We have come a long way in just two months. The key now is to be patient. It is very tempting to take offers that may be presented to you, but the lease is more important than the sign on bonus. We are attempting to put clauses in our lease that will best benefit us all. Once you read the final draft, I am certain you will be happy you held back and stayed with the Neighborhood Group.

In addition, few of us planned on getting any money regarding the Barnett Shale and if you get a lump sum of cash just before the end of the year, it could very easily place you into the next higher tax bracket. If that happens, you’ll end up paying a lot more to Uncle Sam in the year 2007 and your bonus money could possibly be cut in half.

Again I ask, please be patient. We are working hard for you.

Bob Haelle

If you are a member of Neighborhood Group and did not receive the above email it is possible that we don’t have your email address on file or that the address may have been inadvertently entered incorrectly. If so, please send us an email at bobhaelle@gmail.com and we’ll check it and get it corrected.

Time is ticking! Help grow our group even more.

Last Friday I posted a recap about our successful resident meeting the previous night, Thursday where approximately 300 neighbors turned out. In that post I mentioned Bob’s announcement that the cutoff date to join NEIGHBORHOOD GROUP would be extended to include any folks who, to date, have not yet had the opportunity to turn in their signed group information form.

My blog post today is just a note for you to remind and encourage your next door neighbor that there is still time to join with us. But they need to act QUICKLY. We want to keep it open as long as possible but that window of opportunity will close sooner rather than later. I don’t have a firm date of when that will happen so in order to avoid being left out in the cold, tell your neighbor to join our group of homeowners.

If they need a NEIGHBORHOOD GROUP information form they they can click the link below to download a copy. They’ll need to print it, fill it out, sign it and then return it to Bob Haelle at the address on the form.

NEIGHBORHOOD GROUP Information form [Word doc]

Thanks for your continued support and dedication to this cause.

Get in touch with your inner math geek

Neighborhood Group member Warren showed us a website that explains a little more clearly how to calculate the square footage of your property.  It also includes another way to calculate the area if your property is oddly shaped which is much easier than the one I alluded to in an earlier post.

That other formula involved measuring each inside angle of the property shape and from there descended into a math abyss where terms like “polar coordinates”, “vector notation”, “sine” and “cosine” were being tossed around like juggling chainsaws. So, instead of risking a migrane headache, try the website mentioned above. It might save you a few brain cells. Thanks, Warren.