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Proposed Allegheny County ordinance would create oil and gas lease registry

Ty Wright/Bloomberg

Proposed Allegheny County ordinance would create oil and gas lease registry

For municipal leaders who want to plan their communities, environmental groups that want to track how fracking is impacting Allegheny County resources, or residents curious about the well pad next door — there ought to be an easy way to click around for that data, says county Councilwoman Anita Prizio.

On Tuesday, she plans to introduce legislation to establish a registry of oil and gas leases, compelling companies that have oil and gas rights to provide information about them in a different format than what is currently available on the county’s recorder of deeds site.

The result would be a user-friendly website where the public can search documents by address, municipality, and oil and gas company. 

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It’s what the environmental advocacy group FracTracker Alliance set out to do a few years ago with around $40,000 in funding from the Heinz Endowments. In 2016, it released the Allegheny Lease Mapping Project, an interactive map of parcels in the county with information about oil and gas deeds.

But even though the group hired a software engineer to pull and arrange all the publicly available data out there, it found that after 2010, oil and gas deeds didn’t display location information in digital format. That meant pulling together lease data for many such parcels would involve doing so by hand.

When former Pittsburgh city Councilman Doug Shields, who now represents another advocacy group, Food & Water Watch, told FracTracker that its map was missing some well-known leases — for example, CNX Resources’ lease at Pittsburgh International Airport and Range Resources’ lease for drilling under Deer Lakes Park — he learned about the missing location data and added it to his list of causes.

Then Mr. Shields and FracTracker approached Ms. Prizio with an idea for a registry.

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Her ordinance states that “due to the impactful nature of oil and gas extraction,” the information about which parcels are leased is crucial for land development and government interests.

Fracking “is unique in that it has the potential to involve and/or impact upon practically all land in the county,” the document says. However, the registry is also intended to include areas that are leased for conventional, shallow oil and gas development.

Ms. Pritzio, who represents District 3, which includes Fox Chapel and O’Hara — municipalities that are seeing oil and gas activity moving closer to their borders and raising concerns about it — said she’s not trying to discourage fracking in the county.

“I think it doesn’t really matter whether you’re for or against fracking. We just need to let everybody know where it’s being held. Just so people are aware,” she said.

Oil and gas companies have always had to register their deeds with counties. Over time, the kinds of details outlined in those deeds has changed. For example, instead of filing the entire lease, companies now often file a memorandum of lease, a document that says a lease was executed but doesn’t include the terms. Similarly, the signing bonus payments given to landowners were once available as part of the filing but now are typically not shown.

The proposed registry would ask companies to declare not just deed information but also disclose the status and date of environmental permits and to indicate when a well has started producing oil and gas.

Ms. Prizio said she hasn’t talked to any oil and gas companies about her legislation but would welcome their feedback.

Representatives of local oil and gas firms could not be reached for comment on Saturday.

The registry could be funded through a special fee or use some of the funds the county collects through the statewide impact fee imposed on oil and gas shale wells.

She said the specifics can be hashed out when the legislation is referred to a committee.

Anya Litvak: alitvak@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1455.

First Published: September 24, 2018, 2:34 p.m.

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