More farmers explore mine legal rights

Comment: Farmers, you need to take a stand against uranium mining in Virginia or they will take your land. This is happening in the Virginia now because of Mt. Top Removal! People in the mountains of Virginia are losing their land or they have to sell the land at a $1 because of the pressure from mining companies!

By Sam Burgess
Posted Tue Sep 15, 2009 8:03am AEST

Legal Aid Queensland says more farmers are accessing its services worried about mining companies taking over their land.

The Farm and Rural Legal Service was launched last year to give legal advice to farmers in dispute with mining companies or developers.

Legal Aid solicitor Glen Martin says farmers often feel powerless against big mining companies.

"A large mine that is proposed for an area - it is difficult to stop it - but you have to take steps as best you see it to address each particular case and put your best case forward and argue it," he said.

"If it's your will to proceed in that area then put your case forward."

Mr Martin says more farmers are starting to use the service to find out what their rights are.

"You need to take a strong stance if that's your position, so I think there are opportunities there," he said.

"It's been a question of, or a case of, exercising those rights and opportunities to the best of your abilities."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/09/15/2685964.htm

Uranium Resources buys mineral rights

Comment: Is this the future of Virginia if uranium mining is allowed? Just think about this, someday, a driller will just come up to your land and start drilling boreholes!

Friday, July 17, 2009, 12:16pm CDT
Dallas Business Journal

Uranium Resources Inc. has signed a deal to purchase mineral rights on 113,000 acres of uranium-rich land in New Mexico.

Dallas-based Uranium Resources is buying the mineral rights from NZ Uranium in exchange for $1 million cash and four million shares of common stock along with future royalty considerations. The land is located in the Crownpoint area of New Mexico. The deal is expected to close in mid-August.

Uranium Resources (NASDAQ: URRE) estimates the acreage holds about 35 million pounds of uranium. The company already owns a 40 percent fee interest in one section of the Crownpoint land and previously leased other sections.

As a result of the deal, Uranium Resources will increase its New Mexico holdings to approximately 300,000 acres of mineral rights and more than 136 million pounds of uranium.

http://www.bizjournals.com/dallas/stories/2009/07/13/daily54.html?ana=from_rss

Meeting in Grundy Underscores Tensions

Comment: The article below is about mineral rights in Virginia. Beware of people coming to your house and promising you the moon; do not sign anything pertaining to mineral rights (uranium) unless a lawyer is present. The state of VA takes the sides of the Corporations!

Underscores Tensions

By Daniel Gilbert
Reporter / Bristol Herald Courier
Published: June 14, 2009

GRUNDY, Va. – The temperature was rising in the stuffy lecture hall of the Appalachian School of Law, where state officials, gas industry representatives and individual mineral owners gathered uneasily last Tuesday.

Tension was palpable in the room, with speakers urging those present to engage in a civil dialogue – a well-worn plea at meetings on the thorny topic of gas ownership in the region’s mineral-rich fields.

The forum at the law school was the third of its kind in 10 days – part of an educational initiative born of a long-simmering controversy and failed legislation in the Virginia General Assembly.

Legislators, state oil and gas officials and industry representatives presented at all three meetings – in the state’s largest gas-producing counties of Wise, Dickenson and Buchanan – leaving time at the end for citizens to ask questions and make comments.

The trio of meetings was ostensibly dedicated to the controversy over the practice of forced pooling – in which a gas company operates a well on a unit of land against the will of a mineral owner – and the deductions gas operators take out of the royalties they are required to pay owners who are involuntarily pooled.

In presentations by the Virginia Oil and Gas Association, such controversies were brushed with an industry-crafted polish. In one PowerPoint slide, forced pooling became “Majority Rule: Cornerstone of our Democracy;” in another, deductions from royalties to market the gas were rendered as “Post Production = Adding Value.”

“There’s been a little bit of a question as to whose meeting this is,” state Sen. Philip Puckett, D-Lebanon, said at the outset of the third meeting, in Grundy, after several attendees complained they were being short-changed on the public comment time.

“This is your meeting,” he said, addressing his comments to the individual gas owners who have railed against the industry practice of taking post-production charges out of royalty payments.

Puckett, with Delegate Bud Phillips, D-Castlewood, sponsored ultimately unsuccessful legislation earlier this year that would have amended state law to prohibit companies from taking such deductions from owners who have been force-pooled.

Puckett and Phillips also have requested an opinion from the Virginia attorney general as to whether the state Gas and Oil Act is constitutional, whether the Gas and Oil Board has overstepped its authority in allowing post-production charges, and whether individual owners are receiving adequate due process. They expect a response within 30 to 45 days, they said. (I bet he say something, Dillion Rule State!)

In spearheading the educational meetings, Puckett said, “We decided that we at least owed you an explanation as to what’s going on, where we are and what the future might look like” of mineral extraction in the region’s gas-producing counties.

At each of the meetings, VOGA and the Virginia Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy provided a panorama of the region’s history through the present gas issues. The presentations gave detailed explanations of how the Virginia Gas and Oil Board operates, and complex legal procedures such as how owners can extract their money from a state-administered escrow account.

The future, however, remains clouded by legal and philosophical questions on ownership rights, and is further roiled by trust that has eroded over time.

“What do I own?”

Mineral rights in the coal and gas fields come down to an odd assortment of mismatched deeds – someone owns the surface, but has sold the coal underneath; another owns the coal estate, but has sold the gas rights. The hottest mineral dispute centers on a gas that is mined from within a coal seam – the so-called coalbed methane gas – which in the past two decades has grown from industry afterthought to account for 80 percent of natural gas production in the state.

The stakes of coalbed methane ownership have risen in line with its growing profits, and though the Virginia Supreme Court has weighed in on the issue, the dispute remains far from resolved.

“What do I own?” David Asbury, director of the state’s Division of Gas and Oil, asked the audience at the Grundy meeting. “That is one of the most important questions. Legal counsel is your best option, for those who are not used to doing title searches.”

That option rankles gas owners like Jamie Hale, a Buchanan County resident who pointed to the precedent the Virginia high court set in 2004 in the Ratliff v. Harrison-Wyatt LLC case. That ruling upheld the decision of a Buchanan County Circuit Court judge to give the gas owners 100 percent rights to the coalbed methane over the coal owner.

“Why should we have to hire a lawyer to prove what already belongs to us?” Hale asked, as other individual owners applauded.

Puckett chimed in on this point as well.

“If I’m a gas owner in Buchanan County, I don’t think I ought to be the one to prove I own [the coalbed methane],” the legislator said.

But the Ratliff ruling has not settled the conflict, with some coal and gas owners claiming that the Ratliff case revolved on language specific to their deeds, and is not a blanket precedent.

“That’s where good legal counsel comes into play,” Asbury said.

A question of trust

Cooperation, according to some individual owners, is hampered by their mistrust of the gas companies they’ve dealt with over the years.

“A lot of landowners have been given a raw deal by gas companies,” Hale said.

“I’ve been dealing with the gas companies since 1993,” said Shirley Keen at the Grundy meeting. “Don’t sign anything,” she said to a spasm of applause. “Or if you do, make sure you have an attorney there.”

In Clintwood, Brenda McClellan was open-minded but skeptical about the prospect of participating in a gas company well. The Abingdon resident was considering whether to participate as an investor in production from a unit where she owns gas rights. An individual owner, who shares fully in the costs of operating a well, can share in the profits after the gas operator recovers either 200 percent or 300 percent of their investment, depending on whether the owner is leased or unleased.

It was this last part – leaving it to the company to inform her when the capital had been recovered – that worried her.

“What the gas companies pay is a pittance,” she said. “People really feel like they’ve been taken advantage of.”

So deep-seated is the mistrust that some residents who attended the meetings complained about incidents that occurred more than a decade ago.

What concerned Barney Reilly, at the June 4 Clintwood meeting, stretched back to the presidency of Bill Clinton, who happened to be giving a televised address after 9 p.m. one night when Reilly heard blasting from a local mine.

This was not supposed to occur after dark, he explained, and half a dozen local residents noted the incident on their calendars. When a DMME inspector came out to investigate the complaints, “he didn’t bother talking to anyone about the thing,” Reilly said. “He looked at the blasting logs. The blasting logs were taken as gospel, while our complaints were just dismissed.”

Reilly wanted to know if it was still the policy of the Gas and Oil Board to ignore residents’ complaints; Asbury assured him it was not.

But an air of suspicion still colors the way individual owners view their occasional disputes with energy companies and the state. On the night of the Clintwood meeting, rain deluged the area, and a sludge of water and rock-studded mud slammed into the house and garage of Doug and Vickie Fleming, knocking down steel doors and flooding the property.

Doug Fleming, an automotive mechanic who has lived in the area for 37 years, said he had never experienced such flooding, and blamed it on the operations of EQT Corp. – until recently known as Equitable – which is putting in a gas pipeline some distance above his property. Specifically, he believes those operations have clogged a drain pipe – 5 feet in diameter – that channels water beneath his property.

But DMME inspector Jay Henderson found no evidence that pointed to EQT’s responsibility, according to a DMME report filed five days later. “The watershed above Mr. Fleming’s house is not impacted by the pipeline construction,” Henderson wrote.

Said EQT spokesman Wayne Desbrow: “There’s absolutely no way we could have caused that. At best, it’s a real stretch.”

A global issue?

No one who spoke at the meetings questioned or diminished the importance of gas operations to the local economy. Perhaps a dozen rank-and-file gas company workers spoke at the meetings, and they, too, were applauded.

For the industry’s part, Jerry Grantham, president of VOGA, argued that the current law allowing companies to involuntarily pool gas owners and harvest their gas is the fairest, most democratic way of maximizing resources and distributing profit.

He highlighted a scenario in which owners holding 20 percent of the acreage in a unit did not want to be pooled, while the rest favored harvesting the gas. “Should 20 percent of the people keep the other 80 percent from drilling the well and getting paid?” he asked.

As to the industry practice of deducting fees from royalties for compressing and transporting the gas to market – the “post-production charges” – Grantham pointed out that all involved reap the benefits of taking the gas to the market of highest demand.

In other words, the individual owner – forced-pooled or not – gets more money when the gas operator ships it through a pipeline to where it will receive the highest price. And they should contribute to the cost, he said.

“Clearly, we heard back that a pretty sizeable portion of people recognize the importance of gas and mineral resources in general,” Grantham said later in an interview.

As to residents’ complaints and comments, Grantham said, “We can always do better.” But most of the issues raised dealt with individual matters and rather broad policy.

“We didn’t hear a whole lot about post-production costs – which was really sort of the impetus for the whole thing,” Grantham said. “What that tells me is that if it were a more global issue, then we probably would have heard more about it.”

Grantham, Puckett and Asbury will hear more about resident concerns in Clintwood, where they have agreed to return after some at the June 4 meeting complained that the presentations crowded out public comment time.

Puckett was enthusiastic about the outcome of the meetings, and said later he believes he’s closer to a compromise with the gas industry than when his legislation seeking to ban post-production charges to forced-pooled owners sputtered and stalled.

The key, as Puckett described it, is building trust through greater transparency.

“People just don’t trust the gas companies, the coal companies, and that creates a problem for them,” he said. “We’ve got to get to a point where we believe what they charge us is fair.”

The way to do that, Puckett believes, is for gas companies to provide royalty recipients with detailed statements, including what they are deducting to get their gas to market.

“I’m sort of convinced that if there were transparencies in what we’re doing, I would want [the gas] sold at the highest point of sale, and I personally would be willing to consider paying a post-production charge,” Puckett said.

dgilbert@bristolnews.com (276) 645-2558

http://www.tricities.com/tri/news/local/article/uneasy_meeting_in_grundy_underscores_tensions_between_gas_companies_and_min/25320/

BETWEEN A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE

Comment: Is this our Virginia's Future?

COTTAGE COUNTRY / MINING V. RECREATION

Cottagers returning to their retreats this weekend may be surprised to find that they don't own the mineral rights to their properties, Allan Britnell reports, and someone else has staked a claim, leaving them ...

ALLAN BRITNELL

Special to The Globe and Mail

May 15, 2009

It was two years ago that Robin Simpson spotted some damage to the trees lining his property near Gooderham, Ont., in the rolling Haliburton Highlands. "They'd slashed the sides of trees in a line every 400 feet," Mr. Simpson says.

Following the marked trail he eventually came to a tree that had been cut off about four feet above ground. Attached to it was an aluminum tag issued by the provincial Ministry of Northern Development and Mines. It was the first hint that a prospector had been on his property, unannounced and uninvited, to stake a mining claim on the land. Later, digging through the MNDM website, he discovered that his property - and thousands of acres of surrounding Crown and private land - had been staked for a potential open-pit uranium mine.

It's entirely possible that cottagers returning to their lakeside retreats this weekend could make a similar discovery. A small percentage of landowners in Ontario, including Mr. Simpson, only own the "surface rights" to their property, while the Crown retains the below-ground "mineral rights." (The separation of surface and mineral rights is "fairly common" from the Maritimes to British Columbia, says Ramsey Hart of MiningWatch Canada.

In Ontario, landowners can check for any claims on their property on the CLAIMaps at the MNDM website.) As a result, anyone who has paid $25.50 for a prospector's licence is free to enter those lands and mark off old-fashioned mining claims.

The provincial government estimates that only 1.4 per cent of all the land in Southern Ontario is "surface rights only."

CAN SCIENCE SAVE THE OIL SANDS?

But there are thousands of hectares of unprotected Crown land surrounding cottage communities throughout the province, and the country, that could potentially be turned into working mines.

After decades of complaints from cottagers and rural residents, environmental groups and native communities, last year the MNDM began holding consultations on modernizing the 141-year-old Mining Act. The result, Bill 173, the Mining Amendment Act, is currently working its way through the legislature.

One immediate result was that on April 30, the MNDM temporarily withdrew lands where owners held only the surface rights from potential prospecting anywhere south of Lake Nipissing and the French and Mattawa rivers.

For surface-rights holders north of that boundary, including Lake of the Woods, the status quo remains. The order also grandfathered any claims already staked. Still, Bill 173 falls far short of what anti-mining activists had hoped for.

"We're not very happy, to be honest," says Mr. Simpson, who participated in stakeholder meetings on Mining Act reform. "We're asking that Crown land be taken off the map in Southern Ontario."

Ted Spence, a director with the Federation of Ontario Cottagers' Associations, agrees. "The biggest threat to cottagers is that the Crown land that surrounds them is completely vulnerable to mining."

Currently, once a claim has been staked, a mining company could start exploration work with as little as 24 hours notice, and no environmental assessment is required.

That work can be devastating to the landscape. "They can remove up to 1,000 tonnes of material. That's a lot of earth and rock," says Mary Loucks, who's been fighting a proposed graphite mine on and around her 400-acre Long Pond Lake property, near Westport, Ont., since 1992.

After seeing the results of other nearby exploration work - "it looked like the trenches in France during the First World War" - she and her late husband, Don, helped form Bedford Mining Alert, a lobby group.

"It's even more destructive than clear-cutting," says Susanne Lauten, who became so incensed when she learned about the possibility of a uranium mine opening up less than 20 kilometres from her Gull Lake cottage, she started up Cottagers Against Uranium Mining and Exploration. "At least with clear-cutting you can plant trees. With open-pit mining that land is gone. All you're left with is a gaping hole."

On the other hand, without mining, industry advocates argue, there are lot of other things we'd be left without. "If you ban mining in Southern Ontario, you won't have any materials to build your roads, or make bricks or concrete," says Garry Clark, executive director of the Ontario Prospectors Association. "You won't have any salt for highways in the winter. Mining's an integral part of society."

Ultimately, the issue comes down to a battle between competing multibillion-dollar industries: mining, and tourism and recreation. "In Southern Ontario, the economy has shifted entirely away from mining and forestry to tourism," Mr. Spence says. With the economy tailing off, prices for minerals have dropped significantly, putting many potential operations on indefinite hold. (The contact number and e-mail for Bancroft Uranium Inc., the company that controls mining rights to 9,000 acres in and around Mr. Simpson's property, for example, are out of service.) But when prices start to rise again, so will interest in mining.

"Mining is still a very powerful sector, even under the proposed act. We have to be fairly watchful throughout the regulation stage. A lot can happen," Mr. Spence says.

In the meantime, cottagers should keep a close eye on their back forty, and look to others for help if they discover miners on their doorstep. (Ms. Lauten's group is holding an anti-uranium mining rally at Queen's Park in Toronto on Sept. 27.)

Several months after the area around Lyn Sparling's Mellon Lake cottage, near Kaladar, Ont., had been presumably protected as a Conservation Reserve, she literally felt the first rumblings of exploration work on a granite deposit.

It took her group, No Quarry @ Mellon Lake, six years to convince the government to deny the mining company, Palu-Corbelli Corp., a permit on environmental grounds. "We are, of course, very happy with the outcome of the Mellon Lake quarry battle," Ms. Sparling says. "But just as important to us is the example we set for others. A small group of determined and dedicated people can make a difference."

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20090515.LMINING15ART1631/TPStory/Environment

Civil society organizations call for a new mining law

Comment: only thing that makes money off uranium mining are the corporations, it happens all over the world, corps get the money, the local people for it with ruin water, air, land & their health! The corps in this story is from where, do you say where, our neighbors to the North!

GUATEMALA

4/23/2009

Current legislation deprives communities of benefits, allowing corporations to use up important resources.

Last November, more than 6,000 people from 49 predominantly Mayan Mam villages, made their way to the Santa Barbara town hall to vote on mining exploration licences, recently granted by the Guatemalan Ministry of Energy and Mining to Montana Exploradora, a subsidiary of Vancouver-based Canadian Goldcorp Inc.

The villagers were called to the plebiscite by their community leaders and were asked by Mayor Jesús Sales, whether or not they approved of four mining prospection licenses in their area, in the northern department of Huehuetenango.

The town hall was packed to the brim. Children held makeshift banners that read “No to Mining” and when asked by the mayor whether they wished for these projects to go ahead, the building was shaken by a resounding “No!” (these people remind of the meeting by the so called illegal Uranium Sub group and our behavior!!!)

Then, the people of Santa Barbara were asked to vote by a show of hands. Everyone later filed onto the stage to sign a community statement, a copy of which was sent to Congress, the Ministry for Energy and Mining (MEM) and the Presidential Social Communications Secretariat.

Water already scarce
Ensconced in the Sierra de los Cuchumatanes mountain range, Santa Barbara is prone to drought during the dry summer season, which runs from October to early May, and communities feared that mining projects in the area would make the problem worse.

Montana already runs two mining projects in San Miguel Ixtahuacán and Sipakapa, in the northern department of San Marcos and one of the most contentious issues in that region has been the fact that the corporation is allowed unlimited use of the area´s water resources.

In a press release issued by the municipality of Santa Barbara after the plebiscite took place, Mayor Jesús Sales, stated: “Our communities, through their municipal authorities and traditional indigenous leaders urge the Guatemalan State to respect the decisions of those who will be affected by metal mining and abide by ILO Convention 169. We urge the state to annul the licenses halt any further mining activity in our municipality.”

According to Carlos Guárquez, director of the Guatemalan Association of Indigenous Mayors and Authorities, to date, 31 municipalities across the country have held popular consultations or plebiscites, in which mining activity was rejected. Twenty-three of these plebiscites were held in Huehuetenango alone.

A New Mining Law
In 2008, the Center for Legal, Social and Environmental Action, or CALAS, successfully petitioned the Constitutional Court to strike down aspects of the Mining Law. The court found that the law was unconstitutional because it did not require sufficient consideration to be given to the environmental consequences of mining before a license was issued. The law allowed for mining to an unlimited depth and allowed contaminated water from mines to be discharged into rivers. (this is allowed in the North!)

A new version of the law is scheduled to be debated in Congress. However, human rights and environmental activists point out that the new bill proposed by the Congressional Commission on Energy and Mining is just as bad as the original version as favors the mining corporations to the extent that it fails to even distinguish between metal and non-metal mining. Not surprisingly, this bill has the full support of the Energy and Mining Ministry.

On March 19, indigenous and environmental organizations presented the commission with series of demands which they believe should be included in the new mining law such as higher royalties from the mining corporations and the retroactive payment of royalties for existing mining projects in which the corporation makes six figure annual profits but pays the state a pittance.

Royalties from mineral extraction are currently only 1 percent, shared between the state and the affected municipality, whereas a project the size of the Montana´s Marlin mine operating in Canada would be subject to a royalty fee of 13 percent of total production, under the current legislation.

But royalties are not the only point of contention. Indigenous and environmental organizations have also called for a new model of natural resource management that is more in tune with the needs of local communities.

Their main demand is that mining projects be subject to public scrutiny and debate, which means that popular consultations should be heeded and should determine whether a license is granted.

If these recommendations are included in the new mining law, Goldcorp´s subsidiaries Montana and Entremares could face prosecution for failing to consult local communities before beginning a project.

Undeterred, Goldcorp has pressed ahead with the new projects such as the Escobas gold mine in Mataquescuintla, Santa Rosa, and the Cerro Blanco project in Jutiapa, both in eastern Guatemala. The latter also contemplates the construction of a geothermal energy plant.

The government also appears to be little inclined to make any changes to its current energy policy, despite opposition from local communities and is covertly seeking foreign investment in uranium mining.

During the first week of March, a government delegation traveled to Russia seeking investment in infrastructure, oil and mining projects.

“Recent studies show that we have a huge potential to produce uranium but we need investment and technology in order to exploit these opportunities to the fullest,” said Alfredo Pokus, vice mining and energy minister during the scarcely publicized trip.

Energy and Mining Minister Carlos Meany has been more cautious.

“There is no certainty about the country´s uranium reserves,” he said, although three uranium prospection licenses have already been granted: two in Finca Sarroguacax, Cobán, in the northern department of Alta Verapaz, managed by landowner José Martín Montenegro Calderón and one in the eastern department of Chiquimula, operated by Guatemala Copper SA, a subsidiary of Canadian corporation Creso Resources Inc. —Latinamerica Press.

http://www.latinamericapress.org/articles.asp?art=5841

Former Uranium Mining

http://www.pecva.org/anx/ass/library/19/miningleases_pitts1.pdf

Click on the above link for a pdf of former uranium mineral leases in our county!

The file is large so people using modems, it will be slow!

Mineral Rights

Comment: Listed below are mini clips about mineral rights, just click on link to go for complete article:

http://geology.com/articles/mineral-rights.shtml

Mineral Rights

Basic information about mineral, surface, oil and gas rights

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06113/684429-85.stm

Mineral rights give gas drillers free rein

By Caitlin Cleary, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Long-standing state laws that split mineral rights from surface real estate are creating big winners and big losers in the current natural-gas gold rush in Western Pennsylvania.
The winners hold the mineral rights. For them, signing a drilling lease with a gas-producing company can be a lucrative transaction. They are entitled to one-eighth of the royalties and can negotiate free natural gas for their homes.
The losers are landowners who find that their mineral rights were severed from the surface property years ago. They have no control over whether wells are drilled on their property.

http://www.thedickinsonpress.com/articles/?id=20735

Mineral rights showdown at Badlands ranch

Montana man who wants to mine gravel on the Badlands ranch where Theodore Roosevelt once ran his cattle is comparing his dispute with the U.S. Forest Service to an Old West stare-down. He says he won't blink.
"If they want me out of the picture, pay me $2.5 million and I'll go back to Montana and they'll never here from me again," Roger Lothspeich said. "Or I'm going to mine that ranch for decades and decades to come."