The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania has agreed to hear a case to consider whether the rule of capture applies to hydraulic fracking, reports The Hydraulic Fracking Blog of Norton Rose Fulbright.

The case involves landowners’ trespass and conversion claims against an energy company based on hydraulic fracking activities. The plaintiffs  compared the energy company’s fracking activity to slant drilling, claiming that the proppants of hydraulic fracturing “serve the same purpose as a drill bit invading the land.”

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A recent Superior Court of Pennsylvania ruling in a case concerning hydraulic fracturing runs counter to a ruling in a similar case by the Texas Supreme Court, reports John B. McFarland in Graves, Dougherty, Hearon & Moody’s Oil and Gas Lawyer Blog.

The Pennsylvania court held that “hydraulic fracturing may constitute an actionable trespass where subsurface fractures, fracturing fluid and proppant cross boundary lines and extend into the subsurface estate of an adjoining property for which the operator does not have a mineral lease, resulting in the extraction of natural gas from beneath the adjoining landowner’s property.”

In doing so, McFarland explains, the court rejected the reasoning of the Texas Supreme Court when that court held that the rule of capture prevented any such cause of action.

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A federal judge has ordered a pair of attorneys for an environmental group to pay $52,000 in legal fees to an energy company because, the judge said, they filed a “frivolous” legal challenge to a fracking waste injection well in Pennsylvania, according to a report by StateImpact, a reporting project of NPR member stations.

“U.S. Magistrate Judge Susan Paradise Baxter of the Western District of Pennsylvania ruled the attorneys, Thomas Linzey and Elizabeth Dunne, should pay part of Pennsylvania General Energy’s (PGE) legal fees for advancing a “discredited” legal argument that had already been defeated in prior decisions,” writes reporter Reid Frazier. “In addition to the fine, the judge referred Linzey to the state Supreme Court Disciplinary Board for additional discipline.”

In her opinion, Baxter wrote:

The continued pursuit of frivolous claims and defenses, despite Linzey’s first-hand knowledge of their insufficiency, and the refusal to retract each upon reasonable request, substantially and inappropriately prolonged this litigation, and required the Court and PGE to expend significant time and resources eliminating these baseless claims.

Read the StateImpact article.

Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP reports on a study from the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC), titled “The Local Economic and Welfare Consequences of Hydraulic Fracturing.”

On its website, the firm says the study looked at “the costs and benefits of hydraulic fracturing on local communities in nine shale basins throughout the United States, making it the most comprehensive assessment of its kind to date.”

The study explored revenue generated in communities where drilling takes place, local income and employment, benefits to local governments, decreases in the quality of life, and increases in housing prices.

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When a 5.8 magnitude earthquake centered in Oklahoma shook that state and several others over Labor Day weekend, regulators in the Sooner State ordered 37 oil and gas wastewater disposal wells to shut down because of previous connections to quakes, according to a report by Androvett Legal Media and Marketing.

There also have been earthquakes in Texas that some researchers believe are tied to disposal wells used for wastewater fluids resulting from hydraulic fracturing/fracking operations. While state regulators continue to question a definitive link between these wells and earthquakes, some major oil and gas producers are already taking steps to try to avoid problems.

“The more sophisticated producers are already beginning to use technologies to recycle water used in fracking and to develop new formulas that substantially reduce both water usage and the amount that must be disposed by subsurface injection. Those changes will provide numerous benefits, which may include reducing the potential for seismic activity,” said Leonard Dougal, an environmental lawyer with Jackson Walker LLP in Austin who is also a former petroleum engineer.

“In most cases, however, the disposal of wastewater is contracted out to other service companies, and many producers aren’t involved in decisions about where those wells are drilled or how they are operated. But that separation may not totally free producers from a potential lawsuit given the recent widespread publicity about earthquakes. Producers also should take steps to reduce liability by avoiding use of disposal wells or contractors working in areas of known seismic activity.”

The rise of local bans on hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” by local governments has sparked a recent backlash in carbon-producing states, writes Kristen Van de Biezenbos of Texas Tech University School of Law in an article posted on the Social Science Research Network.

“In 2015, Texas, Oklahoma, and North Carolina passed laws that forbid any city, town, or other municipal body from banning fracking or passing certain regulations on the practice, by popular vote or otherwise. Other states are likely to follow suit,” she writes.

In an abstract, she says her article is the first to propose that cities and towns in those states could incorporate and enforce existing state environmental laws. “By doing so, those municipalities may be able to ensure compliance with those environmental regulations by oil and gas companies and minimize some of the environmental harms associated with fracking, even when they cannot enact outright bans on the practice. Further, this Article explains why the incorporation and enforcement of state environmental laws by cities and towns — and particularly cities and towns in states that have taken away local power to enact fracking bans — should not be expressly or impliedly preempted by those laws. Indeed, taking this approach would also further important policy goals inherent in federalism and help restore voter confidence in the democratic process.”

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Aubrey McClendon, the co-founder and former chief executive officer of Chesapeake Energy Corp., was indicted on charges that he conspired to rig bids for the purchase of oil and natural gas leases in northwest Oklahoma, reports Bloomberg.

“McClendon is accused of orchestrating a scheme between two ‘large oil and gas companies’ to not bid against each other for leases, the U.S. Justice Department said Tuesday in a statement. From December 2007 to March 2012, the conspirators decided ahead of time who would win the leases and the winning bidder would then allocate an interest in the leases to the other company, the government said,” according to the report.

While leading Chesapeake, McClendon embraced the fracking shale revolution that helped the company develop into what was for a time the largest U.S. source of gas.

Read the story.