Ohio Utica Shale, Strange tale of drilling leases in North Carolina

Ohio Utica Shale, Strange tale of drilling leases in North Carolina by Bob Downing, August 17, 2012, Ohio.com
“I don’t want anyone fracking under my house. And in the end, I was cheated out of it,” said Young, who lives in Chatham County in the Legend Oaks subdivision. The “mineral rights,” as they are called in property deeds, were kept by D.R. Horton at the time of sale and then transferred to a Texas subsidiary, DRH Energy. Many buyers signed away their rights not knowing that mineral rights gave D.R. Horton the legal right in perpetuity to drill for natural gas under their homes and collect the gas through hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. At the time that D.R. Horton was accumulating a potential economic goldmine of underground drilling rights from unwitting customers, fracking was not legal in this state. But that changed in July when the state legislature narrowly overrode a gubernatorial veto of legislation that would clear the way for fracking as early as 2014.

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