WHERE's Tommy Lee now??

Seems Arlington has jumped on the suing Chesapeake bandwagon. Others suing the company include the DFW Airport, the Fort Worth Bass family, unnamed landowners and folks out in Johnson County.

The list (and someone's nose) keeps growing.

Read about it in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

Especially if you've been fracked...

WHO's next?

The city is suing Chesapeake Exploration, saying the company underpaid royalties on natural gas pumped from about 1,908 acres of public land.

The lawsuit, filed Monday in a civil District Court in Tarrant County, alleges that the Oklahoma City-based energy company has deducted post-production costs from the city’s royalty payments that are not only unauthorized under the lease agreements but also appear to be “excessive and unreasonable.”

Arlington said it has not been able to quantify its monetary damages for the contract breach because Chesapeake has withheld lease documents. But the city said in the suit that it expects to seek monetary relief in excess of $1 million.

Arlington said it has not been able to quantify its monetary damages for the contract breach because Chesapeake has withheld lease documents. But the city said in the suit that it expects to seek monetary relief in excess of $1 million.The suit also alleges that these deductions are not apparent from the information that Chesapeake has provided to the city, saying that those statements “misleadingly reflect” that no deductions are being taken. 

The city sent a letter to the company in April raising concerns about underpaid royalties and the improper deduction of costs. The company did not respond, according to the suit.

“Instead, Chesapeake continues to engage in a scheme of affiliated transactions aimed at hiding or embedding impermissible cost deductions and suppressing the royalties it pays to the city,” the suit says.
Arlington’s suit is similar to one filed against Chesapeake in federal court this year by Fort Worth investor Ed Bass and more than a dozen other landowners in far south Tarrant County. That lawsuit claims that Chesapeake has cheated them out of potentially millions of dollars in royalties for leases on 3,952 acres at the Tarrant-Johnson County line, south of Benbrook Lake.

Last year, Chesapeake Energy agreed to pay Dallas/Fort Worth Airport $5.3 million to settle a similar lawsuit after the airport alleged it had been shortchanged on royalty money from wells Chesapeake drilled on its property. The airport used its gas money to help pay for capital projects including the $1.9 billion terminal renovation.

Joining these large entities in suing Chesapeake are individual landowners. In 2012, Charles and Robert Warren, along with another couple in Johnson County, were seeking class action status in a lawsuit filed in federal court, a rarity in a Texas oil and gas royalty dispute. The case was dismissed by U.S. District Judge Barbara Lynn in May and is currently on appeal.

The suit against Chesapeake isn’t Arlington’s only legal battle with the natural gas drilling industry. 

Last year, the Texas Oil & Gas Association and the Texas Independent Producers & Royalty Owners Association sued Arlington over the creation of a gas well fee.

The fee was expected to generate about $800,000 a year so that Arlington, which has 300-plus gas wells, could hire six more firefighters and to train and equip 42 current firefighters for the creation of two gas well emergency response teams. 

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Ding dong...

Julie Wilson, who has been referred to as a witch by some, has left the building.

(http://www.fwcando.org/node/346)

Seems Friday will be her last day at Chesapeake.  Now WHY would that be?

Says she's going back to consulting.  We can only guess for WHO.

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Well, what do we have here?

Seems normal folks aren’t the only ones getting screwed.

Read in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram about Ed Bass and others suing Chesapeake over royalties, or lack thereof.  And Julie Wilson had no comment??  What’s the world coming to?

They may want to brush up on their “good neighbor” campaign.

Fort Worth investor Ed Bass and more than a dozen other landowners in southern Tarrant County have sued units of Chesapeake Energy in federal court in Dallas, accusing the Barnett Shale's second-largest producer of cheating them out of millions of dollars in royalties.

According to the lawsuit, the companies improperly deducted production costs, expressly forbidden by the leases, and used "sham transactions" with two other Chesapeake affiliates to set a below-market price on which royalties were paid, also a breach of lease terms.

It's not the first time Chesapeake has been sued over royalty payments.

In September, it agreed to pay Dallas/Fort Worth Airport more than $5.3 million in additional royalties after nearly three years of litigation over the sales price for gas used by Chesapeake and other issues.

In 2010, Fort Worth resident Robyn Coffey sued Chesapeake, saying its royalty payments were based on a "fictitious price" for natural gas produced in the White Lake Hills area in east Fort Worth.

Under the lease terms, Chesapeake is not allowed to pass along "any part of the costs or expenses" of producing, gathering, transporting or processing gas, the suit states.

The leases require the owners to bear their share of certain expenses up to 75 cents per 1,000 cubic feet (mcf) "under certain conditions," but those conditions never applied, it says.

Chesapeake imposed costs on the owners exceeding 75 cents per mcf, the suit says.

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Here we go again...

If you thought Carter Avenue was going to be the only street they went after, well, you know the drill.

Urgent message from Don Young-----------

Subject: URGENT: City Council-Chesapeake must be stopped

The photo below was taken July 27, 2012, while standing in the front yard of my childhood home, 1105 Haynes Street, Fort Worth, Texas.

Until about a year ago, the prairie field that extended the entire block across the street, where kids like me flew kites and explored nature, remained unchanged. But about a week before Christmas, 2011, Chesapeake Energy received a permit to drill and frack "multiple gas wells" on the site.

Anyone can plainly see from the aerial photo below, this gas well should NEVER have been permitted. At about 300' away from where I took the photo, it's too close. More than 72 properties in this densely populated neighborhood are DIRECTLY affected. It is what the FW Drilling Ordinance used to refer to as HIGH-IMPACT before, at the drillers request, the phrase was discarded. But now it's too late. The City failed the neighborhood. The well is in.

Now. Now, Chesapeake is asking council approval for an 8" diameter pipeline that will run under homes and in front yards of this very low income, working-class, mostly Spanish-speaking neighborhood. The gas will be UN-odorized.

In an epic failure of leadership to protect innocent citizens, City staffers, Rick Trice, Randle Harwood and Fernando Costa have signed off on the pipeline that council will debate on August 7, 2012.

This pipeline proposal is even worse than the infamous, Carter Avenue pipeline that was changed only after resident and father, Steve Doeung refused to be bought off. But it took the persuasive efforts of Senator Wendy Davis, to help convince Chesapeake to pursue a less dangerous route which they ultimately did.

Will you PLEASE take a moment right now and contact your councilperson, Mayor Betsy Price and especially, District 8 City Councilwoman, Kelly Gray. Cut and paste the following to your personal email:

Options exist to reduce neighborhood impact of the Anderson gas well and pipeline. Either plug the gas well or find a better route. The lives of thousands of nearby residents are worth more than the $31,605.20 that Chesapeake is offering for the pipeline permit. Deny Chesapeake's permit request with prejudice.

Kelly.AllenGray@fortworthtexas.gov

betsy.price@fortworthgov.org

Already impacted by drilling and fracking, hundreds of families will be
at serious safety risk if the pipeline is approved.

Just days before Christmas, 2011,
the City of Fort Worth allowed this to happen.

Alternatives exist to this driller-friendly, neighborhood-killer pipeline route.

The Chesapeake owned, Anderson Padsite is one of many across FW that should have never been allowed.

Don Young

FWCanDo

P.O. Box 470041

Fort Worth, TX 76147

http://www.fwcando.org

"God bless Fort Worth, Texas. Help us save some of it."

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Bazinga

WHAT happens when reporters start asking questions? 

Read it in the Rolling Stone.  Fracker Aubrey McClendon Booted From Chesapeake Board

The facts of the loan itself were bad enough, but the way the Chesapeake’s PR dweebs handled it – at first they said the board was "fully aware" of the loan and approved it, then the next day reversed themselves – just made the whole deal more rancid. Chesapeake is a publicly-held company, with a market cap of about $12 billion.
 
The company’s stock tanked by 10 percent or so, vaporizing more than a billion dollars of shareholder value. The Internal Revenue Service is investigating the loan, as is the Security and Exchange Commission. No less than three shareholders filed lawsuits. You just know Chesapeake’s lawyers are going to be dealing with fallout from this for years. And who knows what other sweet nuggets of impropriety investigators might unearth along the way?

As I learned a few months ago while reporting for Rolling Stone, the Chesapeake is really a land-acquisition company disguised as a natural gas producer, and one that is leveraged up the wazoo.

If I were a Chesapeake shareholder, I’d have lots of questions – like, if the company is playing games with financial disclosure, what kind of foolery are they up to with disclosure about, say, the chemicals they are pumping underground during fracking operations, or what they are doing with the hundreds of millions of gallons of toxic flowback water they dispose of every year?

Enron with drilling rigs.

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