Oil is getting scarce...

Back in the early 1980's, my land down in Louisiana was "thumped". For those of you who are not geologists, don't worry about it, this just means that the oil companies sent a thumper truck out and made a map of the subsurface terrain. Their tentative conclusion was that there was a small pocket of oil down there, but not one big enough to be worth drilling for. Seems that we're on top of a salt dome, but one that's pretty far down, just enough to make us bulge fifty feet or so into the air compared to the surrounding terrain but you can't tell it because a million years of erosion has turned the bulge into rolling hills in the part visible above ground. (Note that this property was once a shallow bay that was part of the Gulf of Mexico, about 100 million years ago, thus why lots of organics would have settled to the bottom of the bay, been covered up by Mississippi silt over the centuries, and voila).

I've been getting legal paperwork for several months now from an oil company that is setting up the legal framework for drilling, i.e., setting up a landowner pool (since the oil lies beneath several people's land) with all the public hearings and etc. that are required under law. Finally, the other day, came the final proof that things are desperate enough in the oil business that they'll drill anywhere: An oil company is trying to steal our mineral rights.

Yeppers, you got that right. They disguised some legal paperwork as a lease payment, but if you actually signed it, you were giving up your mineral rights including all rights to future royalties in perpetuity for $10.

Needless to say, this isn't flying down in the bayou. Those good ole' boys might not have them Harvard edumacashions, but they grew up in the oil bidness, and know damned well what's what. You could hear the sound of paper being ripped up all the way out here on the West Coast. But the point is that nobody would be trying to steal our mineral rights unless they're actually worth something.

And if an oil pool that pathetically small is worth something... expect the price of gas to go up. *WAY* up. If gas isn't $5 per gallon by this time next year, I'll be surprised.

-- Badtux the Oil Penguin