Drilling prospects bring land rush to Illinois
galesburg.com
It's a three page article. I'm only going to post excerpts here. If you're into it, click on
the link above for the rest of the story.
excerpts:
McLEANSBORO —
It’s not a festival or the 19th century architecture that’s drawing the late-model cars from Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Pennsylvania to the downtown square in this tiny, southern Illinois community.
It’s the musty vault inside the county courthouse, where secretive visitors have converged in a hunt for underground riches.
For months, out-of-staters known in the business as “land men” have descended on this 2,900-resident city, lining up to comb through bulky books of yellowed property records dating to the 1800s. The aim is to find choice parcels in a veritable land rush tied to the prospect of reaching previously inaccessible oil and natural gas deposits in the region.
They’re a guarded bunch armed with laptops and legal pads, refusing for competitive reasons to reveal who they’re working for. But they confide they’re painstakingly pinpointing ownership of rights to a shale formation thousands of feet underground for clients hoping to exploit trendy yet controversial horizontal drilling techniques.
“I’ve never seen this kind of activity,” said Mary Anne Hopfinger, Hamilton County’s clerk for the past six years.
The suddenly intense interest in southern Illinois stems from a belief that the region’s New Albany Shale, a formation of rock roughly 5,000 feet below the surface, contains oil and other liquid hydrocarbons that are rarer — and far more profitable — than natural gas...
...The scouting of southern Illinois may portend a boon for the region, but it’s been a headache at times for county clerks. In Wayne County, Clerk Glenda Young estimates her Fairfield office has hosted 30 to 35 land scouts a day. Their interest is reflected in the $6,000 to $10,000 worth of copies or related services Young’s staff has provided for them each month.
In nearby Saline County, six computerized “search stations” in Clerk Kim Buchanan’s office have been in hot demand for two years among agents from energy companies largely based in the South.
The “land men” cling to anonymity, shooing away a reporter as they hunker down in the courthouse vaults. One of them — a hulking Texan who has spent the past month plodding through Hamilton County’s land records — called the sleuthing “a lot like a puzzle,” tracing back some parcels to when Illinois became a state in 1818.
“It can get a little hard on the eyes, but it’s certainly exciting work,” added another Texan who spent the past couple of weeks working the same vault. He previously spent two months in Wayne County
In McLeansboro, the records search has spilled over into tables set up in the hallway outside Hopfinger’s office... |
