The Woodward News

Local News

March 10, 2010

Murphy to host town hall meeting on horizontal drilling

Michelle Seeber Woodward News

Woodward, Okla. — A town hall meeting to get feedback and educate people on horizontal drilling for natural gas production will be held at 5:30 p.m. March 22 at High Plains Technology Center.

During the meeting, Corporation Commissioner Dana Murphy will be discussing whether current Oklahoma Corporation Commission (OCC) regulations are sufficient to answer issues raised by this new method of drilling which is being used more and more for natural gas recovery, OCC spokesman Matt Skinner said.

“There are people that just don’t understand what horizontal drilling means,” Murphy said. “It’s a new technology ... a new way of things being done.”

The technique is aptly named in that when drilling for natural gas, pipelines are implemented horizontally as opposed to going straight down, raising “all kinds of issues,” Skinner said.

Horizontal drills can go thousands of feet, leading to questions, such as “who owns what portion of what and who gets paid how much for what,” he said.

For example, “If I’m a mineral owner, I own X on the map and another owns X on the map,” he said. “So, if you go through those X’s these questions come up.”

Murphy said that by holding the town hall meeting, she hopes to get feedback and educate people who may be affected by horizontal drilling.

Meetings have already been held in McAlester and Clinton and were “very well attended” with 125 to 150 people turning out, she said, noting the meeting in Woodward is being held because “we want to provide the opportunity for the people of Northwestern Oklahoma" to learn about and discuss issues with horizontal drilling.

According to an OCC press release, there will be "substantial time for all attending to ask questions."

“I’m not saying we won’t get some hard questions,” Murphy said. “This is just an opportunity for people in and around Woodward to keep up with what’s happening in Oklahoma.”

“People want to know how it impacts their mineral rights,” she said.

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