Your Texas Legislature at Work, Part 2

Originally published by Charles Sartain.

Posted by Charles Sartain

The Texas legislature is still busy on energy issues. Is that good or bad? It depends on your situation; oil patch thieves won’t like it.

Wind Energy

Senate Bill 931 would blow away the Renewable Portfolio Standard, established in 1999 to set renewable energy goals for Texas. The bill would also halt construction of transmission lines in Competitive Renewable Energy Zones, through which miles of transmission lines connect West Texas wind energy with cities in the eastern part of the state.

The rationale is that wind energy targets in the original act have attained their goal and thus should be terminated. Here is a discussion of the bill.

Wind energy proponents are unhappy. See, for example, this editorial in the Dallas Morning News by Jim Marston of the Environmental Defense Fund. Among other complaints, he cites a double standard:

Oil and gas subsidies = good

Alternative energy subsidies = bad.

They seem to have a point.  Texas gives tax incentives for certain oil and gas production. What’s the difference?

Allocation Wells

House Bill 1552 would add a provision to the Natural Resources Code to address allocation wells. The high points are:

• The statute would apply unless expressly prohibited by a lease, deed or other contract.
•  An operator may obtain a RRC permit allowing it to drill, operate and produce from a well that traverses multiple tracts in order to prevent waste, promote conservation, or protect correlative rights.
• Absent an agreement among affected owners of royalty or mineral interests regarding how to allocate production among the tracts, production will be allocated to each tract on in the proportion “that the operator or lessee reasonably determines or reflects the amount produced from each tract.”
• The operator must send written notice to affected royalty and mineral owners.
• If there is an agreement with a royalty or mineral owner allocating production, the agreement will prevail.
• An affected owner unhappy with the allocation assigned by the lessee may request a RRC hearing on whether the production will harm the correlative rights of working interest and mineral owners, is necessary to prevent waste, and accurately attributes to each affected owner its fair share of the aggregated production.

If the bill passes I will discuss what its effect might be.

Oil Field Theft

House Bill 3291 establishes the crime of selling oil, gas or condensate without a Railroad Commission permit. The bill specifically includes oil and gas equipment or pipeline equipment. If the value exceeds $10,000 it’s a felony.

How do they do it?

In case you are looking for a new line of work: According to proponents of the bill, one way to steal production is to purchase a well that has ceased to produce for lack of production and claim that it is producing and selling oil stolen from another well.  Then you acquire a vacuum truck and help yourself to what’s not yours.

A Religious Experience, Part 2

As promised last week, here are the other artists “discovered” by Sam Phillips and recorded for the first time at Sun Studio:

Johnny Cash 1955

Carl Perkins 1956

Roy Orbison 1958. This one can’t be beat for its intellectual content.

Curated by Texas Bar Today. Follow us on Twitter @texasbartoday.

from Texas Bar Today http://ift.tt/1AlvlwZ
via Abogado Aly Website