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Rolla, ND | I've been just waiting to see what happens if someone sues over this sort of thing. See the thing is, in ND we said that you cannot sever the pore space from the surface.
Now the basic question then would become does he use your pore space for his injection well?
I would argue of course he does and so he shouldn't be able to inject unless and until he compensates you.
Realize of course there is no court precedent to go to that directly speaks to this but you'd have lots in things like oil wells where you don't get to just drill down and take the oil from your neighbors.
Been just waiting to see a court case over the injection wells, for a couple of reasons. One, they tend to place themselves near property lines, two, they tend not to be very good neighbors.
We've had a lot of problems with injections wells. I know of a case where trucks were rinsing their tanks after hauling the saltwater, did they bother to get in line to inject that, no, they backed up to the edge of the area and let the less salty rinse go. Caused quite a problem pretty fast.
In any case, it goes back to who's property is it, the surface is his, but if he's using your porespace, then he owes you something.
People were focused this last session on porespace concerns with what would happen after mining potash.
I asked some questions about it like what does this mean, was told someone couldn't inject something without the permission of the surface owner. Then I asked what about fracking and basically was told that that wasn't the intention and it was temporary and well, the state wasn't going to shut down fracking because it was using the pore space of some ticked off surface owner.
In any case, I'm not really sure where it all would go, but I'd honestly think that an injection well within 100 feet of your property that you could make a case that they were using your pore space and so owed you something. How much would depend on just how the well was drilled and how much was going down. Salt water injection wells aren't currently pooled like oil wells but I can't figure out why not except they weren't traditionally, the law in ND linking pore space to surface ownership makes the pooling almost a requirement in my mind. | |
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Saltwater disposal wells
