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Caution urged in landowners’ pipeline dealings
News Articles | Grand Island (NE) Independent | by Mark Coddington | March 31, 2009
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Blake spoke to property owners as part of an informational meeting organized by the Merrick County extension office.
He and Harold Winnie, a U.S. Department of Transportation official, spoke about the pipeline, which was announced last year and would transport oil from fields in Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the Gulf Coast.
It would be built and maintained by TransCanada through a partnership with the oil giant ConocoPhillips, and would pump 700,000 to 900,000 barrels of crude oil a day once it’s built in 2011.
Its proposed path, as presented by TransCanada officials last summer, would run northwest to southeast through Garfield, Wheeler, Greeley, Boone, Nance, Merrick and Hamilton counties on its way through the state.
The company is nearly finished settling easement agreements on a similar pipeline that runs through eastern Nebraska, Blake said, and he expects TransCanada to begin negotiations in earnest on Keystone XL this year.
The negotiations are primarily over 50-foot easements to allow 36-inch pipe to be buried at least 4 feet deep, along with additional temporary easements for workspace during installation, he said.
Blake noted that though TransCanada officials can at times be difficult to deal with, they treat most landowners relatively fairly and shouldn’t be painted as villains.
“They’re not bad people,” Blake said. “They’re just trying to make a profit.”
But he said the initial contracts offered by TransCanada include wide latitude for the company, allowing it unlimited access to the easement property and forcing landowners to waive all future damage claims.
He recommended that landowners seek out an attorney and find strength in numbers to help push back against those provisions.
In the end, though, he said most landowners in the eastern Nebraska pipeline have been getting deals they’ve found fair.
Still, he told property owners to be careful in negotiating easements, rather than relying on verbal promises. No matter what happens in negotiations, he said, the man in the bulldozer during construction is still going to go wherever he wants to go.
“No matter what they promise, it doesn’t mean a thing if it’s not in writing,” he said. “And even then, unless you’re willing to get out there and police it, it may not even mean much.”
Tagged with: keystone xl, transcanada, nebraska, landowners
