NEW VRINDABAN – The collective lease agreements held by a group of Marshall County mineral rights owners with oil and gas companies are expiring, and this time they say they won’t deal with land agents wishing to sign them.

The group’s representatives are only going to deal directly with the companies, explained mineral rights owner Gabriel Fried, who organized the last contracts for the Krishna-Kay Hill Group.

On Sunday afternoon, he addressed about 25 members of the group who gathered in the community reception room at the Krishna compound in New Vrindaban.

Fried suggested they needed to discuss strategy moving forward.

“I have informed some of the land men that we won’t deal with any land agents,” he said. “We’re only going to negotiate directly with the company. We don’t want somebody in the middle taking anything, and we don’t want the waste of time going back and forth with somebody else.

“It’s important that we stand together as having a large mass of land to lease gives us a lot of bargaining power.”

The group’s current lease for Utica shale is held by EQT and is set to expire in early April. Their contracts for Marcellus shale already have expired, and were held by SWN, Fried explained.

This means the group’s Marcellus shale holdings are now open, and the Utica shale available also will soon be up for lease, he continued.

“We have been getting a lot of offers,” Fried said. “We formed a group and negotiated a really good contract 10 years for Utica. … We’re bringing our group back together with our lease expiring.

“We’re trying to put together as big and strong a group as we can to make sure the individuals are being taken care of.”

He noted “the government has already bought and sold us out,” and referenced a law pertaining to forced pooling in West Virginia that allows oil and gas companies to proceed with drilling if 75% of owners involved accept the deal a company offers them.

“It really minimizes what individuals get,” Fried continued. “They get terrible contracts, terrible (contract) language, bad bonus money, and bad royalties.

“It just puts it in the hands of big business to do whatever they want, and we need to protect ourselves against that. So we are meeting together as a group and developing a large enough body of properties to get us that bargaining power to be able to protect everybody – both environmentally and financially.”

Fried told the group they’ve had “pretty good success working together.”

“We’re getting good royalties, and good up front money, and hopefully good lease language as well – which is critical.”