
A Guy Named Craig May Soon Have Control over a Large Swath of Utah - elliekelly
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/a-guy-named-craig-may-soon-have-control-over-a-large-swath-of-utah
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nihilist_t21
Hey cool! Something I have first hand experience with as an oil and gas
accountant.

The Federal Government, as you can imagine, controls vast amounts of mineral
acreage and the nomination process is how these plots of mineral rights are
brought up to auction. The auctions used to be done in person, but now they
are done online at www.energynet.com.

Federal Oil and Gas leases are all standardized. Like the article states, the
term is for 10 years. You pay an initial bonus consideration payment up front
(whose price is determined by auction), and then afterwards you pay an annual
rental payment. Any production on a Federal lease is subject to a 12.5%
royalty rate, which generally is very cheap compared to a lease from a private
mineral owner.

The article doesn't make the distinction very clear, but this is for the
leasing of the mineral rights only; surface rights are separate and distinct
and might not even be owned by the Federal Government. If a well was to be
drilled, there would be a separate surface use agreement between the oil and
gas company and the surface owner.

If anyone has any questions about the general process of Federal leasing I can
try to answer them as best as I can!

~~~
cddotdotslash
Very interesting! How does this work from an average citizen's perspective? If
I had a spare $10k, could I simply go bid on some parcels, and (assuming I won
the auction), simply let it sit for 10 years, thereby denying other companies
the ability to exploit it?

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philwelch
Environmentalists do things like this sometimes for specifically that reason.

Another way of simply buying more environmental protection from the federal
government is to purchase SO2 allowances at auction. The US government runs a
“cap and trade” system for sulphur dioxide emissions where prospective SO2
emitters have to buy allowances at auction for the tonnage of SO2 they will
emit. Environmentalists frequently buy a chunk of allowances and refuse to
resell them, reducing emissions even more while raising costs for polluters.

~~~
ChainOfFools
Is this one of the strategies used by the Nature Conservancy?

~~~
philwelch
I don't know. The Acid Rain Retirement Fund is a nonprofit that primarily bids
in the SO2 allowance market.

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gonational
Some guy Craig may soon have a 10 year mineral rights lease on some small lot
in Utah…

The author of this ad “is a founder of the grassroots climate campaign”,
doesn’t even mention the size of this “large swath”, so I’m left to wonder if
it is even similar in size to the 1,100 acre example he gives, which itself
would be 0.002% of Utah; that’s not a large swath. I have multiple friends
with larger farms than this in a single town.

If I stake a claim to pan for gold in Montana, I wonder if he will write an
article about me.

~~~
_red
Further, the author wants us to be outraged of "how entirely simple and legal
this is".

However, why should the Federal government get this land at all? We used to
have allodial title many years ago...but then it became common-law precedent
that we effectively "rent" our land from the government and pay perpetual
property taxes for that right.

The lack of allodial title is what ultimately creates an inescapable "head
tax" on every citizen.

~~~
egypturnash
Unless “we” are the people who were here before the Europeans came in looking
for plunder and land, why should “we” lay claim to it at all?

~~~
lazylizard
How far back do we go? First humans were african? Earth is theirs?

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jeffdavis
The title makes it sound like an individual will get control of a couple
percent of the land in Utah.

Reading the article, it seems more like an oil & gas company is purchasing
(EDIT: leasing) some land in Utah, and the article doesn't even make it clear
how much (unless I missed it).

How is this really different from what we already know? There's a lot of cheap
land out there, the country is big, and the federal government makes various
kinds of deals with people who want to develop it. The article says that it's
$2 an acre, which sounds like little, but it doesn't provide a point of
comparison.

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xenocyon
> How is this really different from what we already know?

I actually didn't know that public land could pass into private ownership so
easily.

As it says in the article: "The law itself is the crime — a gift to the oil
and gas businesses."

~~~
jeffdavis
As someone else pointed out, it's not ownership, it's a 10-year lease.

This all sounds pretty routine; "a feature, not a bug", designed to promote
economic development and be accommodating in general.

If you don't like development in general, or Oil & Gas development in
particular, you won't be happy with this arrangement. But I would think there
would be more outrageous examples than this one.

~~~
icedistilled
It's not ownership, but it does permanently alters the land and permanently
removes value in both terms of both recreation and mineral value. So while
they technically don't own it, they get to forever change it and extract a lot
of money from our public land at rock bottom rates.

~~~
ultrarunner
It permanently alters the land, but often all that means is travel
infrastructure like roads or trails. These end up increasing the potential
recreation value in a place that would be otherwise inaccessible.

Whether humanity ought to recreate in these areas or not is another question
(we are currently experiencing numerous wildfires in Arizona and the Southwest
in general). But it’s not necessarily a clear case of destroying the land
permanently. Rain alters land permanently as well, but few are motivated to
stop that process on this type of land.

~~~
icedistilled
Please See this other thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23553446](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23553446)

And please look up the Converse Basic Grove of Sequoias. The whole place was
destroyed to make fence posts. Oh, my bad I suppose "lease" is the current
euphemism for destroying the land like that. But hey! cutting down all those
giant sequoias improved the recreation opportunities, right?

That's an extreme example but any natural resource extraction irreparably
damages land. Even grazing or roads have significant impacts that take
hundreds or thousands of years to recover.

Roads dramatically change the landscape and cause huge impacts. And the roads
usually serve some purpose, i.e. more damaging activities. Crisscrossing the
landscape with roads has a huge impact on the land and does not enhance the
recreational opportunities other than the ability to take instagram pics from
your car.

~~~
ultrarunner
I don’t think you’re arguing in good faith. There are obviously numerous
activities that take place via wilderness access. Given my chosen username on
here I’m quite familiar with the concept. Implying that Instagram photos are
the goal is a strawman, and not even a good one. My hope was to suggest that
the world is a complex place and nuance is warranted.

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sneeuwpopsneeuw
Well there is probably more to the story then just this. For example there are
places in France where you can buy a house and a small piece of land for 1
euro. While this may sound strange the reason the government does this is
because those houses where left abandoned. So when you buy it you sign a
contract with special rules that say that you need to refurbish it or rebuild
it within a few years.

~~~
eximius
Source? I'd be willing to fix up house in Europe.

~~~
dirkt
Googling "france acheter maison 1 eur" find for example this:
[https://www.18h39.fr/articles/maison-a-1-euro-vraiment-
une-b...](https://www.18h39.fr/articles/maison-a-1-euro-vraiment-une-bonne-
affaire.html)) (use Google Translate etc.)

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pg_bot
The federal government owns a ton of land in the west when compared to the
rest of the United States. The federal government owns 64.9% of Utah, but owns
0.3% of New York, 4.4% of South Carolina, and 13.2% of Florida.[0] We should
auction off more land in the west, instead of leasing it.

[0]
[https://ballotpedia.org/Federal_land_ownership_by_state](https://ballotpedia.org/Federal_land_ownership_by_state)

~~~
Miner49er
I'm not sure why that's wanted?

If the goal is to equalize the amount of land owned by the federal government
in each state, why not do the opposite and have the government gain control of
more land in the east?

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driverdan
Who said that was the goal? That doesn't make any sense. It would cost
billions to buy up land on the east coast and only inflate the value of the
remaining land.

Outside of monuments and parks most of the land the gov owns in western states
is undesirable. You can already buy very cheap land in the middle of nowhere
UT, NM, NV, and AZ. The market for off grid desert land with no water is
small.

~~~
barney54
And this is exactly why the federal government still owns so much land.
Through laws like the Taylor Grazing Act they sold almost all lands which had
water in the west.

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tengbretson
An unknown amount of otherwise unwanted land is being leased by Craig for what
is, at this point, an unknown reason? Neat.

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jtbayly
Why assume oil? Isn't it more likely, given the oil economics right now, that
it is gold, or something else?

~~~
martey
The leases mentioned in the article as specifically for oil and gas
development as are handled by the "National Fluids Lease Sale System":
[https://nflss.blm.gov/](https://nflss.blm.gov/)

Mining gold on federal lands seems to go through a different (and easier)
process (involving staking a mining claim as opposed to nominating land and
then bidding on it in an auction): [https://www.blm.gov/programs/energy-and-
minerals/mining-and-...](https://www.blm.gov/programs/energy-and-
minerals/mining-and-minerals/locatable-minerals/mining-claims/staking-a-claim)

~~~
billiam
Yes! I worked in precious metals exploration and the staking process seemed
kinda crazy to me---racing up and down the hills in prospective areas,
carrying the paperwork and bottles to put it them in (you can't use regular
glass because the sun will eventually set the paper on fire). Guess it still
is, at least in some states.

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ConsiderCrying
This seems like such a preposterous idea to me. You can buy an acre of land
for $2 and just... just own it? I don't mean land ownership in general but
rather a situation like this. So some company can just buy up the prairie and
then anyone who'd want to use this for something productive (personally
wouldn't consider drilling for oil productive) has to go and deal with them.
That seems a bit backward, I'd rather see that land in the hands of Native
Americans or, since the other option is a pipe dream, controlled by the
government.

~~~
jeffdavis
It's a lease: "The lease has a term of ten years, and, after the gavel comes
down, the annual rental fee per acre would be a dollar and a half for the
first five years, and two dollars for the second."

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hanniabu
That's so ridiculously insanely cheap....is the land really that worthless?

~~~
bryanlarsen
Over $1000 per square mile per year is a lot of money if there aren't any
minerals worth exploiting on that square mile.

~~~
hanniabu
The year 2020, when land is worthless unless you can exploit it...

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djrogers
All the lease gets you is limited mineral rights, so yes - the value is in
extracting those minerals.

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hackissimo123
Am I the only one who read the headline and thought this was going to be
something about Craigslist?

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ryanmarsh
Spent a few minutes trying to figure out why Black Lives Matter owned so much
of Utah...

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CREwert
Alas! Its a different Craig.

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ggm
May have control... Over mineral exploration licences. And.. it looks like
guys like Craig bid in to prevent exploration by determining not to explore.
So they are bidding to preserve federal land against the predations of
exploration in a time of declining markets for oil and gas

~~~
martey
I don't think this is a correct reading of the article. Craig Larson is the
owner of Prairie Hills Oil & Gas. Nothing in the article suggests that he
nominated the land in order to prevent oil and gas exploration.

I think you are confusing Larson with Terry Tempest Williams, who is mentioned
later in the article as trying to lease land in order to prevent it from being
leased by oil and gas companies. The article doesn't suggest that Williams and
her husband plan to bid on rights in the upcoming auction, so it seems likely
that Larson (or another oil and gas company) will win that auction.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
In particular, Larsen is the one who nominated the land for being able to be
leased. If he wanted to protect the land from being leased, the obvious way to
do so was to simply _not nominate it_ , so it wouldn't be up for auction, so
nobody could bid on it. The fact that he nominated it at all means that he
wants to bid on it.

(I should say it means he means to bid on at least some of it. I could see
wanting to bid on something specific, and nominating much more than that, so
that anybody who wants to swipe the piece you're interested in doesn't know
which piece to bid on.)

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monadic2
Gotta raise those royalty rates!

