AMERICAN RIGHTS IN CHAOS: SHALE OIL SWINDLE OF BLACK FAMILY'S OIL IN GLADEWATER, TEXAS

NEW SLAVERY: SHALE OIL PAYBACK

AMERICAN DREAM

What are rights? The Bill of Rights defines why I will make this examination of the disruption of my entire family’s destiny here in the United States of America, 2013.  This document backs anything our people might have to do to remain free and has been under attack since our nation was born.  The war for a nation bathed for centuries with the soul of black men, women, and children to either continue slavery or to destroy our freedom, our future, was on the line in the Civil War.  The aftermath was devastating for us of the new free because we had no land of our own and no understanding what ownership meant to a human being.  When my ancestors purchased land in 1870 in East Texas, the seemingly limitless expanse of land, made it go virtually unnoticed until 1980. 

Fortunes were being made after the East Texas Oil field was discovered in 1931 with oil reserves in the billions of barrels and natural gas in the quadrillions of cubic feet, a major oil discovery right where our land is. After fifty years of production of hydrocarbons Exxon drilled a high cost gas well on our land without permission or lease and hit natural gas in the Gladewater Field in Upshur County.  We signed an oil and gas lease in 1980 with the title opinion clear at Gladewater Gas Unit #5 with Exxon, securing our first division order and check in 1981. In retrospect, so many people had filed for ownership of the land in Gilmer, the county seat, that Exxon had no alternative than to cure the title or plug the well.  When the dust cleared my ancestors had purchased clear titled land in the middle of this enormous East Texas oil field, we were overwhelmed and humble, poised to have what natural gas and oil can do to your bank account: American Dream.  But after 33 years of analyzing our covenant with ExxonMobil it is evident that a trap was sprung that faithful day my grandmother signed that lease.

What kind of trap? What else could be left to do to us? We did not ask ExxonMobil to find natural gas and oil on our land? A new dynamic surfaced after evaluating a natural gas discovery that ExxonMobil informed us probably would never pay out, which would had increased our fair share of the profits from the hydrocarbons. When it demanded that we provide documents asserting that my grandmother was alive in 1989, the realization that authorities in Gilmer had set their trap.  

This center of Klu Klux Klan domination since 1922 had begun its on our rights as Americans which in my definition is a concrete example of NEW SLAVERY.  What?  The records show illegal auctions of land my great-great grandmother, Rebecca Allen had title to in Upshur County. Texas, in 1870. When the United States of America won the Civil War slavery was abolished to never exist on this land and the promise to pursue its destiny as a stakeholder is the right of every citizen of this great nation. If any one of us is denied this right to fulfil our destiny: America is denied its destiny.  It started adding up after 5,000,000,000 cubic feet of high cost natural gas was produced and gathered by gas gatherers with no tax identification numbers at the lease from 1980 to 2013 and we had no money in the bank. It is a fact that any other mineral royalty owner with natural gas or oil in the Gladewater Field has money in the bank; the field is prolific.  Why not us? This new slavery prohibits heirs of black landowners with mineral rights, gas wells, and oil wells from profiting from their production in a conspiracy that has ExxonMobil at its center: we are the proof.  This bizarre configuration has reinforced control of my and everyone in my family’s destiny by viewing us as still on its slave record.  We are to have only what it offers us, no hope for the future, witnesses to a generation blessed by an Angel struggling to survive when it should not had to, that is what it means to me when it comes to why so many died to give us freedom in the Civil War. 

 So we can’t be lynched anymore at the county court house at Gilmer but we are still oppressed by this challenge to our rights here in America.  Last I heard oil was $100 a barrel, any producing oil well in the Gladewater Field is making money, so what would ExxonMobil be thinking when after preparing a gas well that had produced 4,000,000,000 cubic feet of high-cost natural since 1993, Well #2, in 2006 to produce oil in paying quantities and then plug it in March of this year.

The inquiries I submitted were dismissed in the extent that ExxonMobil was aware that the Title Attorney in Gilmer had made mistakes in its opinion and it had failed to pay us delay rentals on the natural gas and eventually oil for any term of the life of the lease since 1980. This essentially dis-enriched us as the veil of fraud began to lift after oil replaced gas at the lease in 2006 and when the well was shut-in during the highest price surge for oil ever, $150 a barrel, it confirmed the strategy of this new slavery. The descendants of the slave owners in Upshur County, Texas had exacted their revenge, they have the power to order an oil well closed down if black’s could profit even if the gas or oil well was on land that they have owned since 1870, a 143 years. ExxonMobil created this scheme to show its contempt for black’s with total disregard for who might read this and establishment of its new slavery policy in the East Texas Oil and Gas Shale: What can be done?

This is not Putin’s Russia where oil kingpins can be put in prison but what is the difference if there are no oil laws being enforced by our government?  Where if you are black you better step back because you don’t even get paid for oil, ExxonMobil showed when it plugged an active oil well in the Gladewater Field in 2013. 

      

NEW SLAVERY: EXXONMOBIL'S EAST TEXAS OIL SWINDLE

We were in crisis from the day oil was discovered on our land, that ten acres of black gold, gas, condensates and after 26 years of gas production, Well #2 at Gladewater Gas Unit #5 which was completed in 1993 was reclassified as an oil well.  The lease was not terminated but the oil well was plugged in March of 2013 by the operator, EXXONMOBIL, which signed an oil and gas lease with my grandmother in 1980.

How is that possible? The biggest oil company in the world closing down oil wells in the Gladewater Field is where this crisis has controlled a generation of my family’s destiny.

We talked on a deep level that day, me and Dave, at our contract project trying to survive; I did not know his cancer had went terminal. “Why am I here?” he asked me with the most serious look I had ever seen on his face, he was tired, he seemed confused for the first time since I had known him. When his wife had left him after all those years he was not the same but he kept his business going and father a another son. He was amazing. I looked him straight in his eyes and spoke from my heart, “Daddy we all must die but the spirit will live on, we are divine, highly favored by the Great Spirit. I thank you and momma for my existence: I love you daddy!” tears were rolling down my face. 

He had been having all the time I knew him, we wanted for nothing and being black in the fifty’s in Wichita Falls, Texas that was the norm.  A base town for SAC provided a steady stream of money from the airmen and business would hire black men and women. Big Dave had control of the Kemp Hotel, he could hire or fire who he brought in to service the entire operation.  This was big time beyond the imagination of ordinary men and women working and raising families. Oil rich barons would descend there to plan and make deals with oil merchants who family’s had gas and oil from the 1920’s.  He made sure that their stay was one to remember and connected to their schedules for future visits to the Kemp. All that smoke in his café’s from 1970 until 1980 bought cancer on him and he never recovered. He suffered, we all suffered in his death, “How could such a man die?”

 

Momma was six years out from her reunion with daddy but it didn’t have to be that way if we had been given our fair shares of the profits from the hydrocarbons the lease. She would have had enough to survive and hold her own but she was denied her money from the gas by ExxonMobil who told her the lease would produce for no more than three or five years and not ever pay out.  The gas was being gathered by non-taxpaying companies so it was being diverted to the Gladewater Refinery with no tax and no regulation by the Texas Railroad Commission or feds..  By the time another well came in on the lease it was 13 years later, ExxonMobil had made a request to confirm in 1989: Was Granny alive?   Four years later the Gladewater Field rules were permitted to be changed by the Texas Railroad Commission and more than two wells were allowed per unit adjacent to our lease, Well #2 had been completed that same year; 1993. 

That began a 20 year unstated or calculated lease which produced billions of cubic feet of gas and condensates without us getting paid for our royalty interest or delay rentals. From what Lee Raymond informed us in 1980 about the well this was not a paid-up lease, it would not pay out: What about the paying-quantities test which the court must decide on from 33 years of production that ExxonMobil paid nothing.  Big oil giant Exxon closing down producing oil wells in the Haynesville Shale with oil at a hundred dollars per barrel does not fit its empire profile; How could it break an implied covenant of reasonable development for the lease? Is this the actions of a prudent operator whose purpose is making a profit with a producing oil well?

The violation of this implied covenant would sabotage any legal retreat for ExxonMobil if this case could be presented in a court of law.  But the system sustains this oil giant with positive rulings in higher courts regardless of its transgression from Val Dez to Alabama in recent cases. What makes my case different?