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?
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